Article

An aesthetics of diasporic citizenship: the example of Lebanese women in the UK

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

Migration for Lebanese is an ancestral practice that can be traced back to the Phoenicians. This cultural and social heritage has been maintained throughout time and still has an impact on the country to this very day. In the light of the expansion of capitalist mode of production on a global scale and the accentuation of human mobility across borders, the Lebanese migration represents an interesting case. This is not only because of their long tradition of travelling across the world but also, on closer inspection, because Lebanese people seem to have anticipated what has now emerged as a widespread ‘diasporic’ condition. In this regard, aspects such as belonging and participation are crucial. The aim of this work is not only to study a specific migratory experience through a transnational perspective but also to use gender as a fertile analytical category to interrogate all-encompassing issues such as human mobility and citizenship, and to raise more general theoretical questions. Ultimately, this approach will prove useful to critically examine concepts such as citizenship, identity and boundaries produced by contemporary nation states. The objective is to understand what the articulations of belonging and participation across boundaries are and how trajectories affect them. The research has no pretence of exhaustiveness. Nonetheless, as it takes advantage of qualitative methods of analysis, it sheds light on aspects that can prove useful to frame contemporary migration in a novel global perspective.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

... This sense of being torn between two (or more) places or feeling of in-between-ness or 'spatial uncertainty' (Ma, 2003: 11) is tackled by various authors. Caruso (2013) coins the term 'diasporic forms of citizenship' -'a desire to maintain a sense of community and at the same time transcend it' (p. 371). ...
Article
This article examines the ways the Australian property market is addressed among Chinese migrants in Australia on and off WeChat, one of the most popular instant messenger apps installed on Smartphones. Specifically, we focus on how migrant media and real estate professionals’ narratives on real estate properties constitute and reproduce a transnational Chinese diasporic space between China and Australia. Although the latest wave of ‘property talk’ is relatively a new concept to the mainstream Australian societies due to the housing price boom since 2012, talking about land and property ownerships has always been integral part of Chinese diasporic culture. Yet, with the advent of digital media technologies, this cultural conversation is increasingly being delivered, processed and experienced through digital platforms such as that of WeChat. Drawing on observations on WeChat and interviews with Chinese media and real estate practitioners in Australia, we conceive that WeChat plays a vital role in forging and reproducing Chinese diasporic spaces in Australia by articulating the intersection of diasporic spatiality and mediasphere. We contend that WeChat’s affordances of the informational, interpersonal and instrumental have aided Chinese migrants and those Chinese real estate practitioners to co-constitute a social space of property talk that enables new social relations to be negotiated and social networks to be established and reinforced across China and Australia.
Article
Full-text available
Despite cyclical attempts to depict migratory flows as extraordinary, migration has always had a place in human history. Considering the magnitude of human mobility across borders, the management of migrant citizens adopted by affluent Western economies appears both inappropriate and fuelled by panic. Assuming the contemporary time-space compression, the re-articulation of orientalism and neocolonial enterprises and the increasing popular discontent towards renewed exclusionary logic, the Syrian diaspora proves to be a crucial interlocutor to understand patterns of transformation and anticipate new spaces of citizenship. Through Syrians’ first-hand experience we will try to analyze the Syrian diaspora in the UK beyond the lexicon of humanitarian assistance. A transnational approach and a qualitative, intersectional methodology have been employed to gather relevant information in regard to Syrians’ migratory experience, with a focus on their activities in the public space. Ultimately Syrians’ accounts will provide a rich, indispensable viewpoint to all-encompassing issues such as human mobility, aesthetics, public space and citizenship.
Book
Full-text available
h.— Indice 7 Prefazione alla nuova edizione PARTE PRIMA 17 Introduzione 29 Prologo. Il giovane Max Weber, il diritto di fuga dei migranti tede-schi e gli stomaci polacchi Rarissimae aves; Magia della libertà; Una società di nemici; Stomaci diversa-mente costituiti 47 In principio era la forca. Migrazioni, mobilità del lavoro e storia del capitalismo Individui senza storia; Gabbie d'acciaio; La fuga e le briglie 57 Cittadini della frontiera e confini della cittadinanza Nella crisi della cittadinanza; Esclusione; Il doppio spazio dei migranti; Cittadini oltre la nazione?; Migrazioni, diritto di fuga e confini della cittadi-nanza; Problematica appartenenza 79 Dopo le colonie, il mondo UK, 1948; Antiche segregazioni; One World; Culture; Modernità, at large; Marx a Calcutta PARTE SECONDA 101 Né qui né altrove: migrazioni, detenzione, diserzione tra Europa e Australia. Conversazione con Brett Neilson
Article
Full-text available
Contemporary immigrants can not be characterized as the "uprooted'. Many are transmigrants, becoming firmly rooted in their new country but maintaining multiple linkages to their homeland. In the US, anthropologists are engaged in building a transnational anthropology and rethinking their data on immigration. Migration proves to be an important transnational process that reflects and contributes to the current political configurations of the emerging global economy. In this article, the authors use studies of migration from St. Vincent, Grenada, the Philippines, and Haiti to the US to delineate some of the parameters of an ethnography of transnational migration and explore the reasons for and the implications of transnational migrations. The authors conclude that the transnational connections of immigrants provide a subtext of the public debates in the US about the merits of immigration. -Authors
Article
Full-text available
Meanings of “citizenship,” a concept that has informed teaching practices since nation-states first institutionalized schooling, are shaped over time and through cultural struggles. This article presents a conceptual framework for the discourses that currently construct the meanings of citizenship in contemporary Western cultures, particularly the United States. Using discourse analysis, the authors examine texts related to citizenship and citizenship education from 1990 through 2003, identifying seven distinct but overlapping frameworks that ascribe meaning to citizenship. The “civic republican” and “liberal” frameworks are the most influential in shaping current citizenship education; five others are the most active in contesting the terrain of citizenship practices in lived political arenas. The “transnational” and “critical” discourses have yet to significantly challenge the dominant discourses that shape citizenship education in schools. This article questions the view of political life in Western democracies that is promoted by the dominant discourses of citizenship in K–12 schooling.
Article
Full-text available
This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South.
Article
Full-text available
Transnationalism was originally connected to recent immigrant cohorts, but the concept has been expanded to include other groups of people, as well as a whole array of activities across borders. Cosmopolitanism is invoked both as a moral and ethical ideal, as well as a lived experience, thereby facilitating confusion between a theorist’s prescriptive and descriptive statements. In contemporary scholarship, the presence of transnationalism is often used as an indication of cosmopolitanism, and a linear positive correlation between the two is often implied. To rectify this confusion, it is more salient to conceive of transnational social spaces, social fields and communities as the end result of internal globalization (or glocalization). Glocalization allows for a twofold conception of cosmopolitanism: first, as situational ‘openness’ within local contexts and, second, as detachment from local ties. The essay explores these two conceptualizations and argues in favour of the second interpretation. Accordingly, cosmopolitans and locals form a continuum where individuals’ attitudes might range in strength depending upon specific dimensions. The essay develops an operationalization of the cosmopolitan-local continuum and discusses the specific dimensions where it is expected that each group’s attitudes would diverge.
Article
Full-text available
The study of identity forms a critical cornerstone within modern sociological thought. Introduced by the works of Cooley and Mead, identity studies have evolved and grown central to current sociological discourse. Microsociological perspectives dominated work published through the 1970s. Sociologists focused primarily on the formation of the "me," exploring the ways in which interpersonal interactions mold an individual's sense of self. Recent literature constitutes an antithesis to such concerns. Many works refocus attention from the individual to the collective; others prioritize discourse over the systematic scrutiny of behavior; some researchers approach identity as a source of mobilization rather than a product of it; and the analysis of virtual identities now competes with research on identities established in the copresent world. This essay explores all such agenda as raised in key works published since 1980. I close with a look toward the future, suggesting trajectories aimed at synthesizing traditional and current concerns.
Article
Full-text available
Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on international migration by educational attainment from 195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000. Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average educational level and lead to higher concentration of low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the majority of the variability of migration flows and selection. This suggests that, without changing the generosity of family reunion programs, education-based selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The results are highly robust to the econometric techniques, accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.
Article
The Lebanese have become one of the largest immigrant populations in Australia and mark a major departure from the earliest preference for British and Continental European settlers. The recent migration of Lebanese has intensified religious diversity in Australia with Moslem, Maronite Christian, Antiochan Orthodox, Melkite and Druze communities all being in evidence. Over three-quarters of the more than 45,000 Lebanese in Australia, as the result of strong village chain migrations, have settled in metropolitan Sydney where many have formed separate religious and village clusters based strongly on kin ties, rather than anyone Lebanese ethnic quarter. While quite strong residential concentration has occurred this resembles that of immigrant populations from southern Europe and while higher unemployment has occurred recently, there is evidence of considerable residential mobility and dispersion within the first generation in Sydney.
Article
This book critically evaluates the transnational communities approach to contemporary international migration. It does so through a specific focus on the relationship between 'transnational communities' and 'home'. The meaning of 'home' for international migrants is changing and evolving, as new globally-oriented identities are developed. These issues are explored through a number of central themes: the meaning of 'home' to transnational peoples, the implications of transforming these social spaces and how these have been transformed. © 2002 Editorial selection and matter, Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
Article
In a perceptive and arresting analysis, Robin Cohen introduces his distinctive approach to the study of the world's diasporas. This book investigates the changing meanings of the concept and the contemporary diasporic condition, including case studies of Jewish, Armenian, African, Chinese, British, Indian, Lebanese and Caribbean people. The first edition of this book had a major impact on diaspora studies and was the foundational text in an emerging research and teaching field. This second edition extends and clarifies Robin Cohen's argument, addresses some critiques and outlines new perspectives for the study of diasporas. It has also been made more student-friendly with illustrations, guided readings and suggested essay questions.
Article
A fascinating ethnographic journey into migrant women's lives across two countries, Gender in Transnationalism highlights women's construction of ‘home’ between Morocco and Italy as a significant site whereby broader feelings and narratives of displacement and belonging can be grasped.
Article
'Transnationalism' refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states. This book surveys the broader meanings of transnationalism within the study of globalization before concentrating on migrant transnational practices. Each chapter demonstrates ways in which new and contemporary transnational practices of migrants are fundamentally transforming social, political and economic structures simultaneously within homelands and places of settlement. Transnationalism provides a much-needed single, clear and condensed text concerning a major concept in academic and policy discourse today. The book is for advanced undergraduate students, postgraduates and academics.
Article
The paper is organized in three parts. In the first part, we examine several instances of 'national identity politics' and their implications for women and gender relations. In the second part, we highlight contemporary struggles around women's citizenship in various countries. And in the third and final part, we reflect on the larger theoretical and political implications of the experiences in the Middle East and North Africa. These include the importance of a gender perspective in discussions of nationalism, identity, and citizenship, and the central role of 'modernizing women' in the process of democratization and the construction of civil societies in the Middle East.
Article
Part 1 Local and global cultures: migrants or citizens? cities, immigrants and integration multiculturalism past, present and future. Part 2 The refugees: the setting Lebanese immigration migration and the urban process family community proletarianisation conclusion. Part 3 The Lebanese heritage: making the Lebanese nation state making the Lebanese - proletarianisation and pluralism religion and the Lebanese state unmaking Lebanon -civil war and localism conclusion. Part 4 Lebanese families: kinship practices unmarried women wives keeping the courts out of the home. Part 5 Community and identity in the city. Part 6 Islam, multiculturalism and the global city: multiculturalism and urban consciousness Islam and multiculturalism.
Article
The sexual contract? is used in two senses. First, to refer to the book The Sexual Contract (1988) and to Anglo-American societies. The book provides a feminist interpretation of classic theories of an original contract, showing that it has two dimensions, the social contract and a sexual contract, and that the familiar marriage contract and employment contract have been shaped by ideas in the texts. Much has changed today, including marriage law and the economy, but many components of the sexual contract still persist. The second sense refers to the general domination of women by men in any society. The sexual contract is enforced in a variety of forms ranging from legal sanction for powers of husbands to prevention of women earning a living. Men's government of women is one of the most deeply entrenched of all power structures.
Article
This article examines how education policy, in the form of a statutory assessment system used in the first year of primary schools, defines the ‘ideal learner’. This ideal model is important because it prescribes the characteristics and skills a child needs to display in order to be recognisable as a learner. An analysis of the content of the assessment itself is used alongside ethnographic data from classrooms where the assessment is conducted, to demonstrate how the values inherent in the assessment and its associated practices reflect neoliberal discourses. Rational choice, self-promotion and individual responsibility for learning are all valued within this framework, and children’s transitions into recognisable student-subjects are dependent on their adoption of these values. It is argued in conclusion that this restrictive notion of what a ‘good learner’ looks like can work to systematically exclude some children from positions of success.
Article
This article examines the changing nature and meanings of home in diaspora, and discusses the complicated re-homing process among various cultural locations. Asian diaspora poetry in Canada represents a paradoxical feeling of both home-sickness and home-crisis, for the movement between multiple locations of cultures suggests a co-belonging dialogue which, by situating diasporans simultaneously inside and outside of a culture, intensifies both the desirability and the impossibility of a given home-place. In modern diaspora, to re-home is not to go home but to undergo a constructive process in which different cultural passages are convoluted to produce new senses of (in)dwelling around the "axis of a mobility."
Article
This article draws on postcolonial understandings in order to offer a sociological analysis of Lebanese immigrants in Montreal, New York City and Paris. I argue that the concept of diaspora provides a framework for understanding the contradictory aspects of Lebanese immigrant experiences, as some immigrants may undergo a process of assimilation while others continue to hold on to their ethnic identities. Investigating Lebanese immigrant communities as a diaspora leads to the understanding of the ways immigrants construct solidarities that include their homeland, host societies, and the larger diaspora community in various parts of the world. As an analytical framework, “diaspora” incorporates multiple loyalties and attachments that are integral to processes of international migration. Thus, the framework of diaspora promises significant contributions to the understanding of the complex dynamics involved in migration and globalization.
Article
This paper traces the ways in which British born Muslim women self-identify with Britain and South Asia. More specifically, the article explores the ways in which the young women express their sense of belonging and convey cosmopolitan identities while they self-reflect upon their travels to their parents' homeland. The paper argues that the women do not view Britain and South Asian nations in discrete terms along religious and cultural dimensions but with frequent visits in different stages in their lives come to understand these nation-states in porous ways. For example, they self-identify with South Asia because of South Asian culture's emphasis on the family and express openness and tolerance towards their parents' homeland. On occasions they express tourist-like appreciation of their parents' homelands. Yet in other instances, they reflect upon the ways in which they negotiate foreign and challenging circumstances. At the same time they consider Britain to be their home because they find that women have relatively greater independence and rights here. Some of the women also find it easier in Britain to express their religious rights. For example, they find that in Pakistan, although a Muslim nation, it is not customary to wear a headscarf but rather the traditional dress. Much of the literature that has explored diasporic young people's experience has focused on questions of identity through the lens of their country of residence. However, given the age of global interconnectedness and the decreasing salience of nation as an overarching feature of identity, it becomes significant to explore in greater detail questions of belonging, cosmopolitanism, and nation. Examining the narratives of British born Muslim Asian women, this study conceptualizes identity around ‘belonging’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Data are based on in-depth interviews of 25 second-generation British Asian Muslim women meeting regularly at Islamic study circles. Respondents ranged from ages of 19 to 28 years old who were mainly middle class professionals and university students.
Article
The nation/state as an imaginative enterprise encompasses multiple imagined subnational boundaries. The 'public/private', I suggest, is a 'purposeful fiction' constitutive of the will to statehood. As such, its configurations are impacted upon by the institutions and forces competing with and within state-building enterprises. Proposing the terms government, non-government and domestic as analytical tools to demarcate discursive and material domains, I argue that, in Lebanon, the fluidity of boundaries among these spheres is constitutive of patriarchal connectivity, a form of patriarchal kinship linked to the state-building enterprise.
Article
Preface: gender is visible but mostly unseen During the week of April 1999 in which I wrote this paper, two instances of armed violence were gripping the media, at one end and at the other in terms of scale. I am thinking of the micro-conflict that resulted in the massacre of twelve students and a teacher at the Columbine High School in Denver, Colorado, USA, and the macro-conflict in the Balkans in which ethnic aggression against people of Albanian culture from Kosova/a by the regime in Yugoslavia has elicited a violent bombardment of that country by the forces of NATO. A nasty killing spree in a suburban school in a rich country that sees itself as a democracy- this may seem at first sight to be neither what is generally considered ‘armed conflict’, nor ‘political violence’. But this depends on how you see conflict and politics. We learned from news reports following the school massacre that Columbine High School was in fact a micro-political world made up of differentiated subcultures in acute conflict, and the young men who carried out the killings did so as members of one of these, inflicting terror on people seen as ‘different ’ from themselves, as ‘other’. The subcultures were by
Article
A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas'. It is related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West - the new post-colonial subjects. All these cultural practices and forms of representation have the black subject at their centre, putting the issue of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak? Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write - the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name', of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim. We seek, here, to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and representation. Of course, the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, 'enunciated'. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always 'in context', positioned. I
Article
Khachig Tölölyan is Professor of English at Wesleyan University, co-editor of Pynchon Notes and editor of Diaspora. He has published articles on American novels, particularly those of Thomas Pynchon, as well as on postmodernism, Armenian terrorism, and the history and structure of the Armenian diaspora. He has written, in Armenian, Spurki Mech ["In the Diaspora," Haratch Press, Paris], and many articles on Armenian issues and topics. He is at work on a book, Stateless Power: Diasporas in the Transnational Moment and is editing a collection of articles by historians on various diasporas. This essay draws upon a work in progress, Stateless Power: Diasporas in the Transnational Moment. I am grateful to Ellen Rooney for her scrupulous and helpful reading of several drafts of this work. 1. Only some nation-states have done so. While subnational, territorialized minorities (for example, the Catalans in Spain, the Québécois in Canada) and some diasporan groups (for example, Jews in post-Soviet Russia, Cubans in America) have recently experienced an unprecedented range of linguistic, religious, cultural and even political choices, other ethno-national groups (for example, the Kurds in Turkey, the Chechens in Russia) and diasporan populations (for example, Palestinians in Kuwait, Indians in Uganda) have been persecuted by nation-states. Forms of discrimination less direct than such persecution remain pervasive. 2. The fact that nation-states are often problematic should not lead to a hasty celebration of multinational states, however. There have been a number of multinational polities (the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Yugoslav Republic). Each did relatively well for a time, satisfying some or many of the smaller nations that lived within the system without equal access to its state-apparatus and high culture. Each eventually felt disadvantaged or oppressed by some aspects of the system. In several, the collapse of the system was accompanied by the scapegoating and ethnocide of one of the discontented polities (arguably the Chechen and Bosnian cases) and even their genocide (Armenians in the Ottoman Empire). 3. Of course, some form of global socialism once offered such a vision, and may again do so some day. But, at the moment, both discourse and political action are failing to reformulate that order plausibly. Furthermore, much of diasporist discourse is all but explicitly based on a rejection of socialism even when it pays some lip-service to class; its real hope is placed in a fierce advocacy of other types of transnational coalition. The enthusiasm of diasporists for non-socialist, transnational political activity has recently been deplored by Bruce Robbins, who is skeptical about the possibility that the US government will "listen and learn from its hyphenated citizens" and feels that Diaspora itself is host to a "politically complacent internationalism" (98). 4. To be fair, the capitulation to transnational elites has been preceded, for nearly two decades, by a "pioneering" capitulation to other anti-national, anti-statist interests within the US. As the Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley recently noted, the ideological basis for the crippling of the American State has been the notion of empowering states and ordinary citizens. But, as he writes, "modern society has many centers of concentrated power, of which the Government is only one and not always the most important. The large interests that shape our world are more numerous and more powerful even than those the populists of the late nineteenth century decried: corporate bureaucracies, the great institutions of the media, banks and financial institutions, trade associations and lobbying groups, and many others" (37). The absence of transnational elites in this list is suprising, but can be explained by the fact that the great corporate bureaucracies specialize in the care and feeding of same. 5. For the differences between intra- and inter-state diasporas, see Tölölyan, "Exile Government." 6...
Book
This is the third edition of the essential introductory text for all students of qualitative research. Each chapter has been fully updated in terms of references and reading lists.
Article
This paper examines the condition of women as political agents in Lebanon in the context of legislation and political participation. It focuses on the effect of the Civil War on women's conditions of living in Lebanon, and their lives in the post-war period. War had negative effects on women, reinforcing their patriarchal subjugation, furthering their economic deprivation, and diverting attention from issues like women's rights, which have only added to women's political and social marginalization. The war also had a positive effect on women as it opened up new avenues for them to participate in public life. This paper analyzes gender relations in Lebanon through the frameworks of social change and the rise of civil society, but also emphasizes the challenges facing women in post-war Lebanon, where they are still governed by patriarchal values that hinder their political participation and their identification as full citizens.
Article
Passenger cars and other small vehicles have for a long time been the backbone of transport in west Africa. The cars are usually second-hand, and they are sourced on overseas car markets, mostly in western Europe. During the 1990s the port town of Cotonou, Bénin, became one of the most prominent hubs in this car trade: car markets mushroomed, attracting large numbers and a wide variety of traders – including a prominent contingent of Lebanese. This article discusses the role of these Lebanese traders in the car trade through a reconstruction of their careers. It reveals that Lebanese business, which can go through a rapid succession of different economic activities, starts as kin-based enterprise, but gradually incorporates peers and friends. Close analysis of this practice suggests that Lebanese immigrant traders are to a large extent driven by the ideal of enjoying life by adopting an expatriate lifestyle.RésuméLes voitures de tourisme et autres petits véhicules sont depuis longtemps la cheville ouvrière du transport en Afrique de l'Ouest. Ce sont généralement des voitures d'occasion achetées sur les marchés automobiles étrangers, principalement en Europe de l'Ouest. Au cours des années 1990, la ville portuaire de Cotonou, au Bénin, est devenue la principale plaque tournante du commerce de voitures: les marchés de voitures se sont rapidement multipliés, attirant en grand nombre des commerçants divers et variés, y compris un important contingent libanais. Cet article s'intéresse au rôle de ces commerçants libanais dans le commerce automobile en reconstituant leurs carrières. Il révèle que le commerce libanais, qui peut passer rapidement d'une activité économique à une autre, démarre sous la forme d'une entreprise familiale qui peu à peuintègre des pairs et des amis. Une analyse approfondie de cette pratique suggère que les commerçants immigrés libanais sont dans une large mesure motivés par un idéal de jouissance de la vie en adoptant un style de vie d'expatrié.
Article
This article challenges the theoretical opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism with empirical research on the ways in which a group of ordinary Australians talked about multiculturalism in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. It shifts attention from identity work to the understanding of day-to-day social relations: it finds that they are strongly nationalist and yet also display a cosmopolitan embrace of the benefits of cultural diversity. They draw on the inclusionary resources of Australian nationalism and its history to strengthen their cosmopolitanism and calm their anxieties about living with diversity. Their commonsense conceptualising of Australia's contemporary multicultural society in terms of a mix of individuals rather than an ensemble of groups is crucial to understanding why cultural diversity has been embraced within the framework of the nation.
Article
Germany's refusal to pursue active integration policies for three decades has unleashed surprising do-it-yourself-integration processes among migrant communities, as demonstrated by dramatic changes in the Turkish ethnic economy since 1990. This study embeds these developments in an analytical framework linking economic enclaves and urban citizenship. Initially motivated by structural unemployment and social exclusion, guestworkers and their offspring are turning to self-employment, not only adding new jobs to an otherwise moribund national economy but also promoting urban revitalization in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne. The study outlines generational differences within the Turkish-German community, ascertaining that third-generation ethnics are more likely to start businesses outside the food sector and more willing to embrace FRG citizenship. It describes the size and scope of ethnic enterprises across Germany, followed by a treatment of women entrepreneurs in Berlin. Ethnic associations indirectly foster "participatory" consciousness among males, but women tend to identify directly with the society that offers opportunities not available to them in the purported Turkish homeland. Instead of producing "parallel societies" (as German politicians often insist), ethnic businesses and local community involvement are crucial in bridging majority and minority cultures, on the one hand, and in granting Turkish entrepreneurs top-level access to state policy-makers - even without the formal rights of citizenship.