Jorge Duany
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834978
- eISBN:
- 9781469602790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807869376_duany.9
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter approaches the Puerto Rican diaspora as a transnational colonial migration. In so doing, the author defines Puerto Rico as a nation, an imagined community with its own territory, ...
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This chapter approaches the Puerto Rican diaspora as a transnational colonial migration. In so doing, the author defines Puerto Rico as a nation, an imagined community with its own territory, history, language, and culture. At the same time, the island lacks a sovereign state, an independent government that represents the population of that territory. This unsovereign state has long sponsored population displacements from Puerto Rico to the United States. During the first half of the twentieth century, colonial officials embraced migration as a safety valve for the island's overpopulation. During the 1950s and 1960s the Commonwealth government spurred the “Great Migration” to the U.S. mainland. In particular, the Farm Labor Program, overseen by the Migration Division of Puerto Rico's Department of Labor, illustrates the complicated negotiations required by a transnational colonial state. In many ways, Puerto Rico's postwar migration policies anticipated those of contemporary transnational nation-states, such as the Dominican Republic.Less
This chapter approaches the Puerto Rican diaspora as a transnational colonial migration. In so doing, the author defines Puerto Rico as a nation, an imagined community with its own territory, history, language, and culture. At the same time, the island lacks a sovereign state, an independent government that represents the population of that territory. This unsovereign state has long sponsored population displacements from Puerto Rico to the United States. During the first half of the twentieth century, colonial officials embraced migration as a safety valve for the island's overpopulation. During the 1950s and 1960s the Commonwealth government spurred the “Great Migration” to the U.S. mainland. In particular, the Farm Labor Program, overseen by the Migration Division of Puerto Rico's Department of Labor, illustrates the complicated negotiations required by a transnational colonial state. In many ways, Puerto Rico's postwar migration policies anticipated those of contemporary transnational nation-states, such as the Dominican Republic.
Jaeeun Kim
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804797627
- eISBN:
- 9780804799614
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804797627.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
The incongruity between territory, citizenry, and nation has long preoccupied students of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship, including the state’s transborder relationship with ...
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The incongruity between territory, citizenry, and nation has long preoccupied students of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship, including the state’s transborder relationship with its “external” members (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, and ethnonational “kin”). This book is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the complex relationships among the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided. Despite a widespread and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the Japanese colonial state and the two postcolonial states (North and South Korea) has been shifting and recurrently contested. Through analyses of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Extending the constructivist approach to nations/nationalisms and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state to a transnational context, it demonstrates that being a “homeland” state or a member of the “transborder nation” is not an ethnodemographic fact, but an arduous and revocable political achievement, mediated profoundly by the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices of the state.Less
The incongruity between territory, citizenry, and nation has long preoccupied students of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship, including the state’s transborder relationship with its “external” members (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, and ethnonational “kin”). This book is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the complex relationships among the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided. Despite a widespread and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the Japanese colonial state and the two postcolonial states (North and South Korea) has been shifting and recurrently contested. Through analyses of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Extending the constructivist approach to nations/nationalisms and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state to a transnational context, it demonstrates that being a “homeland” state or a member of the “transborder nation” is not an ethnodemographic fact, but an arduous and revocable political achievement, mediated profoundly by the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices of the state.
Carina E. Ray
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780986497315
- eISBN:
- 9781786944535
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780986497315.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Maritime History
This essay explores the difficulties faced by interracial couples - primarily West African men and British or German women - in gaining acceptance in society in the interwar years in Britain and West ...
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This essay explores the difficulties faced by interracial couples - primarily West African men and British or German women - in gaining acceptance in society in the interwar years in Britain and West Africa. It considers the impact of the 1919 race riots in Britain during the postwar economic downturn that left maritime, immigrant, and working class communities particularly impoverished and led to a surge in racism and backlash against non-British labourers. West African men were accused of ‘stealing’ both jobs and women, and white women accused of betraying their nation through interracial marriage. This hostility led to efforts at repatriation to West Africa, which colonial governments would often prevent through legislation. The second half of this essay is a case study of West African husbands and German wives, who caused tremendous legal difficulties to governments looking to cease repatriation. The case studies demonstrate that notions of sex, gender, class, nationality, and religion informed colonial policies that heavily impacted the migration efforts of interracial couples.Less
This essay explores the difficulties faced by interracial couples - primarily West African men and British or German women - in gaining acceptance in society in the interwar years in Britain and West Africa. It considers the impact of the 1919 race riots in Britain during the postwar economic downturn that left maritime, immigrant, and working class communities particularly impoverished and led to a surge in racism and backlash against non-British labourers. West African men were accused of ‘stealing’ both jobs and women, and white women accused of betraying their nation through interracial marriage. This hostility led to efforts at repatriation to West Africa, which colonial governments would often prevent through legislation. The second half of this essay is a case study of West African husbands and German wives, who caused tremendous legal difficulties to governments looking to cease repatriation. The case studies demonstrate that notions of sex, gender, class, nationality, and religion informed colonial policies that heavily impacted the migration efforts of interracial couples.
