Migrants

This article discusses the impact of popular music on the Cuban diaspora (London) by focusing on the ways in which music is used to construct notions of identity and nation. It is argued that, in the host country, Cuban emigrants benefit from a diverse soundscape, which enables them to choose, consume, and perform a selection of popular, national, and diasporic music devoid of the political charge music acquired in their homeland. In diaspora, new listening strategies engage migrants in reconsidering the role certain artists had in shaping their previous knowledge about what constituted national music. A new knowledge, produced in diaspora, influences personal processes of subject construction and the appropriation of a national identity, which departs from previous notions learned in the homeland. The article is based on a series of qualitative interviews with members of the Cuban diaspora in London and participant observation carried out during 2006‐07.

This study constitutes a discourse analysis on migrant illegality as well as an ethnographic study of the meanings rejected asylum seekers assign to their everyday experiences. It provides an angle to larger questions of migration in the European Union from the point of view of rejected asylum seekers residing in the Netherlands. This study argues that there are three intersecting discourses that define the discursive as well as material conditions for the experiences of the researched group. The dominant discourse to which the researched group is assigned to in Dutch society is that on migrant illegality. It interpellates the researched group as cultural as well as ethnic Others rather than rights-holding subjects. This dominant discourse is contested by a discourse of compassion on a societal level as well as by a discourse of deserving refugees that the research participants themselves produce. This study shows that the political statelessness of the research participants translates into de facto homelessness in their everyday lives. The situation of homelessness provokes an intensification of the precariousness of the research participants' lives and also demonstrates how the political and social are necessarily intertwined in contemporary Europe. This study argues that an enforcement of the discourse of compassion is needed. However, this enforcement should not revolve around the figure of the victim, a figure that is highly gendered as women are especially assigned to the position of a victim in the discourses examined in this study. Rather, it should promote a compassionate encounter in which all parties are considered as legitimate interlocutors of their own situation.

The evidence shows that Tanzanian and Zambian university students representing the Afri-can by origin overwhelming majority of the countries’ population are generally tolerant to-wards their compatriots of the non-African (European and South Asian) origins. However, the evidence also gives reason to argue that, on the one hand, in both countries the percep-tion of Europeans is better than of Indians and, on the other hand, the level of tolerance among Zambian students is higher than among Tanzanian. The aim of the article is to find out why it is so; most attention is paid to the second, previously undiscovered phenomenon. The authors examine a number of factors that supposedly could lead to the Zambian edu-cated youth’s higher level of tolerance and arrive at the conclusion that the most significant among them is the existence since pre-colonial time of the Swahili culture and language at minimal number of expansionist centralized polities on the contemporary state’s territory as the background for autochthonous peoples’ unity in Tanzania and lack of such a background till colonial period in Zambia. Among the other factors tested, those that turned out impor-tant for defining the respondents’ attitude to the non-autochthonous minorities are their look at colonialism (the Zambian aggregate is characterized by less total rejection of colonialism due to which the European and South Asian diasporas appeared, as it is seen widely as the time when the nation began to form) and degree of concentration on the values of traditional culture (which is lower among Zambian students). In the meantime, the role secularization plays is contradictory, while belonging to the Christian or Muslim faith, to a larger or smaller ethnic group, place of birth (city, town, village, etc.), and probably financial situa-tion proved insignificant.

On b.a.n.g. lab's provocative technologies and performances, achieved through an engagement with geographic and political spaces. The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) is a project created by the University of California at San Diego’s Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, and still evolving today. Here Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of EDT (with Brett Stalbaum), Principal Investigator of b.a.n.g. lab, and Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, discusses the project with Lawrence Bird. The interview includes input from other members of the collective: Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll and Elle Mehrmand.

"English
Pakistani migrants have settled gradually at N. Ionia during the last fifteen years, under very different circumstances each. It seems like it is a community that gradually negotiates the development of its group identity through the elaboration of different memories and narratives of its members and through its everyday rituals, a community that tells its story and, through this procedure, claims its right to visibility (inwards and outwards).



French
Les immigrants pakistanais N. Ionia progressivement au cours des quinze dernières années, dans des conditions très différentes de chaque. Elle est une communauté qui négocie la formation de l'identité collective par le biais du traitement des différents mémoires et les récits de ses membres, à travers les rituels de la vie quotidienne, l'histoire et, à travers ce processus, le droit de négociation d'être visible (vers l'extérieur et vers l'intérieur).
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The article examines social interactions vis-à-vis outward migration in Guyana where certain local people experience what is perceived as an ‘outside stigma. ’ This stigma as the opposite of the status obtained by migrants and successful global networkers is now being publicly upset with the advent of increasing temporary migrant workers, and local ‘experts,’ who find ways to demonstrate their agency. This upset rebounds the local and unveils specific persons in ways which interrupt and set limits to a ‘global network’. In these interruptions, the network is stilled as a particular local  which is sought by some returned migrants, for instance, in their focus on the ‘pure village bride,’ and which is emphasised by residents in the ways they become experts.