More on Diasporas

My mini-carnival attracted more attention than I expected. I also find the topic continues to have almost daily importance. For instance this evening I will be attending a dinner to celebrate Mexican Independence Day. Such celebrations show the continued connections between the Mexican diaspora in the US and their homeland next door. The Mexican diaspora in the US has always had a strong presence in the South West for obvious historical and geographical reasons. But, its cultural and political profile has been growing throughout the US in recent years.

The response I got from the carnival was of a very high quality. Some of the links in the comments should have probably been included in the carnival itself. I am thus adding this additional post. Jonathan Edelstein at Head Heeb has a post up on the Tongan diaspora in relation to recent political events in that country. The Tongans certainly fit the profile of a lesser known diaspora. Yet in an age of increased migration, the creation of new diasporas due to labor migration from poorer to richer countries will certainly continue to expand. Countries like Tonga now send people to Austalia, New Zealand and the US. In contrast traditional countries of emigration such as Ireland and Germany are now destinations for immigrants.

Jonathan Edelstein also partially fulfilled my wishlist with a link to a web site on Namibia. Written by a recently deceased ethnic German engineer from Namibia it can be found here and has a lot of information on the history of the country's German population. Now if somebody will only send me something on Arabs in Uzbekistan or Japanese in Brazil.

I got a lot comments from Onnik Krikorian who has a lot of interesting posts dealing with the relationship of the Armenian diaspora with the Republic of Armenia. His posts on the Armenian diaspora can be found here and include a series of top notch interviews with prominent people like Raffi Hovannisian. Also dealing with issues concerning the Armenian diaspora is blogrel run by Katy Pearce,a SOAS postgraduate student. So you know it has to be good.

Finally, I am going to update my blogroll this weekend and permanently add the blogs listed above to it. I suspect that as a result of this experiment I will be doing more posts on diasporas and these blogs are pretty good resources. Just one last item. The best general book on the subject, particularly for the general reader is Robin Cohen's Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London, UCL Press, 1997). It does not have anything on the Tongan diaspora, but it does cover a number of larger diasporas in a comparative manner.