UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

This course will explore the most recent scholarship and most recent scholarship and most dominant theories in the field of migration and diaspora studies. New technologies, climate change, economic crises as well as contemporary iterations of terrorism and warfare have all intensified the global movements of people, goods, ideas, cultures, and money. This has reinvigorated the study of migration in earlier periods, with many arguing that related phenomena have been endemic to the human population since our beginning. New frameworks that emphasize networks and relationality, and bring into the foreground interculturalism, borders and borderlands, and hybridic formations have begun to reorder ways of reading human cultures and civilizations. The course brings together theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from both the humanities and social sciences (e.g. anthropology, literary studies, performance studies, psychology, ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, history, and sociology) with various forms of cultural expression (e.g., poetry, film, music, literature). The course places the different theories/strategies in dialogue to empower students of transdisciplinarity with tools for shaping their own unique studies of migration and diaspora in ways that exceed the boundaries of particular disciplines. Themes explored will include: the contexts for the newly invigorated field; the multiple meanings and models of diaspora and migration; the relation of migration and diaspora to conquest, colonialism, post colonialism, refugeeism, political exile, etc.; the heterogeneity of diasporic groups; the problems and potentials of assimilation, acculturation and transculturation; nativism and the hostility of hostlands; generational conflicts and continuities in the (re)production of culture; the role of language and other cultural practices in migratory experiences; the significance of memory for the production of what Salman Rushdie calls "imaginary homelands"; and the phenomenological dimensions of migration and diaspora (loss, between worlds, nostalgia, depression, exhilaration, etc.).