Immigration, Displacement, and Cultural Preservation: Maintaining Home Country Culture in the Diaspora

Dear Colleagues,

In 2021, dozens of young Afghans from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music fled their home country in an arranged resettlement agreement with Portugal, which had agreed to permanently relocate and resettle them. Now residing in the city of Braga, most of these young musicians attend a school for the performing arts, where, in some ways, they replicate the special kind of performing arts high school experience they had in Afghanistan.

A few hundred miles away in Edinburgh, Scotland, there is a refugee outreach and performing arts organization named the Trojan Women Project (TWP). TWP has a two-pronged mission: using drama as a therapeutic approach to treating the traumas of displacement and using performance as an approach to spreading awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis. The project's founders, filmmakers, and producers, Charlotte Eagers, William Stirling, and Itab Azzam, have developed and produced a variety of projects since 2013, all featuring Syrian refugees and in Arabic. Some of the projects are staged productions, while others are in film documentary form.

On the other side of the globe, in the USA, author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen has produced both nonfiction pieces and engaging novels on topics covering immigration, displacement, politics, and the Vietnam War and its aftershocks. His textual products offer a platform for marginalized and displaced characters to voice their stories, contributing to the construction of a cultural dialogue on what it means to be a formerly displaced resident of the United States.

Whether it is the work to preserve young Afghani lives and their musical talents, offering a theatrical platform for sharing the experiences of refugee Syrian women in Scotland, or using literature to highlight the American immigrant experience, each of these examples represents a new trend in human experience in which the diasporic community is celebrated instead of being suppressed. Gone are the days when an Arab immigrant residing in New York City in the 1960s intentionally refrained from teaching his children Arabic so that they could “assimilate,” “integrate,” or “pass as American.” New immigrants around the globe are clinging to their languages, culinary traditions, and musicians, actors, and artists. We are witnessing a new era in which, for many, particularly those forcibly relocated, preserving home country culture is a key to maintaining a sense of self. We are also witnessing an era in which the arts and cultural productions in general, be they theater, film, literature, or music, are explored as channels to make sense of what it means to be a person of “diaspora.”

Whether the work be political and structural or artistic and spontaneous, it is important that these efforts be recognized and researched. For this Special Issue of Humanities, we seek contributions that address the issues of immigration, displacement, and the preservation of cultural practices in diaspora. We conceive that it is both a complex feat and existential in nature that authors, musicians, and artists continue to tell the stories of their home countries and bring their indigenous arts to host communities. These ongoing practices are made even more difficult for artists and creatives in light of the pressures to culturally assimilate and acquire new languages and ways of being upon resettling in the west. Therefore, as researchers, we feel the urgency to document and celebrate the cultural products of both the voluntary immigrants and the involuntary refugees.

We invite contributors to engage in critical exploration that documents the broadly defined cultural productions of diasporic artists. These can be diasporic representations in theater, music, creative writing, visual arts, or other humanistic products. Contributions are expected to analyze these productions while reflecting on questions such as the following:

• How does a particular cultural production preserve the idea of home?
• How can the creative activity of multiple privates of a diasporic group be an active part of the general public sphere of the host community?
• What is the preferred language for diasporic communities when they decide to do a public creative act? What are the implications of this choice?
• What role does habitus play in the desire for or pursuit of cultural preservation?

Prof. Dr. Fadi Skeiker
Dr. Myla Skeiker
Guest Editors

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• migration
• literature
• diaspora
• cultural preservation