Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity

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Challenges conventional understandings of identity based on notions of nation and culture as bounded or discrete. Through careful examinations of various hybrid, border, and diasporic forces and practices, these essays push at the edge of cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory and raise crucial questions about ethnographic methodology. This volume exempliefies a cross-disciplinary cultural studies and a concept of culture rooted in lived experience as well as textural readings. Anthropologists and scholars from related fields deploy a range of methodologies and styles of writing to blur and complicate conventional dualisms between authors and subjects of research home and away, center and periphery, and first and third world. Essays discuss topics such as Rai, a North African pop music viewed as weternized in Algeria and as Arab music in France; the place of Separdic and Palestininan writer within Israel's Ashkenazic-dominated arts community; and the use and misuse of concept "postcolonial" as it is applied in various regional contexts. In exploring histories of displacement and geopgrpahies of identity, these essays call for the reconceptualization of theoritical binarisms such as modern and postmoder, colonial and postcolonial. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students concerned with postmoder and postcolonial thory, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.