Journeys of Asian Diaspora

by Sam George
Journeys of Asian Diaspora
Author: Sam George
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506472508
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Asians make up the largest and most dispersed people of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering (diaspora) and the gathering (ekklesia) of Asian Christians around the world. This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

Interconnections of Asian Diaspora

by Sam George
Interconnections of Asian Diaspora
Author: Sam George
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506478298
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Asians make up the largest and most dispersed peoples of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering (diaspora) and the gathering (ekklesia) of Asian Christians around the world. This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women

by Pnina Werbner
Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among Asian Migrant Women
Author: Pnina Werbner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317983238
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The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora. This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a ‘nation of servants’, reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Orientations

by Kandice Chuh
Orientations
Author: Kandice Chuh
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2001-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822327394
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DIVA critical examination of what constitutes the varied positions grouped together as Asian American, seen in relation to both American and transnational forces./div

Upriver Journeys

by Steven B. Miles
Upriver Journeys
Author: Steven B. Miles
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684170907
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Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, this book describes the circulation of people through one of the world’s great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Steven B. Miles examines the relationship between diaspora and empire in an upriver frontier, and the role of migration in sustaining families and lineages in the homeland of what would become a global diaspora. Based on archival research and multisite fieldwork, this innovative history of mobility explores a set of diasporic practices ranging from the manipulation of household registration requirements to the maintenance of split families. Many of the institutions and practices that facilitated overseas migration were not adaptations of tradition to transnational modernity; rather, they emerged in the early modern era within the context of riverine migration. Likewise, the extension and consolidation of empire required not only unidirectional frontier settlement and sedentarization of indigenous populations. It was also responsible for the regular circulation between homeland and frontier of people who drove imperial expansion—even while turning imperial aims toward their own purposes of socioeconomic advancement.

Asylum-Seeking Journeys in Asia

by Terence Chun Tat Shum
Asylum-Seeking Journeys in Asia
Author: Terence Chun Tat Shum
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351375210
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This book looks in detail at the journeys to asylum in Asia which are largely neglected in the media and academic analyses, despite Asia becoming the most essential region for asylum, receiving refugees from both within and outside of the continent. Treating asylum-seeking journeys as a transnational space, the author investigates the actual asylum-seeking process from homelands to either Hong Kong or Bangkok. Today, refugees undertake multiple, long, and life-threatening journeys before arriving in receiving societies; from the moment of arrival in Hong Kong or Bangkok, they face a wide array of challenges. An ethnographic account of how refugees navigate and negotiate their journeys to asylum, this book highlights the social, political, economic, and psychological processes involved in "becoming" and "being" a refugee. This encompasses not only the physical movement of refugees, but also their embodiments and emotional encounters. The author offers a micro-level analysis of asylum-seeking journeys - from the aspiration to flee, to migration preparation, to border crossing, to homemaking in prolonged displacement. All of these stages reveal how these journeys create ever-evolving realities with new constellations of options and constraints. By focusing on refugees’ understanding, perception of, and interaction with the people, environments, and situations around them, this book illustrates how refugee life plans are shaped and reshaped by the embodied experience of their journeys, and how their ideas of home have changed over time. Asylum-seeking Journeys in Asia will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of migration and refugee studies, diaspora studies, globalisation, and Asian studies. It will also be of interest to policymakers and humanitarian workers involved in providing services and assistance to the global refugee population.

Diaspora Christianities

by Sam George
Diaspora Christianities
Author: Sam George
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506447066
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South Asians make up one of the largest diasporas in the world and Christians form a relatively large share of it. Christians from the Indian subcontinent have successfully transplanted themselves all over the globe, and many from different faith backgrounds have embraced Christianity at overseas locations. This volume includes biblical reflections on diasporic life, charts the historical and geographical spread of South Asian Christianity, and closes with a call to missional living in diaspora. It analyzes how migrants revive Christianity in adopted host nations and ancestral homelands. This book portrays the fascinating saga of Christians of South Asian origin who have pitched their tents in the furthest corners of the globe and showcases triumphs and challenges of scattered communities. It presents the contemporary religious experiences from a plethora of discrete perspectives. It deals with issues such as community history, struggles of identity and belonging, linkage of religious and cultural traditions, preservation and adaptation of faith practices, ties between ancestral homeland and host nation, and diasporic moral dilemmas in diaspora. This book argues that human scattering amplifies diversity within Christianity and for the need for hetrogeneous unity amidst great diversities.

Doing Church at the Amplify Open and Affirming Conferences

by Joseph N. Goh
Doing Church at the Amplify Open and Affirming Conferences
Author: Joseph N. Goh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2022-06-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9783030733162
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This book is a dedicated academic study of Amplify, a series of open and affirming Christian conferences in Asia that provides spaces of worship, support, fellowship, collaboration, and networking for LGBTIQ-affirming churches. Through a detailed analysis of narratives from fourteen Amplify frontliners comprising co-founders, hosts, organisers, co-organisers, speakers, consultants, and other active contributors, this volume chronicles the historical development of Amplify from its 2009 inception in Singapore to subsequent occurrences in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and, most recently, Taiwan in 2018. Written at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and theology, the focus of this volume lies in the construction of Asian LGBTIQ ecclesiologies that emanate from, and speak to the theological vision of doing church at Amplify.

Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America

by Benzi Zhang
Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America
Author: Benzi Zhang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2007-12-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1135908826
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Presenting a new way of reading that helps us discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Asian diaspora poetry, this volume highlights how poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions. Asian diaspora poetry in North America is a rich body of poetic works that not only provide valuable material for us to understand the lives and experiences of Asian diasporas, but also present us with an opportunity to examine some of the most important issues in current literary and cultural studies. As a mode of writing across cultural and national borders, these poetic works challenge us to reconsider the assumptions and meanings of identity, nation, home, and place in a broad cross-cultural context. In recent postcolonial studies, diaspora has been conceived not only as a process of migration in which people crossed and traversed the borders of different countries, but also as a double relationship between different cultural origins. With all its complexity and ambiguity associated with the experience of multi-cultural mediation, diaspora, as both a process and a relationship, suggests an act of constant repositioning in confluent streams that accommodate to multiple cultural traditions. By examining how Asian diaspora poets maintain and represent their cultural differences in North America, Zhang is able to seek new perspectives for understanding and analyzing the intrinsic values of Asian cultures that survive and develop persistently in North American societies.