Diasporic Connections: Cahokia and the Greater Southeast

Social Complexity at Cahokia

A working group held at the Santa Fe Institute May 28-30, 2013, produced a set of consensus answers to questions about Cahokia, an urban place dating to the 12 and 13 centuries and located in what is today the greater Saint Louis region of Missouri and Illinois. Cahokia is an important urban place for theories of social complexity, as it appears to have emerged in the absence of a supporting re...

Diasporic walking sticks

As John Berger and Jean Mohr pointed out in The Seventh Man [5] an arresting photographic essay of European migrant labour in the 1970s the incapacitated and dying migrant is a murky presence within capitalism’s unconscious. Parodying the mounting tension between the global demand for healthy aspirational migrant workers and the responsibility for their long term well-being and care, Berger wro...

Cosmopolitan, Diasporic and Transnational: The Flourishing of Hebrew Modernism

Sikh Leadership: Establised Ideals and Diasporic Reality

As established in the Sikh scriptural canon, ideal leaders internalize qualities of self-sovereignty, intentional servitude, integrative creativity, authentic compassion, and perhaps most significant of all, Divine inspiration. Models of communal decision-making can also be derived from the lives of the Gur -Prophets (1469–1708 C.E.) and the institutions they established. Though the faith recog...

Home and Diasporic Belonging: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia

The current paper examines the ways the concepts of ̳home‘ and ̳belonging‘ are conceived, accepted, and imagined by the characters of Sam Selvon‘s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Taken from two different but close-knit periods in twentieth-century Eng- land, the 1950s and the late 1970s, the novels represent the socio-political circumstances that fo...