This collection of essays is based upon the assumption that the British Empire was held together not merely by ties of trade and defence, but by a shared sense of British identity that linked British communities around the globe. Focusing on the themes of migration, identity and the media, this book is an exploration of these and other interconnected themes that help define the British World of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The essays in this volume have been written by leading experts in their respective fields and bring together established scholars with a new generation of migration and transnational historians. Their work weaves together the ‘new’ imperial and the ‘new’ migration histories, and is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the interplay of migration within and between the local, regional, imperial, and transnational arenas. Furthermore, these essays set an important analytical benchmark for more integrated and comparative analyses of the range of migratory processes – free and coerced – which together impacted on the dynamics of power, forms of cultural circulation and making of ethnicities across a British imperial world.

In British Cultural Identities, Mike Storry and Peter Childs assess the degree to which being British impinges on the identity of the many people who live in Britain. They analyze contemporary British identity through the various and changing ways in which people who live in the UK position themselves and are positioned by their culture today. Using examples from contemporary and popular culture, each chapter covers one of seven intersecting themes: place and environment education, work and leisure gender, sex and the family youth culture and style class and politics ethnicity and language religion and heritage. This new edition is fully updated to include Britain's relationship with the wider world, changes in university education and testing in schools, the trend towards electronic entertainment and social networking, the new impact of 'class', and the culture of political leaking.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.

This book applies oral, archival and other interdisciplinary evidence from West Africa and the Americas to analyses of new world Maroons, slaves and free blacks, examining a "Gold Coast" entrepot of Akan, Ga, Guan and other peoples in an Atlantic era of non-linear, mutable intersection of contested history and culture. Combining extant evidence with newer interdisciplinary insights to reconsider under-recognized histories and actors, Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World explores West African cosmologies, regional statecraft and socio-cultural practice, and the way they contributed to Atlantic ideas of freedom, identity and spirituality. Archival researches of British, Dutch and Danish Atlantic thoroughfares bring to light histories of royals, priests and others remade as captive laborers, Maroons and free blacks. Looking at Akwamu’s overtaking of Great Accra, Jamaica’s Maroon Wars, the 1712 Rebellion in New York and many other examples, this book explores the evolution of identity and spirituality in the diaspora of the Gold Coast and the Atlantic world. Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World will be of interest to scholars and students of African studies, the African diaspora, cultural studies and Atlantic and American history.

People from the British and Irish Isles have, for centuries, migrated to all corners of the globe.Wherever they went, the English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and and even sub-national, supra-regional groups like the Cornish, co-mingled, blended and blurred. Yet while they gradually integrated into new lives in far-flung places, British and Irish Isle emigrants often maintained elements of their distinctive national cultures, which is an important foundation of diasporas. Within this wider context, this volume seeks to explore the nature and characteristics of the British and Irish diasporas, stressing their varying origins and evolution, the developing attachments to them, and the differences in each nation’s recognition of their own diaspora. The volume thus offers the first integrated study of the formation of diasporas from the islands of Ireland and Britain, with a particular view to scrutinizing the similarities, differences, tensions and possibilities of this approach.

Featuring essays by world-renowned scholars, Diasporas charts the various ways in which global population movements and associated social, political and cultural issues have been seen through the lens of diaspora. Wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, this collection considers critical concepts shaping the field, such as migration, ethnicity, post-colonialism and cosmopolitanism. It also examines key intersecting agendas and themes, including political economy, security, race, gender, and material and electronic culture. Original case studies of contemporary as well as classical diasporas are featured, mapping new directions in research and testing the usefulness of diaspora for analyzing the complexity of transnational lives today. Diasporas is an essential text for anyone studying, working or interested in this increasingly vital subject.

“Provocative and well written . . . a must-read for any scholar interested in African identity, the transatlantic slave trade, and resistance.” —American Historical Review Although they came from distinct polities and peoples who spoke different languages, slaves from the African Gold Coast were collectively identified by Europeans as “Coromantee” or “Mina.” Why these ethnic labels were embraced and how they were utilized by enslaved Africans to develop new group identities is the subject of Walter C. Rucker’s absorbing study. Rucker examines the social and political factors that contributed to the creation of New World ethnic identities and assesses the ways displaced Gold Coast Africans used familiar ideas about power as a means of understanding, defining, and resisting oppression. He explains how performing Coromantee and Mina identity involved a common set of concerns and the creation of the ideological weapons necessary to resist the slavocracy. These weapons included obeah powders, charms, and potions; the evolution of “peasant” consciousness and the ennoblement of common people; increasingly aggressive displays of masculinity; and the empowerment of women as leaders, spiritualists, and warriors, all of which marked sharp breaks or reformulations of patterns in their Gold Coast past. “One of the book’s greatest strengths is the ways in which Rucker painstakingly traces how ethnic labels were appropriated, recast, and ultimately employed as a means to establish community bonds and resist oppression . . . Chapters that focus on the creation of the Gold Coast diaspora, religion, and women make for a captivating text that will be of interest to graduate students and specialist readers. Recommended.” —Choice

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.