This paper seeks to serve as a preliminary step towards filling a gap within cultural anthropological scholarship on the Afghan diaspora, particularly the performativity of belonging and the constitution of the diasporic subject. It is also a reaction to mainstream American media's recent depiction of the social experiences of the Afghan diaspora in the U.S. as monolithic and necessarily defined by a primordial connection to Afghanistan. The voices of the children of Afghan immigrants provide a window into expressions of oneself as an "Afghan" that are not always based on an organically-perceived connection to Afghanistan and its cultural productions, but rather on more complex, diverse rubrics that differ with individual and family histories. This paper is based on a three-month ethnographic study I have conducted of young adult Afghan-Americans whose parents emigrated from Afghanistan and settled in various parts of New York shortly following the beginning of the Afghan-Soviet War (1979-1989). Through an analysis of their personal accounts, anchored in theoretical literature on the diasporic subject and on the performance of different identities in everyday life, the paper offers initial insight into the following questions: how do young adult Afghan-Americans articulate the criteria that constitute someone as "being Afghan"; in what social spaces and in the midst of what kinds of references to family histories and historical discourses of Afghanistan do these ideas become more malleable to one individuali; and how is "being Afghan" affirmed through its juxtaposition with other ethnicized and racialized groups within New York as a transnational spacen The small pool of people observed speak to these questions in the following ways: 1. There exists a notion of degrees of "Afghanness" and "being in tune" with Afghan cultural norms and these rubrics, which are measured against an ideal standard for "being Afghan," oscillate in spaces where different types of social capital is valued; 2. Calling oneself "Afghan" can be legitimized, to some, by cultivating a knowledge of Afghanistan's history and the performance of Afghan cultural productions; 3. Cultivating a knowledge of Afghan cultural productions is, oftentimes, viewed as a return to one's true identity and moving away an abandonment of one's true self; and 4. Degrees of "Afghanness" are sometimes affirmed in opposition to other racialized or ethnicized identities. These conclusions contribute to the literature on the formation of the transnational diasporic subject and might prompt a greater probing of media representations of other diasporas' social experiences.

This paper compares two novels by Iraqi refugees in Sweden by analyzing how their narrators' search for new subjectivities procedes from the erosion of Marxist ideologies in their new European post-Cold War contexts. The two novels, Raqs 'ala al-Ma': Ahlam Wa'ira (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams) (2006) by Mahmud al-Bayati and Hawa' Qalil (Little Air) (2009) by Janan Jasim al-Hallawwi, feature narrators who seek to come to grips with their new environment - both societal and natural - in Sweden, in search of new subjectivities which are initially based on their loss of a homeland and loss of political place. Al-Bayati's Raqs 'ala al-Ma' is structured around the narrator's search for the owner of a lost wallet, a search that parallels a similar event that occurred years earlier when he was living in Prague under the auspices of the Iraqi Communist Party. The narrator's search for the wallet becomes analogous to his emergent subject position as a refugee in Sweden and implicates intertwined Middle Eastern and European histories and poetics. The narrator confronts structures of exclusion while creating an inclusive space based on his readings of Arab, European, and Scandinavian historical and literary sources. On the other hand, the narrator of Hawa' Qalhl arrives in Sweden in the early 1990s, in his 11th year of exile previously lived in the Middle East, and declares his distance from the Marxist politics that his former self embraced. However, in his new environment and facing a society in which anti-immigrant sentiment is taking hold, he progressively loses a sense of himself and his place in the world. Deep in a depression textured by nightly asphyxiations (hence the title) he takes refuge in experiencing the beauty of wintry Swedish landscapes in solitude and in imagining poetical and aesthetic languages speak through them. Whereas the literary I of al-Bayati's novel achieves a new ethical and political sense of place through his search , the narrator of Hawa' Qalil resorts to returning to post-2003 Iraq, a decision that aggravates his sense of alienation from his former political self. This paper argues that though divergent in their resolutions (or lack thereof) cultural products and aesthetics are central to attempts at claiming new subjectivities in these two novels, and more broadly, in the emergent genre of Iraqi refugee literature.