The focus of diasporic humanitarian and political activism is often directed towards members of the community still residing in territory recognised as the ‘homeland’ (Bruneau 2010; Clarke 2010; Hammond 2013). Middle Eastern Christians who have migrated to the UK often due to education and employment opportunities but also in some cases due to discrimination and violence experienced in their home countries are no exception and several organisations have been set up in the UK to meet the needs of Christians in the Middle East. Using case studies of charities and lobby organisations established by Coptic, Assyrian and Iraqi Christian migrants including Iraqi Christians in Need, St Kyrel’s Trust, Assyrian Church of the East Relief Organisation and UK Copts, this paper argues that these organisations not only aim to reinforce ties with the homeland but also serve to strengthen communal identity in the UK by focusing upon the suffering of co-religionists. While organisation members may develop links with British political and ecumenical actors in order to gain publicity and support for their goals and the situation of Christians in the Middle East in general, the organisations are still primarily community-oriented concerning actions and funding. However, this approach is being challenged by the second generation who either question what they perceive as a narrow focus in terms of aims and objectives especially relating to wider UK society or else are seen by organisation leaders as being apathetic regarding more active involvement in the organisations and thus the situation of Christians in the Middle East. These intergenerational differences indicate wider tensions between the youth and older migrants relating to the role of the community in the UK and understandings of communal identity, thus potentially impacting upon the future of transnational humanitarian and political organisations run by the diaspora. This paper is based on semi-structured interviews conducted in 2014 in London and Scotland with Christians of Egyptian and Iraqi origin residing in the UK including active members of the case study organisations and is part of research conducted as part of a larger interdisciplinary project comparing Middle Eastern Christian migrant experiences in the UK, Denmark and Sweden.

In the last forty years, emergent global conditions have influenced the experience of Arab-Americans living in the United States. This paper explores some aspects of the production of this transnational subjectivity, new visibility and cultural citizenship among Yemeni-Americans living in Southern California. While Yemeni immigration to the United States starts in 19th century, with the opening of Suez Canal in Egypt, migration had remained uncommon and sporadic until the 1960s when it sharply increased due to the fall of Imamate and changes in American immigration policy (Friedlander 1988). Until the early 1980s, Yemeni migrants to the US were mostly sojourners rather than settlers: they viewed their migration as temporary (Swanson 1988). Yemeni migrants have maintained an ’ideology of return’ and have primarily moved to the United States to improve their status in Yemen by sending remittances to relatives and buying properties in their places of origin (Staub 1989). This paper is about the social history of a small diasporic community of three generations of Yemeni-Americans that I call Little Yemen. In the 1980s, after years of farm work and other minor occupations, some of the earlier founding members of Little Yemen settled in a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley in California. The early Yemeni settlers pooled their resources to establish successful businesses, brought wives and other relatives back from Yemen, and to build their own mosque. Based on ethnographic and oral history interviews with multiple generations, I explore the local, regional, and global circumstances as well as challenges that compelled these migrants to settle in Little Yemen. I focus on the implications of American education as well as economic opportunities and success on the dynamic of settling and the poetic of home and belonging. I argue that the inhabitants of Little Yemen, through participating in a variety of community rituals, ‘produce locality’ (Appadurai 1986) and establish a new sense of belonging that may offset the earlier ‘ideology of return.’

The recent explosion of revolts in the Arab world exposes the oppressive practices of autocratic regimes and nation-states as well as the politics of racial ethnification inside Arab homelands. Today ethnic writing from Yemen posits a revolutionized form of “diaspora” that is no longer defined by geographic mobility and border-crossing to the West. Enduring conditions of diaspora inside the homeland, the community of Black Yemenis (or Akhdam in Arabic) use “diasporic imagination” as an interventionist discourse against racial discrimination, forced labor migration and exclusive tribal affiliations. In his novel, Black Taste … Black Smell, Ali Al-Muqri depicts the culture of racialization and migratory dwelling experienced by Yemen’s black others forcibly displaced between political prisons and miserable slums in their country. The racial attitudes of government officials, the persecution of Arabs of African descent and the enclosed ownership of natural resources in the Arab Gulf turns the homeland to an alienating site of belonging. This paper will argue that one doesn’t need to leave home or emigrate from the homeland to feel diasporic. Al-Muqri’s novel demonstrates how the case of Al Akhdam community in Yemen projects an understudied aspect of diaspora that is rarely examined in diaspora studies. The Yemeni novel makes a case for diaspora that is mainly informed by racial and ethnic subjugation rather than material movement to the West. Contemporary Yemeni literature transcends the emphasis on postcolonial migration from East to West and projects a conception of diaspora undefined by transnational border-crossing and migration to the West. By employing the trope of “diasporic imagination” as a political aesthetic in their writings, Black Yemeni writers traverse the strictures of Arab nation-states and forge a stateless form of citizenship informed by the rerouting of Black roots and the formation of diasporic intermediaries across national borders. The emergence of black Yemeni writing challenges literary critics to rethink the intersectionality between race and the formation of diaspora communities inside the homeland, and the way black activism has become a significant aspect of the Middle East’s political unrest.

This paper will present the oeuvre of Shojaeddin Shafa’ (1918-2010), an Iranian intellectual and bureaucrat, who was central to the efforts of the Pahlavi state to educate the masses and cultivate its perception of Iranian nationalism, in the course of the last decade and a half of its existence. Active at the crossroads between the political and the intellectual, Shafa planned some of the famous events of the Pahlavi state, the greatest of which was the Celebration of 2500 years of Iranian monarchy, held in October 1971. Moreover, Shafa’, who lived in exile from the Islamic Revolution until his death in 2010, kept defending and expounding the Pahlavi historical view of Iranian nationalism, history and identity. In his polemical writings against the Islamic Republic, he demonstrated that the collision between the Islamic Republic and at least part of Iranian nationalists living outside Iran is far from over. This biographical work is part of a larger project that ventures to trace the cultural aspects of the Pahlavi state and its adversaries, mainly from 1963 to 1979, and the echoes thereof in contemporary discourse in and outside Iran.

Separated from Tunisia by only 75 nautical miles, Sicily, the southernmost region of Italy, was the first Italian region to experience Tunisian migration in the late 1960s. Despite being economically marginal to Italy, Sicily also has a history of extensive economic and political relations with Tunisia. This paper examines the changing condition of Tunisian migrants in Sicily focusing on two periods of flourishing cross-Mediterranean relations: the first half of the 1980s (mainly in association with the fishing sector) and the first decade of the 21st Century (mainly characterized by EU cross-border cooperation subsidies). Drawing on a combination of oral histories, interviews and archival research, the paper examines the legal status of Tunisian migrants in each of these two periods, as well as their access to the labour market, and their day-to-day experiences of racialization. The paper claims that while the legal status of Tunisian migrant workers has substantially improved, and they currently face less explicit discrimination on a daily basis, their economic stability has become increasingly precarious due to the economic crisis hitting multiple productive sectors of the island's economy. Thus, while various Sicilian local governments are celebrating the multiculturalism of the island, its 9th to 11th Century Arab history, and its current connections to Tunisia, many of its well-established Tunisian migrants, particularly those who have acquired Italian citizenship, are looking for possibilities to leave the island, or Italy altogether. While underlining its past and present connections to Tunisia is a way for Sicily to boost its strategic importance within Italy and to capture European Union subsidies, this has not translated into material benefits for the island's Tunisian population.

Historians who are interested in explaining the lives of people of African descent in Iran face a number of challenges, and perhaps the greatest of these is a lack of good sources. Official census records and British Foreign Office documents give broad outlines of the size and distribution of the population, and memoirs and official histories can be mined for stories of Africans who served in palaces and elite households. But finding information on the tens of thousands of Africans who toiled in less prestigious circumstances has been much harder. My paper bridges this gap by analyzing 186 English-language travel narratives written by British and American citizens who came to Iran during the Qajar Period. Historians of Iran have long recognized the importance of this category of documents, yet to this date only two dozen or so of the most famous ones are in regular use. This is particularly sad given the astounding breadth of the travelers’ experiences. These men and women mingled with the richest and poorest Iranians in both urban and rural settings in virtually every province, often writing in vivid detail about subjects that Iranian writers would have balked at mentioning at all. I show that these narratives are a deep, rich source for information on the everyday lives of Iranians of African descent—male and female, slave and free. These stories are not written by the Africans themselves, of course, and are still embedded within the writers’ own cultural contexts. Yet when placed alongside the governmental and elite Iranian documentation that is most often our window into this world, this corpus can at least help to provide a more balanced portrayal of what life was like for this too often misunderstood people. In addition, I hope that my use of these documents will serve to underscore their importance for scholars of Iran who focus on other subjects, as well.

How does diversity affect the tendency for individuals to think and act in a fair, ethical, and pro-social fashion? Unfortunately for multiculturalists, a significant amount of evidence links ethnic heterogeneity to negative outcomes in areas such as economic growth, public goods provision, and conflict (e.g. Alesina and Le Ferrara 2003). However, there is also evidence from laboratory studies that homogeneous groups have their own problems. When placed in groups, for example, similar-minded individuals may become more extreme in their views, a phenomenon known as “risky shift” (Myers and Biship 1970). In addition, due to the “similarity-leniency” effect, people may be more lenient when evaluating members of their in-group, perverting the course of justice (Kerr et al 1995). In the Middle East, these issues are especially important because of the salience of group identity. Although a growing literature addresses the effects of heterogeneity on social preferences and altruism more generally, there is less work on how heterogeneity might affect attitudes related to corruption; the acceptability of “connections” as a means of social mobility (i.e., wasta) over demonstrated performance or merit; and the propensity to lie and cheat. At the same time, experimental findings provide good foundations for the hypothesis that heterogeneity—by reducing in-group bias, fostering tolerance, and creating the sense of being judged by others—may encourage more ethical behavior. This paper contributes by examining the effects of heterogeneity on ethical attitudes and behaviors in a sample of Middle Eastern youth. Emirati high school students in the United Arab Emirates were randomly assigned to a homogeneous or a heterogeneous group. Homogeneous groups consisted only of Emirati youth. Heterogeneous groups included both Emirati and expatriate Arab youth. After a group identity-building exercise, a range of ethical attitudes and behaviors relating to corruption, broadly understood, were measured, including cheating propensity via a fake test and leniency toward in-group ethical transgressors. Results should contribute to knowledge about the effects, both negative and positive, of heterogeneity on society, with emphasis on how those effects unfold in the highly diverse Arab world. Bibliography Alesina, A. and E. La Ferrara. 2005. “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance.” Journal of Economic Literature 43: 762-800. Kerr, N. L., Hymes, R. W., Anderson, A. B., & Weathers, J. E. 1995. “Defendant-juror Similarity and Mock Juror Judgments.” Law and Human Behavior 19: 545-568. Myers, D. G., & Bishop, G. D. 1970. “Discussion Effects on Racial Attitudes.” Science, 169: 778-779.