Caribbean immigrants have now become part of the social landscape of many American cities. Few studies, however, have treated in detail the process of their integration in American society. American Odyssey assesses the development and adaptation, in both human and socio-economic terms, of the Haitian immigrant community in three boroughs of New York City. An informed and well-rounded portrayal of a Caribbean community in New York, this book offers a fresh theoretical view of the structuring of urban ethnicity and provides the ethnographic background essential to understanding the problems of the Haitian population in the United States.
In this book, Michel S.Laguerre argues that there exists an informal city located just beneath and in the interstices of the formal city. The metaphor is not geographical, but rather structural and hermeneutical. This is the city where manoeuvres that cannot be done publicly, legally, ethically or otherwise are performed. The author shows with illustrative data drawn from the American urban experience - the San Francisco-Oakland Metropolitan area - why and how the informal city must be seen as the hidden dimension of the formal city.
Not only does this book give a well-researched account of the politicization of Haitian Voodoo and the Voodooization of Haitian politics, it also lays the ground for the development of creative policies by the state vis-a-vis the cult. It is an indispensable research tool for the students of Afro-American, Caribbean and African societies in particular, and for religionists and political scientists in general.
Laguerre proposes a relationship among migrants and their home society that transcends current views in migration studies. The relationship among Haitians who live outside Haiti reflects a web rather than a radial relationship with the home country; Haitian migrants communicate among themselves and the home country simultaneously. In viewing the Haitian diaspora from a global perspective, the author reveals a new theory of interconnectedness in migration, which marks a significant move away from transnationalism.
This book explains the transformation of the nation into a cosmonation (or multisite nation) through the reunification of the homeland with its diaspora. The book elaborates on how the mechanisms of linkages, connections, and networking interact to form distributed sites of homeland and diaspora into a cosmonation and how diasporans in different units of such a crossborder social formation, wherever they relocate, relate to each other. The ensemble thereby functions as a cultural and political collectivity manifested through cultural traditions, inter-site familial, institutional, and associational ties, transnational solidarity, and reverence for the ancestral homeland.
This book briefly delineates the history of the Haitian diaspora in the United States in the nineteenth century, but it primarily concerns itself with the contemporary period and more specifically with the diasporic enclave in New York City. It uses a critical transnational perspective to convey the adaptation of the immigrants in American society and the border-crossing practices they engage in as they maintain their relations with the homeland. It further reproblematizes and reconceptualizes the notion of diasporic citizenship so as to take stock of the newer facets of the globalization process.
A structural and hermeneutic analysis of civil-military relations in Haiti. The equilibrium theory of civil-military relations developed here postulates that the stability of a political system capable of preventing military intervention is the result of three sets of balanced relationships.
This book aims to fill a void in the literature on the contributions of the state to the social protection, educational training, and human security of its overseas citizens. Additionally, Michel S. Laguerre seeks to explain the rise of the postdiaspora condition: an emancipatory metamorphosis of diaspora status. Laguerre pays particular attention to the crossborder services that the state provides, transfrontier mechanisms developed by various institutions, as well as extraterritorial forms of management and governance. He sheds light on complex crossborder arrangements and management, the multiplicity of crossborder agencies and organizations, and the promulgation of new laws that provide a legal basis for these extraterritorial undertakings by the state. The ability of emigrants to hold citizen status—and to enjoy access to the same rights and privileges as those offered to residents of the homeland—sets the cosmonational context for the performance of the postdiaspora condition.
This book analyzes the unfolding of a new institutional phenomenon: the cosmonational parliament of the cross-border nation and the expanded state, focusing on three European national parliaments, namely the French Senate, the Italian Chamber of Representatives and Senate, and the Croatian unicameral parliament.
This study seeks to explain three models of network governance embedded in digital practices that the mainstream monotheistic religions—Judaism, Catholic Christianity, and Islam—have used to lead and manage the worldwide distribution of their local nodes, exploring the connection between network governance and its digital embeddedness and showing how the latter enhances the performance of the former.
In this book on urban poverty in the Caribbean, Michel S. Laguerre presents a detailed analysis of the phenomenon in urban Martinique. He argues that the national structure of inequality finds its myriad expressions in the urban environment. Not only does the city provide the ideological back-up - and the locus where elite ideologies are produced and reproduced - but also the men and women who occupy the positions that sustain the inequality structure. The city serves then as an arena where inequality and poverty are daily manufactured.
This book focuses on three ethnic neighbourhoods in San Francisco - commoditized Chinatown, gentrified Japantown, and defunct Manilatown - and argues that the city is global because it comprises a multiplicity of global niches that interface with and sustain one another at the local level. According to the author, these enclaves are not simply transnational communities but, rather, global ethnopoles. They must be seen within the logic of globalization and not simply that of transnationality. The early emphasis on transnationality is misplaced because it looks at the process and not the outcome. Transnationality is the means by which, or the conduit through which, the global ethnopole is produced. The focus here is on various processes of border-crossing practices, connections, and flows in order to examine the globalized locality and the localized globality. Any theory of transnationality presupposes a theory of globalization. In other words, transnationality is the process by which globality is effected. This new approach of studying ethnic enclaves within the framework of globaliz-ation theory forces us to connect local activities and processes to a much larger universe. However, the view that diasporic communities maintain transnational rel-ations with their homelands is not new, though only recently have social scientists begun to unravel their various layers of interconnectedness. What is needed now is not simply a description of the enclave- homeland relationship but, also, an analysis and comparison of the transnational modalities of incorporation, operation, and reproduction of these ethnopoles, as well as the'`global city' status that is the hallmark of their identity.
This book focuses on American society as a transglobal nation and examines the temporal dimension of diasporic incorporation in New York City. It argues that immigrant neighborhoods are faced not only with issues of economic and political integration, but also are engaged in a sublime and relentless effort of harmonizing the cultural rhythms of their daily life with the hegenomic temporality of mainstream society. Although much energy has been spent in explaining the segregated or ghettoized space of ethnic communitiies, there is, in contrast, a dearth of data on the subalternization, genealogy, and inscription of minoritized temporalities in the structural and interactional organization of the multicultural American City. The study of Ney York City, through an analysis of diasporic temporalities in their relation to the mainstream community and the homeland, provides a productive point of view for decoding the urban multicutluralism of the metropolis. Throughout the book, it is argued that the interaction between the dominant and subaltern temporalities is wholly mediated by crisscrossing global flows that are constitutive of the local scene. In this global context, time equity has emerged as an ethnic project undertaken to undermine time subjugation that is a factor of discrimination and to bring about the advent of a temporally multiculturalized and multiculturally temporized democracy. Until the issue of equity is resolved, the democratic process will remain an unfinished project of modernity.
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