[Note to readers: This post is by Xin Li, who asked me to post it for him due to internet issues. Any mistakes in posting are mine, with apologies. Dr. Kamp] In my final blog, I will discuss BRI, the role of Chinese nationalism, and Chinese migrant workers through the reflection of a conversation I […]
Kazakhstan
My Homeland, My People: Memory in Kazakh Migrations Past and Present
Throughout my blog posts this semester, I have attempted to explore the relationships between historical migration events, the folk narratives remembering those events, and how these narratives are exploited by modern states to build nationalist mythologies. I have compared nation building through the use of mythic histories in Turkey and Kyrgyzstan. This theme is particularly […]
Language and Social Institutions: Koryo Saram, Part II
Whereas my previous blog post outlined the lives and livelihoods of ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East prior to their exile in 1937, my next two posts will shift gears slightly, focusing more on the status of the Korean language among Koryo saram throughout the past century. This post will track the maintenance of […]
Building an Identity in the Post-Soviet Space
In 1991 Kazakhstan became an independent country for the first time in over two hundred years, and set out to create a homeland for Kazakhs all over the world. In order to achieve this feat, the new government would have to hold a census and ensure that Kazakhs were the majority. However, as history in […]
How words matter – from Germany, Kazakhstan, and the US
De Haas emphasized that the way we speak about migration matters, not only to our discourse, but also to the lived experiences of migrants. Using “migrant worker” instead of “expat” indicates a particular idea about the person in question. We perhaps think “unskilled” or it brings up certain ideas of race and ethnicity. De Haas […]