Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas

Bringing together different strands of research on Middle Eastern diasporas, the Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas sheds light on diverse approaches to investigating diaspora groups in different national contexts.

Asking how diasporans forge connections and means of belonging, the analyses provided turn the reader’s gaze to the multiple forms of belonging to both peoples and places. Rather than seeing diasporans as marginalised groups of people longing to return to a homeland, analyses in this volume demonstrate that Middle East diasporans, like other diasporas and citizens alike, are people who respond to major social change and transformations. Those we count as Middle Eastern diasporans, both in the region and beyond, contribute to transnational social spaces, and new forms of cultural expressions. Chapters included cover how diasporas have been formed, the ways that diasporans make and remake homes, the expressive terrains where diasporas are contested, how class, livelihoods and mobility inflect diasporic practices, the emergence of diasporic sensibilities and, finally, scholarship that draws our attention to the plurilocality of Middle Eastern diasporas.

Offering a rich compilation of case studies, this book will appeal to students of Middle Eastern Studies, International Relations, and Sociology, as well as being of interest to policymakers, government departments, and NGOs.

Dalia Abdelhady is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lund University, Sweden. Her work features the application of postcolonial analysis to the sociology of migration. Following a comparative perspective, her work focuses on the meeting point between individual immigrants (and their communities) and institutions in receiving countries (such as schools, labour markets, media and political policies). In addition to a number of journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab Immigrant Experiences in Montreal, New York and Paris (2011), and co-editor of Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe (2020).

Ramy Aly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Ramy’s first monograph Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity was published in 2015 with Pluto Press as part of their celebrated ’Anthropology, Culture and Society Series’. The book is the first ethnographic account of gender, race and class practices among British-born and -raised Arabs in London and attempts to provide an account of the everyday experiences of Arabness in the British capital. Ramy’s research interests and publications engage with the anthropology of ethnicity, migration and diaspora; anthropology and media studies; cultural studies; and youth cultures.