Langue & Parole: Bilingualism, Dialect, Patois! Or Do We All Have to Speak "The Queen’s English"?
NEW ESTIMATES OF THE MOST RECENT CENSUS SHOW that more than 28,000,000 United States residents were born in other countries of non-United States parents. This represents more than double the percentage of the same category more than twenty-five years ago. Locally in terms of Florida, we find that over fifteen percent of Floridians were not born in the United States.
Marginality, undesirability, subordination, enslavement, and persecution constitute an array of tragic results of any of the following conditions: military occupation, religious intolerance, laws by which dominant cultures define ethnic groups, economics, or, simply, visceral fear of difference (and here we need to add gender and sexuality).
In addition, the great wave of immigration at the turn of last century – by now in its fourth, if not fifth, generation of progeny – is not dissimilar to what is happening today. Then, most came from Europe; now most come from Latin America and what we may conceive of as greater Asia.
More significant still, we cannot ignore the more tragic Diasporas that have a much longer history than the two above-mentioned migrations. Due to religious persecution, the Jewish Diaspora figures as the world’s first forced peregrination. As a consequence, Jews for many centuries formed the only religious and ethnic minority in the countries in which they eventually settled, only to suffer last century from the European Holocaust, one of the most tragic systematic persecutions known to humankind. In turn, the 16th century marks the beginning of another involuntary, tragic Diaspora, this time the displacement and enslavement of millions of Africans from their original homeland to numerous countries in the New World.
This conference seeks to offer a platform for a continued discussion of the various notions of Diaspora and what they mean in the North American context. The focus will be on the comparative, interdisciplinary, and transnational discourse(s) on exile, migration, race, and ethnicity within the geo-cultural areas we know as the United States and its close neighbors north and south. There will be a post-conference call for working papers to be included in a CD-ROM publication, Global Diasporistics & the United States.
