Lives in Translation

by Hall, Kathleen D.

• ISBN13: 9780812236675
• ISBN10: 081223667X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-06
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

In Lives in Translation, Kathleen Hall investigates the cultural politics of immigration and citizenship, education and identity-formation among Sikh youth whose parents migrated to England from India and East Africa. Legally British, these young people encounter race as a barrier to becoming truly "English." Hall breaks with conventional ethnographies about immigrant groups by placing this paradox of modern citizenship at the center of her study, considering Sikh immigration within a broader analysis of the making of a multiracial postcolonial British nation. The postwar British public sphere has been a contested terrain on which the politics of cultural pluralism and of social incorporation have configured the possibilities and the limitations of citizenship and national belonging. Hall's rich ethnographic account directs attention to the shifting fields of power and cultural politics in the public sphere, where collective identities, social statuses, and cultural subjectivities are produced in law and policy, education and the media, as well as in families, peer groups, ethnic networks, and religious organizations. Hall uses a blend of interviews, fieldwork, and archival research to challenge the assimilationist narrative of the traditional immigration myth, demonstrating how migrant people come to know themselves and others through contradictory experiences of social conflict and solidarity across different social fields within the public sphere. Lives in Translation chronicles the stories of Sikh youth, the cultural dilemmas they face, the situated identities they perform, and the life choices they make as they navigate their own journeys to citizenship.

Author Biography

Kathleen Hall is an anthropologist and teaches in the Education, Culture, and Society Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Different Immigration Story

From Subjects to Citizens

The Politics of Language Recognition

"Becoming like Us"

Mediated Traditions

"You Can't Be Religious and Be Westernized"

"There's a Time to Act English and a Time to Act Indian"

Consciousness, Self-Awareness, and the Life Path Epilogue: An Unfinished Story

Notes Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

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