Ghosts and shadows : construction of identity and community in an African diaspora / Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Focusing on African diaspora groups that have been virtually ignored in discussions of Canadian multiculturalism, the authors explore the re-creation of communities in exile and the myths of 'homeland' and 'return.'

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This study of "deterritorialized" Eritreans and Ethiopians in Canada is a significant contribution to the scant scholarship concerning recent African immigration to the Americas. Matsuoka (social work, Yale Univ.) and Sorenson (sociology, Brock Univ.) extend Avery Gordon's metaphor from Ghostly Matters (1997) to suggest that "long shadows of colonialism" and an equally "shadowy postcolonial condition" create "haunted spaces" of immigrant "moral economy." "Third" epistemologies, "seething" in their diversity, counter any received wisdom about cultures of exile. The book's strength lies in its consideration of "struggles for the representation of truth" in diasporic communities, and the resulting dynamic models are readily applicable elsewhere in the world. Yet a polemical subtext based on the authors' Eritrean and Oromo activism contradicts their antipositivist propositions. The Ethiopian state is portrayed as a "haunted house in which the raging ghosts of suppressed nations struggle to reassert their presence," even as the state's own "phantoms ... confuse and mislead by offering false versions of history." Although some will surely be put off by this stance, the authors' extensive literature review and detailed discussion of important topics like gender relations in diaspora communities and the "charged strangeness" of African exile in Canada make their book valuable nonetheless. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A. F. Roberts University of California, Los Angeles