Essay on May Joseph and Mississippi Masala

Transnationalism is defined as as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.”(lecture Mixtects). When a native person becomes a transnational they are then participating in sustaining their culture and memories where ever they travel. Transnationalism implies that native migrants continue to be involved in the life

This movie based off of a southern family living in Memphis, Tennessee will show you a true taste of southern hospitality. In every film you have your list of characters along with their personalities and most importantly their motives. Along with the certain qualities of every character comes the ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos which stands for the goodness of a film and/or ethics goes hand in hand with the sender of a film, Pathos which is the passion and emotions of a film which goes hand in hand with the receiver, and lastly the logos which is the logic/information that sends a message. Each rhetoric sends a message and surely puts a movie together.

Peter Marin’s article “Toward Something American: The Immigrant Soul” explains his views on American life versus American culture and how they differ. He explains that in the average American life it is simply the task of finding and calling the place they now reside in home. “Home is for us, as it is for all immigrants, something to be regained, created, discovered, or mourned-not where we are in time or space, but where we dream of being”. (84) In other words, a new immigrant coming to America and a descendent to new world immigrant still experience the same conflict of American life. In the

The concept citizenship has caused various perception of citizenships. In Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and The Alien, she provides a popular perception called the hard shells and soft interiors. Hard shells represent the tough life that

It is the family history, their experiences in Uganda, as well as their new developed identity, setting them apart from the darker skin color black population of Mississippi that will cast a long, dark shadow over the relationship of Demetrius and Mina.

Their romance induces a confrontation between the two ethnic groups. I would like to point out that Demetrius has never set foot in Africa, he was born in the United States and that Mina and her family are themselves Africans. This does not matter the members of the community or Jay. Jay's racism blinds him to the fact that he survived only thanks to his black African childhood friend, Okelo, who bailed him out of jail in Uganda.

Throughout the history, immigration and the United States are inextricably linked. The United States has promulgated many immigration legislations in the past either to restrict or support the immigration. Immigration is still going on and it is a debatable issue even today. In the interview, Chang-rae Lee says, “I’m interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate-with all the attendant problems and complications and delight”(Garner 2). Chang-rae Lee exposes the inner and outer conflicts the immigrants go through in the United States with

In vassanji’s no new land, Nurdin neglected the African life because of the general idi amin dream and disrespect for cultural diversity

In the film, Mississippi Masala directed by Mira Nair, the story focuses on various characters and stories. Its main focus is on an Indian family that is expelled from their homeland, Uganda in the early 1970s. The family unit consists of Jay, the patriarch, his wife Kinnu, and his daughter Mina. They move to Mississippi and settle there in their new home in America. Despite resettling in Mississippi with his family, Jay remains insistent on the notion that Uganda is his home and shows deep emotional attachment to his homeland there.

Mira Nair’s Mississippi Marsala is a tale of a new generation’s desire of the exotic other, and the previous generation’s aversion to the others. Meena in particular has a strong sense of unhomeliness; she is torn between the nation she now lives in, the nation she spent her childhood in, and the nation of her ethnic traditions. Her father, Jay’s drive to get back to his home of Uganda, and her mother’s pull to stay in the United States has left Meena with a feeling of ethnic confusion and a drive for her own individual persona. The collective unconscious felt by both Meena and Demetrius’s family is one of strong traditions, this in part keeping them away from fulfilling their jouissance. Meena and Demetrius’s families continue to separate

In the chapter titled “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said discusses the different aspects of being an exile. His discussion of exile includes what it means to be an exile, the feelings that being an exile produces in individuals, exile in relation to nationalism, and the role of exile in the modern world.  Said first defines being an exile as a state of terminal loss. He states, “the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever” (173).  He then contrasts this terminal loss with the cultural impact that exile has had on the modern West.  He states that, “modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles,” (173) and, “our age[...] is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced

Introduction: The movie Mississippi Masala revolves around a young Indian woman named Mina, who was born and raised in Uganda. She Her family and other Indians were forced to leave their home in Uganda by General Idi Amin. She and her family lived in a comfortable life in Uganda, and they have a home they can call their own. Mina and her family relocated in Greenwood, Mississippi to start a new life and they live in a motel owned by their relatives. She also works in the motel, while her mom runs a liquor store. Her father is a lawyer in Uganda, but now busy fighting the Ugandan government for their lost property. Mina then met Demetrius, an African American man who has a rug cleaning business. The two eventually fall in love with each other.

The concept of identity is often related to binaries and impenetrable boundaries. A hybrid of identity finds themselves caught in between these binaries, able to connect with both sides of a binary spectrum. National identity places individuals in boundaries that can often be crossed due to colonization, imperialism, or mixed heritage. Kristjana Gunnars’s The Prowler explores ideas of national hybrid identity through the protagonist’s refusal to identify with neither her matriarchal nor her patriarchal nationality. The post-colonial tension in Iceland causes her to live in a time of marginalization because of her mixed heritage. However, this marginalization is preferred because she does not desire to fit within the confines of a national boundary.

This disturbed the lives of over 800,000 individuals in the fall of 2017. The Trump administration publicly announces an executive order that would strip legal security from Dreamers, or young immigrant children/teenagers who were brought to the U.S. as children, which would end the Deferred Act for Childhood Arrivals, (DACA) program. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were publicly creating shared narratives to highlight their American identity and an identify that included being in the country where their parents brought them to, while others acknowledging their country of birth. This created a very visible distinction between what it meant to be a citizen for these individuals who have lived in the United States for most of their lives, and what it meant to also remember their place of birth. Morrisey (2013) writes, “DREAM activists adopted disidentification as a tactic to develop and deliver their intentions for national belonging without radically subverting current citizenship structures or entirely assimilating to them. In doing so, DREAMers altered the conditions of national inclusion by engaging in a practice of disidentification that demonstrated the possibility for creating coalitional subjectivity, and how it might be used to facilitate social change (p. 145).

Rootlessness, is a search for home and homeland, a quest for true identity and culture. Diasporic studies