This chapter examines a US Central American experience at the end of the long nineteenth century, as reflected in Centro America, a newspaper established by the Comité Unionista Centroamericano de San Francisco in support of the final, formal effort to establish an isthmian nation in 1921. A rare literary text, Centro America provides a cultural account of the complexities and contradictions that shaped the transnational lives of an early Central American diaspora in the US. The weekly paper published unionist essays, the latest local and global news, literary reviews, poems, society columns, and passenger arrival and departure notices that catered to an audience composed of primarily Central American coffee and other elites. However, Centro America also published a letter written by Abel Romero, a Salvadoran, working-class machinist, urging the paper to speak out against El Salvador’s authoritarian government. By allowing different forms of writing to cohabitate, a complex imaginative space emerges in the paper wherein clashing political and class interests create conflict among Central American communities. Print culture, I contend, visibilizes ruptures that emerged in Centro America when elites were confronted by the economic precarity that burdened their countrymen in San Francisco, from whom they asked and largely received unionist support.

Zuzanna Olszewska explores the poetic and literary agency of Muslim women across time and genres. The chapter reviews both literary and anthropological studies that have deepened our understanding of the importance of written scholarship and oral poetry produced by Muslim women. It also presents a case study of Muslim female poets of Afghani origin now living in the diaspora.

Maria Jaschok analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by Muslim women living as a minority, particularly in contexts where religion is under pressure. The chapter highlights the dynamism exhibited by female imams (ahongs) in China, who have strategically leveraged the pressure on male authority imposed by the Chinese state to carve out a larger role for themselves. The chapter also shows how these women seek to connect with the global Muslim community, or ummah, while relating Islam to their everyday realities.

This chapter concentrates on another significant element of the Irish Catholic Church’s transnational fundraising, namely the collecting tours on behalf of church-building projects that Irish clerics regularly conducted in diaspora destinations, including but not limited to the US. Based on close analysis of a series of surviving personal diaries and letters produced by collecting priests in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the difficulties, including hostile resident clergy, that collecting priests faced, explores the emotions of religious fundraising, for both giver and receiver, and assesses the place that such epic fundraising tours have in the narratives that surrounded Ireland’s newly built Catholic infrastructure.

This chapter concentrates on church buildings, arguing that while they were one of the most significant products of the Catholic Church’s fundraising in this period, they were also, in themselves, important sites of both highly public and deeply intimate fundraising. Taking a material culture approach, the chapter treats a sample of churches built in the post-Famine era as sources that illuminate important aspects of the financial relationship between people and priests. It first discusses the widespread understanding of the church as the ‘house of God’. It then analyses the phenomenon of sponsorship of material and sacred items in the church interior via memorial inscriptions, as well as the interaction of lay people with shrines and a variety of collecting boxes commonly located inside chapels.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.

The phenomenon of ‘Ireland’s spiritual empire’, denoting the influence that Irish churches had on the world through lay and clerical migration in the (very) long nineteenth century, has attracted considerable attention from both contemporary commentators and historians. Yet the converse reality that national churches so embroiled in the global growth of their religions must also have undergone far-reaching changes themselves in the process has been much less studied. Focusing on both Catholic and Protestant churches, this chapter will address a number of modes of religious ‘Americanisation’ that can be detected in Ireland between 1841 and 1925. These will include: the backflow of a ‘cosmopolitan clergy’ who frequently spent long periods in North America and returned to Ireland as potential agents of a religiously inflected Americanisation; the visits of Irish-American and ‘Scotch-Irish’ clergy to Ireland; and the material role that a much-vaunted American religious ‘freedom’ played in the imaginaries of both Catholic and Protestant Irish people, enhanced by both media portrayals and discussion in personal correspondence.

‘Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized’, or so the famed journalist W. T. Stead believed at the turn of the twentieth century. But what did people understand by ‘Americanisation’ and who was doing the Americanising? The term was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used by a range of political figures, writers and commentators, typically with reference to mass migration. At the time of Stead’s comment nearly two million Irish-born people resided in the United States. Through their communications and return journeys to Ireland, emigrants became the primary image-makers of America in Ireland, making distinctive interventions in the development of political ideas and organisational models in Ireland. This chapter examines perceptions of the impact of the United States, and Irish America, on Irish politics and how different American influences were welcomed, withstood, filtered, and were in competition with each other in the period from the end of the Great Famine to the 1920s. They made significant contributions to different types of political activity in Ireland, but they were always entangled with a range of other transnational influences.

Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world, with just over 100 million citizens residing in the country, and Egyptian nationals have long looked abroad for opportunities. This chapter examines the evolution of the country’s policies toward its diaspora and seeks to understand how the Egyptian government has attempted to protect, assist, and cultivate loyalty among its citizens abroad, as well as how it has sought to exert further control over this population. Beginning with targeted secondment policies that aimed to spread pan-Arabist ideology in the 1950s and 1960s, and broadening to mass labor exportation agreements directed primarily toward other Arab nations in the 1970s, Egypt sought to address demographic concerns of overpopulation and an overburdened and underfinanced public sector, and to reap the benefit of remittances as a major contribution to the country’s GDP. But the chapter also addresses Egypt’s failure to establish effective governance of, and engagement with, its diaspora. This includes the overlapping responsibilities of the numerous ministries in charge of emigration, an unwillingness to resolve domestic economic issues in order to prevent further brain drain and to incentivize the return of Egyptians abroad, and the state’s continued use of transnational repression toward its citizenry.

According to Türkiye’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there are approximately 6.5 million Turkish people living abroad. With national communities in more than seventy nations, the Turkish diaspora has a global reach. This chapter examines Türkiye’s relations with its national communities abroad. Over the decades, Türkiye reimagined its relationship with its citizens abroad, which in turn allowed national communities abroad to reimagine their home state. In the early years of labor migration, Türkiye focused on economic benefits such as remittances. Later on, Ankara noticed the public policy potential of national communities living abroad. With widening diplomatic support and an increase in selective cultural engagement, Türkiye expanded its reach to overseas communities. While diplomatic services benefited all, some forms of cultural support targeted conservative populations. Domestic security concerns also led to an interest in understanding the political leanings of the diaspora.

Chinese nationals working, studying, and living overseas have always been an important issue for Chinese policy-makers, who have adopted a variety of policies to protect, support, attract back, and monitor them. This first section of this chapter provides an overview of the presence of Chinese nationals overseas, where they are mostly located, and the factors that shape their presence. It then analyzes the main regulatory and diplomatic efforts made by the Chinese state to protect them. The policies adopted by the Chinese government to support and manage the Chinese diaspora, as well as lure back those highly educated nationals who are seen as an important source of innovation for the Chinese economy are discussed in the second half of the chapter. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the evolution of China’s military activities aimed at protecting Chinese citizens overseas. Overall, it emerges that the Chinese state has invested significant bureaucratic and diplomatic resources in these activities, preferring to keep a low profile in military terms.

The chapter explores how Germany engages with its nationals abroad, covering the diplomatic/consular, economic/social and military dimensions. As of 2020, around 2.9 million Germans permanently lived outside Germany, mostly in other European countries and North America, and approximately 24 million Germans went abroad for their main holidays in 2021. The chapter finds that Germany’s activities towards these German nationals residing or travelling abroad is relatively limited overall, with a focus on supporting and assisting German citizens. There is only little evidence for policies to co-opt Germans abroad, for example in the context of return schemes for highly-skilled German citizens, and no indication for repression at all, as befits a liberal democracy. While Germany’s engagement is typically of low domestic salience, Germany can mobilize significant resources to support its nationals abroad at times of crisis (e.g., natural disasters or hostage situations), in particular through its global diplomatic network. Germany has also used its armed forces for military evacuations from conflict zones, often in close coordination with its European and transatlantic partners. Germany can thus be described as a capable protector that is, however, reluctant to engage with its national communities abroad on a more comprehensive and proactive basis.

The fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

Clare Finburgh Delijani’s chapter accounts for a significant and growing strain of theatre that stages the central role played by migration and transnational, mobile identities not just in France but also across the world. Today around 30 per cent of France’s population comprises either migrants from its former colonies or their postmigrant descendants, demonstrating the key significance of migration to French society and culture. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘relation identity’, which expresses ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures’, Finburgh Delijani demonstrates how the exiles, immigrants and refugees featuring in the plays she examines represent the postcolonial diversity of the French nation. With close analysis of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Le Retour au desert (Return to the Desert, 1988), Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (Scorched, 2003) and Estelle Savasta’s Traversée (Going Through, 2019), Finburgh Delijani exposes how characters illustrate the uprooting of belonging, legitimacy and identity by the often violent severance of migration and exile. However, the trauma that characters suffer – which cannot be underestimated – is counterbalanced by the relational, transnational and cosmopolitan citizens they are able to become.