The
1.5 Generation of Russian Immigrants in Israel: Between Integration
and Sociocultural Retention
Larissa Remennick
Consecutive immigrant generations and the process of their incorporation into host societies are emerging as a new focus of interest in the contemporary sociology of migration (Portes and Zhou; Portes and Schauffler; Portes and Rumbaut; Rumbaut and Portes). The bulk of the evidence from different countries and on various types of migration (ethnic return migration, labor migration, asylum seeking) shows a significant tendency to ethnic and cultural retention in the first generation of adult migrants (Alba and Nee; Rumbaut, “Assimilation”; Rumbaut and Portes). When these migrants assimilate at all, the process is usually partial and segmented, that is, the adjustment in some life realms (in the workplace, in educational and other public institutions) is more effective and expedient than in other, more private ones (family life, personal relationships, consumption patterns).
The Hungarian Status Law: A New European Form of Transnational Politics?
Michael Stewart
Late in the evening of Sunday 21 April 2002, the incoming Hungarian prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, took the stage at his Socialist Party headquarters to accept, informally, the mandate of the electorate. Announcing his intention to form a liberal–socialist coalition government, Medgyessy told his listeners that after a bitterly fought second round of an election that had deeply divided the electorate, he would be the prime minister for all 10 million Hungarians. A few moments later the defeated prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in the course of his resignation speech, had this to say about his outgoing conservative government:
World Literature:
The Unbearable Lightness of Thinking Globally
Gregory Jusdanis
Does literature have anything interesting to say about globalization? Is the work of literary critics germane to those analyzing today's transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods? Many students of globalization, who work primarily in economics, political science, cultural studies, and journalism, would be skeptical of the claim that literary study could address their concerns. Indeed, they would be surprised to learn that Comparative Literature has been championing cosmopolitanism for more than a century, or that it had developed an international perspective on literary relations decades before they had. Comparative Literature, in fact, prefigured today's transnational consciousness through its attempt to transcend the limits of individual national traditions and to investigate links among them.
Andean Transnational
Merchants: An Indigenous Community in Globalization
José Itzigsohn
These two books describe and analyze the ways in which the people of Otavalo, an indigenous community in Northern Ecuador, adapt to and integrate into the contemporary global economy. Otavalo, a small town in the Ecuadorian Andes north of Quito, is the administrative, commercial, and cultural center for the Otavalo people. The Otavalos live in seventy-five small communities dispersed throughout the valley where the city is located. They also constitute, however, a diaspora that “is now worldwide, with permanent expatriate communities in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas and temporary or permanent transmigrants on six continents” (Meisch 11). Otavalo can be considered a successful case of adaptation to globalization.
Notes on
Contributors
