Saturday, August 27, 2005

Carnival of diasporas

Since I seem to be on some sort of carnival black list, I thought maybe I could host my own. Given the small traffic of this blog it would have to be a mini-carnival. But, I think I could make it work. In my last post I mastered embedding links in the text. I now have the basic technology down. I have given some thought on the theme of such a carnival. I want it to fill an unoccupied niche that has broad appeal. I think I came up with a suitable idea. One of my interests is diaspora studies. I subscribe to a broad definition of the term. Simply put a diaspora is a group of people with a common heritage living outside their ancestral homeland who maintain a transgenerational political, cultural or symbolic connection to that homeland. The classic diasporas are the Jews, Greeks and Armenians. Other diasporas include the Irish, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Indians and Chinese. I have blogged a bit about some diasporas here already. Most notably the Germans and Koreans in the Soviet Union and the Kalmyks in the United States. So if you have a post on diasporas or saw one by somebody else you liked, send it to me at pohlcat [the at symbol] rocketmail [dot] com. I am going to set a deadline of 12 September 2005 so I can get them up by 15 September 2005. Also if anybody would like to host a future Carnival of diasporas, let me know. Feel free to spread this message around.

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