Immigration, Incorporation and Transnationalism by Elliott Robert Barkan

Author:Elliott Robert Barkan [Barkan, Elliott Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Emigration & Immigration, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9780765803863
Google: 5PZKjnY8AUEC
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2007-01-15T04:33:49+00:00

The Revival of Cornish Translocalism and Claims for Diaspora

Rather than creating a homogenous society that blurred or eroded cultural distinctions, local places and cultures in the United States were transformed in the twentieth century, a process that quickened with the arrival of new waves of non-European immigrants in the late 1900s. As predicted by Randolph Bourne in 1916, the idealized, monocultural, static conception of America proved to be impossible:

America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strand, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. 48

Globalization, an explosion of travel, migration, and socio-economic interchange, fuelled by ever more efficient transportation and communication networks, has transformed the form and shape of human communities around the world.49 But it has not necessarily led to the cultural annihilation predicted by some observers, where regional, ethnic, or national distinctiveness vanish into a “melting pot.” Rather, it has had the opposite effect, as ethnic groups seek to reconcile the local with the global, in the process rediscovering, reconnecting, re-affirming, and celebrating their various cultural heritages.50

Just as communities have undergone change in America, forces have been transforming communities in Cornwall, where a multicultural awareness has been gathering momentum since the Celtic Revival of the 1920s. This socio-cultural watershed, initially but no longer the preserve of the middle classes, represented an opportunity for Cornwall and the Cornish to look back beyond the crumbling mine engine houses of a failing industrial period to a perceived golden Celtic era. Affiliation with a Celtic past thus allowed the Cornish to opt out of the monocultural static conception of industrial Britain and to be included instead within a vibrant northwestern European Celtic arc, claiming a common identity with the Bretons and Galicians in northwest Europe and the Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Irish within the British Isles. But not with the Anglo Saxon English. The Cornish language, which had ceased to be spoken in a vernacular way in the eighteenth century, was revived, along with the use of St. Piran’s flag (a white cross against a black background) and the Celtic cross. Other symbols of Celtic Cornwall were invented rather than re-invented, including a Cornish Gorsedd (an annual ceremony in the Cornish language, established in 1928, that includes singing, dancing, and the awarding of Bardic titles,51 and the use of the kilt in the Cornish national tartan, with its predominant colors of black and gold. This new Celtic iconography, which would have meant little to most Cornish people in the 1800s, was blended with established and accepted industrial icons and notions of Cornishness that coalesced around the mining industry: brass bands, rugby, football (soccer), male-voice choirs, allegiance to Methodism, and values emphasizing thrift, independence, sobriety, and hard work.

The fact that an increasing number of people are today willing to identify themselves as Cornish is attributable to many factors.

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