Download e-book for kindle: An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America by JoAnn D'Alisera

For greater than a decade a vicious civil struggle has torn the cloth of society within the West African nation of Sierra Leone, forcing millions to escape their houses for refugee camps and others to hunt peace and asylum in another country. Sierra Leoneans have validated new groups worldwide, in London, Paris, long island, Washington, D.C., and in other places. but regardless of the nice geographic variety of this diaspora and the various ethnic backgrounds between Sierra Leoneans settled within the comparable groups in another country, those Africans have come to appreciate and show their shared id via non secular rituals, social engagements, and fabric culture.

In An Imagined Geography, anthropologist JoAnn D'Alisera demonstrates persuasively that the long-held anthropological paradigms of separate, bounded, and distinct groups, geographically positioned and smartly localized, has to be reconsidered. learning Sierra Leonean Muslims residing in better Washington, D.C., she indicates how those immigrants continue extreme and actual group ties via weddings, rituals, and trip, throughout either tremendous city areas and nationwide limitations. D'Alisera examines fundamental matters: Sierra Leoneans' engagement with their place of birth, to which they regularly traveled and sometimes despatched their young ones for upbringing until eventually the outbreak of the civil conflict; and the Sierra Leonean interplay with a various, multicultural, more and more international Muslim group that's present process its personal look for identity.

Sierra Leoneans in the US, D'Alisera observes, exhibit a eager for domestic and the soreness of disconnection in strong narratives approximately their kingdom and approximately their very own displacement. whilst, despite the fact that, self and communal id are formed by way of a urgent have to associate of their followed state with Sierra Leoneans of all ethnic and spiritual backgrounds and with fellow Muslims from different elements of the realm, a technique that's performed out opposed to the complicated social box of the yankee city landscape.