Between homeland and hostland

Diaspora and the migrant experience in the Middle East

Abstract

In the past decade, a growing body of scholarly work has developed a new vocabulary of analytical terms and a new kind of theorizing to describe and explain the experience of contemporary transnational migrants who, like Van, are caught in between, living in transnational, postmodernist spaces. In this complex reality embedded with irony, the migrant workers' expression of diasporic terms to Israeli Jews exemplifies the considerable advantage of studying marginal, migrant communities, both for their intrinsic characteristics and for the unique perspective they allow into the underlying taken-for-granted assumptions of the host society.