Immigrant Ambassadors: Citizenship and Belonging in the Tibetan Diaspora

The Tibetan diaspora began fifty years ago when the current Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and established a government-in-exile in India. For those fifty years, the vast majority of Tibetans have kept their stateless refugee status in India and Nepal as a reminder to themselves and the world that Tibet is under Chinese occupation and that they are committed to returning someday.

In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed 1,000 Tibetans and their families to immigrate to the United States; a decade later the total U.S. population includes some 10,000 Tibetans. Not only is the social fact of the migration--its historical and political contexts--of interest, but also how migration and resettlement in the U.S. reflect emergent identity formations among members of a stateless society.

Immigrant Ambassadors examines Tibetan identity at a critical juncture in the diaspora's expansion, and argues that increased migration to the West is both facilitated and marked by changing understandings of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Tibetan--deterritorialized, activist, and cosmopolitan.

Author: Julia Meredith Hess
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 03/23/2009
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780804760171

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 05/08/2009 pg. 19
Choice 10/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2009 pg. 53

About the Author
Julia Meredith Hess is an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.