Emotional Transnationalism

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If home is where the heart is, and one's heart is with one's family, language, and country, what happens when your family, language, and culture occupy two different worlds?” (Falicov, 2005, p. 399)
To begin with, through migration and transnationalism, Palestinians can become less attached to their culture causing them to become less patriotic. When using the term ‘patriotism’, we first need to refer to culture and it’s power in shaping individuals, societies and communities. People tend to underestimate and misjudge the importance of culture in modeling our character; it is the traditions and beliefs we were raised upon across a history of generations, which identifies us and makes us unique in our respective societies. Likewise, it is not …show more content…

As a result, this typically scarred Palestinian immigrants as they endured a phase of disbelief and psychological suffering of having to leave their memories, property, land and freedom that was rightfully theirs through the concept of ‘emotional transnationalism’. As Falicov mentions in her journal article on this topic, one of the impacts emotional transnationalism is how Palestinian “refugees or exiled immigrants who cannot return to their countries may experience a state of perpetual mourning and may recruit their children into their idealized or denigrated constructions of their countries and their politics” (2005, p. 402); hence, being denied and having limited access to their own country causes Palestinian transmigrants to become less familiar with their culture as they become surrounded by a multicultural environment, which triggered an integration of diversified societies into their lives. This idea is reinforced by Wessendorf, who adds to it the idea of diversification within transnational’s lives influencing their cultural attachment, as it is “ directly intertwined with continuous co-ethnic social affiliations in the local context on the one hand and new kinds of social attachments to people of other origins on the other” (2013, p.