Diaspora
Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2001
Defining
the Overseas Vietnamese
Louis-Jacques Dorais
Since World War II, many Vietnamese have left their country in order to resettle overseas. Their exact number is difficult to assess, but some estimates (e.g., Nguyen) put it at around 2.6 million.2 About half of them now live in the United States, the rest being scattered over sixty different countries, including France (400,000), China (300,000), Australia (200,000), Canada (200,000), and Thailand (120,000).
The vast majority of these overseas Vietnamese—or Viet Kieu— have left Vietnam over the last twenty-five years, as a result of the political and economic changes that accompanied the extension of North Vietnamese rule to South Vietnam in 1975. Most of them consider themselves refugees, citing as their chief reason for leaving their homeland their opposition to the Communist regime.
Nation,
History, and the Idea of Cultural Origin in Melville Herskovits
Eleni Coundouriotis
Start line 3.52 - do not use advance. This may change depending on epigraphs and number of authors - always start on a text line.Melville Herskovits stated explicitly that he would study Dahomey (present-day Benin) as a “primitive culture” from which he could learn about “New World Negro culture.” In the preface to his ethnography of Dahomey, he writes that his study “extends our knowledge of primitive life” and “is intended to provide materials for those students of `New World Negro culture' who wish to know more fully the mode of life of the peoples from whom were drawn the ancestors of the Negroes who today inhabit the Americas” (Dahomey 1: iii). Our current, more critical orientation toward such comparative study makes us skeptical of Herskovits's strategy to juxtapose a contemporary culture as primitive source for a diasporic culture, although this mode of thinking persists in ideologies of diaspora, reminding us of Herskovits's continued influence.
From
Ethnic Affinity to Alienation in the Global Ecumene: The Encounter
between the Japanese and Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants
Takeyuki Tsuda
The return migration of the Japanese-Brazilians from Brazil “back” to Japan is the most recent chapter in an interesting migration legacy that started with emigration from Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century and has now ended with immigration to Japan at the end of that century. Japanese emigration to Brazil began in 1908 and continued in significant numbers until the early 1960s. Many of the emigrants were farmers who were suffering from poverty in Japan's rural areas and were drawn to Brazil by promises of opportunity and wealth in its expanding coffee plantations. Although most of them went to Brazil as dekasegi (temporary migrant workers) with dreams of returning to Japan in several years with considerable wealth, reality proved to be considerably more difficult, and their hopes for eventual repatriation became impossible. As a result, a vast majority of them settled permanently in Brazil with their families.
Globalization,
the Nation-State, and Imperialism: A Review Essay
Alex Dupuy
“Globalization” has become a common term used widely by government officials, business, the media, and scholars in the social sciences and in area and cultural studies. In its most general usage, the term refers to the increasing integration and interdependence of the countries, economies, and peoples of the world as a result of the greater ease of travel and migration; the spread of new electronic, visual, and other communication technologies; international trade and investments; and the creation of new regional and international institutions and organizations.
Past
Legacies, Future Projects: Asian Migration and the Role of the University
under Globalization
Grace Kyungwon Hong
Asian migration to the United States is an important frame through which to understand the myriad effects of the globalized economy; in turn, that migration must be viewed in the context of the United States' own “migration” to Asia via imperialism and neocolonialism, which developed in the post–World War II era. In this era, built upon but exceeding the technologies of a prior era of territorial imperialism and Fordist modes of industrial production, the production of knowledge about “Asia” becomes instrumental to the dominance of US capitalism in the global economy. In this context, the university as a site for the production of knowledge becomes a crucial site of struggle.
Remapping
the World after the Crisis in Area Studies
Peter Rutland
This volume consists of ten papers that analyze the crisis in area studies and its implications for the various social science disciplines. It is a welcome contribution to a debate—on the implications of the end of the Cold War for American academia—that should be happening but, curiously, is not. With authors from around the country, the book is published as part of the Middlebury College Bicentennial Series in International Studies. Middlebury is recognized for providing area studies at its best. It is arguably the leading institution in the country for the teaching of foreign languages, especially with respect to training students in social science alongside their language immersion.
