Diaspora
Volume
10, Number 2, Fall 2001
Antonio
Gramsci and Post-Colonial Theory: “Southernism”
Timothy Brennan
Many of the debates in postcolonial studies—including the tone and ire of antagonistic positions within it—first emerged in the interwar period (1919–1945). The popularity of Antonio Gramsci in postcolonial theory is a muted consequence of this fact. He contains within him the anticolonial energies of a forgotten era, and he has come to represent a uniqueness of vision that was, in fact, not unique.
Defining
Diaspora, Refining a Discourse
Kim D. Butler
What is the difference between migration and diaspora? Are acculturation and ethnonationalism intrinsic dynamics of diasporas? These and other paradigmatic, if implicit, questions have received relatively little attention from scholars in the emerging field of diaspora studies, despite the exponential increase of scholarship in recent years. Epistemological development has lagged behind the writing of monographs and, to a lesser extent, comparative studies. As the term has been appropriated by African, Asian, and even single-town diasporas and by scholars who study them, we have actually become less clear about what defines diasporas and makes them a distinct category. This article proposes some suggestions as to how the extensive existing research on specific diasporas may be analyzed in comparative context as a means of developing an epistemology of diasporan studies.
Figurations
of “India” and the Transnational in W.E.B. Du Bois
Biman Basu
Considering the racial movements and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that even if “the movements themselves could disintegrate, the policies for which they fought could be reversed, their leaders could be co-opted or destroyed,” the “enduring legacy” of these movements can be described in terms of “racial subjectivity and self-awareness,” which had “taken permanent hold, and no amount of repression or cooptation could change that” (97). In other words, against political and economic losses, they measure an advance in terms of subjectivity and consciousness. In the face of a general skepticism about the sovereign subject and consciousness, whether an enhanced subjectivity can be considered a commensurate outcome of political movements depends on the way in which subjectivity is understood.
A
Unique Diaspora? The Case of Adopted Girls from the People’s
Republic of China
Karen Miller-Loessi and Zeynep Kilic
This article considers the recent and ongoing international adoptions of Chinese girls and argues that these adoptions are creating a unique kind of diaspora. The two most salient features of these adoptions are, firstly, that they are taking place on a relatively large scale to fourteen Western countries;1 and, secondly, that about 98% of the adoptees are girls. As we attempt to frame and understand this phenomenon, we refer to literature on traditional diasporas, as well as alternative interpretations of contemporary transnational migrations, to make sense of the dispersion of these girls. We argue that Chinese adoptees constitute a unique diasporic group, distinct from other groups such as first-, second-, or third-generation Chinese immigrants. Our goals in this analysis are both to enlarge our understanding of the specific causes and consequences of the international dispersion of substantial numbers of Chinese girls and, more broadly, to contribute to the burgeoning literature on the varieties and complexities of transnational diaspora in the contemporary world by examining this particular instance.
The
Jewish Question and the Reason of the State
Jonathan Boyarin
The highest praise that my parents, God bless them, can give to a serious movie they have just seen is to describe it as “disturbing.” That may also be an apt way to sum up in a word Jon Stratton's Coming Out Jewish.
Stratton's title may slightly puzzle a US reader—or, in any case, it may puzzle a New Yorker. We may have thought that the epoch of Jewish “passing” generally preceded the gay and lesbian revolution that produced the name “coming out” for the assumption of a marginalized group identity. Stratton's book informs us, however, that Jewish passing is not a story of the past—and also that it has much to do with the same politics of gender, reproduction, family, and society as the gay and lesbian revolution. But Coming Out Jewish is only marginally an account of the discovery and recapture of an occluded collective identity. Much more centrally, it is the first attempt, as far as I know, to present the problematic of Jewish identity, both “internally” and “externally,” as a diagnostic test for the comparative construction of different liberal polities.
Living
Transnational Lives
José Itzigsohn
The emergence of a transnational perspective has changed the study of immigration. Before the introduction of this analytical approach, the study of immigration assumed that migrants basically broke their ties with their countries of origin and that the processes of acculturation and assimilation of migrants to their new society were what mattered most. Transnationalism as a perspective has challenged these assumptions. A large number of studies have shown that migrants retain lasting ties with their countries of origin. The identities and social practices of migrants transcend national boundaries.
Russian
Diasporas in the “Near Abroad”: Implications for International
Peace
Pål Kolstø
The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the most important threat to international peace—the confrontation of two nuclear-armed superpowers—but, in the process, created some new ones. One of the new sources of interstate instability identified by political analysts was the presence of a Russian population, numbering in the millions, who, without having moved, now found themselves living in non-Russian Soviet successor states. Some feared that mistreatment of these groups by the national and nationalist governments of these new states might trigger military Russian responses. Others surmised that, irrespective of how they were being treated, Russia might use these diaspora communities as stalking horses in a bid for regional hegemony and as an excuse for interference in the domestic affairs of neighbor states.
