Diaspora
Volume 10, Number 3, Winter 2001
“My
Heart’s Indian for All That”: Bollywood Film between Home
and Diaspora
Anthony C. Alessandrini
In the spring of 1995, I had just begun to work on issues having to do with the global reception of Indian popular film.2 I was particularly interested in the consumption of Bollywood films in South Asian diasporic communities and was doing some preliminary research in Iselin, a small town in central New Jersey, with a large and thriving “Little India” neighborhood. Since I was also interested in the changes taking place in the Indian popular film industry itself, I had been following the case of Mani Ratnam's film Bombay, which had been released earlier that year, in Tamil and Hindi, to a mix of acclaim and controversy in India. Because the film deals with the communal violence that gave rise to rioting that shook Bombay in 1992 and 1993, some authorities were concerned that screening the film in areas experiencing communal tensions might lead to more violence.
Ethnographies
of Chinese Transnationalism
Adam McKeown
In his 1952 essay, “The Sojourner,” Paul C.P. Siu wrote about people who lived lives that spanned geographical spaces, “developing a mode of living which is characteristic neither of [their] home nor of the dominant group” (42). Ideas and material for this essay resulted from years of research and reflection on his own experiences and those of relatives and friends living as Chinese migrants in the United States. Unfortunately, he was unable to develop this basic insight about the scope of migrant lives in any systematic manner. The essay was formulated as a contribution to assimilation theory and social typing.
One
Face, Many Masks: The Singularity and Plurality of Chinese Identity
Tong Chee-kiong and Chan Kwok-bun
For many decades now, sociologists have been chasing what Isaacs (30) called the “snowman of ethnicity,” otherwise first made known to us by Francis Bacon as “idols of the tribe.” This creature, ethnicity, is as elusive and slippery as it is complex. A plausible starting point for our discourse on the subject is Weber, who sees an ethnic group as one whose members “entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration,” adding that “it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists” (389; emphasis added). The strength of Weber's definition lies in its embodiment of an interplay between the objective and the subjective, perhaps analytically favoring the latter—one's belief or construction.
Foreigners,
Foreignness, and Theories of Democracy
Donna Gabaccia
Nothing better symbolizes the intensifying pace of globalization in recent years than the foreigner, who—as tourist, student, worker, businessperson, refugee, or immigrant—brings the wider world home to almost every nation on earth. While most studies of the earth's most mobile people focus on the challenges they pose for national economies, societies, governments, and cultures, Bonnie Honig in this book explores the challenge of foreigners to democracy itself.
Democracy and the Foreigner is a thickly argued, compact, dense, worthwhile, and difficult book; its many insights deserve a careful summary. But first, a caveat to readers. A more unlikely match of author and reviewer than the one you encounter below could scarcely be imagined. (And if you conclude instead that the match is a creative one, then all credit must go to Diaspora editor Khachig Tölölyan.)
Foreign
Objects: Finding Solutions to Democracy’s Problems
Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, a long and simmering, if not original, tension between democracy and the figure of the foreigner has bubbled to the fore. In response to 9/11, the pretense that the United States is a nation hospitable to all foreigners has been suspended until further notice. The brown-skinned immigrant—Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and Latino, among others—is once again depicted as a threat to democracy, this time in an apocalyptic fashion that calls for an Armageddon on the part of the democratic state to eradicate the (terrorist) foreigner. More disturbingly, because of the so-called war on terror, the rhetoric of the foreigner as a threat to democracy has been rapidly codified in discriminatory laws, denying entry to certain foreigners and permitting the interrogation, incarceration, and deportation of others already living in the United States.
Unlikely
Connections: Italy’s Cultural Formations between Home and the
Diaspora
Clarissa Clò and Teresa Fiore
Movements of people and exchanges among them have been crucial in the characterization of societies. Different cultures have understood and regarded migrants differently, depending on the historical conditions, material and discursive, in which these movements occurred and on the attitudes of both sending and receiving states. It is, indeed, through the lens of the nation-state and of individual national histories that migrations and diasporas have mostly been approached. This model, however, does not allow for a more comprehensive understanding of people's traveling and resettling across space and time, which both predate and go beyond the boundaries imposed by the emergence of modern states.
