Diaspora
Volume1,
Number 1, Spring 1991
Articles:
In
This Issue
Our
first, scholars from several disciplines write about diasporas, or
transnationalism, or both. Their work replicates no template and shares
no single theory, precisely because the journal has no preconceived
identity or profile apart from its concern with whatever will contribute
to the study of all aspects of transnationalism and its classic exemplar,
the diaspora.
Linked
as they are to nationalism and current struggles, these terms are
emotionally and intellectually charged. We will publish articles representing
diverse and even mutually contradictory ideologies and political affiliations,
including those with which we disagree.
The
Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface
Khachig Tololyan
Mexican
Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism
Roger Rouse
Rouse
examines Mexican migration to the United States and the latter's inability
to transform migrants into citizens. He describes the resulting cultural
bifocality that affects both the United States and Mexico, and reads
this migration as symptomatic of the shift to transnational capitalism.
In addition, Rouse demonstrates the inadequacy of images such as Center
and Periphery as descriptions of emerging new differences and proposes
an alternative cartography of social space, in which transnational
migrant circuits and reconceptualized border zones are important.
Heterogeneity,
Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences
Lisa Lowe
Lowe
criticizes representations that have reduced the national diversities
of Asian Americans into simple binaries. Such reduction accompanies
depictions of generational conflict as the central crisis of Asian
American diasporas, which leads either to assimilation or to nativist/nationalist
separatism. Reading films, novels, and poems, and deploying the work
of Gramsci and Fanon, Lowe argues that Asian American social subjects
are the sites of a variety of differences that are complex and politically
enabling.
Italians
in Australia: Building a Multicultural Society on the Pacific Rim
Stephen Castles
Castles
simultaneously analyzes the patterns of Italian migration to Australia
and sketches out the urgent issues facing nation-states that encourage
massive immigration for economic and political reasons. While stressing
that empirical measurements of the impact of Italian immigration are
hard to obtain, Castles argues that monocultural "British"
Australia was irretrievably altered by its efforts, first to assimilate
Italians, and then to accommodate them in a multicultural society.
Anticipating
Nationhood: Collaboration and Rumor in the Japanese Occupation of
Manila
Vicente L. Rafael
Rafael
discusses several languages-Japanese, English, Spanish, and Tagalog-and
two discourses, those of collaboration and rumor, in the Philippines
under Japanese occupation. The latter two are contrastive strategies,
comparable to some used by diaspora populations, that allow people
to imagine and represent their positions of subordination in ways
that hold out some possibility of overcoming them.
Diasporas
in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return
William Safran
Safran,
in the most politically charged essay in this issue, surveys a large
number of diasporas (Jewish, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Palestinian,
Corsican, "black American," Gypsy or Romani, Parsi, Polish,
Chinese, Cuban, and Indian). He explores the role of the memories
and myths of a lost homeland in each of these communities, examining
the differences between those that seek a physical return to their
homeland and those that only extend support and solidarity to it while
struggling to maintain their culture in the host country. Safran regards
the Jewish diaspora as a paradigmatic "ideal type" and discusses
criteria to judge the varieties of diasporization in other communities.
He concludes with a list of questions that he thinks scholars of diasporas
should address.
The
Jewish Community of Salonika: The End of a Long History
Anthony Molho
Molho
evokes and surveys the history of the Jewish community of Salonika,
Greece, which was unusually capable of accommodating Jewish and "Salonikan"
identities, and of managing tensions between Jews of various regional
and cultural origins who flocked to the city after the Spanish persecutions
of 1492. Molho argues for the importance of the role of Marrano Jews
in creating a vital culture during the sixteenth century and depicts
later tensions between Jewish cosmopolitanism and traditionalism,
as well as Turkish and Greek nationalism.
