Diaspora
Volume 11, Number 3, Winter 2002
Intimacy
in a Transnational Era: The Remaking of Aging among Indian Americans
Sarah Lamb
Soon after I returned from India, where I had been studying aging among Bengalis,2 I met an older man from Gujarat. He lived with his wife in his daughter's spacious Palo Alto home, having come to America after retiring as a minor railroad official to be with his US-settled children in his old age. “You are interested in Indian aging?” he inquired eagerly when I met him at an “Indo-American seniors” meeting. “Well, you must visit me.” He had spent much of the past few years reflecting on “Indian” versus “American” modes of aging. When I arrived at his home, he apologized for having no tea (his wife was visiting their other daughter, and his daughter and son-in-law were, of course, at work), and then he launched into his account, opening with an anecdote about the quandaries surrounding getting a cup of tea in America:
A
Nation and Its Diaspora: A Re-examination of Israeli–Jewish Diaspora
Relations
Gabriel Sheffer
Israelis and Diaspora Jews, who together form one of the oldest existing nations and diasporas (Sheffer, At Home Abroad; Smith, The Nation), express grave anxieties about two intertwined issues: the continuity and sustainability of Jewry across the world and Israel–Diaspora relations. In this respect, world Jewry is generally divided into two unequal camps: the majority is pessimistic, and only a minority is more optimistic about the future development of both issues. Increasingly, pessimistic scholars and analysts join those laymen who express concern about diasporic Jewish survival as a distinct trans-state entity endowed with a unique specific identity and about close Israel–Diaspora relations (S. Cohen; Kosmin; Vital; Rubin; DellaPergola; Wasserstein).
Beyond
Gilroy's Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora
Christine Chivallon (translated by Karen E. Fields)
It is beyond dispute that Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, published in 1993, marks an important turning point in the study of diasporas. And it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, more than any other, this book embodies the theoretical positions associated with the rise of “cultural studies” in the 1990s. Gilroy develops Stuart Hall's equally important and similarly innovative conception of diaspora. What these two works have in common is their application of new conceptualizations to the case of Africans in the Americas, who are figured for Gilroy as the “Black Atlantic” and for Hall as the “Afro-Caribbean.” What is most significant about both is that they make the people issuing from the painful experience of the Atlantic slave trade and subsequent slavery emblematic of a new way to think about diasporic peoples. While the Jewish people serves as the archetypical representation of the classical notion of diaspora, in Hall and Gilroy's conception the Black peoples of the Americas offer the paradigm of a new notion of diaspora.
Mobile
Motherhood: Armenian Women's Labor Migration in the Post-Soviet Period
Armine Ishkanian
With the lifting of the Iron Curtain, the citizens of the former Soviet Union had to imagine and construct new lives for themselves; unlike before, these lives could be imagined and lived practically anywhere in the world. While conducting research in Armenia, I learned about men and women who had taken jobs in toy factories in Portugal, canneries in Spain, and factories in Germany. Many people I met in Armenia talked about how they, too, would emigrate to these places to live and work if they could. In this article, I examine the causes of the post-Soviet temporary labor migration of Armenian women to the United States and the experiences and the discourses of self-representation by post-Soviet Armenian transnational migrants whom I studied in Los Angeles area (including Orange County) and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
