Diaspora
Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1991
Articles:
Writing
the African Diaspora in the Eighteenth Century
M. van Wyk Smith
Van
Wyk Smith identifies the prominent features and persistent concerns
of the pre-abolition diasporan discourse that was produced by the
largely autobiographical works of a "relatively small number
of Africans, usually freed, unusually literate [and] doubly displaced."
He explores texts by Gronniosaw, Wheatley, Sancho, Cugoano, and
Equiano.
Diasporan
Intervention in International Affairs: Irish America as a Case Study
Paul Arthur
Arthur
analyzes Irish-American attempts to influence US policy in Northern
Ireland. He gives an account of the fund-raising and lobbying efforts
of the relatively small, activist diasporan segment (NORAID, INC)
of the very large Irish-American ethnic community. Comparing the impact
of these efforts with those of the smaller Jewish-American diaspora,
Arthur sketches the limits of intervention in international affairs
when lobbyists lack unanimity and their target is a US ally such as
Britain, rather than the Arab states.
Caught
in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
David Lipscomb
Lipscomb
shows that Rushdie's Midnight’s Children includes numerous hitherto
unidentified, adapted passages from Stanley Wolpert's A New History
of India. He argues that such juxtapositions of the discourses of
history and memory "serve as metaphors of transnationalism"
and create an "epistemological dislocation" that is characteristic
of the "middle ground" inhabited by diasporan consciousness.
Apartheid
on Display: South Africa Performs for New York
Loren Kruger
Kruger
explores the interaction between a New York-centered metropolitan
context and South African theater, which has "largely been promoted
and received [in it] as ... testimony to the antiapartheid struggle."
South Africa is a multicultural terrain of conflict in which a "hybrid
theatrical nationhood" is emerging, inventing traditions even
as it debates the possibility of separating an "aesthetic moment"
from political struggle. Kruger shows that despite metropolitan attempts
to appropriate this theater, the possibility of "talking (of)
home in the diaspora" persists.
Greek
Americans and the Diaspora
Gregory Jusdanis
Jusdanis's
review essay on Charles Moskos's study of Greek Americans situates
that book in a broader context. Arguing that "Greece as a nation-state
is to a large extent a creation of the Hellenic diaspora," Jusdanis
traces the changes in that diaspora: shifts in geographic focus, material
circumstance, and the ways in which it imagines itself in relation
to the cultural capital that ancient Greece represents in the West.
Commentary
Khachig Tololyan
Tololyan's
"Commentary" about the Armenian diaspora's involvement in
the emerging (ex-Soviet) Republic of Armenia inaugurates a new feature.
Each issue of Diaspora will contain a "Commentary" on a
current transnational phenomenon.
