Volume
12, Number 2 Fall 2003
In
This Issue
Modernity in Question?
Culture and Religion in an Age of Global Modernity
Arif Dirlik
I would like to present an analytical framework that seeks to make sense of two seemingly contradictory developments over the last two decades: economic and political globalization that is taken generally to point to unprecedented global integration, and the resurgence of religions or, more broadly, traditionalisms, that create new political and cultural fractures, or reopen old ones. Most discussions of global developments privilege one or the other of these phenomena. We are all familiar with the by now prolific literature on globalization offering visions (or threats) of impending global integration and homogenization, in which the divisiveness introduced by religious revivals appears merely as a legacy of the past, one that is likely to be bridged by an irresistible globalization that reshapes the world.
“We Crossed a
Lot of Borders”: Refugee Children of the Greek Civil War
Loring M. Danforth
The evacuation of 28,000 refugee children from villages in northern Greece by the Communist Party of Greece in 1948 was one of the most controversial chapters of the Greek Civil War, a conflict whose traumatic impact has continued to polarize modern Greek society. A bitterly contested aspect of this evacuation was the issue of whether these children were removed with or without the permission of their parents. After a difficult journey to Eastern Europe, the refugees were cared for in “children's homes” until they were old enough to live independently. Many of them remained in Eastern Europe; some were repatriated to Greece, and some emigrated to Australia or Canada.
A Contemporary Story of
“Diaspora”: The Tibetan Version
Dibyesh Anand
Until the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tibetan studies suffered from an overemphasis on Buddhism and pre-1950s Tibetan history. Since the late 1980s, however, the situation has gradually changed. One increasingly comes across works related to Tibet that draw upon new ideas culled from various social, literary, and cultural theories. One such concept that is gaining currency is Diaspora.1 Taking their cue from the changing discourses of other dispersions, Tibetanists2working with Tibetan exile/refugee communities have adopted the term. While this development brings Tibetan studies in line with similar disciplines and reflects the self-confidence of the field itself, often the term is used in an undertheorized manner, as a mere synonym or substitute for “refugee” or “exile.” This is problematic, since Diaspora is not just another word for exiles or refugees but a concept with its own history. And this history is necessarily messy and contested.
Proximate Practices? Gender,
Diaspora, and the Rise in Black Internationalism
Kate Baldwin
When Langston Hughes set off for Russia in June 1932, he packed a victrola and several records by Louis Armstrong and Ethel Waters. Hughes brought these unwieldy objects at the urging of his friend, Louise Thompson, the organizer of the group of African American artists, writers, and activists with whom Hughes was traveling. Hughes's attachment, aesthetic and otherwise, to blues and jazz is clearly etched in the work he had produced in the 1920s. His two collections of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes for a Jew (1927), push the apparent limits between modern poetic verse and song verse, fusing modernity and orality. Hughes' memoir of his Soviet journey, I Wonder as I Wander, underscores the lure of mixtures. In his own sparse prose, Hughes recalls that his victrola created a “social center” wherever he traveled. He recounts how Jews, Russians, Asians, Mongolians, Uzbeks, and “Turkomans”1 flocked to his room in Ashkhabad (now in Turkmenistan), and explains, “Everywhere around the world, folks are attracted by American jazz.
Foreigners Transformed:
International Migration and the Remaking of a Divided People
Roger Waldinger
When it comes to the question of assimilation, the American academy and the American people no longer agree. The people and the professors earlier thought alike, both expecting that newcomers and their descendants would abandon old-country ties and habits for the ways and affiliations of the new national community that they had joined. But whereas the people continue to believe in the old-time religion, the professors have changed their minds. Conceptually, they find that assimilation lacks appeal, mainly because it has almost always overlapped with the ideology and practices it should have analyzed—namely assimilationism. Empirically, the scholars conclude that theory and reality diverge and find that the very best that can be said for assimilation is that it did a good job of predicting the past. The professors generally do concede that the descendants of the Italian, Polish, and other mass migrations of the turn of the twentieth century have now climbed to the higher reaches of American society, leaving behind their ethnic attachments.
Notes on Contributors
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