Volume
12, Number 3, Winter 2003
In
This Issue
Model Americans, Quintessential
Greeks: Ethnic Success and Assimilation in Diaspora
Yiorgos Anagnostou
To tell stories of ethnic success is to speak about the nation in all its benevolence and generosity. National ideologies such as the American Dream, mobility, openness, and inclusiveness come to life any time the nation's Others claim socioeconomic achievement. Stories of success turn the ethnic into the national as the former partakes of, and legitimizes, narratives of the latter. Alternatively, the ethnic can, on occasion, command the attention of the nation through the notion of success. The blockbuster status of the independent film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, released in 2002, is a case in point: the representation of an ethnic group within popular culture is such a hit that it generates a metadiscourse in the media about the film's unprecedented popularity, and that, in turn, becomes its own kind of ethnic success story.
Transnationalism and Its
Discontents during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War
Maud Mandel
In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in the concept of “transnationalism.” Thanks to the progressive globalization of political and economic structures and communication networks, previous constraints on the extent to which individuals can participate in more than one society have diminished. Such shifts have had a profound impact on how scholars have conceptualized minority identities. Thus, while those who worked on immigrant communities once focused primarily on “distinctions between the here and the there, the center and the periphery, black and white.... such analyses are being supplemented by a whole set of new, unbounded concepts ... [including] multiplicity, border crossing, disjunction and ethnoscapes, cultural hybridization, porousness, webs, and transnational communities” (Goldin 2).
Beyond
Eve and Mary: Filipino American Intellectual Heroes and the Transnational
Performance of Gender and Reciprocity
Augusto Espiritu
In a 2002 article for the San Francisco–based periodical Asian Week, columnist Emil Guillermo revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had indeed spied upon the Filipino American author Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956). Guillermo credits Asian American academics Marilyn Alquizola and Lane Hirabayashi for their persistence in obtaining Bulosan's FBI files. He quotes Alquizola's observation that Bulosan was “at risk because of his political beliefs—expressed in his work and his writing” and that “these activities were both domestic and international in scope and eventually got the federal government's attention” (Guillermo) Hearkening to Bulosan's social commitment, Guillermo calls Bulosan “a true amok Filipino” and calls for the restoration of his badly damaged reputation. These comments reinforce once again the vitality and historical relevance of Bulosan's life. At the same time, one notices the elasticity and, in particular, the serviceability of that life to the political agenda of Asian American studies.
Diaspora in the Reading
of Jewish History, Identity, and Difference
Denise Eileen McCoskey
In recent years, classical historians have sought to explore the interplay of a wide variety of peoples and civilizations in the ancient Mediterranean. This method seeks not to erase the power exercised both culturally and politically by the Greeks and Romans but to shed greater light on the areas of contradiction and ambiguity that accompanied their hegemonic expressions; that is, to examine more closely not only attempts at domination but also the shifting strategies and consequences produced at the site of contact among Greeks, Romans, and others.2 While such paradigmatic shifts have resulted in numerous regional studies of the ancient Mediterranean, the case of the ancient Jews, who cannot be accounted for within any single region, has invited perhaps more heated debate than any other.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies
Arif Dirlik
I have chosen as my subtitle the title of the volume that I review and reflect upon in what follows; hereafter, I will refer to it as MMP. My title is a question that comes from the concluding lines of the introduction to the volume by one of its editors, Crystal Bartolovich. I do not intend to take up the discussion where she leaves off, but it seems an appropriate point of departure for further reflection. Perhaps wisely, neither the editors nor the other contributors to the volume make a serious effort to provide an answer to the question. Bartolovich follows up the question with a description of the volume that is worth quoting at some length, as it successfully captures the sense of the book and equally successfully dodges the question she raises:
Recent French Conceptualizations
of Diaspora
William Safran
This book by sociologist Stéphane Dufoix is a tour d'horizon of the state of contemporary scholarship concerning diasporas. It ranges across a variety of disciplines. It is particularly welcome because it is concise and tightly argued and because it covers virtually all the basic aspects of the subject. Moreover, it is solidly grounded in the existing literature.
In defining the concept “diaspora” and tracing the evolution of its meaning, the author begins by addressing himself to the historical origin of the phenomenon and its association with the Jewish “classical” perspective. That perspective, long regarded as paradigmatic, informed in the twentieth century the work of the historian Simon Dubnow—who also applied it to the Armenian and Greek cases— and the political scientist Daniel Elazar. Over the course of the past four decades, the concept was first extended to the African and Chinese cases and then increasingly applied and adapted to many other cases.
Notes on Contributors
A JOURNAL
OF TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES
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