Diaspora
Volume
1, Number 3, Winter 1991
Articles:
In This Issue
Herskovits's
Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora
Andrew Apter
Apter
offers a searching though sympathetic critique of the anthropological
paradigm of syncretism, first used by Melville Herskovitz to "measure"
the relative purity of retained African elements in the New World
diasporas and to fashion a narrative of original cultural unity
fragmented by slavery.
Challenging
the assumptions underpinning this narrative, Apter argues for greater
continuity between West Africa and the African diaspora. He locates
within West African religious discourse tactics of refiguration and
revision that endure in New World diasporas as a collective, counterhegemonic
strategy of discursive appropriation.
That
Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas
in the New World
David Scott
Scott
also turns to Herskovits's "inaugural problematic." Identifying
it as the "cornerstone of an anthropology of African diasporas,"
he identifies its self-appointed task, that of uncovering continuities
between Africa and its diaspora. This task persists yet is transformed
in the work of Richard Price on the Saramaka, where it takes the form
of an attempt to corroborate diasporan memories of originary events.
Scott argues that such anthropological discourse seeks to secure authentic
collective identity by constructing continuity with the past, and
risks neglecting the indispensable work of describing the "local
networks of power and knowledge" in which versions of the past
are employed to refashion contemporary identities.
The
Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile
Hamid Naficy
Naficy
argues that for Iranian exiles living in "Los Angeles or other
diasporan communities ... in highly mediated postindustrial societies
.... the popular culture they produce and consume, especially television,"
continually reconstructs and circulates collective identity. He explores
the ways in which the rituals of exilic nostalgia draw on preexilic
poems and films for images of absence, lack, loss, and return, and
stage symbolic reunions. Naficy outlines the boundary-maintaining
practices with which exile communities emphasize their difference,
claim continuity with their past, and enhance internal similarities.
Finally, he explores the ways in which semiotic and ideological power
struggles among Iranian factions inflect the process of imagining
exile community.
Culture,
Ethnicity, and the Politics/Poetics of Representation
Gillian Bottomley
Bottomley
brings together three theoretical positions that contribute to a more
nuanced study of ethnicity. Pierre Bourdieu's work on the habitus,
with its emphasis on a sense of place in historical and social space,
and on knowledge embodied in practice, is not usually conjoined with
Stuart Hall on ethnicity and Paul Gilroy on diaspora. However, Bottomley
teases out of their work ideas about subjectivity, subjection, performance,
and ethnicity, then briefly indicates how they may help to interpret
diasporan cultures, such as the changes taking place in Greek-Australian
dance.
"Like
a Song Gone Silent": The Political Ecology of Barbarism and Civilization
in Waiting for the Barbariansa and The Legend of the Thousand Bulls
Arif Dirlik
Dirlik,
a historian of China, writes about two quite different depictions
of the nomadic "barbarian's" encounter with "civilization."
The core of his essay is a close reading of two representations of
the barbarian (one by a South African, the other by a Turkish novelist).
Such representations, he shows, are inseparable from conceptions of
"civilization," indeed of History. "Barbarians,"
Dirlik argues, are "the extreme case that illustrates what [also)
happens to ... diasporas, minorities in ghettos, the Others of the
nation-state," who are "situated along a continuum within
civilization, as the barbarian is beyond its borders." The introduction
of the voices of all these Others into an understanding of "our"
History, Dirlik argues, is indispensable if we are to avoid not only
the barbarous destruction of the Other but our own incarceration in
a narrow conception of civilization.
A
Host Country of Immigrants That Does Not Know Itself
Dominique Aron Schnapper
Trans.
by Lorne Shirinian
Schnapper's
essay will startle some readers of this journal, who will have detected
a certain editorial unanimity in opposition to "melting pot"
theories. But the distance between any unanimity and intellectual
complacency is short; Schnapper's essay is reminder of other positions.
She argues that France has been a country of immigrants for a long
time, that national ideology and a commitment to Gallicization have
masked this fact, and have even led to a dearth of data for sociologists,
which she laments. While favoring immigration, Schnapper (herself
of Jewish origin and the daughter of Raymond Aron) argues that France
can have "no policy but that of continuing the integration of
its foreign populations through its universal institutions,"
because "no nation can have suicide as a vocation." This
article, simultaneously scholarly and, especially in the American
context, polemical, will serve in lieu of a "Commentary"
essay for this issue.
"Our
Greater Ireland beyond the Seas"
Paul Arthur
Arthur
reviews two books by D. H. Akenson on the Irish diaspora in South
Africa and New Zealand. Together, these argue the need to elaborate
a history of a transnational "Anglo-Celtic" culture, the
proper understanding of which would alter the historiography of the
"British Isles," affect the self-representation of the host
countries, and challenge Irish American stereotypes as to who the
emigrants were and how they lived. Arthur endorses a caveat of Akenson's
that can be salutary for all ethnic history: "If the historical
evidence ... confirms what your grandmother told you, then check,
and check again."
Transformations
of the Sikh Diaspora
Milton Israel
Israel's
review of a collection of essays on the Sikh diasporas of Britain,
Canada, and the United States enumerates a richly suggestive set of
issues. These include debates about the speed with which changes at
home and new waves of immigration alter the structure, institutions,
and assumptions that prevail in a diaspora: the sharpening of a Hindu/Sikh
struggle in the Punjab, for example, has given new vehemence to debates
about Sikh identity elsewhere. In turn, such new debates retrospectively
transform views about and may "do violence to the historical
experience" of earlier immigrants.
