Volume
13, Number 1
Spring 2004
The De-cosmopolitanization of the Russian Diaspora: A View from
Brooklyn in the "Far Abroad
David D. Laitin
Diaspora communities emphasize different aspects of their complex cultural repertoires—whether by choice or by necessity—as they insert themselves culturally and politically into their host countries. Some highlight their race (blacks from the Caribbean into the United States); others their religion (Muslims from Algeria into France); and still others their language-based ethnicity (English in South Africa). Determining ex ante which aspect of their identities will “win” has long perplexed students of ethnicity. But over time, a significant proportion of each diasporic community and their descendents consolidates around a single dimension of difference, conditioning their social and political behavior on their interests as members of a category (say, Catholic) on the highlighted dimension (in this case, religion).
Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State: Armenian Merchants, the English
East India Company, and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748-1752
Sebouh Aslanian
This article offers a non-fictional detective story that enables, and is embedded within, a larger analytical narrative. For reasons that will become clear, I as a historian and archival researcher play an unusually large role in the detective story, a tale of how I tracked down documents that enabled me to reconstruct an act of British colonial-era piracy against merchants of the Armenian trade diaspora in the eighteenth century. At the center of the narrative is an Armenian-freighted2 merchant ship called the Santa Catharina, whose cargo the British Admiralty confiscated in India in 1748 and for the possession of which a complex trial was conducted in London between 1749 and 1752.
Scenarios of Transformation: The Changing Consequences of Old and
New Migrations
David Fitzgerald
This book is both monograph and manifesto. If studies of international migration are too often about immigration to a single place at one time, this volume is relentlessly comparative. It bundles multilayered comparisons between then and now, here and there, and this group and that. Anthropologist-turned-sociologist Nancy Foner draws on a long career of fieldwork to compare several immigrant streams to New York at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Another set of chapters compares contemporary West Indian migrations to New York and London.
Home-Comings and Goings: A Review Essay
Armine Ishkanian
Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return examines various types of return migration, including the return of war refugees, political exiles, and diasporics to their real or imagined homelands, as well as “roots tourism” and forms of long-distance nationalism that are collectively, if not precisely, referred to as “homecomings.” According to one of the editors, Anders Stefansson, return movements across time and space have been ignored in migration studies and social anthropology research because “going home” is perceived as an “antiprogressive, illogical, and illusory” practice that is “structurally invisible” (5).
Diasporas and Their Discontents: Return without Homecoming in the
Forging of Liberian and African-American Identity
Stephen C. Lubkemann
The Price of Liberty is an engaging and thoroughly researched account of how just over 2,000 North Carolinian blacks left for Africa between1820 and 1893 and of the role they played in the establishment of the nascent state of Liberia. In the best traditions of social history, Claude Clegg III traces the emigration and colonization process as the product of interaction among actors with very different and sometimes quite contradictory interests, shaped as much by inadvertent outcomes and unforeseeable shifts in broader political and economic currents as by actor agency or intentionality.
Emplotting Postcoloniality: Usable Pasts, Possible Futures, and
the Relentless Present
Raphael Dalleo
Postcolonial studies is at a crossroads. While the 1980s marked the nascence of postcolonial studies in the academy and the 1990s its triumph, the years since 2001 have been filled with uncertainty and self-doubt for the field. Recent books such as Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Kaul, Looma, Burton, Bunzl, and Esty), Beyond Postcolonial Theory (San Juan), and Relocating Postcolonialism (Goldberg and Quayson) all announce their intention of moving past or away from their object of study, frequently lamenting its increasing institutionalization as an academic practice, even while postcolonial studies (unlike some of its precursors in ethnic studies) has scarcely managed to create a disciplinary, or even interdisciplinary, home.1 The ability of postcolonial approaches to insinuate their way into virtually all disciplines of the human sciences could be seen as their greatest success.
Notes on Contributors
