Diaspora
Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1992
Articles:
Between
Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s
Rey Chow
Chow
considers the impending "restoration" of a reluctant Hong
Kong-neither Chinese diaspora nor yet China-to the "homeland."
While identifying structuring concepts of diasporan discourse, such
as "origin" and "return," she focuses on the shortcomings
of two tendencies in current postcolonial theory.
The
first risks becoming complicit with a mainland Chinese nationalist
and nativist ideology that exalts the rural folk and posits Hong Kong
as alien to that tradition, even as it lapses (unlike Hong Kong) into
a naive celebration of western technology. The second is a "postmodern
hybridism" that celebrates urban postmodernity while occulting
the continuing power of colonialism and racism. Reading the lyrics
of Luo Dayou, a popular songwriter, Chow highlights the "self-writing"
that attempts to empower the Hong Kong polity while preventing its
inscription in others' discourses and political economies.
Relocation
as Positive Act: The Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee's Novels
Carmen Wickramagamage
Wickramagamage
reads two of Mukherjee's novels, Wife and Jasmine, and argues that
they reject the ascription of deracination, victimization, and alienation
to the immigrant experience without assuming that it automatically
leads to emancipatory narratives of self-transformation. Instead,
Wickramagamage shows, her novels represent the discovery that identities
assumed in the homeland are provisional and a range of disabling or
empowering responses to that discovery in diaspora. Mukherjee's fictions
claim that both responses are enabled not just by the host country
but also by the recovery of suppressed and heterogeneous models of
identity that were already present in Hindu culture; paradoxically,
they are only made visible and available by diasporan dislocation.
Essence
and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: Transformations
of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas
John Sorenson
Sorenson
tracks the challenges to Ethiopian "national" identity that
emerged after the overthrow of the Amhari-dominated monarchy and its
Marxist successor-state. These events, and the Eritrean struggle for
independence, have led to a reassessment of theEthiopia that many
in Africa and its diasporas valued as a model of the uncolonized African
"nation." Sorenson explores both the persistence of the
national idea and the contrasting appeal of new ethnonational identities
(Tigrayan, Oromo, Eritrean) that are constructed differently in homeland
and diaspora.
'World
Music" and the Global Cultural Economy
Martin Roberts
Roberts
discusses "world music" as a significant cultural and economic
phenomenon that may alter some of the relations of center and periphery.
He then uses that category to illustrate the ongoing interdisciplinary
production of the concept of "global culture," and to interrogate
some elements of it. Finally, he raises new questions about what is
at stake in the production of this new discourse of globalism.
Kinship,
Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora
Stefan Helmreich
Helmreich
reads Paul Gilroy's work on a black Atlantic diaspora sympathetically
but critically, arguing that it may unwittingly recapitulate some
of the problems he identifies in nationalism and ethnic absolutism:
namely, a dependence on patriarchal images of kinship and on "arborescent"
symbols such as the family tree, rooted in soil and territory rather
than changing community; and on paradigmatic notions of experience
that are androcentric. Helmreich points to the work of Stuart Hall
and Benedict Anderson on constantly changing ways of imagining communal
coherence as a corrective already allied with the best elements of
Gilroy's own argument.
The
Huguenot Diaspora
John Fletcher
Fletcher's
essay surveys the growing literature on the expulsion of the Huguenots
from France three centuries ago, in 1685, which led to the introduction
of the word "refugee" into English. He offers a survey of
their dispersion, analyzes its costs to France and its benefits to
host countries, and speculates about the different course French history
would have taken had the expulsion of this skilled religious minority
not taken place.
The
Shrinking Himalayas
Indira Karamcheti
Karamcheti
discusses both the inscriptions and erasures of Indian diasporic experience
through her reading of Reworlding, a collection of essays that seeks
to provide a panoptic view of the communities of overseas Indians
to which "diaspora" has only been applied recently. After
interrogating the diaspora-generated discourse that constructs a global
"Indianness," Karamcheti looks at technological and sociopolitical
factors that favor the maintenance of new Indian diasporas. Finally,
she considers conditions- e.g., the discursive privileging of the
experience of earlier diasporas such as that of Africans in the Caribbean-which
complicate the elaboration of Indian-diasporan narratives and identities.
