Diaspora
Volume
3, Number 1, Spring 1994
Articles:
Arab
Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco-Maghrebi Identity
Joan Gross, David McMurray, and Ted Swedenburg
Gross
et al. present the complex roles of rai music as a social force
that participates in various contestations, such as those between
Muslim fundamentalists and their opponents in Algeria and between
generations in the heterogeneous Maghrebi diaspora of France.
In addition, they discuss rai's competition with Afrocentric rap performed
by ethnically diverse groups in France. The essay is also a history
of the ways in which this evolving music marks rapidly changing stages
in the construction of identity by diasporic populations that are
variously positioned by ethnicity, race, and class.
Citizens
of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations
Liisa Malkki
Malkki
draws on her field research on Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania,
as well as on a wide variety of texts (ranging from a Bob Hope film
and Disneyland to Marcel Mauss, Etienne Balibar, and Edward Said),
to explore the taxonomic regime of internationalism. She argues that
this regime can be complicit with a simultaneous homogenization and
celebration of the differences among nations. This move habitually
underpins figurations such as the "family of nations" and,
paradoxically, serves to enable the worst forms of nationalism. Her
complex exploration of the dependence of nationalism on a particular
version of internationalism also reflects on the ways in which this
pattern is repeated in the discourses of multiculturalism within the
national frame.
The
Geography of Female Subjectivity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora
Susan Koshy
Koshy
examines Bharati Mukherjee's representation, especially in Wife (1975)
and Jasmine (1989), of both the failure and success of Indian immigrant
women's "emancipation." She argues that the novels insistently
engage various western and Indian paradigms of self-construction.
These include a feminist model of the western bourgeois subject as
the implicit standard of agency and freedom, which attributes a corresponding
lack of agency to Indian and other immigrants who are establishing
American diasporas. Mukherjee's novels, Koshy argues, sometimes provide
astringent commentary on, and at other times are complicit with, western
feminism's perspectives on gender, class, and agency in a postcolonial
world.
Marketing
the Democratic Creed Abroad: US Diasporic Politics in the Era of Multiculturalism
Yossi Shain
Shain
explores the reciprocity of relations that obtain between American
diasporas eager to influence their government in favor of their ancestral
homelands and an American government which, holding the upper hand,
establishes the rules of competition in the lobbying for influence
on foreign policy. He argues that diasporas must follow certain protocols
which honor at least the rules and sometimes the spirit of Pluralism;
such protocols mobilize diasporas as exporters of professed American
ideals about democracy to their homelands. Shain ends by speculating
about the ways in which the competition for influence among diasporas
may lead either to the "balkanization" of American society,
as feared by Arthur Schlesinger and others, or to the reconciliation
of ethnic groups.
