Diaspora
Volume
3, Number 2, Fall 1994
Articles:
Configuring
the Filipino Diaspora in the United States
E. San Juan, Jr.
San
Juan points out that while Filipino Americans outnumber every
other Asian community in the United States, the canonization of
Asian-American literature has excluded their texts.
While
he is critical of the smugness and indifference of intellectuals who
have been complicit in this erasure, San Juan nevertheless affirms
that the Filipino-American experiences of class and nation especially
(and of gender and race to lesser degrees) have been quite different.
He shows that the prolonged anticolonial, nationalist, and more recently
also Marxist struggle at home resonates with strikes and unionization
battles of Filipino workers in the United States, as well as in the
works of writers like Philip Vera Cruz; these struggles and discourses,
he argues, have no true parallels among other Asian-American communities.
Memory,
Innovation, and Emergent Ethnicity: The Creolization of an Indo- Trinidadian
Performance
Frank J. Korom
Korom
explores the relations between religiosity, ethnicity, and the construction
of nationhood by focusing on the festival of Hosay. Originally a Shi'a
commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn, practiced in India, the
tradition was brought to Trinidad in the nineteenth century by indentured
workers. Outlining Hosay's history and the current contestation of
its meanings and roles, Korom shows how one portion of the Indo-Trinidadian
diaspora can insist on the continuity of its practices with those
of the homeland even as others want either to expand or restrain access
to the festival, thereby patrolling ethnic boundaries, and still others-African
Trinidadians-wish to claim an altered form of the festival for the
emergent multiethnic and multireligious "nation-state" of
Trinidad and Tobago.
The
Memory of Place: Rebuilding the Pre-1948 Palestinian Village
Susan Slyomovics
Slyomovics
explores a narrative mode that shares features of history and the
novel: the "memory books" of Jews, Armenians, and Palestinians,
which seek to recreate both the geography and kinship structure of
variously eradicated villages. Focusing on a Palestinian village-book
and a fiction by Ghassan Kanafani, Slyomovics shows how memory books
fashion and embody a communal view of a communal past. Though the
impulse to preserve roots is part of this effort, Slyomovics shows,
these memory books are not primarily antiquarian; created by and helping
to create a political folk memory, they respond to the urgencies of
the present.
"Why
Did You Leave There?": Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson
Michael Eldridge
Eldridge
explores the work of the Jamaican-Canadian "dub" poet Lillian
Allen and maps the ways in which new networks of–especially musical–culture
have emerged along the fault lines of the transnational. economy that
has rendered geographical boundaries unevenly and arbitrarily porous.
His analysis is also an argument for the need to modify Paul Gilroy's
geography of the "Black Atlantic," in order to include in
it the "black tile" in the mosaic culture Canada claims
for itself.
At
Home in Diaspora: Armenians in America
Susan Pattie
Pattie
reflects on the differently imagined communities of homeland and diaspora
in the contemporary Armenian nation. Occasioned by Anny Bakalian's
major sociological study of Armenian Americans, her essay considers
the role of place and sensory memories of the lost homeland in diasporan
enclaves. Pattie variously affirms and interrogates the importance
of factors considered by Bakalian: language and family as well as
organizations such as the church and political parties, which unite
diasporan Armenian communities transnationally even as they divide
individual communities in internal conflict. She concludes by exploring
the "cultural space" of western diasporas, in which the
preoccupation with individuality poses the most substantial challenge
to the traditional Armenian diaspora even as it makes possible new
ways of feeling and being Armenian.
On
Being Jewish or Greek in the Modern Moment
Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.
Ruprecht
takes the publication of Vassilis Lambropoulos's erudite and far-reaching
The Rise of Eurocentrism as an occasion to interrogate various inscriptions
of Hebraic and Hellenic cultures as defining elements of "the
idea of Europe." He argues that "what we now call 'Europe'
was in fact initiated as an extraordinary experiment in cultural synthesis
that originated in the Levant," when the two cultures coexisted
in war and peace for centuries. Foregrounding Lambropoulos's argument
that modern (post Reformation) Europe embodies the triumph of Hebraism
over Hellenism, Ruprecht explores the implications of this for our
reading of texts and collective identities. His findings imply that
the systematic exclusion of both the extermination of pagan Greek
culture and of modern Greece from the memory of a Europe that celebrates
classical "Athens" has been an important step in the fashioning
of European identity.
Theorizing
Glengormley, Reconfiguring Nationhood
Enda Duffy
Duffy
reads David Lloyd's work on Irish nationalism and postcoloniality
as a materialist, Gramscian elucidation of the ways in which the Irish
nation-state functions as "a clearing house of ideologies of
community"; this enables the Irish state to silence subaltern
groups in ways that are, all too often, continuous with the practices
of the empire that preceded it. Duffy endorses Lloyd's preference
for a diasporan criticism of the homeland's high culture that would
also be dedicated to "a revision of the meaning of the state
formation." In addition, he argues for a closer look at the "Troubles"
in Northern Ireland as an occasion for the revisioning of all Irish
identity.
