Diaspora
Volume
4, Number 2, Fall 1995
Articles:
From
Allegories of Identity to Sites of Dialogue
Paulla Ebron and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Ebron
and Tsing point to the increasing importance of fictional representations
of community and of the interpretive discourses that emerge around
them.
Naming
these as sites for allegories of identity, they argue that community
may be definable by its ability to compose its identity around such
fictive allegories. Such fictions, together with their interpretations,
offer "a key zone of the political," a site of potential
dialogue between such groups as the Asian American and African American.
Hitherto, these have imagined themselves as closed, parallel, gendered
communities of color and have sought engagement with the dominant
white groups, imagined as central, rather than striving for dialogue
with each other at various margins.
Translating
Tibet’s Cultural Dispersion: Solzhenitsyn, Paine, and Orwell
in Dharamsala
Steven Venturino
Venturino
analyzes "the ways in which literary translation can effectively
engage issues of Tibet's cultural survival in its current diasporan
and transnational context." Focusing on the Amnye Machen Institute
and its theories, politics, and practices of translation, he explores
their engagement with western assumptions about translation and transnationalism.
This engagement is a response to the fact that Tibetans both in their
occupied homeland and in diaspora no longer have the privilege of
engaging their own traditions indigenously, untouched by Chinese,
western, and global narratives that to a significant extent "determine
their identities and future." Venturino shows that Amnye Machen
has developed strategies of translating foreign-language texts into
Tibetan that simultaneously position Tibetan as a vernacular dialect
of global discourse and yet produce not merely "transformed copies
of originals" but cultural tools that are unmistakably Tibetan
in purpose and meaning.
Is
the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and
Race
Jenny Sharpe
Sharpe
interrogates aspects of the emergence of postcolonial studies in the
contexts of institutional pressure for an acceptable multiculturalism.
She shows that a prevailing brand of postcolonial studies dangerously
collocates such various and irreconcilable categories as the experiences
and texts of past and present colonized peoples; the diasporan experience
of former African slaves; the many and diverse experiences of immigrants
from the Third World to the industrialized world; and neocolonial
relationships between states and transnational corporations today.
This version of postcolonialism too unconsciously takes as its model
postcolonial migration and settlement in Europe, and occludes a wide
range of differences and discontinuities. Sharpe proposes instead
that the postcolonial situation be theorized as the "point at
which internal social relations intersect with global capitalism and
the international division of labor."
Criss-Crossing
Identities: The Russian Jewish Diaspora and the Jewish Diaspora in
Russia
Fran Markowitz
Markowitz
provides a provocative overview of questions of identity pertaining
to the "Soviet Jews" whose politico-juridical identities
were imposed by the Soviet state and whose cultural identity was frequently
forgotten or repressed. They now live in 15 formerly Soviet republics,
Israel, the US, and elsewhere. Do they live as Israelis, as Jewish
citizens of the US, or as a transnational community of their own that
is as yet "unimagined"? Markowitz narrates the unraveling
of the "Soviet" identity (which was never as unified as
the claims made for it), identifies the factors involved in that fragmentation,
and indicates the social and cultural basis of a new community that
draws on Jewishness and the new hostlands but also, emphatically,
on a "Russian" element of culture and experience.
Encuentros
y Encontronazos: Homeland in the Politics and Identity of the Cuban
Diaspora
Maria de los Angeles Torres
Torres
begins by providing an analytical narrative of the several trajectories
of Cuban exile. She tracks the vicissitudes of US and Cuban foreign
policy during the cold war and their relation to the changing internal
alignments of the Cuban-American diaspora. She shows that the cumulative
effect of long cycles of isolation punctuated by attempts at dialogue
and reconciliation produced a rethinking and transformation of the
idea of the Cuban nation.
