Diaspora
Volume
4, Number 3, Winter 1995
Articles:
State
Dominance and Communal Perseverance: The Armenian Diaspora in
the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979-1989
Eliz Sanasarian
Sanasarian
offers an analytical narrative of the life of a Christian diasporan
community in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the installation
of a theocratic Islamic Republic.
She
shows that despite the enormous discrepancy between state power and
that of the Armenian minority, and in spite of the "impatiently
legalistic" approach characteristic of western analysts, a modus
vivendi has emerged that differentially constrains Iranian-Armenians,
allowing them the possibility of negotiation and accommodation in
several spheres. Her article explores the intriguing implications
of communal isolation and communal politics under these conditions.
Gender
and Social Capital among Israeli Immigrants in Los Angeles
Steven J. Gold
Gold
finds in Los Angeles' Israeli immigrant community the "equation
of transnationalism," versions of which have been discerned in
other immigrant diasporas: enhanced income coupled with a diminished
cultural and communal life. Whereas the institutions that make such
a life possible are supported by state and society in Israel, they
are primarily sustained in the United States by the work of immigrant
women. A cost-benefit analysis at the level of the individual, rather
than the family unit, shows that benefits are unequally shared and
that gender is a pertinent variable. Using in-depth interviews, Gold
explores the paradoxical coupling of immigrant prosperity with the
devaluing of "the social and human capital of the women involved,"
and the ambivalences to which this gives rise.
"Bombay,
U.K, Yuba City": Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora
Gayatri Gopinath
Gopinath
outlines the ways in which bhangra, originally a Punjabi musical idiom
brought to Britain by the Indian diaspora, changed by drawing upon
Afro-Caribbean and other non-Indian musics and became "the locus
of a diasporic South Asian youth culture" in London and Toronto,
Port-of-Spain and New York, but also in India. She uses this account
to interrogate the work of Paul Gilroy, characterized as "unable
to fully write Asians into [its] discourse of cultural production"
in diaspora because of its reliance on a black/white binary and a
patrilineal narrative of diaspora. She also finds that bhangra's performances
of masculinist identity are complicit with Indian nationalism's patrilineal
narratives, even when they refigure "the hierarchical relation
between diaspora and the nation." Gopinath concludes by referring
to the growing number of women involved in bhangra and the challenge
their music poses by creating "potentially enabling constructions
of gender in the diaspora."
Is
a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?
Neil Lazarus
Lazarus's
analysis of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic sketches the book's argument
that slavery has been the paradigmatic bearer of modernity figured
as a transcultural and diasporic, rather than a nation-centered, process.
The study of the process, so conceived, privileges mobile cultural
practices and enables Gilroy's reading of the utopianism embedded
in the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of the African diaspora
as a counterdiscourse of modernity. However, Lazarus argues, Gilroy's
choice of the Black Atlantic over the capitalist world system is not
only a productive shift of focus; it also creates a latent, problematic,
and indeed unsustainable "antagonism" between the two.
The
Strategies of Transnational Communications
Anthony Arnove
Arnove
surveys, praises, and interrogates Armand Mattelart's oeuvre. Reviewing
his most recent book, he outlines Mattelart's view that the historical
development of national and transnational communications, media, and
media studies were driven by the needs of the military for coordination,
of state bureaucracies for social control, and of corporations for
profit. Turning to Mattelart's detailed and useful "maps"
of contemporary global communications and to his vision of a democratic
transnational order, Arnove criticizes Mattelart's embrace of an antimaterialist
culturalism that rejects the role of the working class as an inclusive
transnational social category.
