Diaspora
Volume
5, Number 1, Spring 1996
Articles:
Rethinking
Diaspora (s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment
Khachig Tölölyan
Tölölyan
looks at the ways in which dispersions have been transformed into
diasporas.
He
examines the material and discursive factors that reshaped the diasporic
project and enabled the rapid and widespread renaming of many kinds
of dispersions- ethnic, exilic, migrant, racial- as diasporas. He
argues that some factors were the work of diasporan elites while others
were extra-diasporic. He then explores the exclusions, disavowals
and inadvertent complicities that have underpinned the success of
the diasporic project in the past three decades.
"Will
the Model Minority Please Identify Itself?" American Ethnic Identity
and Its Discontents
Ruth Y. Hsu
Hsu
offers a critique of "the rehabilitative concept of ethnicity"
which has been enabling for many ethnics, yet has remained nestled
within an American, nationalist and hegemonist discourse. She argues
that this concept is intimately bound to the myth of the American
dream and the affirmation of American openness, and that it "allows
the center to manage the marginalized and…to provide them with
an identity that supposedly accords them a place in [American] community."
Turning to texts by and about Asian Americans (Roots, AIEEEE!, Time
magazine, etc.) Hsu maintains that "destablizing the construction
of an Asian American ethnic identity necessitates unraveling the narrative
of liberatory self-discovery that characterizes the development of
the pan-ethnic identity," and initiates such an unraveling.
Return
Migration of Japanese-Brazilians to Japan: The Nikkejin as Ethnic
Minority and Political Construct
Keiko Yamanaka
Yamanaka
focuses on the migration to Japan of Japanese-Brazilians ("Nikkeijin")
after a 1989 change in Japanese immigration law made such return migration
possible. She examines some competing theories of migration; narrates
the process of, and explores the reasons for, both the original Japanese
migration to Brazil and the return migration; and shows how economic,
political and racial concerns structured that return migration and
its handling by Japan’s government, corporations and society.
She concludes that "underlying the rapid development of the Brazilian
Nikkeijin diaspora" a transnational process of "circular
migration" is at work. This may lead to the persistence of Nikkeijin
as a distinct diasporan community in both Japan and Brazil, with members
circulating between the two countries, depending on fluctuations in
their politics and economies. Her essay offers evidence that the difficulties
inherent in managing immigration manifest themselves even when the
immigrants are "returning" to their ancestral homeland.
American
Scripts, Canadian Realities: Toronto’s Show Boat
Leslie Sanders
Sanders
takes as her text the 1993 production in Toronto of the American classic,
Show Boat, narrates the circumstances surrounding that production
and also examines the past and present contexts within which Show
Boat was produced, revived, revised, praised and criticized. She notes
the similarity of white praise in Toronto and New York and interrogates
the different reactions of African Canadians and African Americans.
She shows that the white Canadian reaction involved a disavowed adoption
of American racial scripts that provoked and African Canadian response
which has its own specificity, and differs from the African American
in part due to the fact that most of the 250,000 African Canadians
of Toronto are of Caribbean descent. Her essay is an exploration of
"what happens when America’s racial scripts" engage
in trasnational travel.
The
Emergence of Global Contemporaneity
Terry Cochran
Cochran
addresses the contemporary notion of globalization by exploring its
long relationship to an "idea of man." He traces the "idea"
in works by Ficino, Machiavelli, Pascal, Kant and Heidegger, and argues
that a stubborn dualism persists throughout: man is the subject of
history and culture, and yet also defined by a nature that always
retains transcendent features. The shift to secular history and Enlightenment
humanism could not eliminate dependence on such features: changing
history and culture were defined in reference to an "immaterial
patrimony" that depended on an ahistorical idea of man. Cochran
argues that the emergence of global consumer culture, and its analysis
in works such as Baudrillard’s, decisively challenge that dualism
with a description of cultural processes such as dispersion and recycling.
These permit no notion of culture "as something that transcends
the moment of its creation to remain pertinent in subsequent historical
moments." In effect, global culture breaks with all previous
ideas of culture, and its consumers are no longer compatible with
"the ideas of man."
Culture,
Culture Everywhere: The Swell of Globalization Theory
Gregory Jusdanis
Jusdanis
takes issue with currently popular theories of globalization on several
points: their ahistorical celebration of culture, difference, identity
and hybridity; their failure to consider evidence of earlier ecumenical
movements; and their neglect of contemporary forces that encourage
or impose homogeneity in one sphere even as they encourage the circulation
of difference in another. Though Jusdanis begins by engaging Frederick
Buells’ National Culture and the New Global System (Johns Hopkins
1994), he ranges over many kinds of texts and forms of evidence in
order to criticize a widespread tendency to make large claims about
states, transnationalism, globalization and the exceptionality of
the present while that are primarily based (and place a premium) on
the cultural identity of diasporic intellectuals and their literary
production.
