Diaspora
Volume
5, Number 2, Fall 1996
Articles:
The
Odyssey of Indenture: Fragmentation and Reconstitution in the Indian
Diaspora
Brij V. Lal
Lal
delineates important aspects of the history of Indian indenture
and migration, which during the period 1834-1916 sent over one-million
Indians into British colonies ranging from Mauritius to Fiji and
South Africa to Trinidad.
He explores the social background of the migrants, the conditions
of their journey from India, and the myriad difficulties with which
life and work on the plantations (differently) confronted men and
women. Largely unable or unwilling to return, they dealt with disruption,
preserved some continuity of cultural patterns, and constructed a
post-indenture, overseas Indian society out of the fragments of religion
and texts they had brought with them, while elaborating new forms
of cooperation and regulative behavior.
Bordering
Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics
Vijay Mishra
Mishra
explores the old Indian diaspora of indentured labor: the origins
of its new social forms in the crucial spaces of the ship and the
plantation barracks, and the conditions in which women and men of
many castes created a new life while clinging to highly mediated fragments
of an old one. Mishra’s extended exploration of this diaspora
is also prologue: a further, essential part of his argument is that
"the experience of indenture is given artistic form in [Naipaul’s]
works . . . and the artistic documentation of the effects of indenture
history is part of their internal structure." In fact, Mishra
argues — while reformulating Jameson’s much-criticized statement
on Third World texts as national allegories — that Naipaul’s
"East Indian fictions are to be read as diasporic allegories,"
and demonstrates the results of such a reading.
Diaspora
Capitalism and the Homeland: Australian Chinese Networks into China
Constance Lever-Tracy and David Ip
Lever-Tracy
and Ip take as their context the explosive recent development of China
and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese
businesses which, they argue, has produced a significant, identifiably
Chinese current within global capitalism. They explore how far and
in what manner a growing density of transnational linkages between
smaller diasporan Chinese businesses may have been encouraged by the
magnet of an accessible China. Their article is based on open-ended
interviews with thirty-six ethnic Chinese Australians trading with
or investing in China and looks at why and how such diasporan businesses
are entering and operating in China, and with what impact.
The
Turkish Diaspora in Germany
Wesley D. Chapin
Chapin
explores the past, present, and future of the nearly two-million-strong
"Turkish" (in fact heterogeneously Turkish and Kurdish)
diaspora of Germany. In a compact but panoramic survey, he traces
the economically-motivated decisions that led to the importation of
guestworkers from Turkey, the subsequent attempts to regulate their
numbers, their limited integration into German society, and the efforts
to deal with the national and international problems their presence
has raised. Chapin shows that the conflicts and dilemmas are not due
to a single cause, not even "racism," and why they will
be difficult to resolve.
The
Resisting Screen: Multicultural Politics in a Global Perspective
Maurizia Boscagli
Boscagli
explores the central questions posed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
in their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
In her account, these range from "can mass culture be politically
correct?" to can it engage and promote multiculturalism without
lapsing "into a reified identity politics?" While exploring
possible responses, Boscagli also inquires whether older concepts
of politically-committed art can be recast to address the uses of
"committed media" in an era of postcolonial globalization
in and out of the classroom.
Being
Materialist: Beyond Polite Postcolonialism
Edna Duffy
Duffy
wonders whether "it is possible to be a postcolonial critic without
being an historical materialist." He reads Ali Behdad’s
Belated Travellers and David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire as
"thoroughly and admirably concerned with texts," theory,
and some practices. Their very excellence in many indispensable spheres
and endeavors enables him to ask whether the postcolonial critic,
like those she criticizes, is vulnerable to the charge of neglecting
— and even failing — to represent historical and material
concreteness in their specificity, even while gaining authority from
her critique of failures of representation in the colonial text.
Mass
Mediating Diaspora: Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles
David Kazanjian and Anahid Kassabian
Kassabian
and Kazanjian focus their analysis of the mass mediation of contemporary
diasporas through the lens provided by Hamid Naficy’s The Making
of Exile Cultures: Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles. They show
that Naficy’s object of knowledge is the diasporic "exile
culture" produced "out of the conjuncture of an historically
specific population and condition and a similarly specific system
of communication, the mass media." They explore Naficy’s
analysis of the liminality and syncretic equality of exile culture,
his psychoanalytic account of television viewing and collective subject-formation,
and the connection he seeks to establish between the exilic collective
subject and postcolonial studies. While celebrating this work’s
many contributions, they also point to its shortcomings, for example,
in its conception of the differences between exile and diaspora, its
tentativeness toward gender, and its "oddly nationalist interest
in defining ‘Iranianness.’ "
