Diaspora
Volume
5, Number 3, Winter 1996
Articles:
Looking
to the Diaspora: The Overseas Chinese and China's Economic Development,
1978-1994
Paul J. Bolt
Bolt
explores the ways in which "Overseas" or diaspora Chinese
have been an economic asset for the development of China in the
past two decades, investing substantially in their homeland.
At
the same time, he investigates the ways in which some of the Asian
states that have substantial diasporic Chinese populations have sometimes
viewed the process as a potential problem for the hostland. Stressing
that the majority of the very considerable foreign investment in China
over the past two decades has come from diasporan Chinese, Bolt weighs
the factors that have catalyzed this movement of funds, ranging from
diasporic sentiment to the reshaping of policies by the still-Communist
homeland government to accommodate diasporan capitalism.
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.
Daily
life in the transnational migrant community of San Agustín,
Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York
Alison Mountz and Richard A. Wright
Mountz
and Wright portray the quotidian life of transmigrants in a "locale"
they call OP, which includes the village of San Agustin in Mexico's
Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York. They argue that the "interconnectedness
within" this space "can no longer be conceptualized merely
as circulation or exchange." They vividly illustrate the ways
in which air travel, the telephone, and the VCR have in some cases
transformed practices (e.g., language) and in others have reinforced
existing institutions (e.g., collective labor for the village, or
fiestas and the display of wealth accompanying them). They explore
the process of "time-space reassignment" by which the village
seeks to uphold traditions while sending a significant portion of
its adult males to Poughkeepsie, and they examine the personal dilemma
of choosing between community service and individual economic pursuits.
Finally, they define the forms of dissent by which some (e.g., women
migrants, Seventh Day Adventists) challenge the structures of OP.
Sound
Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia
Deborah Pacini Hernandez
Pacini
Hernandez notes Paul Gilroy's discussion of the extent to which musical
exchanges participate in the construction of diasporan identity in
and across the Black Atlantic as a preface to her exploration of the
past and present roles played by Afro-Caribbean music in Cartagena,
Colombia, a city with a large population of African origin. She details
the ways in which the Colombian recording and broadcast industries
resisted the dissemination of such music, and discusses the material
practices centered around picos, locally constructed sound-systems,
through which African-Colombians acquired, reproduced, disseminated,
and transformed recorded diasporan musics. She notes that the black
Cartageneros' production of such music systems preceded the appearance
of world beat in northern contexts by almost a decade, and traces
their acknowledgment of and participation in a diasporic Afro-Caribbean
identity based on musica africana.
Nation
and Anti-Nation: Concepts of National Cinema in the "New"
Media Era
Philip Rosen
Rosen
notes the emergence of a cinema/television opposition which has come
to stand for several other oppositions—between the national and
international, or transnational, or global; between stringently circumscribed
identity and hybridity, and so on. He interrogates the assumption
that the era of diaspora and globalization represents a post-national,
"radical rupture in media history," and argues that "little
of the economic and aesthetic history of cinema was ever separated
from the international." While receptive to the claim that "notions
of hybridity, diaspora identity, and postcoloniality may provide different
perspectives on the supposed emergence of a post-national era with
respect to cinema," his essay instantiates the many ways in which
the post- and trans-national in cinema continue to be inhabited by
the facts and assumptions of the national.
The
Impossible Ethnic: Jews and Multiculturalism in Australia
Jon Stratton
