Diaspora
Volume
6, Number 1, Spring 1997
Articles:
Diaspora
by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial
Formations
Kamala Visweswaran
Visweswaran
investigates the frequently obscured role of class, the contradictory
and shifting role of race, and the increasingly frequent deployment
of an essentializing language of culture in discussions of Indian
immigration.
She
examines the recently popular neoliberal and conservative theories
of migration and diaspora exemplified by the work of Joel Kotkin and
Thomas Sowell, which take the globalization of capital as given, substitute
ethnic and cultural traits for class, and entirely obscure the relative
advantage that some middleman classes gained under imperialism and
have been able to globalize since. Finally, she offers an analytical
narrative of the contradictory ways in which Indian immigrants have
positioned themselves: many once wanted to be counted as white in
order to escape racism; others then claimed racialized reclassification
as minorities entitled to benefit from federal set-aside programs;
and recently still others aligned themselves against Affirmative Action.
Visweswaran's critique of the changing politics of alignment restores
to class the role too often elided or disavowed in the contemporary
Asian American discourse of diaspora.
"From
Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody": South Asian Racial
Strategies in the Southern Californian Context
Rosemary Marangoly George
George
explores the situation of Indian-Americans in Southern California
and identifies insistent forms of immigrant self-definition that deploy
ethnocultural terms to avoid definition by skin color, chromatics,
or race. George argues that the valuable academic and theoretical
discourse on race which advocates racial coalitions in and beyond
the academy does not fully acknowledge the ways in which skin color-and
not race theory-determines the contours of extra-academic racial discourse.
She analyses the behavior, language, and concepts employed by middle
class Indian-American immigrants who seek to avoid being raced, insist
on ethnocultural uniqueness and privilege as a way of entirely avoiding
the spectrum of whiteness, brownness and blackness, and who sometimes
choose self-definition in essentialist and religious terms to avoid
chromatic visibility and racial discourse. Finally, she discusses
past and present racial coalitions that have emerged despite the barriers
created by such evasion.
Diaspora
or International Proletariat? Italian Labor, Labor Migration, and
the Making of Multiethnic States, 1815-1939
Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser Ottanelli
Gabaccia
and Ottanelli explore the history of Italian immigrant labor in countries
ranging from France and Australia to Argentina and the USA. They identify
several patterns for the incorporation of these migrants. The differences
among them are due to differences in the host countries' cultural
and racial attitudes, as well as the ideological and organizational
particularities of native (often nativist) labor organizations. After
offering a brief history and taxonomy of these strategies of organization
and incorporation, in which the radical politics of Italian labor
and exile intellectuals played a considerable role, the authors consider
the appropriateness of the term "proletarian diaspora" as
applied to the Italian labor migration, which formed neither an international
working class to which nationality was irrelevant, nor a classical
diaspora held together primarily by national ties.
"Critical
Post-Judaism" , or, Reinventing a Yiddish Sensibility in a Postmodern
Age
Noah Isenberg
Isenberg
addresses three nested phenomena. The first is the apparent revival
of interest in Yiddish. The second is Jonathan Boyarin's Thinking
in Jewish and his other, closely related works on the Jewish diaspora,
Jewish identity politics, and "critical post-Judaism." The
third is the renewed debate on diasporic identity, which matters to
both Jewish and cultural studies. Isenberg examines the ways in which
Boyarin's attempt to dissociate diasporicity from national territory
and political hegemony is an important if much disputed contribution
to these endeavors.
Defining
Ancient Greek Ethnicity
David Konstan
Konstan's
essay deals with "ethnicity in the culture that gave us the word
ethnos" by focusing on Jonathan Hall's Ethnic Identity in Greek
Antiquity. He finds Hall's learned arguments for considering genealogy
as a fundamental criterion of ethnicity-and for regarding other traits,
like language, as more contingent indicia of ethnicity-useful but
in need of modification. Konstan argues that "the idea that ethnicity
is a discursive phenomenon means just that it depends on ideology,
not on facts as such"; that ethnic discourse makes use of "a
limited and largely arbitrary spectrum of traits by which to define
identity"; and that "ethnicity is a phenomenon of discourse
[which] entails socially generalized claims and counterclaims of [both]
difference and similarity." Surveying the aggregative and oppositional
modes of constructing ethnicity, which Hall periodizes, Konstan concludes
that ethnic discourse in Archaic and Classical Greece availed itself
of both modes and was motivated above all by the need to elaborate
"fictive affinities [which] emerge precisely in response to pressures
that put a premium on forms of social solidarity."
Sephardi
and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Stein
reflects on the ways in which Jewish Studies (and, by analogy, diaspora
studies) constructs one of its objects: Sephardi and Middle Eastern
Jewries, the title of the collection of essays she reviews. The extraordinary
diversity of conditions and features which characterized North African,
Middle Eastern, and Balkan Jewries is matched by the variety (and
often confusion) of theoretical assumptions with which, Stein shows,
the object of knowledge is constructed. Many scholars see inextricable
links between Western Europe, European Jewry and the modernity which
the latter sought to bring (and with which they tried to "colonize")
non-European Jews. The intellectual descendants of nineteenth-century
European Jews are among the scholars who, often shaped by Zionism,
must struggle to rethink how very differently change is experienced
in different diasporas; how diasporas and host populations may be
mutually constructing; and above all what notions of being native
and alien may have meant outside Europe.
