Diaspora
Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 1997
Articles:
"Is
This My Mother's Grave?": Genocide and Diaspora in Atom Egoyan's
Family Viewing
Lisa Siraganian
Siraganian
explores the relations between Canadian Armenian director Atom Egoyan's
film Family Viewing and the originary trauma of the contemporary Armenian
diaspora in the West, the genocide committed by the Ottoman Turkish
state between 1915 and 1922.
Her
close reading of the film, in particular of the ways in which film,
and especially video, facilitate not just memory and reply but also
fantasies of erasure, enables her to address the Turkish denial of
the genocide and to elucidate the ways in which Egoyan's films indirectly
but persistently engage ethnodiasporic realities and ambivalences.
Nationalism
and Immigration in the United States
Ali Behdad
Behdad
shows that a productive ambivalence has been the central feature of
the discourse of immigration ever since Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed
as to the kind of nation America should be. He argues that apparent
contradictions such as the simultaneous existence of hostile nativism
and of receptivity to immigrants were appropriated as enabling ambivalence
in cultural-ideological debates and by administrative actions which,
together, produced the American nation-state. Exploring the relationship
among socioeconomic concerns about immigration, ideology, and the
state, Behdad demonstrates that the circulation of ambivalence makes
available notions of crisis, of the nation under siege, which legitimize
state actions that accommodate or prohibit immigration as "needed."
In effect, he argues, the persistent and necessarily irresolvable
ambivalence about immigration is constitutive of the collective identity
of the American nation-state.
Mediterranean
Topographies before Balkanization: On Greek Emporion, Revolution,
and Diaspora
Artemis Leontis
Leontis's
essay is simultaneously a contribution to spatial studies; an exploration
of the extent to which the topographical imaginary of the new transnationalism
remains land-based; an investigation of the concepts of territorialization
and diaspora in the work of the nineteenth-century Greek author Vikelas;
and an antidote to the relentless presentism of most current notions
of transnationalism and globalization. She shows that Vikelas raised
the question of how the emerging modern nation-state first drew upon,
then challenged and altered an older emporion, a merchant diaspora
of relentless circulation. Before this challenge, the Mediterranean
world in which that emporion flourished was, for Greeks and others,
Leontis argues, not a space "of boundaries that separate but
of routes that connect," one that was never fully encompassed
or "occupied" by any national literature.
A
Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal, and the Emergent Identity of
the Chinese Cosmopolitan
Kwok Bun Chan
Chan
situates the emergence of a new cosmopolitan, transnational, middle-class,
and transilient Chinese identity in a historical trajectory. He explores
a traditional assumption that migration isolates the migrant and causes
family dispersal and counters it with evidence that since the nineteenth
century the family has played an instrumental role "before, during,
and after" the departure of the individual Chinese migrant. He
outlines the role of the "family idea" and of Chinatown
institutions in sustaining thepolicing power of that idea, then turns
to Hong Kong's "astronaut families" to outline the move
away from the "ever-vigilant, normative" constraints of
family and community. This move does not eliminate, but alters the
reach of those constraints and necessitates the development of the
new cosmopolitan identity, which is not uprooted but multiply rooted,
capable not just of double but of multiple consciousness.
Chinese
Diaspora Entrepreneurship, Development, and the World Capitalist System
Paul J. Bolt
Bolt
engages Lever-Tracy, Ip, and Tracy's major recent study of the economic
role of the Chinese diaspora in the development of China's economy,
which also argues that Chinese diaspora capitalism is a distinctive
new form of capitalism. Bolt emphasizes the remarkable and (in the
Western media) under-reported role of transnational, diasporic capital;
he situates that role historically and politically, and sketches the
various efforts of Chinese statesmen and of the state to attract and
regulate diasporan capital; he then explores the possibility that
diasporic investment leads to more equitable development than other
forms of investment by the state and by foreign firms. Finally, while
praising the study's attention to sociological and cultural capital
and to the distinctiveness of Chinese diaspora capitalism, he offers
doubts and alternative ways of thinking about its effects and future.
Homes
and Postcoloniality
Aparajita Sagar
Capitalism
after Globalization
John Marx
Marx
analyzes Paul Smith's Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and
Capital in the North, simultaneously extending its implications and
offering a critique. He focuses on Smith's "central contention
[that] globalization is a camouflage version of late capitalism offered
up by pundits and professors alike," a way for "capitalism's
apologists to reimagine the world"; that it seeks to conceal
the colonial, imperial, and traditionally capitalist realities that
linger behind the global market in which, it is alleged, nations and
the nation-state mean little. Regrettably, even left intellectuals
such as Stuart Hall have accepted some of these claims. Marx contends
that Smith's fundamentally correct analysis nevertheless neglects
the fact that "professionals actually have a very special job
to do" vis-à-vis both the realities of the nation-state
and the fictions of globalization.
