Diaspora
Volume
7, Number 1, Spring 1998
Articles:
Diaspora
and Denial: The Holocaust and the "Question" of the
Armenian Genocide
Gregory F. Goekjian
The Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide have been considered comparable events ever since the term “genocide,” coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was used at Nuremberg. The comparison leads to the recognition of differences between the two genocides, differences often used by revisionist historians to deny the very substance of genocide to the Armenian case. I want to argue that these differences are real, but that they are structural, not substantive, and that the impact of structural difference may be understood through an examination of the relationship among modern historiography, genocide, and diasporization. Put simply, the Holocaust constituted a symbolic end to the Jewish diaspora, whereas the Genocide is the symbolic origin of the Armenian diaspora. In actuality, of course, an enormous and powerful Jewish diaspora remains after the Holocaust, and Armenia had a significant diaspora for centuries before the Genocide. But whereas the Holocaust resulted in the creation of a concentrated, modern center for Jewish historical discourse, the Armenian Genocide erased that center, creating a “nation” that has had to exist in exile and memory—in diaspora.
Riding
the Waves of (Post)Colonial Migrancy: Are We All Really in the
Same Boat?
Carole Fabricant
I would like to begin by juxtaposing two very different pictures of global travel taken from recent articles in the popular media and considering their implications both for contemporary postcolonial theory and for our readings of “third world” fictional texts.2 In one article from the summer of 1997 (Newton 6–7), the Los Angeles New Times displayed on its cover a slender man in his thirties staring hopelessly out from behind a barred window. The caption read: “No Way Out: Romanian Gavrila Moldovan Risked His Life to Come to America. The INS Promptly Locked Him Up on Terminal Island. Three and a Half Years Later, He's Still in Jail.” The accompanying story described Moldovan's desperate flight out of Romania after being declared a “noncitizen” for writing an anti-government news article, which rendered him vulnerable to immediate arrest, and after his parents died in a suspicious car “accident.”
Citizens
of the Trans-Nation: Political Mobilization, Multiculturalism, and
Nationalism in the Greek Diaspora
Anastasia N. Panagakos
In the early 1990s, the Greek diaspora experienced an exceptional period of political mobilization, sparked by the international community's recognition of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia as an independent state. While there is little contestation that Macedonia exists as a geographic area, who can claim Macedonian history and ethnic identity is much more problematic. The struggle to claim Macedonian identity has been fought between groups located in Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, and the Greek and Macedonian diasporas, each group proclaiming themselves the true Macedonians. In the diaspora, this struggle has manifested itself through newspaper editorials, letter-writing campaigns, lobbying efforts, festivals, and political rallies.
Palestine:
Kan Wa-Ma Kan?
Barbara Harlow
Too many memories? Difficulties of diaspora? Or lapses in memory? The spring of 1998 marked the passage of fifty years of nakba, the historic Palestinian “catastrophe.” Israel celebrated the season as an anniversary, commemorating the fifty elapsed years of its statehood. The short-lived “peace process” initiated in the preliminary if protracted negotiations in Madrid in 1990, which were abruptly concluded in their displacement to Oslo, was once again “stalled.” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to expand the boundaries of West Jerusalem, in a move clearly designed to add to the pressures on Arab East Jerusalem and predetermine the “final status” talks of the process by decisively altering both the topography and the demography of greater Jerusalem. And the Israeli Supreme Court referred the highly controversial issue of the legalized torture of Palestinian prisoners back to the Knesset for further determination.
Local
Sentences in the Chapter of the Postcolonial World
Laura Chrisman
Start line 3.52 - do not use advance. This may change depending on epigraphs and number of authors - always start on a text line.Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
The grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that the maps can become fuller ... But the small narratives do not stand by themselves—as they would for Lyotard; they are local sentences in the chapter of the postcolonial world. (73–4)
These comments, from Peter Hulme's introduction, strike a keynote for this essay collection as a whole. Although some of its contributors align themselves with those very postmodern arguments from which Hulme marks his distance, they all share his concern with scaling down postcolonial cultural analysis and theorization to focus on particular cultural, historical, and geographical cases. This provides a striking contrast with the earlier stages of the “industry,” as inaugurated by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), which was concerned with mapping a phenomenon of massive historical and geographical proportions; or, alternatively, with Homi Bhabha's projects in the mid-1980s (Location chap. 2–6), which took up the task of theorizing a generalized colonial subjectivity. It is not only the focus on “locality” which differentiates this collection from the earlier work of Said and Bhabha.
