Diaspora
Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1998
Articles:
In
this issue...
Francophonie
and Zionism: A Comparative Study in Transnationalism and Trans-Statism
William F.S. Miles and Gabriel Sheffer
For about four decades now, practitioners and scholars have been examining transnational organizations, the networks that they create, their varied activities, and the economic and political ramifications of these activities. Initially these observers mainly focused on the multinational corporations (MNCs) that gained considerable visibility and, one may say, disrepute in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, as these MNCs and inter-governmental organizations (IGOs)2 proliferated, investigators widened the scope of their examination to analyze such organizations' growing variety (see, for example, Keohane and Nye; Said and Simmons; Jenkins). Later observers studied the emergence and rapid growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and various religious cults, including the admirers of the Maharishi, the Moonies, and Scientology—that have been active on the international level in such diverse spheres as ecology, human rights, and religion (Galtung; Mansbach, Ferguson, and Lampert; Modelski).
Between
Ambivalence and Intrusion: Politics and Identity in Armenia-Diaspora
Relations
Razmik Panossian
The irony of this poem is that it was not written in the diaspora, but in the “homeland” of Soviet Armenia, by one of its most prominent poets. And yet, he is still haunted by the uncertainty of being a “tourist” in his “own land” and by the rootlessness of being part of “a landless people.” The poet, living in the Soviet Armenian republic, is nevertheless drawn to the lost lands beyond the borders of his country, to the heartland of historic Armenia, presently located in Turkey, which was emptied of its indigenous Armenian population through the 1915 Genocide. Emin captures the ambiguity in the question “where is my homeland?”—a question much more commonly posed by diasporic people. The answer is difficult because of the variations and overlap in the very definitions of “homeland” and of “Armenianness” in both the diaspora and the homeland. For the past eighty years, Armenians have been arguing, sometimes vehemently, over homeland-diaspora relations. Consequently, the essential division within the Armenian nation, and within its major diaspora communities, has been, and still is, over the question of how to relate to (formerly Soviet) Armenia, the surviving “kin-state”3 of the much broader and ambiguous notion of the “Armenian homeland.”
The
Politics of "Italians Abroad": National, Diaspora, and New
Geographies of Identity
Anne-Marie Fortier
Italian people's relationship to national identity is complicated by a history of mass emigration that reached important proportions in the years following Italian Unification. There are approximately 4.5 million Italian emigrants living outside Italy,2 and an estimated 25 million emigrated between 1876 and 1965 (Vasta). When descendants of emigrants are included in the surveys, estimates reach up to 65 million people of “Italian origin” living around the world.
In this essay, I examine how the creation of an Italian emigrant identity relies on some form of “return to the nation.”4 The nation has been widely theorized as a system of representation whereby individuals come to view themselves as part of an imagined community of people who do not come in direct contact with each other, yet share an image of their communion (Anderson 15). Their shared belonging is shaped around narratives of origins and destiny that represent the nation as primordial, timeless, and grounded in a mythic origin that is located within a delimited territory (Hall, “Question” 292–5). The national myth encloses and fixes identities by grounding them within a bounded time-space. Moreover, discourses of nationhood naturalize individuals' allegiance and identification to the nation, making it something that is “second nature.”
My
Poly-Ethnic Park: Some Thoughts on Israeli-Jewish Ethnicity
Moshe Shokeid
In spite of a common assumption that most major sources of immigration to Israel have dwindled, it seems there are always new waves of Jews, sometimes from the most unexpected places, ready to return from their diaspora to their “homeland.” The discovery and the dramatic exodus of Ethiopian Jews, for example, was completely unforeseen by the founders of the state. So too was the influx of Jews from the crumbling Soviet Union, whose prospects of immigration and even of survival as Jews seemed most unlikely only a few years ago. Some Jewish romantics are still looking for the “ten lost tribes” hidden in distant, exotic lands. No doubt, one can always discover, away from home, some rituals and traditions reminiscent of Judaism. I remember my own youthful fascination with the fate of the lost Israelites banished from their land, who ended up beyond the mythical Sambation river. No less enchanting were the stories of the Jewish kingdoms headed by heroic warriors and queens. Those mythical Jews seemed far more appealing than many of the men and women I met in my neighborhood.
Religious
Identification in Transnational Contexts: Being and Becoming Muslim
in Ethopia and Canada
Camilla Gibb
The Harari are a recently formed diaspora of Muslim elites from the walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia. Ethiopians as a whole have not had a history of migration—of moving abroad permanently or changing their citizenship (Catholic Immigration Centre 1). The Harari have been particularly localized and were described as late as the mid-1960s as a “one city culture” (Waldron, “Social” 6) because the overwhelming majority of their numbers resided inside the old city wall. Today, only about one-third of the total population lives in the old city, the majority of them elder inhabitants. The largest concentration of Hararis outside Ethiopia is now in Toronto, Ontario: nearly 10% of the entire population lives in this diverse Canadian city. In this paper, I draw upon comparative ethnographic fieldwork with Hararis in Harar and Toronto to explore the ways in which this move from Ethiopia, as asylum seekers or as immigrants to Canada, has affected individual and group identities.
Creating
Italians in Canada
Donna R. Gabaccia
The English-speaking world tends to privilege the United States as the paradigmatic “nation of immigrants” produced by two subsequent waves of international migration—the first between 1830 and 1930 and the second between 1965 and the present. Still, foreigners have never represented more than 14% of the US population. Scholars now acknowledge that the US was only one of many nations formed in the cauldron of the massive global migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Argentina, Switzerland, France, Canada, and Australia have all, at various times, had proportionately more foreigners among their populations than the United States.
In
This Issue
Fortier
examines in some detail the political and cultural practices of identity
in which the leaders of the Italian diaspora in Britain engage. These
seek to produce coherent narratives of collective selfhood which are
neither simplistically essentialist nor relentlessly pluralist, Fortier
argues. Challenging both poles of that disturbing dualism in diaspora
studies, she shows that Italian practices in Britain combine elements
of essentialism (e.g., appealing to a “fixed and unalterable
original culture”) and pluralism (e.g., demanding that the Italian
nation-state alter its conception of itself in order to give a political
voice to Italians living outside the state's territory). Working hard
to integrate the “here” of their local British experience
with the “there” of Italian origins, this diaspora, Fortier
demonstrates, creates “a border zone between identity-as-essence
and identity-as-conjuncture.”
Gabaccia examines Nicholas Harney's account of the Italian diaspora
in Toronto today, which focuses on community organizations as
local sites for the production of diasporic cultural identity. These
organizations belong to three fairly distinct tiers and include clubs
that bring together emigrants and descendants from a single village,
a region, or all of Italy. All are responsive to incentives and pressures
both from the Canadian state—with its official multiculturalist
policies—and from the Italian state, whose changing policies
toward its national and regional diasporas significantly reshape Toronto's
communal institutions, even as non-state factors, such as the celebrations
of local patron saints, also persist. Gabaccia, a historian examining
the work of an urban anthropologist, reflects on the ways in
which different disciplinary and gender perspectives lead to consequentially
different conclusions when scholars and governments ponder how and
to what effect the diasporic identities of the “new”
transnational immigrants in multicultural societies differ from
earlier migrations.
Gibb studies the diaspora of Muslim elites from Harar, once almost
a city-state in Ethiopia. Although until recently the Harari, like
most Ethiopians, migrated little, today some 10% of them live in Toronto.
Gibb surveys the changing meanings of Ethiopian identities in a country
that has never been homogeneous, and of Harari identity within that
context. She also contrasts the special dispensations concerning Harari
identity within Ethiopia and the loss of distinction within the larger
Ethiopian and Muslim diasporas of Canada. Drawing on comparative
ethnographic fieldwork in Harar and Toronto, Gibb explores the
effects of a Canadian “multiculturalism policy that defines diasporic
communities on the basis of `nationalisms' or citizenship rather
than subnationalisms, ethnicities or religious orientations.”
Such an approach, she argues, risks failing to understand critical
aspects of the immigration and settlement experience. Denied the privilege
of the distinct local identity they held within Ethiopia, the Harari
of Toronto are developing a Muslim Canadian identity which diverges
from and even criticizes the traditions of Islamic practice and “sainthood”
which so distinguish Harar in Ethiopia.
Miles and Sheffer argue that among the ranks of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) now emerging in global civil society, there are
trans-state as well as transnational organizations. Respectively representing
these by the organizations created by the movement for Francophonie
and those created by Zionism, they argue that both “diasporic
entities constitute significant subsystems of the emerging global
civil society.” They offer brief narratives of the ideological
and historical origins of the two movements, then establish detailed
parallels of organization and function and reflect on five types of
comparable problems encountered by these organizations.
Despite “the marked differences between Zionism and Francophonie,
especially in regard to the ¼ number of their members, their
ethnic composition and their goals,” the authors conclude, the
two remain comparable entities. Though both movements emerged before
the new global system, they are now effective members of it and indeed
are “forerunners of novel patterns of social and political organization.”
Panossian offers a historical overview and a detailed analysis of
the changing political links between Armenia and the Armenian diaspora
over the past seventy-five years. He traces the shifting strategies
of Armenia's communist rulers (ca. 1921–1991) and of the Diaspora's
leading organizations and institutions. His account points to the
ways in which the ideal of a diasporic nation can clash with the priorities
of both Communist and post-Communist homeland regimes, leading to
acrimonious debate and conflict. Panossian demonstrates how profound
discursive and political rifts develop in a diaspora precisely over
the issue of “how to relate to [an] existing homeland.”
While such debate divides the heterogeneous Armenian diaspora,
he concludes, the persistent idea of the importance of remaining
connected to “the homeland keeps [Armenians] united as one
nation” in homeland and diaspora.
Shokeid explores the changing nature of Israeli Jewish ethnicity.
He examines both the persistence and the transformation of the Jewish
diaspora-derived ethnic cultures within Israel, a state whose founders
assumed that a mizug galuiot would take place—an “ingathering
of exiles,” a secularization and modernization whose ideology
Shokeid compares to that of the melting pot. Instead, he sees in Israel
a poly-ethnic society in which cultures originating among diaspora
Jews who lived in areas as diverse as Morocco and Romania persist.
He reflects on what the ethnic cultures of European Jews were like
(a topic apparently less studied in Israel than the culture of Sephardic,
Mizrachi, or “Oriental” Jews), and also looks at aspects
of the national culture of pre-1967 Israel. Finally, he considers
the reasons why the persistence of such different ethnicities has
not led to more social conflict in Israel, and shows how the study
of these ethnicities may yet offer local challenges to such widely
used notions as Gans's famed “symbolic ethnicity.
