Diaspora
Volume
7, Number 3, Winter 1998
Articles:
In
this issue...
Category
Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity
Susan Koshy
The identity of South Asians in the United States has proved to be problematic, both for the self-identification of the group and for the identifying institutions and popular perceptions of the host society. As a result, a certain exceptionalism (commonly indexed as ambiguity) has come to attach itself to the historiography of South Asian American racial formation.2 This exceptionalism, in turn, has formed the ground for two competing constructions of South Asian American racial identity that wield significant influence today. One view, represented by some of the major immigrant organizations and reproduced by many middle-class immigrants, stresses ethnicity and class and denies or mitigates the historical salience of race for South Asians in the United States. This position emphasizes the anomalous status of South Asian Americans among racial minorities and embraces the rhetoric of a color-blind meritocracy.
African
Philosophy vs. Philosophy of Africa: Continental Identities and Traveling
Names for Self
David Chioni Moore
In various times and places, peoples have wandered the world maintaining older names they hold as theirs. In a broad sense they are exiles, and collectively they form diasporas. At other times it is the names that wander, eventually finding, being found by, and even partly creating peoples. At still other times, both names and peoples, even place-names and divergent groups of people, separately travel, are set in motion, shift, meet, collide, jam, join, switch, separate, and recombine until some happenstance consolidation is seen as natural. Such is the case for Africa, as both name and place. This complex, non-internal naming process is neither unusual nor wrong—indeed, it is the rule for nearly all the world's geographies and identities. But it can prove vexing. Thus, in the following pages, I will try to clarify Africa's identity, that conjoining of a name, a place, and a people, by examining two Philosophies associated with it: the contested existing field of African Philosophy, and the as-yet unnamed discursive practice I call Philosophy of Africa.
International
Migration in a Global Context: Recent Approaches to Migration Theory
Ramón Grosfoguel and Hector Cordero-Guzmán
Traditional sociological paradigms about immigrants in the United States have been based on approaches that privilege the concept of ethnicity: the assimilation school (Gordon; Park) and the cultural pluralist school (Glazer and Moynihan). Both were based on the migration experience of Europeans at the turn of the century.
According to the assimilation school, all immigrant groups pass through several stages in the process of assimilation to the host society. First, they become acculturated to the values, norms, and culture of the host society. Usually it takes two or three generations to lose values, language, and culture of origin. Second, once assimilated to “Anglo-American” culture, which eliminates any discriminatory obstacles that could affect their successful incorporation to the labor market, they are able to assimilate structurally to the mainstream American economy.
The
Seven Pillars of Nationalism
Peter Murphy
“No one can have two countries.” This maxim, in many respects the governing maxim of the nation-state, turns two norms into facts: first, that dual or multiple geopolitical identities are impermissible; second, that geopolitical allegiance must be to a “land.” The transformation of these norms into facts was (in large part) the work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some cases, this work was very bloody; in many cases it was also left incomplete because of memories, often only half-understood, of alternative norms and political facts—memories of states in which dual identity was taken for granted, and in which allegiance was not to “a land” or “a country” but to a “porte”—a city gateway through which the transactions of the world flowed.
An
American Studies Dilemma
Tim Watson
Although these two important books deal with different periods in twentieth-century history, their motivation and strength come from strikingly similar analyses of the same moment in the post-war period, namely the rise of the US civil rights movement. Both authors argue that the gains of the 1950s and 1960s were made at the expense of an earlier American politics rooted in transnational solidarities (of both race and class), which was destroyed by the exclusive attention paid to the “American dilemma” of internal racism. James's and Von Eschen's revisionary works demonstrate the necessity for, and the potential of, a new post–Cold War, post–civil rights dialogue between US ethnic studies, especially African-American studies, and the more internationally oriented discourses of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies—and it is in the interests of furthering this dialogue that I am reviewing these books here.
Notes
on Contributors
In
This Issue
Koshy
shows that some South Asian Americans and scholars have neglected
“the historical salience of race for South Asians in the US,”
while other South Asian Americans and many scholars based in the Humanities
have treated displays of “South Asian color consciousness as
equivalent to white racism.” Ironically, she argues, both groups
“construct racial identification as a choice, inadvertently
reproducing the American ideology of self-making,” even though
the evidence suggests that South Asian Americans have been “ineluctably
racialized.” Using census categories and reviewing important
cases concerning citizenship, Koshy rethinks the question of South
Asian American identity in terms of responses to the frequent assignation
of racialized identity by the dominant society. She also examines
“the differences in the racialization of South Asians in Britain
and the US” and highlights “the limitations of the middle-class
minority strategy of refusing racial identification within the United
States.”
Moore examines the term “Africa,” which emerged not from
within a territory and the people who inhabit it but as a “wandering”
name, externally created over time, yet now assigned and appropriated
for the task of defining such identities as “African” and
“African diaspora.” He seeks to “clarify Africa's identity,
that conjoining of a name, a place, and a people, by examining two
Philosophies associated with it: the contested existing field of African
Philosophy, and the as-yet-unnamed discursive practice” that
he calls Philosophy of Africa. He argues that the principles he develops
in this particular case study may have application for a range of
world identities that are variously regarded as postcolonial, transnational,
and diasporic, such as “Asian” or “Caribbean.”
Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzmán begin by reviewing some older
models of migration and integration (the assimilation school and the
cultural pluralism view) and three recent responses to them, characterized
as “the new economic sociology,” the “context of reception,”
and the “transnational” approaches to migration theory.
They identify the shortcomings of each approach , focusing on the
insufficiently materialist interpretation of social networks as equivalent
to “cultural practices”; the occulted persistence of some
of the assumptions of the culture of poverty approach; the under estimation
of the importance of racial determinants and of global dynamics; and,
finally, the subsuming of a heterogeneous reality by the term “transmigrant”
in transnational studies. As a corrective, they offer a view of transnational
migration that is more sensitive to regional variations, racial dynamics,
structural differences, and the diverse patterns of the social reproduction
of migrant communities.
Murphy begins his analysis of nationalism by juxtaposing the national
model, which focuses on allegiance to a “land” or country,
with a multiethnic and multicultural “portal state” such
as the Byzantine and, especially, Ottoman Empires, which were built
around a “porte,” the gate of a city, functioning emblematically
for The City—Constantinople/Istanbul, in this case. Murphy explores
this gate-centeredness and other architectural features and tropes
of such a City-oriented discourse in order to foreground what they
indicate about Ottoman self-understanding and the exercise of Ottoman
power within the empire and vis-à-vis its many peoples. He
explores the emergence of a polylicit cosmopolitanism that included
under its mantle both territorialized minorities and diasporan peoples
that lived within and across the borders of empire. Having established
the social, political, and aesthetic model of the portal state, Murphy
explores the ways in which its decline, reactions to it, and divergences
from it led to the emergence of the nation-states of the Balkans (and,
by implication, west Asia) and identifies “the seven pillars
of nationalism.” Although these seven pillars rise complexly
out of his analysis of a particular context, they clearly have implications
for a more inclusive analysis of the emergence of homeland and diaspora
nationalisms outside Western Europe.
Watson's essay begins by examining two important new books/arguments
(by Winston James and Penny Von Eschen) about the role of migrant
Caribbean radicals in African American political activism during the
first half of the twentieth century. He shows that these books see
the gains made by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s
as coming “at the expense of an earlier [African]-American politics
rooted in transnational solidarities of both race and class.”
Situating these arguments within ongoing debates in the three fields
of American, Ethnic, and Postcolonial Studies, Watson shows how renewed
attention to Caribbean migration to the US (but not just
to the US) and to the political interactions between Caribbean
radicals and American Africans productively challenges all three
fields. His discussion ranges over well-known figures (C.L.R. James,
Marcus Garvey) but also others who remain regrettably obscure to recent
scholarship (including Grace Camplbell), as well as over various Caribbean
communities, including the Afro-Cuban. Like James, Watson
concludes that although at present the “suture” between
African American and Caribbean Studies is unstable, a properly transnational
and diasporic focus makes it a promising one for the near future.
