Diaspora
Volume
8, Number 1, Spring 1999
In
this issue...
US
Border Theory, Globalization, and Ethnonationalisms in Post-Wall
Eastern Europe
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
In April 1999, the simultaneous involvement of the United States in three apparently unrelated events illustrated important shifts in geopolitical realities. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which prefigured dramatic geopolitical changes in the countries of the former “Evil Empire,” a US-dominated NATO not only bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but also continued its air strikes against Iraq. In the same month, NATO also approved a new Strategic Concept that identified the “uncontrolled movement of large numbers of people” as ample justification for military “crisis intervention” and thus officially recognized international migration and refugee flows as a new class of security challenges.
Proximity
and Distance: Palestinian Women’s Social Lives in Diaspora
Celia Rothenberg
This article focuses on how women in two Palestinian diaspora communities—one in Jordan and the other in Toronto—experience social ties to those they have left behind in the West Bank and to others within their adopted communities.1 This analysis allows for a synchronic comparison of the nature and effects of these diaspora locations on areas of social life that are central to women's daily lives. It is my hope that this study will complement other studies that focus on how living in a particular diaspora location diachronically, or across generations, affects an immigrant or exile community's family and community formations (see, for example, S. Abu-Laban, “Family”; Yousif). My examination here thus draws out how the diversity of diaspora locations shapes, and is shaped by, women's experiences.
On
Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into
“Literature in English”
Rita Raley
What does it signify to speak of a World Literature in English? In what ways might diaspora studies and transnationalism be linked to the contemporary phenomenon of global English, with a mode of comprehending the world that holds English at its center? What can diaspora studies and transnationalism learn from the “language question” frequently raised in discussions of both cultural imperialism and postcolonial writing? What can they learn from the question of globalism now so ubiquitous in contemporary criticism? How does the Literature in English concept relate, on the one hand, to Edouard Glissant's outline of the “liberation” that results from compromising major languages with Creoles (250), and, on the other, to Fredric Jameson's implicit yearning for a philosophical universal linguistic standard not circumvented by linguistic heteroglossia (16–7)? These questions outline the conceptual terrain of this article, in which I read the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English” as both symptom and cause of the emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration situated on the line between contemporary culture and the academy.
Mixed
Feelings
Ken Hirschkop
At the very beginning of Feeling Global, Bruce Robbins remarks that “it is not a surprise or scandal that any given version of internationalism turns out to be local and conjunctural rather than universal” (7). Not a surprise, because it's axiomatic for recent thinking about culture that every attempt to transcend the limits of a “local” standpoint is doomed from the outset. Not a scandal, because Robbins thinks he can fashion a version of left-wing internationalism that has moral force in spite of this. It's a difficult task, and Robbins not only refuses to cut corners, he insists on describing each corner in detail before carefully navigating his way around it. Had he been a sailor on Odysseus's ship, he would have thrown the Sirens megaphones before attempting to sail past their island.
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
Hirschkop
reads Bruce Robbins's Feeling Global as a post–Cold War attempt
to fashion a worldly yet at the same time distinctly American cultural
internationalism. Like Robbins, Hirschkop asks how one can acknowledge
the importance of location, position, and the impossibility of detachment
even as one strives for “an internationalism of action”
not paralyzed by a fear of complicity with dominant forces that
seek to project and impose US power. He examines Robbins's elaboration
of a transnational worldliness that avoids the new American cultural
nationalism as well as the errors of misguided internationalisms.
He identifies in Robbins's work what he calls a “continuity thesis,”
whose consequence may be an acknowledgment of differences in
scope but not in nature between national-communal and transnational
cultures. Hirschkop also examines the related yet different embrace
of a continuity thesis in the work of Richard Rorty, concluding with
questions about the asymmetries of power and motive that compel some
people, commonly situated in “the West,” to take up universalist
positions.
Raley argues that we are witnessing “the discursive transmutation
of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies”into “World Literature
in English.” Her essay traces the origin of current claims about
“one great English-[language] literature” that “both
sutures and exceeds national literary traditions” back to the
moment of British colonialism and to Matthew Arnold, even as
it explores the emergence—in the commercial and scientific spheres,
but also in many parts of the academy—of claims that English
is now the global language. While looking at the links between the
ever greater insistence on that claim and the development of the category
of World Literature in English, Raley also examines the new configurations
of identity that maintain academically, commercially, and politically
convenient differentiations and hyphenations within the field.
Rothenberg's article is, first, a direct examination of how “women
in two Palestinian diaspora communities (in Jordan and Canada) experience
social ties to those they have left behind in the West Bank and to
others within their adopted communities.” It also engages
a growing literature on diaspora, deterritorialization, and transnationalism
in which mobility is celebrated even as proximity and the logic of
the sedentary are undervalued. Her article explores the importance
of the notion of closeness (a term of spatial geography as xwell
as of kinship) in the social life of a West Bank Palestinian village
in general, and of its women in particular. The importance attributed
to these ties, she argues, persists even as members of the community
migrate to Kuwait, Jordan, and Canada.
Sadowski-Smith questions the assumption that the emergence of cross-border
ethnodiasporan affiliation on the US–Mexican frontier leads to
a post-national moment of resistance. Invoking the example of the
Berlin Wall, the old border it marked, its apparent disappearance,
and the emergence of new re-borderings both in eastern Europe
and elsewhere, she argues that Ethnic and American Studies can
no longer be satisfied with a US—Mexican, or even hemispheric,
perspective: global capital, she argues, crosses borders it only sometimes
renders more porous, or eliminates; at other times, “it requires
the existence of differential living conditions on a global scale.”
She notes that just as, in the US–Mexico border zone, increasing
permeability to some economic processes coexists with an increasingly
anti-immigrant remilitarization of the same border, so also across
the globe “there is a proliferation of economic, social, and
political borders” that coexists with the emergence of new supranationalisms
such as NAFTA and the EU, and, indeed, makes them economically more
viable.
Watson's essay examines 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. 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 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,
as well as over various Caribbean communities, including the Afro-Cuban.
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.
Erratum
As
the result of a computer error, Tim Watson's review essay “An
American Studies Dilemma,” published in Diaspora 7:3, was not
printed in full. The complete essay appears in this issue, with Diaspora's
apologies both to Professor Watson and to our readers.
