Diaspora
Volume
8, Number 2, Fall 1999
Articles:
In
this issue...
From
Ethnonational Enclave to Diasporic Community: The Mainstreaming
of Israeli Jewish Migrants in Toronto
Rina Cohen
Previous research on Israelis in Toronto has revealed the existence of a distinctive ethnic community of Israelis on the margins of, but at the same time distinct from, the more established Jewish community (G. Gold and Cohen 182; Cohen and G. Gold, “Israelis” 18). As is the case in other Israeli communities in North America (S. Gold, “Patterns” 121; Mittelberg and Waters 422; Rosen 28; Shokeid 43; Sobel 31; Uriely, “Patterns” 48, “Rhetorical”), Israelis in Toronto tend to live in Jewish neighborhoods, send their children to Jewish day schools or Sunday schools, be members of the JCC (Jewish Community Center), and participate in some of the local organized Jewish activities. While remaining a marginal part of the general Jewish community, they have developed distinctive Israeli communal activities involving politics, recreation, culture, and entrepreneurship.
The
Politics of History on the Internet: Cyber-Diasporic Hinduism and
the North American Hindu Diaspora
Vinay Lal
Nothing has been as much celebrated in our times as the information superhighway. Everyone is agreed that never before has information proliferated so profusely, diminishing, as is commonly thought, the boundaries and barriers that have held people apart, though many voices have sought to distinguish between “knowledge” and “information,” while others have railed at how the overwhelming surfeit of information has made some people incapable of thinking beyond trivia and the “factoid.” We speak with unreflective ease of the “information revolution,” and in this clichéd expression there is the most unambiguous assertion of confidence in the benign telos of history. Some commentators, alluding to more recent developments such as “e-commerce,” speak even of going “beyond the information revolution,” but there is something of a consensus that the “information revolution” has been to our age what the “industrial revolution” was to the eighteenth century (Drucker).
Toward
a Profane Postcolonialism
Neil Larsen
Postcolonialism, it seems, has had its day. Such, at any rate, is the word on the academic street level, outside special sessions of the MLA and along the myriad alleyways of Internet chatter. A relative newcomer to “poco” could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, of course: university presses continue to announce new titles in which the term features prominently; every English department or “cultural studies” curriculum must have its “postcolonialist” (under which heading all or part of US “ethnic” studies is often included); graduate students in the humanities and on the left fringes of the social sciences must be introduced to postcolonialism's authoritative theorists and texts; and who knows how many “poco” dissertations are in preparation or still to be written?
From
Multiculture to Polyculture in South Asian American Studies
Vijay Prashad
In 1997, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (Maira and Srikanth). This was unexpected, not because of the quality of the book, but principally because of the little attention hitherto given to those who write about the “new immigrants” of the Americas (including South Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Africans, and West Asians). Prior to 1997, scholars and writers of South Asian America had been known to skulk in the halls of even such marginal events as the Asian American Studies Association and complain about the slight presence of South Asian American panels. That complaint can now be put to rest.
Notes
on Contributors
In
this issue
Cohen
explores the genesis, structure, and dynamics of the Israeli immigrant
ethnic community of Toronto, which so far remains distinct from
the Jewish-Canadian diasporic community there. Based on interviews,
she concludes that differences in Israeli and Jewish identity, commitment
to Zionism, and divergent attitudes toward voluntary emigration
from the homeland all contribute to the distinctness of the Israeli
community. Cohen offers evidence of the strength and organization
of Toronto's Jewish diasporic community, juxtaposing it to the relative
lack of connection with synagogues, formal organizations, and
Jewish causes manifested by Israeli immigrants, who socialize mostly
with each other in informal settings. She concludes that there are
some indications that the children of immigrants are becoming integrated
into the organized Jewish community.
Lal
examines the relationship between the “post-industrial Vedic
diaspora” and the Internet. He sketches some of the current,
cheerfully unexamined assumptions about cyberspace as a democratic
and inclusive space, then turns to the majority Hindus of the 1.3-million-strong
Indian diaspora. He explores some of the ways in which the “Hindu
diaspora in the US aspires to be Vedic” by creating an ossified
version of the faith, tending toward Hindutva, “Hinduism stripped
to its imagined essences.” This turn is accompanied by a
new politics that rejects what it sees as the homeland government's
“pandering to minority communities.” “What, then,”
asks Lal, is “the post-industrial civilization of Hindus”
settled in the US and advanced West? His answer depends upon a detailed
examination of cyber-diasporic Hindu militancy, of organizations
that seek to shape its rhetoric, directing it not only against Pakistan
or Kashmiri Muslim guerrillas but against Islam itself. A historian,
Lal looks at “the Hindutva notion of history” manifested
in cyberspace and at specific attempts to reconstruct history and
chronology in a manner consistent with their beliefs and politics.
He concludes that if “Silicon Valley scientist-historians”
and their “diasporic brethren have it their way, Hindutva history
will be the most tangible product of the wave of globalization over
which they preside from their diasporic vantage point.”
Larsen
thinks that Neil Lazarus's Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the
Postcolonial World appears at a moment when postcolonial theory “is
being unmade and an intellectual market-place cleared for its potential
successor.” Lazarus's book, Larsen finds, offers an informed
and rigorous polemical engagement with postcolonialism, viewed from
the standpoint of a historical materialism that is “in congress
with a national-liberationist, anti-colonial tradition of critical
theory.” Its critique of postcolonialism “concedes nothing
in principle to the vernacular post-structuralism” that continues
to underpin the former. Larsen applauds the book's persistent
concern with global capitalism and “the national question”
because “the structural transformations” imposed by global
capital are still “experienced by the overwhelming majority of
the globe's population within a national setting”; he approves
of the book's oppositional engagement with a trans-culturalism that
is insistently anti-national. But he criticizes the “absence
of any well-developed theory that would explain what is by most accounts
the failure in radical-social terms of the national-liberation, Third-Worldist
project.” Larsen also considers, but finds unconvincing, Lazarus's
argument in favor of a “subalternized version of national-liberation
doctrine” and his Adornian explanation of why “Third World,
postcolonial intellectuals and artists” are best positioned
to offer a critique of capitalist, neocolonial modernity.
Prashad's
review of A Patchwork Shawl, edited by Shamita Das Dasgupta, and Karen
Leonard's The South Asian Americans begins by examining the changing
conditions that frame the reception and recognition of South Asians
and the tensions that emerge as this new diaspora undergoes hyphenation
while seeking to sustain authenticity. He examines the process
of “hyphenated” naming of the migrant and some of the ways
in which, as Karen Leonard shows, “migrants deploy the dyad of
South Asia–America to make a point about their current lives.”
He underscores the importance of gender in both works by expanding
the implications of Dasgupta's comment that “the main casualty
of our communities' efforts to reformulate homogeneous authenticity
are women.” Addressing the concerns raised by Leonard and by
various essayists in Dasgupta's book, Prashad explores the tensions
between authenticity and hybridity, without validating the received
meanings of either, and also looks at other dyads that construct the
homeland and the hostland as sites of particular national and diasporic
identities. Finally, drawing on Robin Kelley's work, he argues not
for a multicultural but for a “polycultural” view of the
world, one that would “complicate the foundation of identity
but does not undo its importance.”
