Diaspora
Volume
8, Number 3, Winter 1999
In
This Issue
Interpreting
Immigration Laws: “Crimes of Hospitality” or “Crimes
against Hospitality”
Mireille Rosello
Par le renforcement aveugle et continu de leur politique répressive à l'égard des immigrés, les ministres de l'Intérieur successifs ont contribué à éliminer l'hospitalité du champ des vertus françaises. Ils ont rendu possible l'effroyable expression “délit d'hospitalité,” osant ainsi faire basculer dans la catégorie des actes condamnables ce qui était une valeur à préserver, à encourager. (8)
[Through the continual and short-sighted enforcement of repressive anti-immigrant politics, one Minister of the Interior after another has contributed to eliminating hospitality from the list of French virtues. They have allowed the coinage of the terrifying phrase “crime of hospitality,” thus daring to push a value that should be preserved and encouraged into the category of reprehensible acts.]
From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the
Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept
Dominique Schnapper
“Where once were dispersions, there now is diaspora” (Tölölyan, “Rethinking” 3). The recent diffusion of the word currently applied to countless populations is a phenomenon that warrants analysis. A Greek word, it has been used since antiquity to designate the destiny of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple and the annexation of Judea by the Romans. In French, it was capitalized: it was the Diaspora. During the modern period, from the Great Discoveries until about 1968, the term was extended to include the dispersion of Greeks and Armenians outside of Greece and Armenia, and then the Chinese. It had come to designate the condition of a geographically dispersed people who had settled in different political organizations but who maintained, in spite of this dispersion, some form of unity and solidarity. Since 1968, the term has seen a genuine inflation—especially in the United States. It has since designated all forms of population dispersion, until then evoked by the terms expelled, expatriate, exile, refugee, immigrant, or minority.
Comparing
Diasporas: A Review Essay
William Safran
The diaspora phenomenon has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. This is not surprising: in an age of globalization, which is marked by proliferating population movements, ever-faster communication, and cultural exchanges across political boundaries, one becomes increasingly aware that the “nation-state” is an oddity; that the notion of the fixity of cultures is an illusion; and that the fashioning of homogeneous societies is unrealizable, if not undesirable. This development has given rise to numerous studies of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities. In the past several years, the term “diaspora” has come to be used more and more loosely as an inclusive term for these and other kinds of minorities who can trace their origins to a country or region other than that in which they reside. Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, two French scholars of nationalism and minorities, are among those who are not comfortable with that tendency.
Victim
Diaspora? The Case of the Sikhs
Gurharpal Singh
Since the fateful events of June 1984, when the Indian army entered the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikhs' holiest shrine, the activities of the Sikh diaspora have attracted considerable academic attention.2 The fortunes of this vibrant community have become a major transnational irritant to Western states, linking the complex, and often interminable, politics of the homeland with ethnic and social concerns in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australasia. This volume by Tatla is the first serious effort to study the subject, and it has emerged from the Transnational Communities Programme at the University of Oxford, which is sponsored by the Economic and Social Science Research Council of the United Kingdom.
Marketing
the Diasporic Creed
Sheila L. Croucher and Patrick J. Haney
Beginning on Thanksgiving Day 1999, and for many months to follow, the impact of diaspora groups on US international and domestic politics became strikingly clear when Elián Gonzalez's mother drowned, along with ten other Cuban refugees, while trying to reach South Florida's shores. Six-year-old Elián survived and reached the US, but only to suffer another torrent, once in the US, of lawsuits, custody battles, and a shameless political tug of war. Cubans on the island demanded that the boy be sent back to his father, who was still living in Cuba and pleading for the return of his son. Cuban Americans in Miami, including relatives of Elián, refused to return the boy to the “Communist tyranny” his mother had died trying to escape. This battle over one little boy's fate is just the most recent episode in a case that has, for over thirty years, illustrated the dedication (in this case antagonistic) that diasporas can maintain toward a homeland, the energy they can and will expend to influence US foreign policy toward that homeland, and the profound as well as profoundly complex implications of diaspora identity and mobilization for US politics and the US political system.
Notes on Contributors
In
This Issue
Croucher and Haney engage in detail Yossi Shain's important recent
book, Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the US and
Their Homelands. They summarize his arguments, point to tensions within
them, and illustrate and elaborate the implications of his key claim
that US-based diasporas are more involved than ever with shaping the
policy of the US towards their symbolic homelands, with interesting
and ultimately positive consequences. Like Shain, but not always
agreeing with him, Croucher and Haney explore how such involvement
challenges and can transform diasporic identity, American foreign
policy, American conceptions of the US as a pluralist democracy,
and even the homeland's conception of itself as a cultural and
political entity. They look at Shain's examples of Cuban, Mexican,
African, Jewish, Arab-American, and other diasporas and demonstrate
the complexity of the task of establishing his claim that in
“marketing the American Creed abroad,” diasporas actually
promote democracy both at home and abroad without increasing
tensions or risking “balkanization.”
Rosello
discusses French laws that can make extending hospitality
to illegal immigrants into a crime. She begins by offering an account
of a specific case in which a woman who hosted a friend and the friend's
partner, an illegal immigrant from Zaire, was prosecuted. In analyzing
the polyvocal outcry that resulted, Rosello explores the outrage and
resistance of some French citizens in response to a law that implicitly
charges individuals with the responsibility of decoding “the
guest's body” because it is the host's “responsibility to
find out about the guest's legal status.” This introduction of
the policing function into the home turns the binary state/immigrant
into a triangle: state/immigrant-guest/citizen-host. Rosello then
explores the ethical and political dilemmas of hospitality, which
Derrida has also addressed. She speculates on the possibility
that as a response to such laws, “chains of solidarity may be
created between citizens and foreigners rather than between citizens
and their government.”
Safran's
review essay engages Robin Cohen's Global Diasporas, an important,
“detailed, and wide-ranging” text (which inaugurates a series
of books on diaspora studies, such as Tatla's on the Sikh diaspora-see
Singh, below). Safran acknowledges that when discussing
the diverse and global phenomenon of contemporary diasporization,
the creation of large and inclusive categories-which is an important
part of Cohen's project-may be valid. But he also argues that Cohen
overlooks the cost of creating such categories. He disputes some
of Cohen's efforts to challenge the primacy of the until recently
paradigmatic Jewish diaspora, which he regards as specifically
anti-Zionist and generally politicized, and which, he also argues,
may dilute the concept of diaspora and rob it of its analytical
utility by accepting quite dissimilar expatriate groups as diasporas.
Safran simultaneously criticizes Cohen's influential arguments, seeks
to affirm the continuing usefulness of the Jewish diaspora as exemplary
if not paradigmatic, and elaborates his own well-known definition
of diaspora and the factors that define it.
Schnapper
wonders whether the ongoing, more inclusive, and increasingly
laudatory reevaluation of diasporas is always useful for scholarship,
which traditionally has aspired for concepts shaped independently
of prevailing values. She considers whether the “semantic break”
between pre-1968 and later, more inclusive definitions of diaspora
reflects a reality that is “as total as it first appeared.”
She discusses the logic of the nation-state, which earlier tended
toward the “nationalization” of diasporic minorities, and
the limits of such action then and now. Recalling that until recently
diasporas were primarily shaped by a dialectic between cultural and
political traditions that took place within a national framework,
she considers that dialectic within contemporary transnationalism,
when the number and kinds of minority communities engaged in it is
much larger, and concludes that this increase must not lead us to
neglect to reserve a special place for diasporic populations “that
maintain institutionalized ties, whether objective or symbolic, beyond
the borders of nation-states.”
Singh's
review essay addresses the problems raised by D.S. Tatla's book on
the Sikh diaspora and the Sikhs' search for a statehood independent
of India. He praises the book's wealth of sources and its “narrative
of the political activities of [that] diaspora at a crucial juncture.”
But he wonders whether “the role of the diaspora in the development
of [Sikh] nationalism and the search for statehood” is that which
Tatla envisages. He argues that Tatla may overestimate the role of
the diaspora as an initiator, while underestimating the degree to
which its actions continue to emerge as responses to the initiatives
of homeland activists. Singh argues for the indispensability
of considering the Indian state's own nation-building activities as
an important factor in the shaping of Sikh action. In addition, he
looks at the effects of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and globalization
on Sikh diasporic identity, affirming that the new technologies that
have facilitated rapid and continuing contact between Sikh communities
have “reinforced ... pre-existing traits without substantially-so
far-creating new ones.” Rather, he argues, the impact of
both globalization and localization has been “to challenge ...
the logic of Indian nation-building in the peripheral regions”
of the state.
