Diaspora
Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2000
Special
Issue: The Materiality of Diaspora
Edited by Karen Leonard and Pnina Werbner
In
This Issue
Introduction:
The Materiality of Diaspora-Between Aesthetic and “Real”
Politics
Pnina Werbner
The prizing open of a familiar concept inaugurates new directions for research. It also leads to a proliferation of definitions and typologies as, over time, the concept comes to be reworked from different disciplinary vantage points and re-interpolated into widely divergent ethnographic accounts or aesthetic texts. This complex, often dialectical process of thinking through a concept anew is not simply linear; it loops back on itself in creative tension with earlier theoretical insights.
So too with diaspora: as the concept has traveled, certain new generalizations have come to be widely accepted and often repeatedly rediscovered. For example, early discussions of cultural hybridity have been augmented by a far broader consensual stress in the literature on the social heterogeneity of diasporas, the fact that as social formations they are internally divided.1 Not just a fusion of discourses but a multiplicity of discourses, some intersecting, some mutually clashing and contradictory, is widely recognized to underpin the representation of diaspora and its organizational structures.
State,
Culture, and Religion: Political Action and Representation Among South
Asians in North America
Karen Leonard
In what ways, other than through aesthetics, is the “politics of diaspora” constituted? Pnina Werbner has suggested that, in the formation of diasporas, “real” politics might consist of “transnational moral gestures of philanthropy and political lobbying ... grounded in ideas about a shared past and future.” Thus she urges us to interrogate the relationship between politics and art, or “real” politics and aesthetics, in diasporas and/or transnational communities (concepts not the same, but increasingly conflated in the literature: Vertovec 277).
Identity Discourses and Diasporic Aesthetics in Black Paris: Community
Formation and the Translation of Culture
Bennetta Jules-Rosette
Diasporic African communities in France are a byproduct of the demise of the colonial enterprise and the social and economic reconfiguration of France after World War II. Prior to the 1960s, African immigration to France was sporadic, encompassing students, intellectuals, and a small population of workers and war veterans. The 1960 census recorded a total of 18,000 sub-Saharan Africans residing in France (Dewitte 18). By 1982, the African immigrant population had leapt to 127,322 (INSÉÉ, Recensement général). The 1990 census aggregated North and sub-Saharan Africans, for a total population of 1,633,142 (INSÉÉ, Recensement de la population). None of these figures include the substantial and ongoing presence of Afro-Antilleans in France.
Cultural Interventions: Arab American Aesthetics between the Transnational
and the Ethnic
Sally Howell
Much of contemporary writing on diaspora stresses, as Gilroy and Clifford do, the inadequacies of national and ethnic identities. As people move (and are moved) across the globe, they transform local identities into new and hybrid forms. Sometimes, people in motion are reborn. They look back on the “land of their [first] birth” with a sense of relief—some have escaped, after all—or with pangs of nostalgia for a time and place that no longer exist. Whether they are “Afro-Americans” traveling to Europe (as in Gilroy's example) or Arab refugees arriving in Detroit, they cannot avoid bringing “the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” with them.
“Crown
Heights is the Center of the World”: Reterritorializing a Jewish
Diaspora
Henry Goldschmidt
A story is sometimes told about a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov (the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidic Judaism) who yearned to see the Holy Land—or at least the story was told to me, one night in 1997, by a Lubavitch Hasidic rabbi in Crown Heights, the multiracial neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where many Lubavitch Hasidim make their homes.
It was late on a Friday evening, and the rabbi and I were walking together through the dimly lit and quiet streets of Crown Heights—past modest brick row houses and low-rise apartment buildings; the graffiti-tagged walls of garages and grocery stores; the tiny spots of grass that pass for lawns in Brooklyn; and the occasional group of Blacks or Jews, headed out for the evening or in for the night, enjoying the unseasonably warm winter weather. I'd been the rabbi's guest that night for a festive Sabbath meal, and he was walking me home.
Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transnation
Khachig Tölölyan
The sun never sets on the Armenian diaspora. Its constituent communities include—in a descending order that reflects population and not cultural, political, or economic importance—communities in Russia (nearly 2 million), the United States (800,000), Georgia (400,000), France (250,000), the Ukraine (150,000), Lebanon (105,000), Iran (ca. 100,000), Syria (70,000), Argentina (60,000), Turkey (60,000), Canada (40,000), and Australia (30,000). There are some twenty other communities with smaller populations, ranging from 25,000 down to 3,000, in Britain, Greece, Germany, Brazil, Sweden, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, the Gulf Emirates, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Venezuela, Hungary, Uzbekistan, and Ethiopia.
Distinct and heterogeneous as these communities are, three generalizations can be ventured about them and the global diaspora they constitute. First, communal elites, along with the diasporic institutions, organizations, and associations2 they lead, have been unusually important to them for an unusually long time.
Diasporas
through Anthropological Lenses: Contexts of Postmodernity
André Levy
Hershberg's assertion, back in the early 1970s, that “the Age of Aquarius is being replaced by the age of Ethnicity” (1) remained appropriate for almost two decades, as many anthropologists and other social scientists followed the intellectual agenda encapsulated in this catchphrase. In the early 1990s, however, the study of cultural groups seemed to veer toward a study of diasporas, and “diasporic language appear[ed] to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse” (Clifford, “Diasporas” 311; see also Anthias, Demetriou. The founding of this journal—Diaspora—in 1991 also exemplifies that shift in interest, which remains current.
Notes on Contributors
In
This Issue
Werbner begins her Introduction to this issue by effectively summing
up some of the elements of a consensus about diasporas that has emerged
in the past two decades, hinting at the conundrums diasporas
present-for example, the fact that they can be transnational
and national(ist), cosmopolitan and parochial. She views this special
issue of Diaspora as an attempt to engage with “the constitutive
relations between intellectual creativity, diasporic quotidian culture,
subjective consciousness, and political action” and points to
approaches that view “diasporic culture [as] materially inscribed
and organizationally embodied.” This leads to a consideration
of the “dialectics between diaspora aesthetics and `real'
political mobilization,” which, in turn, requires acknowledgment
of the fact that the aesthetic and subjective “are shaped in
tension with prior and [often] more widespread hegemonic diaspora
discourses and modes of institutional organization.” Werbner
then offers brief and astute analyses of the individual essays gathered
here, foregrounding those points that connect them to each other
and to a new understanding of diasporic civil society.
Leonard
examines the South Asian communities (Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim) of
the United States and Canada, focusing on the Muslims. She considers
different state policies, as well as differing communal agendas in
organization and political lobbying, and asks how shared aesthetic
practices bridge some of these differences, along with differences
of class. She ponders the experience of difference that persists among
the first generation of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim immigrants from South
Asia and asks what kinds of diasporas will emerge as a result
of various new affiliations and experiences of commonality that the
second, now youthful generation of South Asians is undergoing.
These are always complicated-as when South Asian Muslims find
some common ground with Arab and other Muslims while remaining separate
from the single largest such group in the United States, African American
Muslims. She explores other options that are made possible by the
sharing, in some cases, and hybridization, in others, of cultural
practices brought over from South Asia, but concludes that the Americanizing
of Islam and Islamicizing of America, the emergence of South Asian
student groups on university campuses, and the encounter with North
American politics all work against the creation of national diasporas
and are more likely to lead to “broader non-diasporic communities
in the new homelands” of Canada and the United States.
Jules-Rosette
offers an analysis of three African diasporic artistic movements that
also had political aspirations and consequences, which they worked
to achieve through the elaboration of identity discourses: Negritude,
“Parisianism” (which focused on exile and alienation), and
“postcolonial universalism” (which emphasizes the emergence
of a global yet African culture). Her richly detailed descriptions
and analyses conclude with an assessment of the politics of cultural
translation in francophone pan-Africanism and the ways in which it
seeks to address and engage a transnational diasporic audience. Throughout,
she attends to the difficulties of economic entrepreneurship and political
action that were inseparable from artistic and literary expression.
Howell
offers a detailed account of the production, performance, and reception
of Arab art and popular culture in Detroit during a period of intense
stigmatization of Arab-Americans. She explores paradoxes presented
by the success of a local institution in introducing some Arab art
(usually hybrid high and popular art) to mainstream performances and
exhibitions. In a heterogeneous Arab-American community marked by
class and educational differences, she shows, this appealed to
the better-educated segment and to non-Arabs, while most Arab-Americans
continued to prefer folk performances and community events. Whereas
diaspora scholarship often lavishes attention upon the hybrid
and crossover cultural products of diasporas, Arab-Americans in Detroit
continued to express a felt need for their specifically communal folk
culture. This culture, Howell shows, appeals to the heterogeneous
Arab-American community (Muslim and Christian, drawn from many Middle
Eastern Arabophone countries) both on aesthetic grounds and because
it can bridge persistent differences that even political action to
create a pro-Palestinian and pan-Arab movement has not been able to
overcome.
Goldschmidt
simultaneously offers an account of certain features of life
in the Lubavitcher Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights and a larger analysis
of the problematic relations between the valorization of diasporic
life and the quasi-national (re)territorialization of some diasporic
communities. His essay explores aspects of the contentious discourse
and behavior of some diasporas that are sometimes embarrassing
to advocates of diasporas: the persistence of national feeling, the
rejection of hybridity and border-crossing, the striving for forms
of political power. His essay is at once informed and informative
about the Hasidic enclave and its attempts to represent itself
as central to all Jewish (including Israeli) life, its efforts to
distinguish itself geographically from the Afro-Caribbean neighborhood
in which the Hasidim are often a minority, and the ways in which these
are not simply parochial issues but are of interest to anyone
working on diasporas, transnationalism, and globalization.
Tölölyan
offers a survey of the history of the Armenian diaspora since its
formation in the eleventh century and an analysis of its passage,
in the past two decades, from exilic nationalism to diasporic transnationalism.
His account focuses on the communal elites (merchants, notables, businessmen,
and philanthropists; clergy; intellectuals, artists, performers, and
scholars) who aspire to and often succeed in representing their diasporic
communities in both the semiotic and political senses of representation.
His essay insists on the disproportionate importance of elites and
the organizations and institutions they establish, fund, and
direct, not because they democratically represent a majority of the
population at all times but because they sustain a diasporic civil
society and public sphere and make possible the stateless power-both
productive and prohibitive-that is present in the Armenian
diaspora(s). Throughout, Tölölyan insists on the productive
and constitutive tensions between hybridity and purity, inclusion
and exclusion, cosmopolitan transnationalism and parochial nationalism,
the logic of mobility and the logic of the sedentary, the porousness
of borders and the reterritorialization of diasporic enclaves, which
together have characterized both the discourses and the grounding
realities of the diaspora. He argues that recent work on diasporas
errs in favoring only the first of each of these sets of terms.
Levy
situates Susan Pattie's study of diasporic Armenian communities that
move from homeland to Cyprus to London within contesting anthropological
approaches to diasporas. He argues that, appearances to the contrary,
anthropologists have not been altogether successful in engaging the
diaspora phenomenon. He locates the causes of this failure in the
discipline's methodological commitment to the notion of one field
site, which is only now being challenged by multisited research; in
its preference for emphasizing patrolled yet porous, negotiated borders
rather than the elements that diasporas themselves regard and treat
as inflexible, non-negotiable aspects of their identity; and, finally,
in anthropology's desire to make an antinationalist moral force out
of diasporas and their sometimes nationalist culture. Pattie's work
shows that Armenian diasporic consciousness is in important part shaped
by a residual nationalism, Levy argues. He praises the book's detailed
engagement with the ways in which communities are constructed and
endowed with institutions, and he distinguishes between a comparative
perspective, which the book has, and a transnational perspective,
the lack of which he criticizes.
