Diaspora
Volume
9, Number 2, Fall 2000
American
Jews and the Construction of Israel's Jewish Identity
Yossi Shain
In 1999, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, members of the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements funded a public campaign on Israel's city billboards and in the Israeli media, calling on secular Israelis to experience their religious identity afresh. In a backlash against the monopoly and coercion exercised by religious orthodoxy—which has led many Israelis to shed their religious identities to an extent that goes beyond what their socialization by secular Zionism urged—the campaign called upon Israelis to embrace religious pluralism under the slogan “there is more than one way to be a Jew.” Financed by a grant from a Jewish family foundation in San Francisco, this campaign met with a harsh and somewhat violent response from the Israeli ultra-Orthodox sector. A leading ultra-Orthodox figure stated, “If this situation continues, we will have a cultural war here, the likes of which we have not seen in a hundred years” (Sontag).
How
Durable and New Is Transnational Life? Historical Retrieval through
Local Comparison
Robert C. Smith
Is transnational life among migrants “new,” and, if so, how? How does a transnational perspective enable us to understand immigrants and immigration more deeply, both today and in the past? This article seeks to engage these questions through a comparative analysis of migration and related transnational social processes at the local level in two very different cases and time periods: a Swedish farming community in the American Midwest spanning most of the previous major wave of migration (1860s–1920s) and a contemporary Mexican community in New York City (1940s–present). Using two cases set in different time periods and contexts of reception both constrains our ability to answer the questions posed above and gives us leverage in answering them. The limits stem from the different methods used in the Swedish case (mainly archival historical; see Ostergren) and the Mexican case (mainly ethnographic; see Smith, “Los Ausentes,” “Transnational Localities,” “Migrant Membership”), and from the fact that the outcomes are known in the Swedish but not in the Mexican case.
The
"Sojourner Hypothesis" Revisited
Philip Q. Yang
The concept of “The Sojourner” is a very important and influential one in the study of early Chinese immigration to America and of Chinese Americans. The sojourner concept originated from Paul Siu's widely-cited article “The Sojourner,” published in American Journal of Sociology in 1952, which was largely extracted from his dissertation, entitled The Chinese Laundryman and completed at the University of Chicago in 1953.2 Siu defined the sojourner as an immigrant who “clings to the culture of his own group” and who “is unwilling to organize himself as a permanent resident in the country of his sojourn” (“Sojourner” 34). Like the marginal man, the sojourner is also a deviant; but, unlike the marginal man, the sojourner does not “seek status in the society of the dominant group” (Siu, Chinese Laundryman 294). He “spends many years of his lifetime in a foreign country without being assimilated by it” (299).
European
Spaces: Portuguese Migrants' Notions of Home and Belonging
Andrea Klimt
Movement, dislocation, and contingent, multilocal forms of belonging are increasingly prevalent and normalized ways of life. Ethnographers of transnationalism are documenting the various ways in which people connect the complex geographies of their lives and attempt to forge meaningful identities within multiple and protracted disjunctures. According to this literature, mobility, travel, transience, and liminality are the common themes of late-twentieth-century existence (Appadurai; Clifford; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, “New Migration”); the notion of “home” is increasingly uncoupled from the location of daily life (Amit-Talai; Berking; Goldring; Olwig; Rapport and Dawson, “Home”; Smith); and citizenship is not the only status through which people acquire social and political rights or national identities (Kearney; Soysal).
Intellectuals
and Their Others: What Is to Be Done?
Misha Kokotovic
John Beverley's Subalternity and Representation is an impressive work of synthesis that maps the contours of the last twenty years of Latin American literary and cultural criticism in unusually lucid prose. Through a wide-ranging discussion of history, political economy, literature, and mass culture in the Americas (North and South), Beverley identifies the stakes in contemporary Latin Americanist theoretical debates by situating these debates in sociohistorical context while also engaging, from a Latin Americanist perspective, current trends in cultural theory in the North American academy. The essays that make up Subalternity and Representation are organically linked to a degree unusual in a collection of what is, for the most part, previously published work. Moreover, Beverley tackles a host of complex issues with a level of clarity admirable in a field cluttered with an arcane jargon it generates at several times the rate it produces genuinely new ideas.
Diasporama
Notes
on Contributors
