Diasporas and the nation-state: From victims to challengers

International Affairs

Volumn 72, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 507-520

  Cohen, Robin ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039607985     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2625554     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Thus James Clifford, 'Diasporas', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 303, avers that 'We should be able to recognize the strong entailment of Jewish history on the language of diaspora without making that history a definitive model. Jewish (and Greek and Armenian) diasporas can be taken as non-normative starting points for a discourse that is travelling in new global conditions. ' Similarly, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett in 'Spaces of dispersal', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 340, while accepting Clifford's argument that the Jews should not be thought of as the normative model, argues that in discussing issues of homelessness, placelessness and statelessness, 'the Jew has served as the oncomouse of social theory.' Finally, Jonathan Boyarin, in an unpublished paper presented to the International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Montreal, 1095, p. 5, holds that 'It is important to insist, not on the centrality of Jewish diaspora nor on its logical priority within comparative diaspora studies, yet still on the need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history within the contemporary diasponc rubric.'
2. Thus James Clifford, 'Diasporas', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 303, avers that 'We should be able to recognize the strong entailment of Jewish history on the language of diaspora without making that history a definitive model. Jewish (and Greek and Armenian) diasporas can be taken as non-normative starting points for a discourse that is travelling in new global conditions. ' Similarly, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett in 'Spaces of dispersal', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 340, while accepting Clifford's argument that the Jews should not be thought of as the normative model, argues that in discussing issues of homelessness, placelessness and statelessness, 'the Jew has served as the oncomouse of social theory.' Finally, Jonathan Boyarin, in an unpublished paper presented to the International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Montreal, 1095, p. 5, holds that 'It is important to insist, not on the centrality of Jewish diaspora nor on its logical priority within comparative diaspora studies, yet still on the need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history within the contemporary diasponc rubric.'
3. Thus James Clifford, 'Diasporas', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 303, avers that 'We should be able to recognize the strong entailment of Jewish history on the language of diaspora without making that history a definitive model. Jewish (and Greek and Armenian) diasporas can be taken as non-normative starting points for a discourse that is travelling in new global conditions. ' Similarly, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett in 'Spaces of dispersal', Cultural Anthropology 9: 3, 1994, p. 340, while accepting Clifford's argument that the Jews should not be thought of as the normative model, argues that in discussing issues of homelessness, placelessness and statelessness, 'the Jew has served as the oncomouse of social theory.' Finally, Jonathan Boyarin, in an unpublished paper presented to the International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Montreal, 1095, p. 5, holds that 'It is important to insist, not on the centrality of Jewish diaspora nor on its logical priority within comparative diaspora studies, yet still on the need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history within the contemporary diasponc rubric.'
4. Arnold Ages, The diaspora dimension (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 10.
5. Daniel Halévy, an eminent French writer, concurred. He thought it essential to escape the confines of a traditional religion: 'How happy I am to have left that hell, to have escaped from Judaism.' Many other emancipated European Jews shared this sentiment. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who also had Jewish ancestry, was equally blunt. Judaism was not a religion but a misfortune: 'Those who would say Judaism is a religion would say that being a hunchback is a religion' - both cited in Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew accused. Three anti-Semitic affairs: Dreyfus, Beilus, Frank, 1884-1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 15 and 62.
6. Lindemann, The Jew accused, pp. 35-93.
7. There is an immense literature on the Dreyfus trial. A reliable account of its implications is provided by Michael R. Marrus, The politics of assimilation: the French Jewish community at the time of the Dreyfus affair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).
8. Cited in David J. Goldberg and John D. Raynor, The Jewish people: their history and their religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 166.
9. William Safran, 'Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return', Diaspora 1: 1, 1991, p. 83.
10. I have dealt with the ambiguities Caribbean peoples present under the interrogative title of 'A diaspora of a diaspora? The case of the Caribbean', Social Science Information 31: 1, 1992, pp. 193-203.
11. Safran, 'Diasporas in modern societies', pp. 83-4.
12. I have not spent much time in this article expanding on imperial, labour and trade diasporas.The standard work on trade diasporas is Philip Curtin, Cross-cultural trade in world history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
13. As will have been gathered by now, I prefer the phrase 'the age of globalization' to 'post-modernity' or 'late modernity' as the first expresses process rather than outcome and alludes more clearly to the totality of world-wide changes, not just to the shifts in the consciousness of the intelligentsia in the metropoles.
14. H.V. Perlmutter, 'On the rocky road to the first global civilisation', Human Relations 44: 9, 1991, pp. 897-1010.
15. Wang Gangwu, China and the Chinese overseas (Singapore:Times Academic Press, 1991), pp. 170-1.
16. Peter Kwong, The new Chinatown (New York: Hill & Wang, 1987), pp. 25-6).
17. Jon Rex, 'Ethnic identity and the nation state: the political sociology of multi-cultural societies', Social Identities 1: 1, 1995, pp. 30-1.
18. Morris Dickstein, 'After the Cold War: culture as politics, politics as culture', Social Research 60: 3, 1993, pp. 539-40.
19. Aisha Khan, 'Homeland, motherland: authenticity, legitimacy and ideologies of place among Muslims in Trinidad', in Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and migration: the politics of space in the South Asian diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 93.