The contemporary discourse of diaspora studies

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 647-655

  Tölölyan, Khachig ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DIASPORA; GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION; IMMIGRATION POLICY; MIGRATION;

EID: 37349127324     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-2007-040     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. The more frequently used "interdisciplinary" is almost always unjustified. In area studies, existing disciplines such as history and literature are brought to bear one after another, providing a binocular perspective on the topics studied, but without producing a truly new, hybrid method and object of knowledge.
2. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Dispersion and Evolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993).
3. "Hundreds ofthousands of evacuees from the New Orleans area stranded in overcrowded hotels, motels and makeshift shelters and on highways across much of the South underscored a new reality on Tuesday: an extended diaspora of a city's worth of people, one arely seen in the annals of urban disaster." Kate Zenike and Judy Wolgren, "in Search of a Place to Sleep, and News of Home," New York Times, 31 August 2005. The New York Times has repeatedly used the term since.
4. See Simon Dubnow's entry on "Diaspora" in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. Seligman and Alvin Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1931-35), 3:126-30, for a formulation ofthe earlier consensus.
5. The classical paradigm also stipulated a desire by diasporansto return eventually to the homeland, but this was a desire ritually and rhetorically proclaimed, realized occasionally by individuals but very rarely on a communal scale until the emergence of nationalism precipitated group movements to the homeland in the later nineteenth century.
6. Shepperson's paper was first published in African Forum: A Ouarterly Journal of Contemporary Affairs 2 (1966): 76-93, which is not easily accessible.
7. It is commonly known from a later version, "The African Abroad orthe African Diaspora," Emerging Themes of African History, ed. T. O. Ranger (London: Heinemann, 1968), 152-76.
8. That change in prestige is dueto a dozen factors discussed in Khachig Tölölyan, "Rethinking Diaspora (s)," Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies 5 (1996): 3-37.
9. Of course, poverty functions as a form of coercion and initiates migrations that can lead to dispersion. But such dispersions, unless accompanied by catastrophes like the Irish famine in 1845, orthe dire conditions of travel like those experienced by Indians shipped to the Caribbean after 1834, do not usually lead to cultures constructed around traumatic memory.
10. A terminological problem dogs diaspora studies when "home" is at issue. The actual home of many diasporic peoples may be the United States or Canada, yet scholars continue to speak of such countries as the host land. For the first generation, this is true. But in the case of those born in these and similar receiving countries, where the extension of citizenship to the native-born is very nearly automatic (as it is not, say, for Kurds born in Germany), to speak of the United States or Canada as a host land after the first generation of migration is odd. To address this oddity, in my own work I now refer to the United States as my home and the home of its Armenian diaspora and to Armenia as the homeland (of my ancestors).
11. Walter Connor, "The Impact of Homelands upon Diasporas," Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 16-46, 16.
12. The former is most commonly the case when visible racial differences or major religious differences invite prejudicial exclusion - people of color, Muslims, Jews, and others experience this regularly. In cases such as that of African slaves in America, even when homeland languages and kin ties are lost and religious and social practices survive in fragments, the discriminatory treatment suffices to sustain an ethnoracial community that can be reimbued with notions of diasporicity.
13. John Armstrong, "Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas," American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 393-408.
14. For a fine study of diasporic polycentrism among Armenians, see Sebouh Aslanian, Dispersion History and the Polycentric Nation: The Role of Simeon Yerevantsi's Girk vor Kochi Partayjar in the Armenian National Revival of the Eighteenth Century (Venice: Bibliothèque d'Arménologie Bazmavep, 2004).
15. Exemplary in their demonstrations of the ways in which the transnational circuit sustains the transnational social field, altering both the receiving and the sending societies, are Roger Rouse's early study of the diaspora of the Mexican municipality of Aguililla in California, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diasporal (1991): 8-23;
16. and Peggy Levitt's study of Dominicans in New England, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
17. Richard Alba and Victor Knee, Remaking the Americon Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
18. The debates about this new social formation, engendered in the French media by the scholarship of Olivier Roy, continues to rage, aggravated by bonlieu riots and fears of terrorism. The language, musical culture, social structure, and political organization of this new social formation is unstable, under pressure by French state intervention, and impossible to characterize adequately at this time.
19. Gabriel Sheffer and William Miles, "Francophonie and Zionism: A Comparative Study of Transnationalism and Trans-statism," Diaspora 7 (1998): 119-48.
20. Randolph Bourne, "Transnational America," Atlantic Monthly 118 (1916); 86-97.
21. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, "The Complex Politics of Canadian-American Interdependence, " in Canada and the United States: Transnational and Transgovernmental Relations, ed. Annette Baker Fox, Alfred O. Hero Jr., and Joseph S. Nye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
22. With in sociology proper, the key texts that established the term were Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992);
23. and Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and De-territorialized Nation-States (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1994).
24. These comments on Italian-American ethnics paraphrase some passages in my "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment," Diaspora 5 (1996): 3-37.
25. Khachig Tölölyan, "Restoring the Logic of the Sedentary to Diaspora Studies," in Les diasporas: 2000 ans d'histoire, ed. Lisa Anteby-Yemeni, William Berthomiere, and Gabriel Sheffer (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires cle Rennes, 2005), 137-48.
26. Bill Maurer, "A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization in Virgin Gorda, British Virgin islands," in The Anthropology of Globaization: A Reader, ed Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 101.
27. Tölölyan, "Restoring the Logic of the Sedentary."
28. Pnina Werbner, "The Place Which Is Diaspora: Chaordic Leapfrogging, Replicating, and Transnational Networking" (paper presented at the international Workshop on Transnationalism, University of Manchester, 16-18 May 1998).
29. I use the terms in their original sense, pioneered by the linguistic anthropologist Kenneth Pike in the 1950s and widely used until the 1970s. Emic, modeled on phonemic, refers to the perspective ofthe insider, the native user of a language, or, by extension, the discourse bywhich members ofa diaspora talk about themselves to themselves asthey study their own social formations. Etic, modeled on phonetic, refers to the discourse by which linguists discuss a language not their own, which they characterize by a professional terminology not known to native speakers; by extension, this refers to the discourse of diaspora studies, which the ordinary members and even elites of specific diasporas often fail to understand and, when they do, adopt selectively while disputing many of its assertions. The reluctance to acknowledge such disputes - which would reveal the racism and nationalism found in some diaspora populations - mars the discourse of several utopianist scholars of diaspora.
30. See, e.g., Sheng-mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diasporic Literatures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003);
31. and Khachig Tölölyan, "Armenian-America n Literature," in Immigrant Literatures in the United States, ed. Alpana Sharma Knipiling (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996).
32. The exchange between the supradisciplinary discourse of diaspora studies and the studies of diaspora conducted within specific disciplines may have as much in common with disciplines such as Marxism or psychoanalysis as with area studies. There are no departments of Marxism and very few of psycho-analysis; both are supradisciplinary discourses with no disciplinary home. But scholars of, say,the English novel, or French feminism, or racial stereotyping freely draw on both and contribute to their continuing vitality and relevance.