Clifford, Routes PDF

ROUTE s
Travel and Translation

in the Late
Twentieth Century
jAMES CLIFFORD
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
Diasporas 245
But in practice it has not always been possible to keep them clearly
separate, especially when one is discussing (as I am here) a kind of
10 "theorizing" that is always embedded in particular maps and histories.
Although this essay strives for comparative scope, it retains a certain North
American bias. For example, it sometimes assumes a pluralist state based
on ideologies (and uneven accomplishments) of assimilation. While na-
tion-states must always, to a degree, integrate diversity, they need not do
Diasporas so on these terms. Words such as "minority," "immigrant," and "ethnic"
will thus have a distinctly local flavor for some readers. Local, but trans-
latable. I have begun to account for gender bias and class diversity in my
topic. More needs to be done here, as well as in other domains of diasporic
complexity where currently I lack competence or sensitivity
Tracking Diaspora
An unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms now jostle and converse
This essay asks what is at stake, politically and intellectually, in contem- in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and
porary invocations of diaspora. It discusses problems of defining a travel- regions: terms such as "border," "travel," "creolization," "transculturation,"
ing term, in changing global conditions. How do diaspora discourses "hybridity," and "diaspora" (as well as the looser "diasporic"). Important
represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from new journals, such as Public Culture and Diaspora (or the revived Transi-
home? What experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? How do tion), are devoted to the history and current production of transnational
these discourses attain comparative scope while remaining rooted/routed · cultures. In his editorial preface to the first issue of Diaspora, Khachig
in specific, discrepant histories? The essay also explores the political Tololian writes, "Diasporas are the exemplary communities of the trans-
ambivalence, the utopic/dystopic tension, of diaspora visions that are national moment." But he adds that diaspora will not be privileged in the
always entangled in powerful global histories. It argues that contemporary new journal devoted to "transnational studies" and that "the term that
diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-stalt' once described jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares mean-
or of global capitalism. While defined and constrained by these structures, .ings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant,
they also exceed and criticize them: old and new diasporas offer resources expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community,
for emergent "postcolonialisms." The essay focuses on recent articulations ethnic community" (Tololian 1991: 4-5). This is the domain of shared
of diasporism from contemporary black Britain and from anti-Zionist and discrepant meanings, adjacent maps and histories, that we need to
judaism: quests for nonexclusive practices of community, politics, and sort out and specify as we work our way into a comparative practice of
cultural difference. intercultural studies.
A few caveats are in order. This essay has the strengths and weaknesses It is now widely understood that the old localizing strategies-by
of a survey: one sees the tips of many icebergs. Moreover, it attempts to bounded community, by organic culture, by region, by center and periphery-
map the terrain and define the stakes of diaspora studies in polemical ami may obscure as much as they reveal. Roger Rouse makes this point
sometimes utopian ways. There is sometimes a slippage in the text bl·· forcefully in his contribution to Diaspora's inaugural issue. Drawing on
tween invocations of diaspora theories, diasporic discourses, and distim:l research in the linked Mexican communities of Aguililla (Michoacan) and
historical experiences of diaspora. These are not, of course, equivall·nt. Redwood City (California), he argues as follows:
244
246
FUTURES
Diasporas 247
It has become inadequate to see Aguilillan migration as a movement

between distinct communities, understood as the loci of distinct sets of crete predicaments denoted by the terms "border" and "dia_spora" bleed
social relationships. Today, Aguilillans find that their most important kin into each other. As we will see below, diasporic forms of longmg, memory,
and friends are as likely to be living hundreds or thousands of miles away and (dis)identification are shared by a broad spectrum of minority and
as 1mmed1ately around them. More significantly; they are often able to migrant populations. And dispersed pe~ples, once separated from home-
maintain these spatially extended relationships as actively and effectively lands by vast oceans and political barriets, increasingly find themselve~ m
as the ties that link them to their neighbors. In this regard, growing border relations with the old country thanks to a to-and-fro made poss1ble
access to the telephone has been particularly significant, allowing people by modern technologies of transport, communication, and labor migra-
not JUSt to keep in touch periodically but to contribute to decision-mak- tion. Airplanes, telephones, tape cassettes, camcorders, and mobile job
ing and participate in familial events from a considerable distance markets reduce distances and facilitate two-way traffic, legal and 1llegal,
(Rouse, 1991: 13).
between the worlds places.
This overlap of border and diaspora experiences in late twentieth-
Separate places become effectively a single community "through the con-
century everyday life suggests the difficulty of maintaining exclusivist
tinuous circulation of people, money; goods, and information" (14). 'Trans-
paradigms in our attempts to account for transnational identity f~rma
national migrant circuits," as Rouse calls them, exemplify the kinds ol
tions. When I speak of the need to sort out paradigms and mamtam
complex cultural formations that current anthropology and intercultural
studies describe and theorize. 1 historical specificity, I do not mean the imposition of strict meanings an_d
authenticity tests. (The quintessential borderland is El Paso-juar~z. Or 1s
Aguilillans moving between California and Michoacan are not in dias-
it Tijuana-San Diego? Can la ligna be displaced to Redwood Clty, or ~o
pora; there may be, however, diasporic dimensions to their practices and
Mexican American neighborhoods of Chicago?) William Safran's essay m
cultures of displacement, particularly for those who stay long periods, or
the first issue of Diaspora, "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of
permanently; in Redwood City. Overall, bilocale Aguilillans inhabit a bot-
Homeland and Return" (1991), seems, at times, to be engaged in such an
der, a site of regulated and subversive crossing. Rouse appeals to this
operation. His undertaking and the problems he encounters may help us
transnational paradigm throughout, giving it explicit allegorical force by
see what is involved in identifying the range of phenomena we are pre-
featuring a photo of the famous wedding of Guillermo G6mez-Pefla and
pared to call "diasporic." . . .
Emily Hicks, staged by the Border Arts Workshop of San Diego-Tijuana
Safran discusses a variety of collective expenences m terms of the1r
at the point where the U.S.-Mexico frontera crumbles into the Pacific.
similarity to and difference from a defining model. He defi~es diasporas
Border theorists have recently argued for the critical centrality of formerly
as follows: "expatriate minority communities" (1) that are d1spersed_ fro~
marginal histories and cultures of crossing (Anzaldua, 1987; Calderon and
an original "center" to at least two "peripheral" places; (2) that mamtam
Saldivar, 1991; Flores and Yudice, 1990; Hicks, 1991; Rosaldo, 1989).
a "memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland"; (3) that
These approaches share a good deal with diaspora paradigms. But border-
"believe they are not-and perhaps cannot be-fully accepted by their
lands are distinct in that they presuppose a territory defined by a geopo-
host country"; (4) that see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return,
lmcallme: two sides arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined hy
when the time is right; (5) that are committed to the maintenance or
legal and illegal practices of crossing and communication. Diasporas usu-
restoration of this homeland; and (6) whose consciousness and solidarity
ally presuppose longer distances and a separation more like exile: a coll-
as a group are "importantly defined" by this continuing relationship with
stitutive taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future. Diaspo-
the homeland (Safran 1991: 83-84). These, then, are the main features of
ras also connect multiple communities of a dispersed population.
diaspora: a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alie~a
Systematic border crossings may be part of this interconnection, hw
tion in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongomg
multilocale diaspora cultures are not necessarily defined by a speci 1ir
support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by
geopolitical boundary. It is worth holding onto the historical and geo-
this relationship.
graphic specificity of the two paradigms, while recognizing that the con-
"In terms of that dcfmition," Safran writes, "we may legitimately speak
248 fUTURES Diasporas 249
of the A~enia~, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Cuban, Greek, and per- the cultural forms sustaining and connecting the two scattered "peoples"
haps Chmese d1asporas at present and of the Polish diaspora of the past, are comparable within the range of diasporic phenomena. In Safrans
although none of them fully conforms to the 'ideal type' of the jewish prefiguration of a comparative field-especially in his "centered" diaspora
diaspora" (84). Perhaps a hesitation is expressed by the quotes surround- model, oriented by continuous cultural connections to a source and by a
ing "ideal type," a sense of the danger in constructing, here at the outset teleology of "return"-African American I Caribbean I British cultures do
of an important comparative project, a definition that identifies the dias- not qualify These histories of displacement fall into a category of quasi-
poric ph~norr:enon too closely with one group. Indeed, large segments of diasporas, showing only some diasporic features or moments. Similarly,
JeWish h1stoncal experience do not meet the test of Safrans last three the South Asian diaspora-which, as Amitav Ghosh has argued (1989),
criteria: a strong attachment to and desire for literal return to a well-pre- is oriented not so much to roots in a specific place and a desire for return
served homeland. Safran himself later notes that the notion of "return" for as around an ability to recreate a culture in diverse locations-falls outside
Jews is often an eschatological or utopian projection in response to a the strict definition.
present d_Ystopia. And there is little room in his definition for the princi- Safran is right to focus attention on defining "diaspora." What is the
pled ambrvalence about physical return and attachment to land which has range of experiences covered by the term? Where does it begin to lose
characterized much jewish diasporic consciousness, from biblical times definition? His comparative approach is certainly the best way to specify
on. Jewish anti-Zionist critiques of teleologies of return are also excluded. a complex discursive and historical field. Moreover, his juxtapositions are
(These strong "diasporist" arguments will be discussed below.) often very enlightening, and he does not, in practice, strictly enforce his
It is certainly debatable whether the cosmopolitan jewish societies ol definitional checklist. But we should be wary of constructing our working
the Mediterranean (and Indian Ocean) from the eleventh to the thirteenth definition of a term like "diaspora" by recourse to an "ideal type," with
centuries, the "geniza world" documented by the great historian of trans- the consequence that groups become identified as more or less diasporic,
national cultures, S. D. Goitein, was oriented as a community, or collection having only two, or three, or four of the basic six features. Even the "pure"
of communities, primarily through attachments to a lost homeland (Goi- forms, as I've suggested, are ambivalent, even embattled, over basic fea-
tein, 1967-1993). This sprawling social world was linked through cultural tures. Furthermore, at different times in their history, societies may wax
forms, kinship relations, business circuits, and travel trajectories, as well and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities-obstacles,
as thr.ough loyalty to the religious centers of the diaspora (in Babylon, openings, antagonisms, and connections-in their host countries and
Pal~stm~, and E~t). The attachment to specific cities (sometimes super- transnationally \
sedmg t1es of rehgwn and ethnicity) characteristic of Goiteins medieval We should be able to recognize the str6ng entailment of jewish history
world casts doubt on any definition that would "center" the jewish dias- on the language of diaspora without making that history a definitive
fora i~ a single land. Among Sephardim after 1492, the longing for model. jewish (and Greek and Armenian) diasporas can be taken as
home could be focused on a city in Spain at the same time as on the nonnormative starting points for a discourse that is traveling or hybridiz-
Holy Land. Indeed, as jonathan Boyarin has pointed out, jewish experi- ing in new global conditions. For better or worse, diaspora discourse is
ence often entails "multiple experiences of rediasporization, which do not being widely appropriated. It is loose in the world, for reasons having to
necessarily succeed each other in historical memory but echo back and do with decolonization, increased immigration, global communications,
forth" (personal communication, October 3, 1993). and transport-a whole range of phenomena that encourage multilocale
As a multiply centered diaspora network, the medieval jewish Mediter- attachments, dwelling, and traveling within and across nations. A more
ranean.may be juxtaposed with the modern "black Atlantic" described hy polythetic definition (Needham, 1975) than Safrans might retain his six
Paul Gilroy, whose work will be discussed below. Although the economil' features, along with others. I have already stressed, for example, that the
and political bases of the two networks may differ-the former comnwr- transnational connections linking diasporas need not be articulated pri-
cially self-sustaining, the latter caught up in colonial/neocolonial forces- marily through a real or symbolic homeland-at least not to the degree
250 FUTURES Diasporas 251
that Safran implies. Decentered, lateral connections may be as important This is especially true when they are the victims of ongoing, structural
as those formed around a teleology of origin/return. And a shared, ongoing prejudice. Positive articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the
history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as normative territory and temporality (myth/history) of the nation-state. 3
important as the projection of a specific origin. But are diaspora cultures consistently antinationalist? What about their
Whatever the working list of diasporic features, no society can be own national aspirations? Resistance to assimilation can take the form of
expected to qualify on all counts, throughout its history And the discourse reclaiming another nation that has been lost, elsewhere in space and time,
of diaspora will necessarily be modified as it is translated and adopted. but that is powerful as a political formation here and now. There are, of
For example, the Chinese diaspora is now being explicitly discussed. 2 How course, antinationalist nationalisms, and I do not want to suggest that
will this history, this articulation of travels, homes, memories, and trans- diasporic cultural politics are somehow innocent of nationalist aims or
national connections, appropriate and shift diaspora discourse? Different chauvinist agendas. Indeed, some of the most violent articulations of
diasporic maps of displacement and connection can be compared on the purity and racial exclusivism come from diaspora populations. But such
basis of family resemblance, of shared elements, no subset of which is discourses are usually weapons of the (relatively) weak. It is important to
defined as essential to the discourse. A polythetic field would seem most distinguish nationalist critical longing, and nostalgic or eschatological
conducive to tracking (rather than policing) the contemporary range of visions, from actual nation building-with the help of armies, schools,
diasporic forms. police, and mass media. "Nation" and "nation-state" are not identical. 4 A
certain prescriptive antinationalism, now intensely focused by the Bosnian
Diasporas Borders horror need not blind us to differences between dominant and subaltern
claims: Diasporas have rarely founded nation-states: Israel is the prime
A different approach would be to specify the discursive field diacritically example. And such "homecomings" are, by definition, the negation of
Rather than locating essential features, we might focus on diasporas bor- diaspora.
ders, on what it defines itself against. And, we might ask, what articula- Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never,
tions of identity are currently being replaced by diaspora claims? It is in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational
important to stress that the relational positioning at issue here is a process networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of
not of absolute othering but rather of entangled tension. Diasporas are accommodation with, as well as resistance ~' host countries and their
caught up with and defined against (1) the norms of nation-states and (2) norms. Diaspora is different from travel (though it works through travel
indigenous, and especially autochthonous, claims by "tribal" peoples. practices) in that it is not temporary It involves dwelling, maintaining
The nation-state, as common territory and time, is traversed and, to communities, having collective homes away from home (and in this it is
varying degrees, subverted by diasporic attachments. Diasporic popula- different from exile, with its frequently individualist focus). Diaspora
tions do not come from elsewhere in the same way that "immigrants" do. discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct
In assimilationist national ideologies such as those of the United States, what Gilroy (1987) describes as alternate public spheres, forms of com-
immigrants may experience loss and nostalgia, but only en route to a munity consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside
whole new home in a new place. Such ideologies are designed to integrate the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference. Diaspora
immigrants, not people in diasporas. Whether the national narrative is one cultures are not separatist, though they may have separatist or irredentist
of common origins or of gathered populations, it cannot assimilate groups moments. The history of jewish diaspora communities shows selective
that maintain important allegiances and practical connections to a home- accommodation with the political, cultural, commercial, and everyday life
land or a dispersed community located elsewhere. Peoples whose sense ol forms of "host" societies. And the black diaspora culture currently being
identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and articulated in postcolonial Britain is concerned to struggle for different
violent loss cannot be "cured" by merging into a new national community. ways to be "British"-ways to stay and be different, to be British and
something else complexly related to Africa and the Americas, to shared ahistoricism. With all these qualifications, however, it is clear that the
histories of enslavement, racist subordination, cultural survival, hybridi- claims to political legitimacy made by peoples who have inhabited a
zation, resistance, and political rebellion. Thus, the term "diaspora" is a territory since before recorded history and those who arrived by steamboat
signifier not simply of transnationality and movement but of political or airplane will be founded on very different principles.
struggles to define the local, as distinctive community, in historical con- Diasporist and autochthonist histories, the aspirations of migrants and
texts of displacement. The simultaneous strategies of community mainte- natives, do come into direct political antagonism; the clearest current
nance and interaction combine the discourses and skills of what Vijay example is Fiji. But when, as is often the case, both function as "minority"
Mishra has termed "diasporas of exclusivism" and "diasporas of the bor- claims against a hegemonic/assimilationist state, the antagonism may be
der" (1994). muted. Indeed, there are significant areas of overlap. "Tribal" predica-
The specific cosmopolitanisms articulated by diaspora discourses are in ments, in certain historical circumstances, are diasporic. For example,
constitutive tension with nation-state I assimilationist ideologies. They are inasmuch as diasporas are dispersed networks of peoples who share
also in tension with indigenous, and especially autochthonous, claims. common historical experiences of dispossession, displacement, adapta-
These challenge the hegemony of modern nation-states in a different way tion, and so forth, the kinds of transnational alliances currently being
Tribal or Fourth World assertions of sovereignty and "first-nationhood" do forged by Fourth World peoples contain diasporic elements. United by
not feature histories of travel and settlement, though these may be part of similar claims to "firstness" on the land and by common histories of
the indigenous historical experience. They stress continuity of habitation, decimation and marginality, these alliances often deploy diasporist visions
aboriginality, and often a "natural" connection to the land. Diaspora cul- of return to an original place-a land commonly articulated in visions of
tures, constituted by displacement, may resist such appeals on political nature, divinity, mother earth, and the ancestors.
principle-as in anti-Zionist Jewish writing, or in black injunctions to Dispersed tribal peoples, those who have been dispossessed of their
"stand" and "chant down Babylon." And they may be structured around lands or who must leave reduced reserves to find work, may claim "dias-
a tension between return and deferral: "religion of the land" I "religion of poric" identities. Inasmuch as their distinctive sense of themselves is
the book" in Jewish tradition; or "roots" I "cut 'n' mix" aesthetics in black oriented toward a lost or alienated home defined as aboriginal (and thus
vernacular cultures. "outside" the surrounding nation-state), we can speak of a diasporic di-
Diaspora exists in practical, and at times principled, tension with na- mension of contemporary tribal life. Indeed, recognition of this dimension
tivist identity formations. The essay by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin that has been important in disputes about tribal membership. The category
I will discuss below makes a diasporist critique of autochthonous ("natu- "tribe," which was developed in U.S. law to distinguish settled Indians
ral") but not indigenous ("historical") formulations. When claims to "natu- from roving, dangerous "bands," places a premium on localism and root-
ral" or "original" identity with the land are joined to an irredentist project edness. Tribes with too many members living away from the homeland
and the coercive power of an exclusivist state, the results can be pro- may have difficulty asserting their political/cultural status. This was the
foundly ambivalent and violent, as in the Jewish state of Israel. Indeed, case for the Mashpee, who in 1978 failed to establish continuous "tribal"
claims of a primary link with the "homeland" usually must override identity in court (Clifford, 1988: 277-346).
conflicting rights and the history of others in the land. Even ancient Thus, when it becomes important to assert the existence of a dispersed
homelands have seldom been pure or discrete. Moreover, what are the people, the language of diaspora comes into play, as a moment or dimen-
historical and/or indigenous rights of relative newcomers-fourth-genera- sion of triballife. 5 All communities, even the most locally rooted, maintain
tion Indians in Fiji, or even Mexicans in the southwestern United States structured travel circuits, linking members "at home" and "away." Under
since the sixteenth century? How long does it take to become "indigl'- changing conditions of mass communication, globalization, postcolonial-
nous"? Lines too strictly drawn between "original" inhabitants (who often ism, and neocolonialism, these circuits are selectively restructured and
themselves replaced prior populations) and subsequent immigrants risk rerouted according to internal and eternal dynamics. Within the diverse
array of contemporary diasporic cultural forms, tribal displacements and The Currency of Diaspora Discourses
networks are distinctive. For in claiming both autochthony and a specific,
transregional worldliness, new tribal forms bypass an opposition between The language of diaspora is increasingly invoked by displaced peoples
rootedness and displacement-an opposition underlying many visions of who feel (maintain, revive, invent) a connection with a prior home. This
modernization seen as the inevitable destruction of autochthonous attach- sense of connection must be strong enough to resist erasure through the
ments by global forces. Tribal groups have, of course, never been simply normalizing processes of forgetting, assimilating, and distancing. Many
J "local": they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes,
regional and interregional networks. 6 What may be distinctively modern,
however, is the relentless assault on indigenous sovereignty by colonial
minority groups that have not previously identified in this way are now
reclaiming diasporic origins and affiliations. What is the currency, the
value and the contemporaneity, of diaspora discourse?
powers, transnational capital, and emerging nation-states. If tribal groups Association with another nation, region, continent, or world-historical
survive, it is now frequently in artificially reduced and displaced condi- force (such as Islam) gives added weight to claims against an oppressive
tions, with segments of their populations living in cities away from the national hegemony Like tribal assertions of sovereignty, diasporic iden-
land, temporarily or even permanently In these conditions, the older tifications reach beyond mere ethnic status within the composite, liberal
forms of tribal cosmopolitanism (practices of travel, spiritual quest, trade, state. The phrase "diasporic community" conveys a stronger sense of
exploration, warfare, labor migrancy, visiting, and political alliance) are difference than, for example, "ethnic neighborhood" used in the language
supplemented by more properly diasporic forms (practices of long-term of pluralist nationalism. This stronger difference, this sense of being a
dwelling away from home). The permanence of this dwelling, the fre- "people" with historical roots and destinies outside the time/space of the
quency of returns or visits to homelands, and the degree of estrangement host nation, is not separatist. (Rather, separatist desires are just one of its
between urban and landed populations vary considerably But the spe- moments.) Whatever their eschatological longings, diaspora communities
cificity of tribal diasporas, increasingly crucial dimensions of collective life, are "not-here to stay" Diaspora cultures thus mediate, in a lived tension,
lies in the relative proximity and frequency of connection with land-based the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remem-
communities claiming autochthonous status. bering/desiring another place. If we think of displaced populations in
I have been using the term "tribal" loosely to designate peoples who almost any large city, the transnational urban swirl recently analyzed by
claim natural or "first-nation" sovereignty They occupy the autochthonous Ulf Hannerz (1992), the role for mediating cultures of this kind will be
end of a spectrum of indigenous attachments: peoples who deeply "be- apparent.
long" in a place by dint of continuous occupancy over an extended period. Diasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing,
(Precisely how long it takes to become indigenous is always a political minority discourse. 7 Transnational connections break the binary relation
question.) Tribal cultures are not diasporas; their sense of rootedness in of "minority" communities with "majority" societies-a dependency that
the land is precisely what diasporic peoples have lost. Yet, as we have seen, structures projects of both assimilation and resistance. And it gives a
the tribal-diasporic opposition is not absolute. Like diasporas other defin, strengthened spatial/historical content to older mediating concepts such
ing border with hegemonic nationalism, the opposition is a zone of rela- as WE. B. Du Boiss notion of "double consciousness." Moreover, diaspo-
tional contrast, including similarity and entangled difference. In the latl' ras are not exactly immigrant communities. The latter could be seen as
twentieth century, all or most communities have diasporic dimensions temporary, a site where the canonical three generations struggled through
(moments, tactics, practices, articulations). Some are more diasporic than a hard transition to ethnic American status. But the "immigrant" process
others. I have suggested that it is not possible to define "diaspora" sharply, never worked very well for Africans, enslaved or free, in the New World.
either by recourse to essential features or to privative oppositions. But It And the so-called new immigrations of non-European peoples of color
is possible to perceive a loosely coherent, adaptive constellation of l'l'· similarly disrupt linear assimilation narratives (see especially Schiller et
sponses to dwelling-in-displacement. The currency of these responsl'S Is a!., 1992) _H Although there is a range of acceptance and alienation associ-
inescapable. ated with ethnic and class variations, the masses of these new arrivals are
Diasporas 257
256 fUTURES
kept in subordinate positions by established structures of racial exclusion. being American or British or wherever one has settled, di~ferently It i~ a~so
Moreover, their immigration often has a less aU-or-nothing quality; given about feeling global. Islam, like judaism in a predomm~ntly Chnsnan
transport and communications technologies that facilitate multilocale culture can offer a sense of attachment elsewhere, to a different tempo-
communities. (On the role of television, see Naficy; 1991.) Large sections rality a~d vision, a discrepant modernity. I'll have more to say below about
of New York City; it is sometimes said, are "parts of the Caribbean," and positive, indeed utopian, diasporism in the current transnatiOnal moment.
vice versa (Sutton and Chaney; 1987). Diasporist discourses reflect the Suffice it to say that diasporic consciousness "makes the best of a bad
sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the situation." Experiences of loss, marginality, and exile (differentially cush-
homeland not as something simply left behind but as a place of attachment ioned by class) are often reinforced by systematic exploitation and blocked
in a contrapuntal modernity 9 advancement. This constitutive suffering coexists with the skills of sur-
Diaspora consciousness is thus constituted both negatively and posi- vival: strength in adaptive distinction, discrepant cosmopolitanism, and
tively It is constituted negatively by experiences of discrimination and stubborn visions of renewal. Diaspora consciousness lives loss and hope
exclusion. The barriers facing racialized sojourners are often reinforced by as a defining tension.
socioeconomic constraints, particularly-in North America-the develop- The currency of diaspora discourses extends to a wide range of p~pu-
ment of a post-Fordist, nonunion, low-wage sector offering very limited lations and historical predicaments. People caught up m transnatwnal
opportunities for advancement. This regime of "flexible accumulation" movements of capital improvise what Aihwa Ong has termed "flexible
requires massive transnational flows of capital and labor-depending on, citizenship," with striking differences of power and privilege. Th~ range
and producing, diasporic populations. Casualization of labor and the extends from binational citizens in Aguililla I Redwood City or
revival of outwork production have increased the proportion of women Haiti/Brooklyn to the Chinese investor "based" in San Francisco wh~
in the workforce, many of them recent immigrants to industrial centers claims, "I can live anywhere in the world, but it must be near an airport
(Cohen, 1987; Harvey; 1989; Mitter, 1986; Potts, 1990; Sassen-Koob, (Ong, 1993: 41). This pseudo-universal cosmopolitan bravado st~etches
1982). These developments have produced an increasingly familiar mo- the limit of the term "diaspora." But to the extent that the mvestor, m fact,
bility "hourglass"-masses of exploited labor at the bottom and a very identifies and is identified as "Chinese," maintaining significant connec-
narrow passage to a large, relatively affluent middle and upper class tions elsewhere, the term is appropriate. Ong says of this category of
(Rouse, 1991: 13). New immigrants confronting this situation, like the Chinese immigrants: "Their subjectivity is at once ~eterritoriali~ed in
Aguilillans in Redwood City; may establish transregional identities, main- relation to a particular country; though highly locahzed m relatwn to
tained through travel and telephone circuits, that do not stake everything family" (Ong, 1993: 771-772). Since family is rarely in one place, where
on an increasingly risky future in a single nation. It is worth adding that exactly do they "live"? .
a negative experience of racial and economic marginalization can also lead What is the political significance o_f th~s partic~lar crossmg~up_ of na-
tional identities by a traveler in the Clrcmts of Pacific Rim capltahsm. I~
7
to new coalitions: one thinks of Maghrebi diasporic consciousness uniting
Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians living in France, where a common light of bloody nationalist struggles through~ut the world, the I~vestors
history of colonial and neocolonial exploitation contributes to new soli- transnational diasporism may appear progressiVe. Seen m conn~cnon with
darities. And the moment in 1970s Britain when the exclusionist term exploitative, "flexible" labor regimes in the new Asian and PaCl~~ econo-
"black" was appropriated to form antiracial alliances between immigrant mies, his mobility may evoke a less positive response. The pohucal and
South Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans provides another example of critical valence of diasporic subversions is never guaranteed. Much more
a negative articulation of diaspora networks. could be said about class differences among diasporic populations. In
Diaspora consciousness is produced positively through identification distinguishing, for example, affluent Asian b~siness _families livin? in
with world-historical cultural/political forces, such as "Africa" or "China." North America from creative writers, academiC theonsts, and destitute
The process may not be as much about being African or Chinese as about "boat people" or Khmers fleeing genocide, one sees clearly that degrees of
Diasporas 259
258 FUTURES
diasporic alienation, the mix of coercion and freedom in cultural of displacement rather than placement, traveling rather than dwelling, and
(dis)identifications, and the pain of loss and displacement are highly disarticulation rather than rearticulation, then the experiences of men will
relative. tend to predominate. Specific diaspora histories, co-territories, commu-
Diaspora experiences and discourses are entangled, never clear of com- nity practices, dominations, and contact relations may then be generalized
modification. (Nor is commodification their only outcome.) Diasporism into gendered postmodern globalisms, abstract nomadologies.
can be taken up by a range of multicultural pluralisms, some with quasi- Retaining focus on specific histories of displacement and dwelling keeps
official status. For example, the Los Angeles Festival of 1991, orchestrated the ambivalent politics of diaspora in view. Women's experiences are
on a grand scale by Peter Sellars, celebrated the lumpy U.S. melting pot particularly revealing. Do diaspora experiences reinforce or loosen gender
by giving the bewildering diversity of Los Angeles a global reach. The subordination? On the one hand, maintaining connections with home-
festival connected Thai neighborhoods with imported dancers from Thai- lands, with kinship networks, and with religious and cultural traditions
land. The same was done for Pacific islanders and various Pacific Rim may renew patriarchal structures. On the other, new roles and demands,
peoples. 10 Transnational ethnicities were collected and displayed in avant- new political spaces, are opened by diaspora interactions. Increasingly, for
garde juxtaposition, ostensibly to consecrate a non-Eurocentric art/culture example, women migrate north from Mexico and from parts of the Car-
environment. Los Angeles, successful host to the Olympics, could be a ibbean, independently or quasi-independently of men. While they often
true "world city" The festival was well funded by Japanese and American do so in desperation, under strong economic or social compulsion, they
corporate sponsors, and for the most part it delivered a nonthreatening, may find their new diaspora predicaments leading to renegotiated gender
aestheticized transnationalism. The low-wage sweatshops where many relations. With men cut off from traditional roles and supports, with
members of the celebrated populations work were not featured as sites for women earning an independent, if often exploitative, income, new areas
either "art" or "culture" in this festival of diasporas. 11 of relative independence and control can emerge. Life for women in
Reacting to trends in the U.S. academy, bell hooks has pointed out that diasporic situations can be doubly painful-struggling with the material
international or postcolonial issues are often more comfortably dealt with and spiritual insecurities of exile, with the demands of family and work,
than antagonisms closer to home, differences structured by race and class and with the claims of old and new patriarchies. But despite these hard-
(hooks, 1989, 1990; see also Spivak, 1989). Adapting her concern to the ships, they may refuse the option of return when it presents itself, espe-
present context, we see that theories and discourses that diasporize or cially when the terms are dictated by men.
internationalize "minorities" can deflect attention from long-standing, At the same time, women in diaspora remain attached to, and empow-
structured inequalities of class and race. It is as if the problem were ered by, a "home" culture and a tradition-selectively Fundamental values
multinationalism-issues of translation, education, and tolerance-rather of propriety and religion, speech and social patterns, and food, body, and
than of economic exploitation and racism. While clearly necessary, making dress protocols are preserved and adapted in a network of ongoing con-
cultural room for Salvadorans, Samoans, Sikhs, Haitians, or Khmers docs nections outside the host country But like Maxine Hong Kingston (1976),
not, of itself, produce a living wage, decent housing, or health care. who redeems the woman warrior myth from all the stories transmitted to
Moreover, at the level of everyday social practice, cultural differences arc her from China, women sustaining and reconnecting diaspora ties do so
persistently racialized, classed, and gendered. Diaspora theories need to critically, as strategies for survival in a new context. And like the Barbadian
account for these concrete, cross-cutting structures. women portrayed in Paule Marshalls Brown Girl, Brownstones (1981)-
Diasporic experiences are always gendered. But there is a tendency for who work hard to make a home in New York while keeping a basic
theoretical accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, "aloofness" from "this man's country"-diaspora women are caught be-
to talk of travel and displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizin~ tween patriarchies, ambiguous pasts, and futures. They connect and dis-
male experiences. Janet Wolffs analysis of gender in theories of travel is connect, forget and remember, in complex, strategic waysY The lived
relevant here (Wolff, 1993). When diasporic experience is viewed in terms experiences of diasporic women thus involve painful difficulty in mediat-
ing dis~repant worlds. "Community" can be a site both of support and allegiances come into focus-a loyalty to Islam in the Salman Rushdie
oppressiOn. A couple of quotations from Rahila Gupta offer a glimpse of dispute, for example. There is no guarantee of "postcolonial" solidarity.
a South Asian ("black British") woman$ predicament: Interdiaspora politics proceeds by tactics of collective articulation and
disarticulation. As Avtar Brah has written concerning the debates of the
Young women are ... beginning to question aspects of Asian culture late 1980s surrounding terms for diasporic community in Britain, "The
but there is not a sufficiently developed network of Black women~ usage of 'black,' 'Indian' or 'Asian' is determined not so much by the nature
support groups (although much valuable work has been done in this
of its referent as by its semiotic function within different discourses. These
area! to e~ab_le them to operate without the support of community and
family. This IS a contradiction in which many women are caught: be- various meanings signal differing political strategies and outcomes. They
tween the supportive and the oppressive aspects of the Asian commu- mobilize different sets of cultural and political identities, and set limits to
nity ... where the boundaries of a 'community' are established" (Brah, 1992:
Patriarchal oppression was a reality of our lives before we came to 130-131).
Britain, and the fact that the family and community acted as sites of
resistance to racist oppression has delayed and distorted our coming The Black Atlantic
together as women to fight this patriarchal oppression. (Gupta, 1988:
27, 29).
Diaspora communities, constituted by displacement, are sustained in hy-
brid historical conjunctures. With varying degrees of urgency, they nego-
Th~ _book from which these quotations are taken, Charting the journey: tiate and resist the social realities of poverty, violence, policing, racism,
Wntmgs ~y Black and Third World Women (Grewal, 1988), maps a complex and political and economic inequality. They articulate alternate public
ov~rl_appmg field of articulations and disarticulations in contemporary spheres, interpretive communities where critical alternatives (both tradi-
Bntam-what Avtar Brah has called a "diasporic space. "13 Grewal$ anthol- tional and emergent) can be expressed. The work of Paul Gilroy sketches
ogy presents common experiences of postcolonial displacement, racializa- a complex map/history of one of the principal components of diasporic
tio~, and political struggle, as well as sharp differences of generation, of Britain: the Afro-Caribbean I British I American "Black Atlantic."
regwn, of sexuality, of culture, and of religion. A possible coalition of In There Ain't No Black in the Union jack (1987), Gilroy shows how the
~iverse "black British" and 'Third World" women requires constant nego- diaspora culture of black settler communities in Britain articulates a spe-
tiatiOn and attention to discrepant histories. cific set of local and global attachments. On one level, diaspora culture's
Do diasporic affiliations inhibit or enhance coalitions? There is no clear expressive forms (particularly music) function in the defense of particular
answer. Many Caribbeans in New York, for example, have maintained a neighborhoods against policing and various forms of racist violence. On
sense of connection with their home islands, a distinct sense of cultural, another level, they offer a wider "critique of capitalism" and a network of
and sometimes class, identity that sets them apart from African Americans transnational connections. In Gilroy$ account, the black diaspora is a
people with whom they share material conditions of racial and clas~ cosmopolitan, Atlantic phenomenon, embroiled in and transcending na-
subordination. Scarce resources and the mechanisms of a hierarchical tional antagonisms such as Thatcherite England$ "cultural politics of race
social system reinforce this response. It is not inevitable. On the one hand and nation." It reinvents earlier strands of Pan-Africanism, but with a
f~el~ngs of diasporic identity can encourage antagonism, a sense of supe~ postcolonial twist and a 1990s British-European tilt. St. Clair Drake has
nonty to other minorities and migrant populations. 14 On the other, shared distinguished "traditional" from "continental" Pan-Africanist movements
histories of colonization, displacement, and racialization can form the (1982: 353-359). The former had its origins in the Americas, and it
basis for coalitions, as in the anti-Thatcherite alliances of "black" Britain emerged strongly in the late nineteenth century through the work of black
which mobilized Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and South Asians in the churches, colleges, and the political movements associated with Marcus
1970s. But such alliances fall apart and recombine when other diasporic Garvey and W E. B. Du Bois. It was a transatlantic phenomenon. With
the postwar emergence of African states, African nationalist leaders moved making of the Atlantic working class (a multiracial group), and challenges
to the forefront, and Pan-Africanisms center of gravity moved to continen- recent arguments from within the British labor movement for a popular
tal Africa. The allied political visions of Kwame Nkrumah and George "Left nationalism" to counter Thatcherism. Finally, Gilroys black Atlantic
Padmore would lead the way. Writing in the 1980s and 1990s in the wake decenters African American narratives, bringing the Caribbean, Britain,
of this visions retreat, Gilroy returns the "black" cultural tradition to a and Europe into the picture.
historically decentered, or multiply centered, Atlantic space. In the proc- "The history of the black Atlantic," he writes, "... continually criss-
ess, he breaks the primary connection of black America with Africa crossed by the movement of black people-not only as commodities-but
introducing a third paradigmatic experience: the migrations and reset~ engaged in various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizen-
tlings of black British populations in the period of European colonial ship, is a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, iden-
decline.
tity, and historical memory" (Gilroy, 1992a: 193). Gilroy brings into view
Gilroys brilliantly argued and provocative new book, The Black Atlantic: "countercultures of modernity," bringing "black" not only into the Union
Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993a), projects in historical depth a jack but also into debates over the tradition of Enlightenment rationality.
diverse black diaspora culture that cannot be reduced to any national or This "black" element is both negative (the long history of slavery, the
ethnically based tradition. This map/narrative foregrounds histories of legacy of scientific racism, the complicity of rationality and terror in
crossing, migration, exploration, interconnection, and travel-forced and distinctively modern forms of domination) and positive (a long struggle
voluntary. A collection of linked essays on black intellectual history, The for political and social emancipation, critical visions of equality or differ-
Black Atlantic rereads canonical figures in a transoceanic perspective, ques- ence that have been generated in the black diaspora).
tioning their inscription in an ethnically or racially defined tradition: Du If there is a utopian agenda in Gilroy's transnational counterhistory, it
Bois in Germany; Frederick Douglass as ship caulker and participant in a is counterbalanced by the antagonistic violence, displacement, and loss
maritime political culture; Richard Wright in Paris, connecting with the that are constitutive of the cultures he celebrates: the Middle Passage,
anticolonial Presence Africaine movement. Transnational culture-making plantation slavery, old and new racist systems of dominance, and eco-
by musicians is also given prominence, from the nineteenth-century Fisk nomic constraints on travel and labor migration. In There Ain't No Black
University jubilee Singers to contemporary reggae, hip-hop, and rap. in the Union jack, the long fifth chapter on music and expressive culture
Gilroy is preoccupied with ships, phonograph records, sound systems, and ("Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of Capitalism") follows and depends
all technologies that cross, and bring across, cultural forms. The diaspora for its effect upon four chapters that establish the discursive, political
cultures he charts are thoroughly modern-with a difference. power of racist structures in postwar Britain. Some version of this
Gilroy tracks moving vinyl, locally scratched and dubbed. But hc utopic/dystopic tension is present in all diaspora cultures. 15 They begin
roots-or routes-music in a wider transcultural and subaltern history ol with uprooting and loss. They are familiar with exile, with the "outsider's"
the Atlantic. Drawing on recent historical research by Peter Linebaugh and exposed terror-of police, lynch mob, and pogrom. At the same time,
Marcus Rediker that uncovers a multiracial radical political culture span- diaspora cultures work to maintain community, selectively preserving and
ning the eighteenth-century Atlantic (1990), Gilroys account questions recovering traditions, "customizing" and "versioning" them in novel, hy-
"national, nationalistic, and ethnically absolutist paradigms" (Gilroy, brid, and often antagonistic situations.
1~92a: 193), on both the Right and the Left. He counters reactionary Experiences of unsettlement, loss, and recurring terror produce discrep-
discourses such as those of Enoch Powell (and a growing chorus) that ant temporalities-broken histories that trouble the linear, progressivist
invoke a "pure" national space recently invaded by threatening aliens, that narratives of nation-states and global modernization. Homi Bhabha has
assume the entanglement of Britain in black history to be a postwar, argued that the homogeneous time of the nation's imagined community
post-British Empire phenomenon (sec also Shyllon, 1982). He also sup- can never efface discontinuities and equivocations springing from minor-
plements E. P Thompsons "makin~ of the Engll.~h working class" with the ity and diasporic temporalities (1990). He points to antiprogressive proc-
265
Diasporas
264 FUTURES
memories of slavery and in continuing experiences of racial terror casts a

esses of repetition (memories of slavery, immigration, and colonization,
critical shadow on all modernist progressivisms. Gilroy supplements the
analyses of Zygmunt Bauman (1989) and Michae~ Taussig (1986) on t?e
renewed in current contexts of policing and normative education), of
complicity of rationality with racial terror. At c~~I~l moments, the ~horce
supplementarily (the experience of being "belated," extra, out of synch),
and of ex-centricity (a leaking of the national time/space into constitutive
of death or the risk of death is the only possibility for people With no
outsides: "The trouble with the English," Rushdie writes in The Satanic
future in an oppressive system. Gilroys reading of Frederick Douglass'
struggle with the slave-breaker probes such a ~oment, paired with the
Verses, "is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what
story of Margaret Garner, whose killing of her childre~ to spare them from
it means"). Diasporic "postcolonials," in Bhabhas vision, live and narrate
these historical realities as discrepant, critical modernities. He invokes the
slavery is retold in Toni Morrison's Beloved. The resulu~g sense of .rupture,
"scattered" populations gathering in the global cities, the diaspora where
of living a radically different temporality, is expressed m an mtervieW With
new imaginings and politics of community emerge.l6
Morrison quoted extensively in The Black Atlanttc:
Gilroy p~o?es the specific "diaspora temporality and historicity, memory
and narratlV1ty that are the articulating principles of the black political Modern life begins with slavery . . . From a woman's point of view, in
countercultures that grew inside modernity in a distinctive relationship of terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black
antagonistic indebtedness" (l993a: 266). Arguing against both modernist women had to deal with post-modern problems m the nmeteenth cen-
linear progressivism and current projections of a continuous connection tury and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people a long
~th Africanity, The Black Atlantic uncovers a "syncopated temporality-a time ago: certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and need to reconstruct
different rhythm of living and being." Gilroy cites Ralph Ellison: "Invisi- certain kinds of stability Certain kinds of madness deliberately gomg
bility, let. me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're mad in order, as one of the characters says in the book, "in order not to
never qmte on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. lose your mind." These strategies for survival made the truly modern
~nstead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of person. (Gilroy, 1993a: 308).
Its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.
Morrison's "modern person" is the result of struggle with a "pathology."
And you slip into the breaks and look around" (Gilroy, 1993a: 281).
"Slavery broke the world in half," she goes on to say. And not only for
Ellison (via Gilroy) offers a black version of Walter Benjamin$ practice of
Africans: "It broke Europe." It made Europeans slave masters. .
Diaspora cultures are, to varying degr~es, produced. by regimes of
countermemory, a politics of interrupting historical continuities to grasp
the "mo.nads" (Ellison's "nodes"?) or "fissures" in which time stops and
political domination and economic inequal~ty. B~t these VIolent ~roces~es
prophetically restarts (Benjamin, 1968). In syncopated time, effaced sto-
of displacement do not strip people of their ability to sustam d1stm~uve
nes are recovered, different futures imagined.
In diaspora experience, the co-presence of "here" and "there" is articu- political communities and cultures of resistanc~. Ob~ousl~ the m1x .of
destruction, adaptation, preservation, and creatiOn vanes WI~h ea~h his-
lated with an antiteleological (sometimes messianic) temporality. Linear
torical case and moment. As counterdiscourses of modermty, d1aspora
histor_Y is broken, the present constantly shadowed by a past that is also
cultures cannot claim an oppositional or primary purity. Fundamentally
a desired, but obstructed, future: a renewed, painful yearning. For black
ambivalent, they grapple with the entanglement of subversion and the law,
Atlantic diaspora consciousness, the recurring break where time stops and
of invention and constraint-the complicity of dystopia and uto~1a.
restarts is the Middle Passage. Enslavement and its aftermaths-displaced,
Kobena Mercer works with this constitutive entanglement in a penetratmg
repeated structures of racialization and exploitation-constitute a pattern
of ~lack experiences inextricably woven in the fabric of hegemonic mod- essay, "Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination."
ermty. These experiences form counterhistories, off-the-beat cultural cri-
There is no escape from the fact that as a diaspora people, ~lasted out
tiques that Gilroy works to redeem. Afrocentric attempts to recover a of one history into another by the "commercial deportation of .slavery
direct connection with Africa, often bypassing this constitutive predica- (George Lam min~) and its enforced displacement, our blackness IS thor-
ment, are both escapist and ahistorical. The "space of death" reopened by
Diasporas 267
266 FUTURES
oughly imbricated in Western modes and codes to which we arrived as intervention into black history reflects a specific predicament: what he has
the disseminated masses of migrant dispersal. What is in question [in called "the peculiarities of the Black English" (Gilroy, 1993b: 49-62). The
recent black British film] is not the expression of some lost origin or Black Atlantic decenters, to a degree, a sometimes normative African Ameri-
some uncontaminated essence in black film-language, but the adoption can history. To a degree. The specific experiences of plantation slavery,
of a critical "voice" that promotes consciousness of the collision of emancipation, South-North mobility, urbanization, and race/ethnic rela-
cultures and histories that constitute our very conditions of existence. tions have a regional, and indeed a "national," focus that cannot be
(Mercer, 1988: 56) subsumed by an Atlanticist map/history of crossings. Although the roots
. There a~e important differences between Mercer's and Gilroys concep- and routes of African American cultures clearly pass through the Carib-
tions of d1aspora. Mercer's version is rigorously antiessentialist, a site of bean, they have been historically shaped into distinct patterns of struggle
multiple displacements and rearticulations of identity, without privilege to and marks of authenticity. They are not transnational or diasporic in the
race, cultural tradition, class, gender, or sexuality. Diaspora consciousness same way or to the same degree. Important comparative questions emerge
is entirely a product of cultures and histories in collision and dialogue. around different histories of traveling and dwelling-specified by region
For Mercer, Gilroys genealogy of British "blackness" continues to privilege (for example, the "South" as a focus of diasporic longing), by (neo)colonial
an "African" origin and "vernacular" forms-despite his stress on historical history, by national entanglement, by class, and by gender. It is important
rupture and hybridity and his assault on romantic Afrocentrisms (Mercer, to specify, too, that black South America and the hybrid Hispanic/black
1990) Y For Gilroy, Mercer represents a "premature pluralism," a post- cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America are not, for the moment,
modern evasion of the need to give historical specificity and complexity included in Gilroy's projection. He writes from a North Atlantic I Euro-
to the term "black," seen as linked racial formations, counterhistories, and pean location. 18
cultures of resistance (Gilroy, 1993a: 32, 100). Gilroy is increasingly explicit about the limitations of his "strictly pro-
I do not want to oversimplify either position in an important, evolving visional" undertaking (1993a: xi), presenting it as a reading of "masculin-
dialogue that is probably symptomatic of a moment in cultural politics ist" diasporism and as a first step open to correction and elaboration.
and not finally resolvable. In this context it may be worth noting that, There is no reason his privileging of the black Atlantic, for the purposes
because the signifier "diasporic" denotes a predicament of multiple loca- of writing a counterhistory in some depth, should necessarily silence other
tions, it slips easily into theoretical discourses informed by poststructural- diasporic perspectives. With respect to contemporary Britain, one can
ism and notions of the multiply positioned subject. Indeed, many of these imagine intersecting histories based, for example, on the effects of the
discourses have been produced by theorists whose histories are, in varying British Empire in South Asia, or on the contributions of IslamiC cultures
degrees, diasporic. The approach I have been following (in tandem with to the making and critique of modernity. Gilroys work tactically defines
Gilroy) insists on the routing of diaspora discourses in specific maps/ a map/history in ways that may best be seen as "anti-antiessentialist," ~he
histories. Diasporic subjects are distinct versions of modem transnational double negative not reducible to a positive. If diaspora is to be somethmg
intercultural experience. Thus historicized, diaspora can~ot become ~ about which one could write a history-and this is Gilroy's politically
master trope or "figure" for modern, complex, or positional identities, pointed goal-it must be something more than the name for a site of
cross-cut and displaced by race, sex, gender, class, and culture. multiple displacements and reconstitutions of identity. ~ike "blac~ Eng-
Gilroy's specific map/history is certainly open to amendment and cri- land," the black Atlantic is a historically produced social formauon. It
tique-for skewing "black Britain" in the direction of an Atlantic world denotes a genealogy not based on any direct connection with Africa or
with the Afro-Caribbean at its center, for focusing on practices of travel foundational appeal to kinship or racial identity.
and cultural production that have, with important exceptions, not been In the current theoretical climate of prescriptive antiessentialism, dias-
open to women, for not giving sufficient attention to cross-cutting sexu- pora discourses such as Gilroy's refuse to let go of a "c~anging same,"
alities in constituting diasporic consciousness. Moreover, his diasporic something endlessly hybridized and in process but persistently there-
memories and practices of collective identity maintained over long and Zionism in nineteenth-century European nationalist ideologies-the
stretches of time. Gilroy attempts to conceive the continuity of a "people" influence of Heinrich von Treitschke on Du Bois, or Edward Wilmot
without recourse to land, race, or kinship as primary "grounds" of conti- Blyden's interest in Herder, Mazzini, and Hertzl. Nor should v:e forget _a
nuity19 What, then, is the persistent object of his history? How to circum- common history of victimization by scientific and popular raosms I antl-
scribe this "changing same"? The black Atlantic as a counterhistory of Semitisms, a history that tends to be lost in current black-jewish antago-
modernity is crucially defined by the still-open wound of slavery and racial nisms. (For a corrective, see Philip, 1993; and West, 1993.) Gilroy con-
subordination. It is also a "tradition" of cultural survival and invention out fronts these connections in the last chapter of The Black Atlantic. Here I
of which Gilroy writes. But before he can invoke the much-abused term merely suggest a homology between defining aspects of the two diasporas.
"tradition"-site of a thousand essentialisms-he must redefine it, A full discussion of the differences, tensions, and attractions of the tradi-
"wrench it open": tions is beyond my present compass.
When understood as a practice of dwelling (differently), as an ambiva-
[Tradition] can be seen to be a process rather than an end, and is used lent refusal or indefinite deferral of return, and as a positive transnation-
here neither to identify a lost past nor to name a culture of compensation alism, diaspora finds validation in the historical experiences of both dis-
that would restore access to it. Here, too, it does not stand in opposition placed Africans and jews. In discussing Safran's constitution of a
to modernity nor should it conjure up wholesome, pastoral images of
comparative field, I worried about the extent to which diaspor~, defined
Africa that can be contrasted with the corrosive, aphasic power of the
post-slave history of the Americas and the extended Caribbean. Tradition as dispersal, presupposed a center. If this center be~omes as~~oat~~ ~:h
can now become a way of conceptualizing the fragile communicative an actual "national" territory-rather than Wlth a remvented tradltlon, a
relationships across time and space that are the basis not of diaspora identities "book," a portable eschatology-it may devalue what I called the lateral
but of diaspora identifications. Reformulated thus, [tradition] points not to axes of diaspora. These decentered, partially overlapping networks of
a common content for diaspora cultures but to evasive qualities that communication, travel, trade, and kinship connect the several communi-
make inter-cultural, trans-national diaspora conversations between them ties of a transnational "people." The centering of diasporas around an axis
possible. (Gilroy, 1993a: 276, emphasis added) of origin and return overrides the specific local interactions (identifica~ions
and ruptures, both constructive and defensive) necessary for the mamt~
Identifications not identities, acts of relationship rather than pregiven nance of diasporic social forms. The empowering paradox of d1aspora 1s
forms: this tradition is a network of partially connected histories, a persist- that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there. But there is
ently displaced and reinvented time/space of crossings. 20 not necessarily a single place or an exclusivist nation.
How is the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here) re-
membered and rearticulated? In a forcefully argued essay, "Diaspora: Gen-
jewish Connections
eration and the Ground of jewish Identity," Daniel and jonathan Boyarin
Gilroy rejects "Africa" as privileged source (a kind of Holy Land) while defend an interactive conception of genealogy-kinship not reducible to
retaining its changing contribution to a counterculture of modernity His "race" in its modern definitions-as the matrix for dispersed jewish popu-
history of black Atlantic diversity and conversation echoes the language lations (I993). They offer sustained polemics against two potent alterna-
of contemporary jewish diasporism, anti-Zionist visions drawn from both tives to diasporism: Pauline universalist humanism (we are all one in the
Ashkenazic and Sephardic historical experiences. As we shall see, their spiritual body of Christ) and autochthonous nationalism (we are all one
critique of teleologies of return to a literal jewish nation in Palestine in the place that belongs, from the beginning, to us alo~e). The for~er
parallels Gilroys rejection of Afro-centered diaspora projections. The on- attains a love for humanity at the price of imperialist incluswn/converswn.
going entanglement of black and jewish diaspora visions, often rooted in The latter gains a feeling of rootedness at the expense of excluding others
biblical imagery, is salient here, as are the shared roots of Pan-Africanism with old and new claims in the land. Diaspora ideology, for the Boyarins,
involves a principled renunciation of both universalism and sovereignty- this dissociation among people, language, culture, and land has been an
an embrace of the arts of exile and coexistence, aptitudes for maintaining enormous threat to cultural nativisms and integrisms, a threat that is one
distinction as a people in relations of daily converse with others. of the sources of anti-Semitism and perhaps one of the reasons that
Permanent conditions of relative powerlessness and minority status Europe has been much more prey to this evil than the Middle East. In
justify and render relatively harmless ethnocentric survival tactics-for other words, diasporic identity is a disaggregated identity jewishness
example, imposing marks of distinction on the body (special clothing, disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not
hairstyles, circumcision), or restricting charity and community self-help genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with one
another. When liberal Arabs and some Jews claim that the jews of the
to "our people." In conditions of permanent historical exile-or what
Middle East are Arab Jews, we concur and think that Zionist ideology
amounts to the same thing, in an exile that can end only with the Mes- occludes something very significant when it seeks to obscure this point.
siah-ethnocentrism is just one tactic, never an absolute end in itself. The production of an ideology of a pure jewish cultural essence that has
Rabbinical diasporist ideologies, developed over twenty centuries of dis- been debased by Diaspora seems neither historically nor ethically cor-
persion and drawing on biblical traditions critical of Davidic monarchy rect. "Diasporized," that is disaggregated, identity allows the early me-
and of all claims to authenticity in the "land," in effect continue the dieval scholar Rabbi Sa'adya to be an Egyptian Arab who happens to be
"nomadic" strand of early judaism. For the Boyarins, this is the main- jewish and also a jew who happens to be an Egyptian Arab. Both of
stream of jewish historical experience. And they assert unequivocally that these contradictory propositions must be held together. (Boyarin and
the Zionist solution to the "problem" of diaspora, seen only negatively as Boyarin, 1993: 721)
galut ("exile"), is "the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination The passage expresses a powerful and moving vision, especially for a
... capturing judaism in a state" (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993: 722, 724). world riven by absolute oppositions of Arab and Jew. It need not detract
Drawing on the scholarship ofW D. Davies (1992) and others, they stress unduly from its force to ask whether Rabbi Sa'adya's disaggregated identity
the ambivalence in jewish tradition, from biblical times to the present, would have been restricted, or differently routed, if he had been a woman.
regarding claims for a territorial basis of identity "Return," defined as How did women "mix" cultures? And how have they transmitted, "gene-
exclusive possession of the "land," is not the authentic outcome of jewish alogically," the marks and messages of tradition? How have women em-
history Against the national/ethnic absolutism of contemporary Zionism, bodied diasporic judaism, and how has judaism marked, empowered, or
jonathan Boyarin writes, "we jews should recognize the strength that constrained their bodies?
comes from a diversity of communal arrangements and concentrations The Boyarins, in this essay at least, are silent on such questions. They
both among jews and with our several others. We should recognize that do briefly invoke feminist issues in the sentences that immediately follow
the copresence of those others is not a threat, but rather the condition of the passage quoted above.
our lives" (1992: 129).
The Boyarins' account of diaspora aspires to be both a model of (his- Similarly, we suggest that a diasporized gender identity is possible and
torical jewish experience) and a model for (contemporary hybrid identi- positive. Being a woman is some kind of special being, and there are
ties). This aim is apparent in the following passage: aspects of life and practice that insist on and celebrate that speciality But
this is not simply a fixing or a freezing of all practice and performance
Diasporic cultural identity teaches us that cultures are not preserved by of gender identity into one set of parameters. Human beings are divided
being protected from "mixing" but probably can only continue to exist into men and women for certain purposes, but that does not tell the
as a product of such mixing. Cultures, as well as identities, are constantly whole story of their bodily identity Rather than the dualism of gendered
being remade. While this is true of all cultures, diasporic jewish culture bodies and universal souls-the dualism that the Western tradition of-
lays it bare because of the impossibility of a natural association between fers-we can substitute partially jewish, partially Greek bodies, bodies
this people and a particular land-thus the impossibility of seeing jewish that are sometimes gendered and sometimes not. It is this idea that we
culture as a self-enclosed, bounded phenomenon. The critical force of are calling diasporized identity (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993: 721)
Arguments from antiessentialist feminism are implicitly deployed here, is devoted to critical ground-clearing, making space for multifaceted,
and the figure of "woman" is joined to that of the Jew to evoke a model nonreductive transmissions of the marks and messages of peoplehood.
of identity as a performed cluster/tension of positionalities. 21 Would it Against Pauline spirituality, they insist on carnal, socially differentiated
make the same sense to say that a body was sometimes black, sometimes bodies. The bodies are gendered male, which is to say they are unmarked
not, sometimes lesbian, sometimes not, sometimes poor, and so forth? Yes by gender-at least in this essay 22 (Daniel Boyarin's Carnal Israel [l993b],
and no. For we approach a level of generality at which the specificities as well as his work on Saint Paul [l993a], centrally engages feminist
and tensions of diasporist, racialist, class, sex, and gender determinations issues.) The Boyarins argue persuasively that the multiple social transmis-
are erased. Moreover, in this assertion of a common predicament we sions of genealogy need not be reduced to a "racial" matrix of identity But
glimpse the hegemonizing possibilities of diasporist discourse. Skimmed in deploying the language of "generation" and "lineage," they risk natural-
over in the identification of "diasporized" gender identity are a series of izing an androcentric kinship system. As in Gilroy's history, which leans
historical specifications. "Human beings are divided into men and women toward the diasporic practices of men, there is considerable room for
for certain purposes." Whose purposes? What are the unequal dividing specification of gendered diaspora experiences. 23
structures? How do these functional "purposes" appear from different sides
of the gender divide? I have already argued that it is important to resist Diasporic Pasts and Futures
the tendency of diasporic identities to slide into equivalence with disag-
gregated, positional, performed identities in general. As they necessarily The Boyarins ground their defense of diaspora in two thousand years
draw from antifoundationalist feminism, postcolonial critique, and various of rabbinical ideology, as well as in concrete historical experiences of
postmodernisms, contemporary diaspora discourses retain a connection dispersed community They state: "We propose Diaspora as a theoretical
with specific bodies, historical experiences of displacement that need to and historical model to replace national self-determination. To be sure,
be held in comparative tension and partial translatability this would be an idealized Diaspora generalized from those situations in
I have dwelt on one instance of too-quick diasporic equivalence in the Jewish history when the Jews were relatively free from persecution and
Boyarins' essay to identify a persistent risk in "theoretical" comparisons, a yet constituted by strong identity-those situations, moreover, within
risk that haunts my own project. Overall, the Boyarins maintain the which promethean Jewish creativity was not antithetical, indeed was syn-
specificity of their point of engagement, their "discrepant cosmopolitan- ergistic with a general cultural activity" (Boyarin and Boyarin, 1993: 7ll).
ism" (see Chapter l, above). As observing Ashkenazic Jews, they contest Jewish life in Muslim Spain before the expulsions-a rich, multireligious,
for a tradition, from within. But their theory and practice preclude this multicultural florescence-is one of the historical moments redeemed by
"inside" as an ultimate, or even principal, location. Perhaps, as they this vision. "The same figure, a Nagid, an Ibn Gabirol, or a Maimonides,
recognize, in allegorizing diasporism they run the risk of making Jewish can be simultaneously the vehicle for the preservation of traditions and of
experience again the normative model. But in the passage just cited, the mixing of cultures" (721). We enter, here, the whole "geniza world"
diaspora is portrayed in terms of an almost postcolonial vision ofhybridity. of S. D. Goitein, the Mediterranean of the eleventh to the thirteenth
Whose experience, exactly, is being theorized? In dialogue with whom? It centuries (and beyond) where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived, traded,
is clear that the Boyarins have been reading and reacting to minority and borrowed, and conversed in the process of maintaining distinct commu-
Third World authors. And Paul Gilroy is a close student of Walter lkn- nities.24
jamin. Moreover, Asian American diaspora theorists are reading hlad< There are no innocent periods of history, and the geniza world had its
British cultural studies. Diasporas, and diaspora theorists, cross paths in share of intolerance. Without reducing these centuries to a romanticized
a mobile space of translations, not equivalences. multiculturalism, one can recognize an extraordinary cosmopolitan net-
The Boyarins do not, in fact, say very much about the specific medta· work. As Goitein and his followers have shown, lines of identity were
nisms of "genealogy" (or "generation," as they also call it). Their chid dlort drawn differently, often less absolutely than in the modern era. For long
periods and in many places, people of distinct religions, races, cultures, sion, these historical resources, seem less anachronistic. If a viable political
and languages coexisted. Difference was articulated through connection, arrangement for sharing the land of Palestine finally emerges, jews and
not separation. In his book After Jews and Arabs, which draws generously Arabs will need to recover diasporist skills for maintaining difference in
on Goitein's research and vision, Ammiel Alcalay portrays a Levantine contact and accommodation.)
world characterized by cultural mixing, relative freedom of travel, an Max Weinreichs historical research has shown that the maintenance of
absence of ghettos, and multilingualism-the antithesis of current na- Ashkenazic jewishness (yidishkeyt) was not primarily the result of forced,
tional, racial, and religious separations. A sweeping work of counterhistory or voluntary, separation in distinct neighborhoods or ghettos. This rela-
and cultural critique, Alcalay's study begins to make room for womens tively recent "ghetto myth" supports an ethnic absolutism (as Gilroy might
histories, specified by class, in its world of intersecting cosmopolitan put it) that denies the interactive and adaptive process of historical jewish
cultures. In this he builds on Goiteins awareness of "the chasm between identity
the popular local subculture of women and the worldwide Hebrew book
culture of the men" (quoted in Alcalay, 1993: 138). This "chasm" need Ashkenazic reality is to be sought between the two poles of absolute
identity with and absolute remoteness from the coterritorial non-Jewish
not be taken to mean that men were cosmopolitan, and women not:
communities. To compress it into a formula, what the Jews aimed at was
affluent women, at least, traveled (sometimes alone), were involved in not isolation from Christians but insulation from Christianity Although,
business, held property, crossed cultural borders-but in particular ways throughout the ages, many jews must be supposed to have left the fold,
that jewish diaspora studies have only begun to recognize and detail. the community as a whole did succeed in surviving and developing. On
Alcalay's history gives "regional" concreteness to a diasporist jewish the other hand, the close and continuous ties of the jews with their
history which, in the Boyarins' version, is not connected to a specific neighbors, which used to be severed only for a while during actual
map/history "jewish history" is, of course, diverse and contested. In the outbreaks of persecutions, manifested themselves in customs and folk
present Israeli state, a division between Ashkenazic and Sephardic!Mizrahi beliefs; in legends and songs; in literary production, etc. The culture
populations reflects distinct diaspora experiences. As reclaimed in Alcalay's patterns prevalent among Ashkenazic jews must be classified as jewish,
book, the Sephardic strand offers a specific counterhistory of Arab/jewish but very many of them are specifically Ashkenazic. They are mid-course
coexistence and crossover. Sephardic/Mizrahi histories may also generate formations as those found wherever cultures meet along frontiers, in
"diasporist" critiques by Arab-jewish exiles within the Israeli "homeland" border zones or in territories with mixed populations. (Weinreich, 196 7:
2204)
(Lavie, 1992; Shohat, 1988, 1989). Sephardic regional roots and emerging
alliances with "Third World" or "Arab" movements can articulate networks Weinreichs prime specimen of Ashkenazic border culture is Yiddish, the
that decenter both the diasporist figure of the "wandering jew" and the "fusion language" of which he is the preeminent historian. He also lays
overwhelming importance of the Holocaust as defining moment in mod- great stress on the open-ended process of Talmudic interpretation through
ern 'Jewish history" In Israel, a minority of European jews have taken a which laws (dinim) and customs (minhogim) are continuously adapted and
leading role in defining an exclusivist jewish state-predicated on relig- clarified anew in the light of the Torah (which, the Yiddish saying goes,
ious, ethnic, linguistic, and racial subordinations. Sephardic/Mizrahi "contains everything"). The defining loyalty here is to an open text, a set
counterhistories question this state's hegemonic self-definition. Important of interpretable norms, not to a "homeland" or a even to an "ancient"
as these struggles may be, however, one should not overgeneralize from tradition. I have been quoting from a summary essay of 1967 in which
current hierarchical oppositions in Israel. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Weinreich characterizes Ashkenazic diasporic history without any men-
traditions are complex, containing nationalist and antinationalist strands. tion of return, Holy Land, or Israel. The distinction of jew and non-jew
There are strong resources for a diasporist anti-Zionism in pre-Holocaust is critical, but processual and nonessentialist: "It turns out that the very
Ashkenazi history (Indeed, the recent signing of a fragile peace accord existence of a division is much more important than the actual location
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization makes this vi- of the division line . . . More often than not, it appears, the distance
Diasporas 277
276 FUTURES
between jewish and non-jewish patterns is created not by a difference in can empower new ways to be "traditional" on a more than local scale.
the ingredients proper but rather by the way they are interpreted as Epeli Hau'ofa's recent recovery of a long history of Pacific travels in the
elements of the given system" (Weinreich, 1967: 2205). Difference, for projection of a new "Oceanian" regionalism ("our sea of islands") is a case
Weinreich, is a process of continual renegotiation in new circumstances in point (Hau'ofa et al., 1993).
of dangerous and creative coexistence. 25 The works I have been discussing maintain a clear, at times crushing,
What is at stake in reclaiming these different Ashkenazic and Sephardi<.: awareness of the obstacles to such futures, the constant pressure of trans-
diasporist visions, beyond their evident contribution to a critique of Zion- national capital and national hegemonies. Yet they express, too, a stubborn
ism and other exclusivist nationalisms? An answer is suggested by my own hope. They do not merely lament a world that has been lost. Rather, as
belated route to the geniza world and the company of Goitein admirers: in diaspora discourses generally, both loss and survival are prefigurative.
a remarkable hybrid work of ethnography/history/travel, In an Antique Of what? We lack a description and are reduced to the merely reactive,
Land, by Amitav Ghosh (1992). An Indian novelist-cum-anthropologist, stopgap language of "posts." The term "postcolonial" (like Arjun ~p
Ghosh writes of his fieldwork in the Nile Delta, and in the process padurais "postnational") makes sense only in an emergent, or utop1an,
uncovers a deep history of transnational connections between the Medi- context. 26 There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments,
terranean, Middle East, and South Asia-a history onto which he grafts tactics, discourses. "Post-" is always shadowed by "neo-." Yet "postcolo-
his own late-twentieth-century travel from one Third World place to nial" does describe real, if incomplete, ruptures with past structures of
another. In the dispersed Cairo geniza archive, he tracks the almost for- domination, sites of current struggle and imagined futures. Perhaps what
gotten story of an Indian traveler to Aden, the slave and business agent of is at stake in the historical projection of a geniza world or a black Atlantic
a jewish merchant residing in Mangalore. (The history of this archive is is the "prehistory of postcolonialism." Viewed in this perspective, the
itself an engrossing subplot.) Ghosh5 search for his twelfth-century pre- diaspora discourse and history currently in the air would be about recov-
cursor opens a window on the medieval Indian Ocean, a world of extraor- ering non-Western, or not-only-Western, models for cosmopolitan life,
dinary travel, trade, and coexistence among Arabs, jews, and South Asians. nonaligned transnationalities struggling within and against nation-states,
Like janet Abu-Lughod5 important overview, Before European Hegemony global technologies, and markets-resources for a fraught coexistence.
(1989), and like the earlier world-historical visions of Marshall Hodgson
(1993), Ghoshs account helps us remember/imagine "world systems,"
economic and cultural, that preceded the rise of an expansionist Europe.
In the late twentieth century it is difficult to form concrete pictures of
transregional networks not produced by and/or resisting the hegemony of
Western techno-industrial society These histories of alternate cosmopoli-
tanisms and diasporic networks are redeemable (in a Benjaminian sense)
as crucial political visions: worlds "after" jews and Arabs, "after" the West
and the "Rest," and "after" natives and immigrants.
Such visions and counterhistories can support strategies for nontotaliz-
ing "globalization from below." The phrase, paired with "globalization
from above," is proposed by Brecher et al. (1993) to name transregional
social movements that both resist and use hegemonizing technologies and
communications. This constitutive entanglement is, I have argued, char-
acteristic of modern diaspora networks. Entanglement is not necessarily
cooptation. Recalling older histories of discrepant cosmopolitan contacts

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What is the essay asking about contemporary invocations of diaspora?

How does the author argue diasporic practices cannot be reduced?

ROUTE s

Travel and Translation

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

It has become inadequate to see Aguilillan migration as a movement

memories of slavery and in continuing experiences of racial terror casts a

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