Week 10: (Re)thinking Diasporas

http://www.cnas.org/node/723?gclid=COXDk--7464CFQKEhwod7iLcaA

 This week's articles offer different ways of defining, using and perceiving Diasporas from the lens of other theorists and academic studies. Rather than just knowing the differences between "Old" and "New" Diasporas or the five characteristics that define Diaspora, these articles offer different modes of thinking in terms of diaspora. Though it has been three years since the Obama administration issued the Security Strategy plan to maintain a positive global relation with the Asian-Pacific region, how does this impact patterns of migration to and from Asia?

Dispesh Chakrabarty’s “Notes towards a Conversation between Area Studies and Diasporic Studies,” purposes the potential benefits that area studies and diasporic studies offer each other. Chakrabarty first gives context about area studies, originating from U.S. liberal education for Americans in the postwar period. The development of area studies are carried out by long intensive study of other parts of the world and their economies, histories, government, sociology, and arts. However, area studies remain to have Eurocentric assumptions for studying cultures that were considered foreign. He uses Subaltern Studies, “a mutant of area studies,” as an example to demonstrate what area studies can contribute to understanding South Asian diaspora. Subaltern studies are a series that comes out of Delhi for an American audience to understand specificities of India’s history in a less, compact way and thus, it is also transnational for it is distributed to over four continents of Europe, North America, India and recently Australia.  He uses Subaltern Studies to reflect the possible relationships it has with South Asian studies by comparing it to Public Culture that is committed to a space that is produced by the interstices between nations and territories by the economic and cultural processes of globalization. They both share the political imagination that visualizes the international solidarity of scholars and activists to fight against global and regional forces of injustices and inequalities. The differences between both are that Public Culture expresses the need to “think ourselves beyond the nation” whereas Subaltern Studies commits to operating intellectually within a framework for which the nation, not nation-state, is still a salient and resilient category. This understanding of Subaltern Studies helps us rethink diaspora in that the nation and its multiplicity and heterogeneity of people, languages, cultures, class, religious and political beliefs, also shape the experiences and the identity of its people in diaspora.
                Chakrabarty also reflects on how diaspora studies may impact area studies or Subaltern Studies to expand in five different areas. These areas include raising questions about the histories within family dynamics such as sexuality, gender, aging, bodily practices; reflecting and defining generation; memory belonging to different generations within diaspora; the politics of identity in being “South Asian” in western democracies; and globalization of South Asian class formations and cultures. He also notes two areas in which diasporic studies can use area studies: interactive multiculturalism and the area of creative and performance arts within diaspora. He goes on to say that areas studies scholarship has been focused on centers that are cultural, statist, bureaucratic and familial whereas diasporic studies, politics of multiculturalism, and theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appardurai lead us away from the imagination of centralizing structures.

Robert G. Lee’s “Crossing Borders of Disciplines and Departments” discusses the experiences of Asian immigrants in the U.S. after the 1996 Congress authorization of Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport any immigrant who had any conviction that was violent or non-violent and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks intensified the attack on immigrants altogether. He goes on to introduce the next two chapters written by Nancy Abelmann and Epifanio San Jaun Jr. Lee highlights San Juan’s assertion to build Asian American Studies with which to change the world rather than understand American society. I agree with San Juan’s assertion because in the history of Asian American studies, it derived from transnational solidarity with the counter-culture revolution, anti-Vietnam war movements, Third World Liberation Front, etc. These were anti-imperialist movements across the globe that help produced Asian American studies and thus, it would be ironic that Asian American studies do not help produce global change as well.

Nancy Abelmann’s “Anthropology, Asian Studies, Asian American Studies” uses Max Gluckman’s Closed Systems and Open Minds to demonstrate the micropolitics of academic localities as closed systems by championing naiveté – “the treatment of complex social phenomena ‘as simple, crude, or gross” – so as to ‘get on with the job,” and that the (mis)communication in those localites, particularly the student body need to have open minds. In her anecdote of receiving a letter from the Anthropology Department’s Courses and Curriculum Committee that expressed their support in her course if she just limit by design just to English literature or that she cut her 500 words and eight citations devoted to document the coordinates of transnationally shared anthropological history of the portrayal of “Korean” “Culture” just because it did not follow the long-standing organizational, institutional and ideological configurations of the department and university. To better understand her analogy to Gluckman’s theory, she states that “What these ever so micropolitics reveal, I think, is a university – and I do not take ours to be exceptional or uniform – closing its systems, and not necessarily open-mindedly,” (206-61). Furthermore, Abelmann argues that culture talks disrupts and decenters received configurations of knowledge. She believes that today’s classrooms should be held open to have conversations with the students that constitute to their identities and identification of their daily lives. She calls for professors to have an open mind for student’s questions, needs, stories, and imagination that contribute to the diversity in the classrooms of the university which have everything to do with diaspora and displacements. Therefore, to enable open systems is also to invite open minds.

Ien Ang’s “Beyond ‘Asian Diasporas’” proposes her definitions of the classical and today’s diaspora to further understand and move beyond the notion of Asian Diasporas. She says that the difference between the diaspora then and now is the experience of trauma. For example, she states that “the classic definition of diaspora emphasized the traumatic past of the dispersed group, in today’s usage trauma is located as much in the present, in the contemporary experiences of marginalization or discrimination in the nation-state of residence,” (286). In focusing about today’s usage of diaspora, Ang asserts that the term not only involves experiences of trauma and marginalization in the present moment, but it can also become a description of empowerment, enrichment and expansion as well. This means that out of the trauma of marginalization that people in today’s diaspora experience, produces identity and community that resists the power of nation-states. An example Ang gives are the “modern Chinese transnationalism” that Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini refer to as powerful diasporic Chinese business networks in the racial/cultural/economic profile of contemporary global capitalism, (287). This means that the nation-states no longer have full control of its populations’ composition or the capability to command people’s movements in and out of their territories. How does this help us understand beyond Asian diasporas? Ang makes a good point that Asia is just an idea, constructed in our imagination, and that construction hides the fact that Asia is actually quite heterogeneous in terms of people, histories, economies, cultures. Thus, Asians as a people do not exist, because there are so many different ways of seeing people as Asian.  When the terms Asian and diasporas are together, Ang means to look at Asia and Asians with a diasporic point of view that emphasizes on the displacement, flows and movements of the subject whom ultimately embodies multiple histories and identities that maintain contradictory linkages of the past while experiencing disconnection within some origin from Asia.

Sauling C. Wong’s “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” discusses denationalization in three cultural phenomenon that he calls the easing of cultural nationalist concerns, the growing permeability between “Asian” and “Asian American,” and the shifting from a domestic American to a diasporic perspective.  The easing of cultural nationalist concerns is due to the changing demographics of a more diverse Asian American population and the theoretical critiques of gender, class, and sexuality within Asian American studies is denationalizing because it challenges the American structures of power that are also present in Asian American studies. The denationalization in the permeability of “Asian” and “Asian American,” arises from a larger global movement of transnational capital, whose cultural consequences include a normalization of multiple subjectivities, migrations, and border-crossings.  Lastly, the shift from a domestic American to a diasporic perspective in Asian American studies is denationalizing because “A diasporic perspective also provides the only way to capture the complexities of multiple migrations and dispersed Asian-origin families, which are not at all uncommon in the population designated as Asian Americans,” (10).  This means that the shift from a domestic point of view of Asian Americans studies to a diasporic view will encompass the diversity of migrations and dispersions of families originating from Asia. In his Reservations subsection, he highlights the dangers and consequences of uncritically participating in denationalization and the risks can be grouped into two categories of subsuming into master narratives and depoliticization occluded by theoretically self-critiquing.

                Regina Lee’s “Theorizing Diaspora: Three Types of Consciousness,” argues that diasporic communities tend to exhibit three forms of consciousness which are idealization of homeland, boutique multicultural manifestation, and transitional/transformational identity politics. The psychological state of homeland idealism within a diasporic community represents their ambivalence – having both negative and positive feelings toward home and host land – and thus is always marginalized for being physically absent from the homeland and socially excluded from the host society and its narrative. As the nation-states of both home and host countries tend to construct themselves as positive images with positive narratives, diasporic communities that idealize the homeland are trapped in the present because they are limited to an extent of which their narratives can recover those histories. The second psychological state of boutique multicultural manifestation is when diasporic/ethnic minorities within multicultural societies use the fact of their difference, highlighting their visibility, to gain recognition and some kind of acceptance into the host society. Though this is superficial and based on systematic exploitation of cultural plurality of ethnicities and the economic structuring of those groups into a subclass, it guarantees value-added capital and economic surpluses. And lastly, diasporas as being in a transitional or transformational state implies that they are still evolving personally as well as at community level and theorizations about their diasporic condition are works in progress that have to be constantly revised. Thus this type of diasporic consciousness enables the diasporic subject to be aware of its roots in more than one history and its location in the present as well as in the past.

                David Palumbo-Liu’s “Asian Diaspora, and Yet…” argues that the rubric of Asian Diasporas demonstrates a basic contradiction of diaspora as being transported into the modern and postmodern periods. He views the term Asian Diasporas as a rubric that subordinates the variety of case histories and attempts to find the conceptual, historical, theoretical, and political justification for it. He analyzes the notion of diaspora from the editors of this volume, Oxford’s English Dictionary’s definition of experience to further challenge a statement made in the editor’s Introduction that they deploy the word logic to avoid the claim that the state is in fact homogenous. He reveals the basic contradiction of diaspora as having “to name both a difference and a sameness at once, and inside and an outside, a co-occupation, and this is its tension,” because of this “partial belonging” (281). He questions the term Asian as an oppositional definition that differentiates Asia from the West and tends to reinforce categories that are broad and has undifferentiating a fashion. Perhaps the biggest argument he makes is that the contradiction of diaspora is the transposition of the term from a premodern to modern and postmodern carrying the historical and foundational element of disenfranchisement and statelessness that drives the identification with home. This means that however we use the term as political or cultural identification, we should be aware of the possibility that for some diaspora is the loss of something real and irrecoverable.

(1) According to Chakrabarty, what is the conversation between area studies and diasporic studies and how can they potentially benefit each other? (Reader)

(2) What were some of the experiences of Asian immigrants after the 1996 Congress authorization of Immigration and Naturalization Service of deportation and give an example how the 9/11 terrorist attacks intensified the attacks against certain Asian American communities? (Displacements)

(3)How does Abelmann apply Gluckman’s Closed Systems and Open Minds to her anecdotes of the micropolitics of academic localities and (mis)communication within these localities, particularly the student body?   (Displacements)

(4) What is Ien Ang’s definition and the usage of today’s diaspora and how does that help us understand her when she says, “There are no Asian diasporas, only ways of seeing diasporas as Asian?” (Reader)

(5) Explain the three ways that Wong discusses denationalization of Asian American cultural criticism? (Reader)

(6) Explain the three psychological states that Regina Lee argues that diasporic communities exhibit and what are the benefits of each? (Reader)

(7) What is the contradiction that Palumbo-Lui sees in the transposition of the term diaspora and how does the term Asian Diasporas demonstrate this contradiction? (Asian Diasporas)

By Laura Vu