The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course?

Abstract

38 A & Q Rhodes, John David, and Elena Gorfinkel, eds. 2011. Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Yiman. 2008. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and Its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1: 9–21. Yomota, Inuhiko. 2003. “Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku” [The popular imagination of Asian cinema]. In Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku [Popular cinema in Asia], 9–30. Tokyo: Seidosha. Zhang, Yingjin. 2007a. “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies .” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovikova and Kathleen E. Newman, 124–36. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007b. “Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Inter-disciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, no. 1: 27–40. The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course? Evelyn Hu-DeHart As someone who has been linking the term diaspora to Chinese since the 1970s, when I gingerly began my investigation into the history of Chinese migration to Latin America and the Caribbean—a large region of the Americas not commanding much attention at the time in the consideration of the wide and massive dispersal of Chinese from their homeland to practically all corners of the world, from the Ming Dynasty through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first—I feel it necessary now to reassess the continuing deployment of this term within diaspora studies in general and Asian and Asian American studies in particular. Thirty some years ago, the term diaspora was not yet familiar to most people in and out of academia and was certainly not applied to the Chinese or any other wandering people aside from Jews, for whom the term seems to have been invented. Although the word was Greek, the Jews claimed it after expulsion from their homeland and subsequent worldwide dissemination over the course of two millennia, beginning in the ancient world. These dispersed Jewish communities-in-exile maintain a collective memory of, and fierce loyalty to, their original homeland, pledging as their primary mission as a people and a culture to regain and return to that homeland and to restore it to its former security and A & Q 39 prosperity. To live in perpetual exile and yearn for return outside the homeland is the essence of the Jewish diaspora. Moreover, that desire to return home from the diaspora has been fueled by a troubled relationship with host societies that cannot or will not accept them as social equals. According to some diasporic Jews, anti-Semitism has not abated but only intensified with time.1 Most Jews understand diaspora because it has been embedded into their collective identity.2 Many others, if they hear the word diaspora, would likely connect it to Jewish history. A few might also have heard talk about the African diaspora of the modern world. Accompanying the rise of capitalism and the colonial reach of Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America for markets and raw materials, the African slave trade saw for over four centuries the forced removal and sale of millions of men and women who were dispersed throughout the Americas as chattel slaves. Unified initially by the dehumanizing regime of New World (plantation) slavery and later reinforced by the demeaning regime of systematic and institutionalized racism, descendants of slaves identify with each other through race, as “black people,” and have created multiple expressions of blackness through culture—music, dance, art, literature—throughout the diaspora. In contrast to the Jewish diaspora, and some notable exceptions notwithstanding ,3 most descendants of slaves have not been driven by a returnto -Africa movement but invested more in dismantling antiblack racism and fighting for citizenship, civil, and equal rights in the postemancipation , postcolonial diaspora. Although not as deeply entrenched as diaspora is among Jews, for African Americans and descendants of slaves across the Americas, the term may have resonance. At the time that Africans were being forcibly removed from their ethnic homelands, or deceptively induced to leave home, Chinese people had already been actively trading around the South China seas and across the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa...