Cultural Diaspora Research Articles

Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest, most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East, yet the complex world Arabic-speaking immigrants have created there is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. In this volume, Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock bring together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. The book goes behind the bulletproof glass in Iraqi Chaldean liquor stores. It explores the role of women in a Sunni mosque and the place of nationalist politics in a Coptic church. It follows the careers of wedding singers, Arabic calligraphers, restaurant owners, and pastry chefs. It examines the agendas of Shia Muslim activists and Washington-based lobbyists and looks at the intimate politics of marriage, family honor, and adolescent rebellion. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, while over fifty photographs provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected, images. In their efforts to represent an ethnic/immigrant community that is flourishing on the margins of pluralist discourse, the contributors to this book break new ground in the study of identity politics, transnationalism, and diaspora cultures.

Culture of the Chinese Diaspora

Culture of the Chinese Diaspora

Von Ave bis Zores

There have to be named mainly four epoques of linguistic import from Semitic languages into Germanic and German: prehistory transmitting the oriental legacy by the media of Greek and Latin; the influence of Jewish diaspora culture and of Christian mission in the Early Middle Ages; the time of close cultural contact between East and West since the crusades; last but not least the impact of Jiddish culture in Modern Times.

Japanese Bankers in the City of London: Language, Culture and Identity in the Japanese Diaspora

Japanese Bankers in the City of London: Language, Culture and Identity in the Japanese Diaspora

‘Friedliche imperialisten,’ Deutsche auslandsvereine und auswaertige kulturpolitik, 1906-1918. 2 vols

Historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American history, as well as historians of ethnic cultures in geographic diasporas, need to pay serious attention to Juergen Kloosterhuis’s two-volume book entitled German Ethnic Organizations Abroad and Foreign Cultural Policy 1906–1918. This published Ph.D. dissertation represents a major departure from mainstream scholarship as it asks a new and important question about German war guilt: What role did cultural politics play in German efforts to reach great power status between 1871 and 1920? The result is a nuanced, sophisticated micro study that examines how the ideas and practices of German cultural policy evolved in the context of Great Power competition.Kloosterhuis pays particular attention to Kurt Rietzler, the close adviser of German chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. Rietzler argued in favor of a third, nonviolent path toward Great Power status for Germany: economic imperialism. This, according to Kloosterhuis, represents an overlooked alternative that needs to be wedged between the other two political options that are by now very familiar: the apocalyptic yearnings of class warfare by German communists and socialists, and the racial madness of German fascists. Rietzler insisted on the possibility of peaceful imperialism based on economic competition, a prescription from which several ingredients where finally taken after 1945.Next follows a gem of a chapter. Whereas until 1914 German cultural policy had evolved into a professionalized “quiet tool” through ongoing interactions between German governments and ethnic German clubs abroad, this changed once World War I broke out. Kloosterhuis masterfully demonstrates how the maelstrom of war itself turned governmental cultural policy into a new, distinct process that militarized previous authentic expressions of diaspora culture into a propaganda tool that had to be dominated by the German state. This militarization of cultural policy, unlike the policy of economic imperialism, left no room for diaspora self-definition or self-expression. Because Germany had to win the war, cultural policy and ethnic groups abroad had to be reshaped aggressively to fit the self-destructive needs of war propaganda; the Ger-man loss of World War I changed the function of cultural policy once again. In the midst of the collapse of the monarchic political system, German diplomatic bureaucrats earmarked once again the “weapon of culture” as one of the few real remaining tools that Germany could deploy in the new international order created through the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles.In the second volume Kloosterhuis provides an impressive, probably exhaustive catalog, that lists all ethnic clubs abroad in the geographical regions of Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, Near East, and the Far East. Australia is not included. More important, this catalog lists the year and place of publications for each organization.This impressive scholarly achievement is a thrilling invitation to move beyond the painful clichés of Polka and Gemuetlichkeit when it comes to the study of German ethnic communities abroad. Kloosterhuis creates an intellectual and bibliographical foundation on which we can stand and ask deeper questions. For example, his findings beg for a comparative study of other ethnicities abroad. How did the experiences, expressions, and practices of Japanese, Chinese, French, British, Italian, Spanish, U.S. and Syrian ethnic organizations in Latin America compare to those of Germans? Another future research topic would be a comparison between the cultural policy practices of the German monarchy, the Weimar Period, the Third Reich and Federal Republic of Germany (1949–89). There can be no better foundation to study the repeated instrumen-talization and manipulation of European and Asian cultural diasporas for the purposes of Great Power politics in the twentieth century. Unfortunately the book has not yet been translated into English or Spanish.

Carnival Radio: Soca-Calypso Music and Afro-Caribbean Voice in a Restricted Service License Station in Manchester

This article examines the sociologial significance of the concepts of voice, dialect, and accent, using as a case study local area commercial and nonprofit radio stations in the northwest of England. The article argues that whereas much of local and regional radio is dominated by a form of working-class voice, this tends to be homogenized and has little relationship to the reality of distinct spatially located communities. However, taking the case of a small scale, restricted service license Afro-Caribbean station in the Moss Side and Hulme inner-city area of Manchester, the author argues that radio can serve the socio-cultural needs of specific and identifiable communities. He elaborates this argument by looking at soca-calypso music, which was a key feature of the station's broadcasting, and adopts Barthes's concept of “grain of voice” as well as the ideas of Appadurai, Gilroy, Bhabha, and Hall in the cultural diaspora and new ethnicities research. The article concludes that similar cultural strategies need to be applied to address the sociocultural problems facing white working-class communities in transition.

Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings

For Prespa Albanians, both at home in Macedonia and in the diaspora, the most significant events of any year are wedding ceremonies. During days and weeks of festivities, wedding celebrants interact largely through singing, defining and renegotiating the structure of their social world and establishing a profound cultural touchstone for Prespa communities around the world. This account of Prespa weddings combines photographs, song texts and recordings of the wedding music. Jane Sugarman focuses her account on notions of gender identity, demonstrating the capacity of singing to generate and transform relations of power within Prespa society. The study offers a considerable contribution to the analysis of music and gender, music in diaspora cultures, and the social constitution of self and subjectivity.

Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff

Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff Dalia Kandiyoti (bio) Recently proliferating theories and politics of migration and diaspora have focused on issues of assimilation, nativism, and nationalism without sufficient consideration of one important concept: the discourse of place as a generative source of culture, and, significantly, the role of place in the experience of displacement and immigrant identity. 1 This is a curious gap in critical thinking, especially since the current border crises and immigration panics are about constant redefinitions of place, territory, and frontiers. Even the postmodernist stress on theories of “the local” and the politics of location has produced relatively little thought about the intersections of territory, immigration, and narrative. The nature of places (of origin or dispersal) is crucial to studies of displacement and transition, for the migrant and the conquered have to negotiate new ways of being in concrete spaces with specific attributes. The returning regionalism in literary criticism and politics relies all too often on new versions of patriotism (see Dainotto) without the benefit of a dynamic interpretation of places that may incorporate change and movement. [End Page 77] In a recent article, Richard Sennett writes about the impact of globalization on places, arguing that “the identity of places has weakened, becoming more hybrid in composition because of the impact of global labour migration; . . . the power of place has weakened” (13). While globalization has certainly brought manifold changes, the contention that places as such were once homogenous and not “hybrid” or that they used to be self-determining (13) is not tenable. As geographer Doreen Massey has suggested, “places for centuries have been complex where numerous and conflicting communities intersected” (6) and never provided “seamless coherence of character” or “comforting, bounded enclosure” (8). Similarly, while certain fictions and criticisms of “the local” focus on static, unchanging place-identities, diasporic literatures may provide an alternative production of the local in which change, heterogeneity, and instability define place. In this essay, I examine turn-of-the-century immigrant narratives that thematize place and localness to configure identity-in-displacement. If “the local” may promise to render a sense of permanence, repetition, and security, in what manner then did immigrant writing highlighting mobility, change, and insecurity draw on ideologies of place? At the crossroads of “the local” and immigrant fiction, each of the two Russian-Jewish authors I consider, Abraham Cahan in the U.S. and Alberto Gerchunoff in Argentina, challenges the ideology of location as primordial or fixed and conceives a locus of mobility by refashioning, to a certain measure, the languages of rootedness in American literary and cultural nationalisms and adding a Jewish inflection to them. Through this analysis of their pioneering works and their contexts, I show how the trajectory of immigrant identity, and especially Jewish identity at the turn of the century, is recreated through space and spatial discourse. James Clifford has argued in an important article on diaspora that “the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (308; emphasis added). In the works of Cahan and Gerchunoff, it is partly through this redefinition of space and the local that displaced culture gets reassembled and literary genre is modified. Localization and territory are doubly important for fictions of the Jewish experience, given the problematic nature and history of Jewish territoriality. And for turn-of-the-century East European Jews, the configuration [End Page 78] of the new American spaces was to be permanent. For, as historians such as Ronald Takaki have pointed out, these Jews were not immigrants; they were refugees. Possible options for other turn-of-the-century migrants such as transnational mobility, plurilocality, and return were denied them. In the U.S., over 50 percent of the Italians in the 1880–1924 period returned home, and many “commuted,” as it were, for seasonal work (Thernstorm 1036). In Argentina, out of the four million foreigners who entered the country between 1890 and 1914, 2.4 million stayed permanently (Solberg 33). For East European Jews, the urgent task of redefining culture in the new diaspora required...

The Salon Album of Vera Sudeikin-Stravinsky

Before meeting Igor Stravinsky in 1921 in Paris, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin-Stravinsky (1888-1982) was already known as the Muse of the Muses in what had been the bohemian, intellectual life of St. Petersburg-Petrograd. Hers was the Silver Age of Russian culture, when symbolism reigned in the cabarets and the artistic process itself was a form of celebration. As the habitues of this world fled the Bolsheviks, Vera, an artist and writer in her own right, managed to preserve their heritage in an extraordinary literary production: an album containing poems, sketches, fragments of music, and other dedications by some of the most influential Russian cultural figures of the day. The Album, reproduced here for the first time, is both a record of a cultural diaspora and a monument to the Russian fin de siecle. In 1917 Vera fled to the south of Russia with her then-husband Sergei Sudeikin, a renowned painter and stage designer for the Ballets Russes. They traveled three years throughout the Crimea, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, organizing artistic gatherings at many of their stops. Vera recorded her impressions of the journey and along the way invited her famous friends to make creative offerings to her Album. Together they produced a literature of loss--of city and country, of childhood, of an entire era. The material, much of which has never been published, includes poems by Osip Mandelstam, Konstantin Balmont, and Mikhail Kuzmin; musical fragments by Vladimir Pol and Igor Stravinsky; and drawings and watercolors by Boris Grigoriev, Lado Gudiashvili, Sergei Sudeikin, the Zdanevich brothers, and Vera herself. The Album survived war, revolution, and exile, but it was never published until now. In this edition, which reproduces every page of the Album in full color, John Bowlt uses Vera's diaries along with many other sources to explain the stories behind the entries. The biographical information, dates, and places, all accompanying each entry, will help today's readers form a vivid picture of a fascinating era, and an understanding of an extraordinary woman and the cultural liaisons that made up her world.

“Critical Post-Judaism”; or, Reinventing a Yiddish Sensibility in a Postmodern Age

Within months of each other, two articles on Yiddish language and culture appeared in the public press during the summer of 1996. First, in the pages of The New Republic, Harvard's chair of Yiddish Studies. Ruth Wisse, addressed the question of a Yiddish revival in a skeptical, even pessimistic, piece titled “Shul Daze: Is Yiddish Back from the Dead?” Wisse contends that Yiddish no longer has any validity as a vital cultural idiom, and that as it currently exists, in its secular incarnation, it can only be viewed as an object of academic inquiry. She writes of misplaced hopes among various journalists, who call on her for expert confirmation that we are now witnessing a renaissance of this otherwise near-extinct language. Such journalists, explains Wisse, often mention the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts, the Yiddish film retrospectives currently en vogue at urban arts houses, and the international boom in Klezmer music. “I am tempted to tell my callers what they want to hear,” remarks Wisse, “yes, because my students can now study Sholem Aleichem in the original and write Yiddish letters to their grandparents—make that their bobbes and zeydes—a Yiddish renaissance is in the offing. But the reference to my academic post reminds me that I'm not paid to lie” (Wisse 17). Yet perhaps it isn’t really a lie that Wisse is being asked to tell after all. At least, that is what the Forward’s cultural editor Jonathan Rosen would like us to believe. In his “A Dead Language, Yiddish Lives,” published in The New York Times Magazine, Rosen calls attention to the fact that Yiddish, though still largely considered a ghostly remnant of the past, a leftover from the tum-of-thc-century migrations of Jews from Eastern Europe, is now experiencing a new life among younger Jews in the American diaspora, in particular among those searching for a source of identification beyond the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish state. Rosen cites renowned playwright Tony Kushner, who expresses equal disappointment with the state of Israel and melting pot America and, in comparison, views Yiddish culture as “less butch and macho” than Israeli culture; together with other Jews of his generation, Kushner claims that through Yiddish he is “reawakening to Diaspora culture” (Rosen 26). Rosen observes that a growing segment of gay Jews (the Yiddish equivalent to the Act Up slogan, “shvaygen=toyt”—also the title of a Klezmatics record album—adorns a t-shirt in the article's accompanying illustration) have taken to a redefined Yiddishkeit. In recent years, Rosen suggests, diversity has replaced assimilation as an American goal, and in this climate Yiddish may have the chance to flourish again. For Rosen, Yiddish is the language which best represents what he calls “the paradox of the American diaspora: the wish to feel different and at home” (27).

Home is Where You Make It: Repatriation and Diaspora Culture among Iranians in Sweden

This article examines attitudes toward returning to Iran among Iranian refugees in Sweden. Differences between Iranians are traced to various factors including economic position and political invol ...

Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?

The Black Atlantic is a rich, rewarding, and immensely ambitious work. Predicating itself upon the assumption that “the history and expressive culture of the African diaspora, the practice of racial slavery, [and] … the narratives of European imperial conquest… require all simple periodisations of the modern and the postmodern to be drastically rethought” (42), it takes as its project nothing less than the formulation of a new and comprehensive theory of modernity (and of modernist cultural practice). By insisting on the constitutive “internality of blacks to the West” (5), this new theory challenges the nation-centeredness, the Eurocentrism, and the rationalistic logocentrism of the most influential theories of modernity from Hegel onwards.

Is a Counterculture of Modernity a Theory of Modernity?

The Black Atlantic is a rich, rewarding, and immensely ambitious work. Predicating itself upon the assumption that “the history and expressive culture of the African diaspora, the practice of racia...

Disputes at the boundaries of ‘new internationalism’

The Institute of New International Visual Arts (INIVA) — which is funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain — has been given a brief to recognise that all peoples and cultures today are part of the same world... to develop new ways of looking at contemporary visual arts and their histories throughout the world, and to broaden their framework beyond the narrow boundaries of prevailing Eurocentric debate. The cultural and intellectual promise of INIVA rests on establishing a critical negotiation of the cultural formations that are emerging as a .consequence of the twin pressures of cultural diasporas and socio-economic globalisation. Cultural difference is not an optional addition but a constitutive force in the dynamism of plural societies.

Cockaigne to Diddy Wah Diddy: Fabulous Geographies and Geographic Fabulations

ALTHOUGH the fashion for studies of folktale diffusion has waned dramatically, the origins of Afro-American narratives are the subject of continued debate, a prominent issue in the broader controversy over the sources of black culture in the African Diaspora. While the international associations of American tales are seldom self-evident, the clear affinities between the Afro- and Euro-American samples indeed question the degree to which enslaved Africans and their descendants borrowed from, contributed to, or cooperated in 'European' folklore in the New World. The most recent round in this dispute proceeds from Richard Dorson's claim that only a small percentage of the Afro-American tale repertoire derives from Africa, a position vigorously contested by folklorists and anthropologists who discern a much greater African contribution in New World narrative.' Ironically, both Dorson and his Africanist critics advance their views as affirmation of the viability and vitality of black culture in the hostile Americas, yet both have resorted to untenable generalizations subverted by their abuse of inconclusive and inconsistent tale indexes. In their attempt to quantify the source of the Afro-American sample in its entirety, they have compiled expansive tabulations enumerating 'reports' of various proposed types and motifs from the available bibliographies, though anyone who actually assembles and examines the texts (or rather the accessible texts) cited under a selection of entries from these works soon recognizes that, during the daunting process of preliminary classification for subsequent analysis, indexers have as an expedient constantly classed together transparently unrelated narratives, an aberration that can only be rectified through detailed historic-geographic investigation of individual tale categories. Despite the claims of Dorson and his detractors, the current editions of the type and motif indexes in themselves are patently unreliable as indicators of genetic relations between the stories catalogued therein.2 Moreover, such sweeping surveys of second-hand reports from tentative reference aids create the fallacious impression of the impersonal, wavelike automigration of folktales,3 since these speculations on the 'probable' dissemination of narratives are typically unimpeded by the very cultural conflicts that epitomize the topic; that is, even precluding positive identification of European or African antecedents or absolute demonstration of American origins for individual stories, the contested corpus itself suggests that tradition bearers from inimical cultures found frequent opportunity to communicate artfully, a neglected phenomenon essential to understanding tale-telling and transmission as human activities. The example to be discussed here is particularly intriguing in this regard; according to some black narrators, the tale of the Land of Cockaigne diffused from European to Afro-American oral tradition because of, not in spite of, this antagonism. The proposed tale-type for Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland (Aarne-Thompson 1930) actually subsumes a number of motifs describing a realm of miraculous abundance or employing the familiar theme of the World Turned Upside Down, motifs whose wide distribution and variety suggest that many are independent inventions rather than cognate migrants.

Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory

Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. 2. Anthropological Ancestors and Interpretation Theory: Boas, Malinowski, and Evans-Pritchard. 3. Peter Winch and Ordinary Language Philosophy. 4. The Neo-Popperians and the Logic of One Science: I.C. Jarvie and Robin Horton. 5. Ordinary Language Philosophy in Question: Steven Lukes and Alasdair MacIntyre. 6. Beyond Explanation and Understanding: The Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. 7. Hermeneutics and Critical Anthropology: The Synthesis of Practical and Critical Reason. 8. Modernism and Postmodernism in Anthropology. 9. Bounded Cultures - Bounded Selves: The Challenge of Cultural Diasporas. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Survival of a Culture: Tibetan Refugees in India

Throughout human history there has always been a flow of persecuted and dislocated people. Today, in the age of totalitarianism, that flow has become a flood. In our time, millions have fled from reigns of terror in their homelands seeking refuge and a new life in another society and culture. Most have no other choice but to escape from intolerable threat and danger, to break with the bonds of their heritage and try to become part of a different national tradition, contributing some of their own values to the new country of their choice. For most of them, their past is gone, their life has changed under the pressure of new demands caused by the need for assimilation. In that sense Tibetans who fled to India are not ordinary refugees. They have taken refuge not as individuals alone, but rather as a national polity that has escaped the destruction taking place in Tibet and has sought and been given the protective mantle of a neighboring friendly country. Both a people and cultural institutions have taken refuge in a host setting and have demonstrated both strength and survivability. That is the extraordinary and unique story of the Tibetans in India, a story that demonstrates the vitality of the Tibetan culture and of the people-the one hundred thousand who fled with their leader, the Dalai Lama, from Tibet across the Himalayas to the safety of a land with its own great religious tradition, a land originally the major source of Tibetan Buddhism. India, the land of Gandhi and the land where the Buddha once lived, was the best sanctuary Tibetan polity could have found. Clearly, the survival of Tibetan culture in the Indian diaspora is one of the wondrous and hopeful events of our time. Twenty-six years ago, when the Dalai Lama arrived in India after his incredible escape from Lhasa over the high Himalayan mountain passes,