Diasporic Imagination Research Articles

Editors' Note

Editors’ Note Ng Chin-keong and Tan Chee-Beng, Chief Editors Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Chinese Overseas. The study of Chinese overseas has been growing in importance since World War II. With Chinese in almost all the countries in the world, their presence as well as their global networks and contribution to local societies have been the focus of interest of scholars, politicians, business people, and lay people. To date there are scholars and students of Chinese overseas all over the world. Their writings are mainly published in books and a diverse range of journals in social studies. However, there is not one internationally-refereed journal that is professionally devoted to the study of Chinese overseas. JCO aims to fill this gap by providing an interdisciplinary forum for the promotion of research and writing on Chinese overseas. There are many terms for ethnic Chinese of different nationalities living outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. We have decided to use the now popular and hopefully not so controversial term "Chinese overseas" as the equivalent of haiwai huaren in Chinese. We are aware of the politics of labels, and in this journal, we allow authors to use their preferred term as long as it is consistent within an article, and is academically sound. For example, "overseas Chinese" may be used to emphasize the historical perspective, and in some contexts, reads better in English than "Chinese overseas." In yet other contexts it may be convenient to use the term "Chinese diaspora" when the global space is emphasized. We support the liberal choice of a convenient term, provided one is aware of the political implications of the various labels. There are five articles, two reports and five book reviews in this inaugural issue. The five research articles show the importance of using the transnational perspective to study Chinese overseas and that the study of China too can benefit from studying Chinese overseas. Prof. Wang Gungwu provides us with a perceptive discussion of Chinese writers in Southeast Asia and North America. Of particular interest is his analysis of ethnic Chinese writers having different selves in relation to his/her fellow Chinese community, and in relation to other ethnic groups in the country. These writers have their different images of China, too. Having to deal with the local-national and impacted by the process of globalization, ethnic Chinese writers are very much concerned with identities. Prof. Wang suggests using the Chinese categorization of nei (within) and wai (without) to better understand how overseas Chinese writers adjust to the "criss-crossing circles." In the next article, Elizabeth Sinn analyzes the place of Hong Kong in her discussion of the Chinese diaspora as a transnational space of consumption in "Preparing Opium for America." She gives a detailed description of Hong Kong as the chief supplier of prepared opium, especially for the Chinese in the United States. [End Page v] Michael Szonyi's "Mothers, Sons and Lovers" describes the complexity of the overseas Chinese divided family before 1949. In contrast to the usual image of passive women left behind in China by emigrants, Szonyi draws our attention to the roles played by wives and other relatives in managing investments in China. Emigration created both opportunities and suffering for women left behind in China. Szonyi points out that migration as a strategy to raise the economic well-being of the family in China was risky as family members, including wives, might betray the sojourner's trust, not just on investments but also on matters sexual. Glen Peterson's "Overseas Chinese and Merchant Philanthropy in China" shows the significance of the transnational perspective in helping to understand merchant philanthropy in China, such as in Guangzhou, where the phenomenon can be better understood by considering both the merchants in China and Chinese merchants overseas. Homeland philanthropy was embraced by merchants in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and Peterson argues that the ideology behind this shifted from "Confucian culturalism" to modern nationalism. The article by Sun Wanning looks at media and the Chinese diaspora. She demonstrates "how the processes of media production, representation and consumption are integral to the formation of a Chinese diasporic imagination," and argues...

Liberalism, Anglo-Jewry and the Diasporic Imagination: Herbert Samuel via Israel Zangwill, 1890–1914

Through better education, cheap posts, and a widespread Press, the attractions of new countries are nowadays more fully understood in the old. With the new safety and cheapness and comfort of sea voyages, the chief of the earlier hindrances to migration have disappeared. Men realise the advantages of migrating, and at the same time find it easier to migrate. The consequence is a vast and continuous flow of population, probably more vast, more continuous, more widespread in these times than at any previous period in the known history of mankind. Herbert Samuel

The Diasporic Imaginary

The Diasporic Imaginary

'Black Magic' and Diasporic Imagination

Within a colonial framework black diasporan thinking became most evident in the slaves' religious practices. Diasporic Imagination was displayed in terms of rituals of remembrance, social bonding across racial diversity, worship of African Gods, and imagined return to the homeland. These diasporic elements in African-Carribean slave religion, however, challenged white authority and conceptions of white superiority. A closer look at British colonial discourse of the late 18th century illustrates the colonialist's obsession with the slaves' display of their Africaness in religious ceremonies and the struggle to come to terms with the unsettling implications of slave magic. Moreover, these literary productions reflect white anxieties as to the stability of the imperial situation and reveal the white man's growing awareness regarding the limitations of imperial power.

Historical, Dialogical, and Diasporic Imagination in Feminist Studies of Religion

Historical, Dialogical, and Diasporic Imagination in Feminist Studies of Religion

Cultures of Exile: Diasporic Identities and the "Imaginations" of Africa and India in the Caribbean

In this article, I explore the similarities and differences in the way Africa and India were constructed, or how the notion of an idealized "home" as part of the diasporic imagination was "imagined" by peoples of African and Indian origins in the Caribbean. How do diaspora discourses construct homes away from homes in the context of cultural dislocation and displacement? How were imagined Africa and imagined India constructed, and who were the constructors of these two imagined communities? I argue that the "ideologies of return" that were articulated in these two movements were fundamentally different. Whereas the attempt to embrace a "lost" Africa was premised on physical repatriation and cultural return, the attempt to reconnect with a lost India was based essentially on symbolic projections, which saw Indian Caribbean peoples taking pride in being part of a great civilization and culture but not wanting to go back to India.

Booking passage: exile and homecoming in the modern Jewish imagination

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in culture, what she calls the 'poetics of exile and return'. Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with Jewish Journeys, Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In Jewish Geographies Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination - in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.

MAKING IT TRADEABLE: VIDEOTAPES, CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES AND DIASPORAS

In this commentary I address some of the key ideas presented in Kolar-Panov's paper titled ‘Video as the diasporic imagination of selfhood: a case study of the Croatians in Australia’ which was published in Cultural Studies 10: 2, 1996. My own research, conducted during the same period, on the same group of migrants and in the same country, found very little evidence to support some of the assertions made in the paper. I therefore challenge the author's main assumptions about the impact of video technology on the formation of diaspora identities and address some of the theoretical issues behind the notion that video technology is the first widespread postmodern communication medium. I highlight the intrinsic similarities between telecast and video technologies and show how Kolar-Panov's argument tends to slide into both technological and social determinism.

Review: Bosnia by Television, Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination

Review: Bosnia by Television, Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination

Book Review: Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States

Book Review: Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.

The Philippine temptation: dialectics of Philippines-U.S. literary relations

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Civilize 'em with a Krag: Errand to the Boondocks 2. Discourse of Hegemony, Projects of Critique and Resistance 3. Masks of the Filipino in the New 4. Overseas Writing: Toward a Political Economy of the Diasporic Imagination 5. Violence of Exile, Politics of Desire: Prologue to Carlos Bulosan 6. Articulating a Third World Modernism: The Case of Jose Garcia Villa 7. Allegories of the Nation in the Postmodern World Afterword Notes Works Cited Index

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.

Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Diasporic Imagination 1. A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities 2. Bhakti and Postcolonial Politics: Hindu Missions to Fiji 3. Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836-1885 4. Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad 5. Hindus in Trinidad and Britain: Ethnic Religion, Reification, and the Politics of Public Space 6. New York City's Muslim World Day Parade 7. Indian Immigrants in Queens, New York City: Patterns of Spatial Concentration and Distribution, 1965-1990 8. Gendering Diaspora: Space, Politics, and South Asian Masculinities in Britain. 197 9. New Cultural Forms and Transnational South Asian Women: Culture, Class, and Consumption among British Asian Women in the Diaspora Contributors Index

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States

Video and the diasporic imagination of selfhood: A case study of the croatians in Australia

Abstract This article is concerned with the role and effects of video on cultural technology in the Croatian diaspora in Australia in the light of the war in former Yugoslavia. It reveals the fragility of the cultural boundaries both of Australian multiculturalism and of the emerging postmodern culture of hybridity, which favour symbolic ethnicity as a form of ethnic identity. It also traces the gradual and often nervous formation and reinvention of Croatian cultural (diasporic) identity which has, with the inception of war, turned into fully fledged diasporic nationalism.

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (review)

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (review)

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States.

Journal Article Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States. By Matthew Frye Jacobson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. xiv, 321 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-83185-3.) Get access Mark Wyman Mark Wyman Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 3, December 1995, Pages 1234–1235, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945201 Published: 01 December 1995

Special sorrows: the diasporic imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants in the United States

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that every immigrant to the United States became American, by choice and with deliberate speed. Yet, as Special Sorrows shows us, this is simply untrue. In this compelling revisionist study, Matthew Frye Jacobson reveals tenacious attachments to the Old World and explores the significance of homeland politics for Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on Yiddish, Polish, and English-language sources, Jacobson discovers the influence of nationalist ideologies in the overt political agendas of such ethnic associations as the Knights of Zion and the Polish Falcons, as well as in newspapers, vernacular theater, popular religion, poetry, fiction, and festivals, both religious and secular. In immigrant communities, he finds that nationalism was a powerful component of popular sensibility. A captivating example of Jacobson's thesis is immigrant reaction to American intervention in Cuba. Masculinist/militarist strains of nationalist culture met with the keen impulse to aid a subjugated people. The three national groups, rich with memories of their own subjugation, found an unlikely outlet in the Caribbean. But when the U.S. war for Cuban liberation was followed by a crusade for Philippine subjugation, immigrants faced a dilemma: some condemned the American empire rich in Old World parallels; others dismissed the Filipinos as racial others and embraced the glories of conquest. In effect, the crucible of American imperialism was vital to many immigrants' Americanization, in the sense of passionate participation in national politics, pro or con. This work answers the call of scholars to recover the full experience of these immigrants. It adds to the tapestry of America's turn-of-the-century political culture and restores an essential transnational dimension to questions of ethnic identity and behavior.