Diasporic Subjects Research Articles

"Que Se Pudieran Defender (So You Could Defend Yourselves)": Chicanas, Regional History, and National Discourses

"Que Se Pudieran Defender (So You Could Defend Yourselves)":Chicanas, Regional History, and National Discourses Antonia I. Castañeda (bio) Chicana lives, inscribed on roadways and waterways, link people, rivers, communities, valleys, and regions in histories embedded, since long before the sixteenth century, in northward migrations from Mesoamerican valleys to Inuit shores.1 Where and how do these lives, linked across time, space, and place, fit into regional histories that, at best, reinforce a fragmented understanding of a Chicana/o presence in the region as well as in U.S. history? This fragmented understanding is rooted in a historiography that has excluded Chicanos, a population annexed to the United States by military conquest and international treaty in the mid-nineteenth century, from the conceptualization of both region and nation. The power of place is in its ordering, and the ordering of space entails the operation of gender, race, and class. In this context, how does a history that recognizes the presence and continuity of Chicanas in these landscapes long before the nineteenth-century annexation reorder the regional and national space that has rendered their historical experience invisible?2 The presence and migrations of Chicanas challenge current constructs of regional history and speak to larger epistemological, methodological, analytical, and interpretive questions and categories in the construction of U.S. history. How do we conceptualize, tell, and write the story of the United States and its regions? Who tells the story and how? Who is authorized to tell the story? Whose story gets told? Who controls the ordering of time, space, and place? To concretize the issues relative to Chicanas and regional history, this essay centers gendered, racialized, sexualized, and historicized working-class Chicana bodies and the transregional migration of farmworkers from Texas to Washington State during the mid-twentieth century. My examination of migration draws heavily on historian Emma Pérez's theory of Chicanas' "diasporic subjectivities" and of Chicanos as a "diasporic population."3 I use both terms—migration and diaspora—throughout this paper. Pérez's proposition [End Page 116] of diasporic subjectivity as the "oppositional and transformative identity that allows these women to weave through the power of cultures, to infuse, and be infused, to create and re-create newness" is critically important to the discussion.4 This essay argues three main points: Chicana migration within the boundaries of the United States challenges current conceptualizations and categories of analysis of U.S. regional history; Definitions of "regions" are contingent on people's sociopolitical and geographical location; and The imposition of regional boundaries distorts the narrative of the experience of women's lives. The article focuses on the twentieth-century "internal migration" of Chicanas from Texas to Washington. This migration, I argue, is an outgrowth of the consolidation of U.S. military conquest, of capitalist development, and of state and national politics in the western half of the United States and must be understood within that context. It cannot be understood within a strictly regional context. Challenging Regional Boundaries In the battle over history, which is fundamentally about who gets to define the stories being narrated, will the defining come from the realities of lived experiences, like those of my mother and other Tejana farmworkers, or will it come from the abstract principles that have ordered and organized U.S. history to date? Rethinking Chicana history means rethinking regional history, and this ultimately requires rethinking the history of the United States. Constricted by imperialist mappings of the Americas, as well as by the categories, language, and triumphanist historiography of its consequent nation-states, the act of writing Chicanas into history—to borrow historian Emma Pérez's title—requires deconstructing or rejecting existing categories of analysis, including "regional history" and the "women's West."5 Precisely because regions, like maps, are icons of nationhood, it is necessary to deconstruct the representation and location of Chicanas within that cartography and iconography across time and space.6 It is particularly important to explore the discursive fields and practices that have located Chicanas within the national "order of things," which in turn defines regions and thereby fixes one's place within the nation and its regions.7 Regional history fragments the history...

Diasporic subjects and identity negotiations: Women in and from asia

Diasporic subjects and identity negotiations: Women in and from asia

Diasporic subjects: Gender and mobility in south sulawesi

This article considers the gender dynamics of a migrant population living in an industrial processing zone on the outskirts of Ujung Pandang, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Based on historical, demographic, and ethnographic analyses of migration linked to this site, the research focuses on the ways that the relationships between morality, migration, and gender are changing for migrants to this zone. As more young women have migrated to join this peri-urban industrial workforce, their presence has spurred a renegotiation of gendered morality, particularly in terms of gendered meanings of inhabiting “public” space and participating in the industrial labor force. These migrants form their gender identities not only through place-bound contact with people in origin and destination sites, but also through contact with the sociocultural norms of migrants from other parts of the archipelago and world, transnational industrial and media expansion, and continued reference to their families' “Bugis values.” Recent research has analyzed the growth of the new female industrial workforce in relation to postmodern production relations and new patterns of consumption. In this article, I build on these studies to explore the ways migrants' cultural struggles around gender are shaped not only by new production relations and consumer aspirations, but also by the interethnic interactions of low-income migrants themselves living in the zone. The tensions that characterize these negotiations mark a historical shift in the gendered meaning of “the local” in the Bugis diaspora.

When "To die in freedom" is written in English

When “to die in freedom” is Written in English Petar Ramadanovic* (bio) Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. [UE] For Teresa Brennan While waiting to leave Vienna in May of 1938, Sigmund Freud writes a letter to his son Ernst. “Two prospects,” he says, “keep me going in these grim times: to rejoin you all and—to die in freedom.” Almost sixty years later, Cathy Caruth comments upon this letter, emphasizing that the last four words—“to die in freedom”—were written in English. It is here, Caruth suggests, in the movement from German to English, in the rewriting of the departure within the languages of Freud’s text, that we participate most fully in Freud’s central insight, in Moses and Monotheism, that history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas. [UE 23–24] And she concludes: “In this departure, in the leave-taking of our hearing, we are first fully addressed by Freud’s text, in ways we perhaps cannot yet fully understand” [UE 24]. In this text I argue that Caruth’s understanding of trauma as “deeply tied to our own historical realities” [UE 12] offers a possibility to think anew our involvement in each other’s histories, as we examine what we mean by history, writing, and community. My reading depends in particular on the insistent recurrence of figures of “entanglement” in Caruth’s text, which I take to be Caruth’s own “translation of the concept—of the experience of trauma” [UE 7]. 1 That is, Caruth’s “entanglement” is the trace of an [End Page 54] unclaimed experience and has a function analogous to “departure” in Freud’s text and to “falling” in Paul de Man’s, both analyzed by Caruth in Unclaimed Experience. As such, “entanglement” and its variations, being “inextricably bound up” or “inextricably tied,” are not representations of trauma. They rather suggest a different, aporetic understanding of the relation between history and reference, experience and writing. I will try to show that Caruth’s notion of trauma as unclaimed experience, together with our entanglement in each other’s histories, chart a history of the modern subject as a history of implication. This subject is recognized by its inextricable ties to what cannot be experienced or subjectivized fully. And this unfinished becoming, surviving and being with others, is the form of its being and its history. The subject in or of trauma is thus, for Caruth, culturally and politically a diasporic subject, en route toward subjectivity. Diaspora Freud—the one who wants to die in freedom—is running away from a genocide, just ahead of it, so to speak. The diaspora toward which he is going is a place where one simultaneously speaks English and another language. As such, this diaspora is both a site of translation and a destination of resettlement: neither a paradise nor a melting pot, but a situation or a space which is not yet and which still waits to be thought. So we follow Freud, a Jew, who wants to die in freedom and is about to embark on a journey from Vienna to London, where he will rejoin his family. London, for Freud, is a place where language, freedom, and death somehow come together, where they will meet in the future. It is a substitute home. A substitute because Freud departs toward it. And a home because it offers shelter. Moreover, since London is also the place of Freud’s death, his departure towards it is not a simple forward movement but also what Caruth would call a return—a return to inanimate matter. If Freud’s return/departure speaks to “us” “today,” as Caruth suggests, this is not only because of the literal or figurative itinerary Freud covers but also because there are other departures that themselves inform the way we hear Freud. Indeed, Freud’s desire for freedom, a desire, as Caruth says at one point, to bring “his voice to another place” [UE 23], invokes the fundamental American myth of freedom. The phrase “to die in freedom” unwittingly carries with it...

Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion

In Funny Boy, Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel in six stories, the upper-middle class Sri Lankan Tamil narrator traces the seven years of his childhood and adolescence that preceded the Tamil-Sinhalese riots in 1983, and his family’s subsequent migration to Canada. Given the illegibility and unrepresentability of a non-heteronormative (female) subject within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and diaspora, the project of locating a 'queer South Asian diasporic subject' - and a queer female subject in particular - may begin to challenge the dominance of such configurations. The slide from female homosociality into female homoeroticism in this scene, as well as in another where Radha rubs oil into Sita's hair, serves to locate female same-sex desire and pleasure firmly within the confines of the home and 'the domestic', rather than as that which safely occurs 'elsewhere'.