Diasporic Vision Research Articles

Review: Black Diasporic Visions

Review: Black Diasporic Visions

Crafting memory: literary (Re-)creation in Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards

ABSTRACT Throughout her illustrious creative and scholarly career, which spanned over five decades, French-Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1934-2024) earned a reputation as an iconoclast, a rebel disdainful of conventions and averse to simplistic formulas. A habitual provocateur, Condé reveled in her role as a rule-breaker, who challenged Negritude’s masculinist discursive norms, and ushered in a paradigm shift in the prevailing vision of Africa as central to Caribbean cultural formation. This study examines the place of African diasporic literary traditions in La vie sans fards (2012). A confessional tale delivered in a taut, propulsive narrative brimming with equal amounts of tragic intensity and dramatic energy, the memoir traces Condé’s eventful life in Africa in the turbulent decade of the sixties. I am especially interested in Condé’s evocation of a vast array of African diasporic writers as inspirational in her own artistic development, and as crucial to the awakening of her diasporic vision. It is my contention that Condé’s bold, radical departure from her earlier reactions vis-à-vis the African literary landscape demands attention. Considering the author’s proclaimed goal to unravel the absolute, complete truth, this essay situates Condé’s reminiscences within the broader context of a veritable boom in life writing and its study.

White Atlantic: Counterfeiting Race in France

This article proposes that a new white racial consciousness is emerging in France. Camouflaged as the default universal, unraced and unmarked, against which racial difference is measured, whiteness turns racelessness into power. We know as much from the critical race and whiteness studies that have dissected the normative apparatus at work in white pretentions to color-blindness. But if such a critique remains relevant in France—where color-blindness is the legally mandated norm—it also isn’t enough. Examining recent polemics against le racisme anti-blanc, or anti-white racism, I document how white color-consciousness is taking hold in the French mainstream. The new white identity revolves around a central premise: the victimization of white people by the forces of antiracism. Advancing a diasporic vision of beleaguered whiteness, French architects of what I call the white Atlantic issue dark warnings about the “genocidal” consequences for white people of Black Lives Matter and related social movements. In so doing, I argue, they counterfeit the collective historical experience that gives race meaning—in particular the experience of Black people, whose history of transatlantic suffering the new white identity simulates and exploits.

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement Shelby Crosby (bio) and Terrence Tucker (bio) In the essay, “Positive Obsession,1” Octavia Butler explores how she became a writer and, more importantly, why she chose to write science fiction (or what we now call Afrofuturism). Terribly shy, Butler’s love of science fiction and fantasy began as a way to escape and build worlds where she could be “a magical horse, a Martian, a telepath…. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these” (128). To be anywhere but here is part of Afrofuturism’s appeal. While these worlds can explore the realities of being Black in our current world, it also creates new images and feelings about said world. And that’s what we hope this issue will do for y’all—we want these essays to expand your minds and maybe even change how you see the world as the 80th CLA Convention we organized in Memphis in 2021 did for us. That conference inspired us to develop this issue. We want to keep the conversations started there going. The convention’s theme, Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions, carved out space to discuss explicitly the extensive presence of Black futurity, of race and technology, and of fantasy and science fiction as key parts of African American literary tradition. Black writers have always infused their work with speculative elements even as they chronicle Black life with unmatched forms of realism. And while we see Afrofuturism present in art, music, and fashion, as Isiah Warner III and Lisa Yasezk claim in their introduction to Literary Afrofuturism, “such powerful artistic statements derive from a much older entertainment medium: the printed word” which can “extend back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley and nineteenth century abolitionist, solider, and journalist Martin Delany and continue today with the award-winning SF of Delany, Jemisin, and a host of other authors” (3). Our ideas for the convention and this issue stand on the shoulders of the Memphis native Sheree Renee Thomas, whose 2000 edited collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora served as a launch point to study Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as traditions that reach as far back as the production of African American literature itself, as well as the history of CLA, itself founded in Memphis and still committed to the study and teaching of Black literature and language. We felt it critical to explore the history this tradition [End Page 1] while simultaneously celebrating the contemporary explosion of Afrofuturism in the mainstream, embodied by 2018’s Black Panther, and the well-known, overdue credit that Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have begun to garner. These mainstream, public discussions of what Reynaldo Anderson has termed “Afrofuturism 2.0” appear at a crucial time in the history of Black folks because even as the technological advances and social media platforms that fuel this moment have brought Black people around the world more access, opportunities, and autonomy to be seen and heard, the external forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and market fundamentalism continue to oppress and dehumanize communities. Some of those forces have been emboldened over the last fifteen years as the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama period has failed to reverse the institutional impact of white supremacist hegemony. The persistence of police brutality and the explosion of mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the upsurge of white nationalism into mainstream rhetoric and policy have led many to abandon hope of ever achieving the equity that many have sought for generations. For some, the result has been the descent into the violence and apathy that engulfed the Black community in the 1980s and 1990s. The second, perhaps more insidious has been the abandonment of collective action in favor of an individualism that prioritizes the self-consciousness or assimilation of the one but rejects the philosophies of collective uplift over which activists, intellectuals, and artists battled deep into the 20th century. Historically African Americans relied on faith traditions, specifically through Black liberation theology and the black prophetic tradition...

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua

Reviewed by: Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean by Jatin Dua Adrienne Mannov Jatin Dua. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 264 pp. In Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, anthropologist Jatin Dua has woven an insightful and refreshing monograph about contemporary maritime piracy emanating from Somalia, with specific focus on what he refers to as "an anthropology of protection" (23). For Dua, this means empirically tracking practices of protection that are violent and/or coercive, whether they are meant to protect lifestyles, land, trade routes, financial assets or free trade (19). This move destabilizes the "empirical and analytical divides between piracy and counter-piracy," (4) and Dua shows us how they are, in many ways, quite similar. The introduction to Captured at Sea is a fabulous piece of scholarship that offers important interventions to how we understand sovereignty, and specifically challenges the taken-for-given conceptual divide between the land and the sea. The first three chapters seek to anchor piracy practices to reciprocal kinship groups (diya) and counter-piracy to marine insurance companies (121). He begins with a thorough historical framing of protection practices in the region, and then shows how these practices continue to be relevant in everyday relations with those who practice Somali piracy. His chapter on the connections between counter-piracy and marine insurance is based on the framework of maritime regulations and law. Thereafter, Dua focuses on ransom-making practices (Chapter 4) and on being captive (Chapter 5). The book is based on research that stretched over approximately four years during which he developed a methodology that is "transregional" (24). In practice, this means that Dua not only links sites perceived as separate—such as places at sea and on land or diya groups and insurance [End Page 737] companies—but he shows how these sites are and constituted through their connections across space, time and reciprocal relations. By taking juxtaposed local practices of space, time, and relations seriously, he charts a field of global connections. In fact, describing his own work as "transregional" does not do the scope of this research justice. Dua brings the reader to courtrooms in Kenya and to coastal villages and khat markets in Puntland, northern Somalia, where readers bump along mountain roads with him and worry that he is "no longer a protected guest" (177). We accompany him to the underwriting rooms at Lloyd's of London's marine insurance offices (110) and are introduced to seafarers in Delhi offices, sometime-pirates on Somali shores, and even a pirate boss in "a town in Puntland" (80). We join him at the Multi-National Headquarters—the EU's counter-piracy taskforce—nestled in a suburb of north London (100), at a bar in Djibouti frequented by private armed guards (141), and for lunch in Washington, DC with high-ranking officers from the US military. We meet a wealth of interlocutors: fishermen and pirates, khat merchants, village elders, private armed guards, international seafarers, dhow captains, military figures, marine insurance underwriters and ransom negotiators. Research of this kind requires serious travel and on-going and nimble access negotiation. Dua's methodology is much more than just transregional. Importantly, he also carried out field research at sea, on board small fishing vessels, dhows, naval patrols, and a container ship. Constructing a field of connections across land and sea are key to his arguments. The monograph is also built up around relevant historical accounts. Dua carefully frames Somali piracy within a wider colonial and postcolonial history of Somalia (50), including its civil war from 1969–1991, and within a rich history of trade routes, practices, and relationships in the region (8). Walking the reader through the historical and political underpinnings of hostis humanis generis, or "the enemy of all mankind" (86), we learn that the pirate was not always seen as a criminal, or even as an enemy. Instead, Dua unpacks two kinds of historical thalassocracies: one that is diasporic, and one that is imperial. A diasporic vision allows the lines to be "blurred between seizure and exchange" (12). In the other, piracy is seen...

Grappling With War, Grappling With Grief: Filipina Poets in Hawai‘i and Diasporic Visions of Sovereignty

This essay explores the decolonial potential of Filipina demilitarization work in Hawai‘i through two contemporary activist-poets, Darlene Rodrigues and reyna aiko leah lani ramolete hayashi. I argue their work marks a notable shift— particularly in Hawai‘i but also throughout our decolonial diaspora—of Filipinx imagining how the unfinished struggle for sovereignty in the Philippines informs our understanding of sovereignty for the Indigenous nations on whose lands we have settled. Rodrigues and ramolete advance a politics rooted in the refusal to play by empire’s rules, namely, the militarization of land, the militarization of bodies, and the insatiable appetite for war.

A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas (review)

Reviewed by: A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas Kathy Peiss Elisabeth Gallas. A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. Translated by Alex Skinner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 416 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000252 A Mortuary of Books is a significant new study of the rescue and restitution of looted Jewish books in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Elisabeth Gallas builds on a rich and growing scholarship that explores the response of Allied policymakers, the American military government, and Jewish organizations to cultural devastation. A revised version of her 2013 book, translated from the German, A Mortuary of Books examines the Jewish groups that came together after the war to make a compelling legal and moral claim upon heirless looted books. At the same time, Gallas uncovers the profound meaning of these books for the Jewish intellectuals and scholars who worked tirelessly to save them. She begins with the establishment of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the key American military installation for the salvage of looted and displaced books, supervised by the army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section. Gallas focuses, however, on Jewish organizing and lobbying efforts in the United States, Great Britain, and Palestine, an effort that began during the war. Although the groups did not always see eye to eye, in the end they formed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), which the US government recognized in 1949 as the legal successor agency to handle orphaned and unidentifiable Jewish books. In three years, they distributed nearly 500,000 volumes and between 8,000 and 10,000 ritual objects. Together the United States and Israel received the bulk of these works, with the remainder allotted to Great Britain and other countries with Jewish populations. Only a small number went to Germany and none to Eastern Europe. Gallas highlights the innovative legal arguments used by JCR and its predecessors. Following long-standing policy, the Allies recognized only nation-states in restitution cases; they had no precedent to follow in the case of European Jews, whose communities had been destroyed and property stolen in Germany and German-occupied countries. Jewish legal experts argued that the restoration of Jewish heritage and communal life could not occur within the existing national framework for restitution. They argued instead for the recognition of a transnational Jewish collectivity as a legal, political, and cultural entity. The struggle over Jewish books was a formative, if largely unrecognized, moment in the evolution of ideas about transitional and restorative justice. An unusual coalition of Jewish scholars and intellectuals led this effort, which helps explain why there was such intense, even obsessive attention to books at a time of dire need among surviving European Jews. They included Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt, as leaders of the JCR; Gershom Scholem, who collected for the Hebrew University and collaborated with Arendt; and Lucy Dawidowicz, representing the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and laboring to identify YIVO books at Offenbach. Gallas eloquently [End Page 460] traces how their deep belief in the need to rescue Jewish cultural heritage shaped their immediate postwar aims and long-term intellectual work. The rescuers perceived books not only in material but also symbolic terms. Animating books with human qualities, they likened looted volumes to the murder of European Jews. "Saving these books," Rabbi Herbert Friedman of the United Jewish Appeal observed, "amounted to saving the People of the Book" (56). The books simultaneously memorialized the Jewish past and served as a spiritual and cultural foundation for the living. They represented historical continuity and rupture, not only as a matter of time, but also place. This is apparent in the shifting meaning of the term "reconstruction," which initially referred to the restoration of European Jewish culture, but by 1946 signified a Zionist and diasporic vision of the Jewish future. Yet the transnational Jewish collectivity was a construction, held together despite tensions over who should receive the books. JCR's American leaders believed US institutions should be a major beneficiary, given the nation's large Jewish population and the military's role in preserving them. Scholem and Judah L...

Diasporic visions: colonialism, nostalgia and the empire in Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House

ABSTRACT Released on the 70th anniversary of Partition, Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House, which is narratively and stylistically constructed in the fashion of heritage cinema, chronicles the last days of the empire in India and is said to provide a ‘British Asian perspective’ on Partition. This article addresses the debate that followed the release of the film and, in particular, the analysis focuses on the interplay between Partition, diaspora, and representations of the imperial past. Through the analysis of the film’s structure and narrative, the article discusses its representation of British India and argues that, notwithstanding its potential to unsettle traditional representations of the empire of period dramas, the film’s glamorous depiction of the British rulers ultimately feeds into the contemporary wave of colonial nostalgia.

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

Pursuing paradise: Jewish travel comics as feminist spiritual quests

Abstract Although much has been written about the impact of Jewish culture and identity on comics and graphic novels, to date, no culturally specific hermeneutic has been used to expand our understanding of the relationship between Jewish comics and the cultural matrix in which they are formed. The relationship between Kabbballah and Literary criticism has been explored by Bloom, Handelman, Wolffson and others. However, once again, it has never been applied to comics, despite the deeply visual nature of Kabbalistic imagery and symbolism. I will utilize the celebrated Kabbalistic ‘travel’ narrative of the Four Sages who enter the Pardes, the Orchard, or Paradise, which will serve as a paradigm for analysing the work of four female autobiographical comics artists. In the Rabbinic tradition, PaRDeS became an acronym for four layers or levels of interpretation – Peshat, the literal meaning of a text, Remez, its symbolic structure, Drash, its relationship to other texts, and Sod, its mystical meaning. Each of the four sages represents a model of a particular approach, and the fate they meet acts as a critique of the potential reductiveness of that approach, if used exclusive of the others. I explore the work of four female artists who mediate between personal and collective quests for meaning in their work, focalized through their own experiences. All of these artists were featured in the touring exhibition Graphic Details, curated by Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer. Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki visit Israel as outsiders, and write from Diasporic perspectives; Glidden struggles with received ideology on a Zionist Birthright tour, while Libicki seeks to embed herself in the army, and pass as ‘fully Israeli’. Sztokman argues that ‘the “Israel” that Diaspora Jews prefer to usher into their identities remains a powerfully and singularly male construct’. In addition to deconstructing this masculine construct from a Diasporic perspective, the inclusion of work by Israeli artists Racheli Rottner, and Illana Zeffren, reflecting on their relationship to the Diasporic vision of faith and identity, provides more nuanced and alternative models of cultural critique and religious dialogue from Israeli perspectives. I seek to initiate a mutually enriching dialogue between Kabbalah and comics, interweaving a feminist interpretation of the Kabbalistic story with a Kabbalistic reading of these feminist comics, which celebrate the power of Jewish narrative, symbolism and hermeneutics in subtle and surprising ways.

Statelessness in a world of nation-states: the cases of Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and the UK

ABSTRACTMass displacement in the Middle East is a major political challenge for contemporary Middle Eastern and Western states. As a consequence, statelessness has emerged as one of the central political issues in relation to the collapse and weakening of the states in the Middle East. Through deploying a qualitative inquiry and interviews with 50 Kurdish immigrants, this article investigates how members of Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and the UK conceive and experience statelessness in a world of unequal nation-states and hierarchical citizenship. Since diasporas are important non-state actors in nation-building processes, it is important to analyse their diasporic visions and the ways they challenge or reinforce the power of the nation-state in the context of migration. While from a legal or a right-based approach, the solution to statelessness is found in acquisition of a nationality/citizenship, I posit that in a world structured by the political normativity of the nation-state, nations without states will continue to be in search of national self-determination, political autonomy and sovereignty in the international comity of sovereign nations.

Haunting memories of war in Chinese cinema and diaspora: Visions of national trauma, power and autoethnographic collage

The transgenerational ghosts of trauma from war, death and injustice within Chinese twentieth century history are carried through the remembrances and silences of mediated, diasporic visions of memory. These ghosts are visible through Chinese cinema at the intersection of modern China’s national interests, issues of power and the transnational distribution/production of official memory. These relations also suggest an insistence to produce particular national, unified identifications within the collective imaginations of spectators across generations in the Chinese diaspora. While some national wounds are ‘chosen’ and remembered (for example, Western colonialism, Imperial Japanese invasion), other collective traumas continue to be disavowed through cinematic memory productions. In response to these issues of historical rewriting and memory production, I propose alternate ways of seeing cinema through a critical autoethnography that juxtaposes other mediations of memory. I explore how this approach to cinema spectatorship enables diasporic subjects to interrogate how affective trauma transmits unconsciously across generations.

The legacy of liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's hidden conversation

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. 'This Man of Our Destiny': Moses Mendelssohn, Nathan the Wise, and the emergence of a Liberal Jewish Ethos Chapter 2. Diasporic Visions: the emergence of Liberal Judaism Chapter 3. Abraham Geiger Chapter 4. Hermann Cohen's Prophetic Judaism Chapter 5. Ernst Cassirer and the Ethical Legacy of Hermann Cohen Chapter 6. Ernst Cassirer: The Enlightenment as Counter-History Chapter 7. Hannah Arendt: The Task of the Historian Chapter 8. Hannah Arendt: A Question of Character Conclusion: The Legacies of Liberal Judaism Bibliography Index

On Forgotten Shores: Migration in Middle East Studies and the Middle East in Migration Studies

For all their apparent differences, the colonial and nationalist discourses of the twentieth century shared a vision of the world as an aggregate of discrete bundles of land and people, hermetic units sealed off from one another and defined by their particularities. Whether they spoke in terms of nations or empires, regions or civilizations, they worked to produce the reality they described – one of bounded territories and populations, each one neatly delineated and differentiated from the next. In so doing, they created truncated histories, narrowed-down narratives shorn of wider connections. In the following pages, we will address the implications of such schemes for Middle Eastern studies, and propose an alternative, diasporic vision of this field. A consideration of the population movements that have marked the modern history of the “Middle East” can open up new avenues and approaches for research, and put into question the implicit stress upon fixity and enclosure which still underpins scholarship on the region.

Armenian Homelands and Homecomings, 1945–9

ABSTRACTThis article, based on research in the Armenian National Archives, focuses upon a neglected aspect of early Cold War history, the repatriation of diasporan Armenians to the Soviet Union (1945–9). I highlight the contested and historically conditioned nature of homelands, examining the multiple ways in which Soviet authorities and diaspora agencies attempted to authenticate Soviet Armenia as a ‘homeland’. Armenian constructions of homeland were transformed through the process of homecoming, and I examine attempts to reconcile the realities of life in the Soviet Union with diasporic visions of homeland based on an idealized national past.

Producing Exile: Diasporic Vision in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

Set in postcolonial Nigeria during the Biafra War, Adichie's second novel represents the fracturing of national unity and the suffering of the Igbo people as the doomed war propels them into diaspora. The essay explores the novel's diasporic vision, tracing Adichie's representation of the colonial legacies that shape public history and undermine personal communities. Rejecting historical omniscience and narrating instead through three uncertain characters, Adichie demonstrates the diasporic vision produced by events in the novel. The estranged observers demonstrate anticolonial modes of perception and the potential for a diasporic consciousness attuned to the innate failures of nationalism.