Editors' Comment
The Editors and Editorial Community
On Moving Targets
When I got to Bradford I took a taxi. It was simple: Bradford is full of taxis. Raise an arm and three taxis rush at you. Like most taxi drivers in Bradford, the driver was Asian and his car had furry, bright purple seats, covered with the kind of material people in the suburbs sometimes put on the lids of their toilets. It smelled of perfume, and Indian music was playing. The taxi driver had a Bradford- Pakistani accent, a cross between the north of England and Lahore, which sounds odd the first few times you hear it. Mentioning the accent irritates people in Bradford. How else do you expect people to talk? they say. And they are right. But hearing it for the first time disconcerted me because I found that I associated northern accents with white faces, with people who eat puddings, with Geoffrey Boycott and Roy Hattersley. ( Hanif Kureishi 1986: 150)
Diasporas, like pilgrimages, military campaigns and diseases, are indifferent to the idiosyncracies of nation-states and often flow through their cracks and exploit their vulnerabilities. They are thus a testimony to the inherent fragility of the links between people, polity and territory and to the negotiability of the relationship between people and place.
Diasporas come in many forms. There are diasporas by design and diasporas by accident. There are, to borrow Albert Hirschman's terms, diasporas of loyalty and diasporas of exit. There are also temporizing diasporas, waiting to turn into sour stories of exile or fairy tales of liberation. But whatever these differences (and there are many others), diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and time and create new maps of desire and of attachment.
But there has been a major change in diasporas over the last, post-industrial century. Previous diasporas involved large-scale population movements across human landscapes (and political boundaries) otherwise characterized by a sense of stability. Today's diasporas seem somehow normative, creating a pattern of human movement and instability, against which geographical and territorial certainties seem increasingly fragile.
Diasporas today are often camouflaged by other expressions of human restiveness and other instabilities of national politics. Hidden among the movements of tourists and guest-workers (which are often more long-lasting than they are supposed to be) and the instabilities of refugee camps and transnational ethnic movements, diasporas are no longer easy to spot. Indeed, to speak of diasporas - if by diasporas we mean phenomena involving stable points of origin, clear and final destinations and coherent group identities - seems already part of a sociology for the world we have lost.
Diasporas today run not against the grain of transnational cultural relationships but with them. So we need to reflect anew about the cultural politics of diaspora. Many of the essays in this issue of Public Culture constitute starting points for such reflection.
This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of what a revitalized cultural sociology of diaspora might look like. But we would like to make one suggestion about the route to such a theory; it must centrally revolve around lags and disjunctures.
The lags we have in mind are of many sorts, but the most important are lags in memory. More and more diasporic groups have memories whose archaeology is fractured. These collective recollections, often built on the harsh play of memory and desire over time, have many trajectories and fissures which sometimes correspond to generational politics. Even for apparently well-settled diasporic groups, the macro-politics of reproduction translates into the micro-politics of memory, among friends, relatives and generations.
The disjunctures that any theory of diaspora in today's world must take into account are also many. Elites in diasporic groups often leave fortunes behind and have to reconstruct status and wealth in unstable games of snakes and leaders. The young, quick to take on the everyday practices - linguistic and otherwise - of their new environments, often acquire troubling kinds of leverage over their elders. Women, sometimes employable where their husbands or brothers are not, become brokers of new domestic cultures and of new kinds of sexual politics. (The domestic politics of divided diasporic families is beginning to receive sustained aesthetic attention, as can be seen in the critical acclaim which has greeted the recent Canadian film Milk and Honey [Directors: Rebecca Yeates and Glen Salzman] about a Jamaican woman who goes to work in Toronto as a domestic, leaving her 8-year old son behind.) Flows of capital in international money markets often precede and prefigure the still sluggish movements of people. Further, the dynamics of nation-states, which often push human diasporas in one direction, are not the same as the dynamics of international capital, which often draw currency flows in other directions. Diasporas and their money are soon parted, though international finance (as is the case with Japanese real estate dealings in New York and fiscal dealings on Wall Street) is sometimes the vanguard of human migration. By the same token, more groups (and especially the women in them) in places like Mexico, Taiwan and Malaysia constitute high-tech sweatshops for fluid, global financial interests.
The recent events in China add a new chapter to the history of political diasporas, as intellectuals who have fled China contemplate the chimera of democracy there, and find themselves in a passionate dialogue with the many Chinese students and intellectuals who were already in the West, hoping to return to China. This latter group, which is said to number about 40,000 in the United States alone, illustrates another sort of lag: a group moves abroad in quest of education and finds itself exiled by the vicissitudes of politics at home, like many Iranian intellectuals after Khomeini's revolution. Such lags are in part a product of the disjunctive diaspora of the idea of democracy itself.
Diasporic texts create their own disjunctures. The Satanic Verses is only the most dramatic example of texts whose diasporic velocity has exceeded the diasporic imagination of their readerships. Hanif Kureishi's brilliantly prescient essay in Granta 20 on the cultural politics of Bradford in 1986 captures the sense of a diasporic cauldron waiting for its brutal rendezvous with textuality, a rendezvous uncannily arranged by Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses were the subjects of our last Editorial, and a special section of this issue is devoted to them. Whatever our moral dilemmas concerning this book and the persecution of its author, it is worth noting that the controversy revolves critically around the politics of memory and the fissive potential of diaspora. Rushdie's dialogue with Islam is at least as much a product of his travels through India and Pakistan to England, and his memories of an Islamic childhood, as it is a product of a displaced adult confronting Islamic fundamentalism and British racism. Reacting to him, on the other hand, are diasporic Muslims, in the cities of India, Pakistan, England, the United States and elsewhere, whose memories are more directly caught up with the anguish of diasporic reproduction. An artist's right to doubt, on the one hand, and a group's right to believe, on the other, both dilemmas of diaspora. Such are the ironies of moving texts in a world on the move.
Television and cinema create their own strange twists in the cultural politics of diasporas. Many diasporas are today driven, in part, by impressionist media collages of some imagined metropolitan 'elsewhere'. At the same time, for newly arrived groups, like Turks in Germany and Sweden, film and video cassettes ensure the continuous flexing of the muscles of memory, and the tapping of hidden veins of nostalgia. Complex transnational flows of media images and messages perhaps create the greatest disjunctures for diasporic populations, since in the electronic media in particular, the politics of desire and imagination are always in contest with the politics of heritage and nostalgia. While the engines of private enterprise (by and large) fuel the former, the apparatuses of nation-states thrive on the latter. Thus diasporic groups today must continually negotiate cultural reproduction without what Joshua Meyerowitz would call 'a sense of place'. More subtle, and more troubling, is that the negotiation of desire and memory creates a peculiar temporal ambience, in which past and future are continuously fungible.
But we must not be too quick to leap from the ubiquity of diaspora to an abiding global sense of placelessness and timelessness. For populations involved in the diasporic process continually display the vitality of bricolage. They piece together housing and language, electricity and ethnicity, clothing styles and state entitlements with remarkable energy, in ways tailored to the idiosyncracies of their new locations. Much of a new sociology of diaspora will have to focus on this bricolage: on how, in the face of so many disjunctures, the everyday miracle of reproduction is achieved.
But such bricolage is not easy work. It is in the grinding of emotional gears and in the sheer interactional wear and tear involved in this daily work of reproduction in a diasporic world, that states find their disciplinary practices contested, that ethnocide finds its collective energies, and that international terror (whether of the state or of its opponents) finds its daily counterpart. There is much here to which social scientists will have to attend, if they are to work towards what might be called a sociology of displacement. The diasporic world in which we live is a world of futures searching, often violently and unwittingly, for their pasts. It is this search that a truly global theory of diaspora must confront.