Diaspora and The people

The tension between surface textures and deep structures often results in curious and complex cultural tropes in which the old and the new contend or compromise in unusual ways. It is obvious that diasporas and homelands have a complex, ambivalent and often dialectical relationship with another.

The enduring value of the diasporic experience is a spring of agonized inspiration, multiple identities, new subjectivities, creative memories and fresh perspectives on language and life, a stage seems to have come when one problematize the concept of the diaspora. The word diaspora may be used as an umbrella term for immigrant writers; it conceals the differences in their backgrounds as well as contexts.

The first general assumption is that the diaspora refers to those who write. The second general assumption is that the diasporic writer occupies a kind of second space, of exile and cultural solitude. Homi Bhabha calls it a third space, a hybrid location of antagonism, perpetual tension and pregnant chaos in his “The location of Culture”. The reality of the body, a material production of one local culture and the abstraction of the mind, a culture sub-text of a global experience, provide the interwining threads of the diasporic existence of a writer: this is a neither/nor condition that Sura P.Rath calls “Trishanku”in his article “Home(s) Abroad: Diasporic identities in “Third Space” . The products of this hybrid location are results of a long history of confrontations between unequal cultures and forces, in which the stronger culture struggles to control, remake or eliminate the subordinate partner” (Smader Lavie et.al). There are different forms of “Othering” experienced within the diaspora, and also different levels of identity. Imagining the other is not necessarily a crippling experience; it also defines one’s self and reassures one about one’s own distinct identity. The narrative production of home assures many strategies according to one’s relation to the place one came from, the place one came to and the place one belongs to. The idea of home is also related to time that transforms it into history or myth. Post – Colonialism seems to come full circle in those writers who inhabit the third space, live the third culture and shape the third history.

According to Homi Bhabha, the discourse of the wandering peoples of the diaspora marks a “Shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation”. Thus it interrupts the monologic discourse of modern metropolises with their imperial memories. It is a moment of disinherited unsetting imperial inheritance and thus challenging the monolith of the modern western nation; but it can also foster cultural nationalism.

Diasporic idealogies reinforce and reproduce patriarchy, class structure and ethnic conflict. Distinctions of class, sect and patriarchal norms within the family are also often reproduced by the diaspora as part of the reproduction of structure at home, often viewed as the structures of the lost Golden past and hence also of the promised future. Fortunately more and more diasporic writers are becoming aware of the relativity of the concept of the diaspora, its inherent contradictions with its multiple possibilities of alienation and assimilation, retreat into remembered patterns and revolt against them of being the colonizer and the colonized, marginal and central.

Immigration

The age of immigration

This article presents a short history of European immigration to the United States. Although the process began during the Renaissance period, immigration was intensive during 1880-1920. Number of pushing and pulling factors contributed to the European emigration. Some of the pushing factors were oppressive religious and political climate, growing unemployment caused by the structural transformation of economy because of industrialization, wide-spread poverty amidst population explosion because of improved medical facilities, and the severe agricultural failures.
Certainly leaving home is not an easy decision. But when people see a better prospect in the other land, they sacrifice many things to get there. Number of things lured Europeans to go to the US. A relatively liberal political and religious atmosphere assured them that they would not face any prosecution because of their faith. Since US industrial base was expanding, and a huge virgin land still existed, they saw the higher economic possibilities. The inherent nature of American society as a nation of immigrants was another reason behind people’s decision to opt for their destination.
Since immigrants came with their distinct cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds, they did not easily assimilate to their new country. Most of them lived in their ethnic neighborhoods fulfilling cultural needs and connections. Most of the immigrants were young, thus a great engine of work and enthusiasm. In fact, they did not have a pleasant experience in the very beginning. They sacrificed a lot for the hope of better future for themselves and their offspring. Most of them worked hard and long in low wages and lived in the insalubrious conditions. But condition changed with their children and grandchildren. The new generation witnessed the social mobility, got easily assimilated to the mainstream culture and did not suffer from the nostalgia of lost homeland.

Today’s Immigrants?

In this write-up, the writer discusses the change the US has experienced in today’s immigrants. Basically, most of today’s immigrants are Asians and Latin Americans. Although some of them are refugees coming from war-torn locations, most of the immigrants are well-educated human power looking for better economic and other opportunities. Most of them work in service-based industries because the US is not expanding its manufacturing base now. Although these immigrants are different in ethnic and geographical origin, they are not fundamentally different in the kind of response they get from the host country, in the way they relate themselves with the ethnic neighborhoods and in the way they sacrifice for the sake of their offspring.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is a controversial issue in both Canada and the USA because people perceive it differently. Some people believe that multiculturalism, especially bilingual education, is detrimental because it hampers the core of their national character. They believe that unity and prosperity emerge from the homogeneity of practices. But others believe that multiculturalism has been beneficial for the nation because it provides a pool of talents to innovate the economy. They also believe that the immigrants are not threat to the mainstream national character because most of the newly arrived people observe their cultural rituals at home while follow the mainstream code outside. They also don’t think immigration as a major problem because most of the second and third generation immigrants have the tendency to melt with the mainstream culture.

The Nation, Nationalism and literature

The Term Nation is both historically determined and general. As a term, it refers both to the modern nation-state and to something more ancient and nebulous- the 'natio'- a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging. The distinction is often obscured by nationalists who seek to place their own country in an"immemorial past' where its arbitaries cannot be questioned.

For we often hear that nationalism is dead. Despite explosive independence movements in different part of the world, many seem convinced of this. Some point to global developments that cast nationalism in the refratory light of heroic memory, where the invariable goals of creating the administrative economy, a repressive apparatus capable of waging war, and a sense of belonging that glosses over class conflicts, are being passed over in favour of local affiliations and loyalities on the one hand, and on the other, are being rendered obsolete by the international realities of multinational corporation and the telecommunications industry.

In fact, it is in the third world fiction after the second world war that the fictional uses of 'nation' and 'nationalism' are most pronounced. The nation is precisely what Foucault has called a 'discursive formation' - not simply an allegory or imaginative vision, but a gestative political structure which the third world artist is consciously building or suffering the lack of.

The phrase 'myths of the nation' is ambiguous in a calculated way. It does not refer only to the more or less unsurprising idea that nations are mythical, - there is no 'scientific' means of establishing what all nations have in common. The phrase is also not limited to the consequences of this artificiality in contemporary political life - namely, the way that various governments invent traditions to give permanence and solidity to a transient political form.

The rising number of studies on nationalism in the past three decades reflects its lingering, almost atmospheric, insistence in our thinking. In cultural studies, the nation has often lurked behind terms like 'tradition', 'folklore', ' or 'community', obscuring their origins.

The rise of the modern nation - state in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is inseparable from the forms and subjects of imaginative literature. On the one hand, the political tasks of modern nationalism directed the course of literature, leading through the romantic concepts of 'folk character' and 'national language' to the divisions of literature into distinct 'national literature'. On the other hand, and just as fundamentally, literature participated in the formation of nations through the creation of 'national print media'-the newspaper and the novel.

In tracing these ties between literature and nation, Some have evoked the fictive quality of the political concept itself. Race, geography, tradition, language, size, or some combination of these seem finally insufficient for determining national essence, and yet people die for nations, fight wars for them, and write fictions on their behalf. Others have emphasized the creative side of nation - forming, suggesting the cultural importance of what has often been treated as a dry, rancorous political fact.

Nations are the imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role.

Diaspora

According to Oxford English Dictionary, Diaspora, refers to any body of people living outside their traditional homeland. Diasporas are sandwiched in their memory as almost simultaneous and cumulative. Diaspora is the “Voluntary or forcible movement of people from their homelands into new regions. (68)” Under colonialism, diaspora is a multifarious movement, involving temporary or permanent movement.

The “temporary or permanent” movement of Europeans all over the world, leading to colonoial settlements. Consequently, the ensuing economic exploitation of the settled areas necessitated large amounts of labour that could not be fulfilled by the local populace. The diaspora resulting from the enslavement of Africans and relocation to places like the British colonies. After slavery was outlawed, the continued demand for workers created indentured labour which produced large bodies of people from poor areas of India, China (and others) to the West Indies, Malaya, Fiji, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, etc. The diasporas are of importance to post colonial studies because the descendents of these people have come to produce highly unique cultures that both maintains and builds on the perceptions of their original cultures.

Diasporas are people who live outside their “natal (or imagined natal) territories” and recognize their traditional homelands are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, religions they adopt, and cultures they produce. Diaspora can be broken down into various forms: victim diaspora, labour diaspora, imperial diasporas, trade diasporas, homeland diasporas cultural diasporas. Each of the above categories underline a particular cause of migration usually associated with particular groups of people.

Diasporic subjectivity is necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier “elsewhere” in an active and critical relationships with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. “Home” then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location.

One cannot live earn, pay taxes, raise a family, produce scholarship, teach and take passionate and vigorous political stances in the one’s present location, and still continue to call it “not – home”. The demands of the “politics of location” are complex: “home” and “not-home” and “coming” and going” are neither literal nor figurative but rather, issues within the politics of “imaginary geographies”. Due to diasporic displacement, there is a “now” and a “then” in one’s life, underwritten by a “here” and a “there”.

With a change of location, there is both change and no-change. When people move, the very continuity of their identity is expressed as a function of historical change. It is as through the phenomenon of moving away from one’s given home into an acquired home vividly thematizes some of the constituent problems of historiography: how to represent the past in and through its very displacement, and how to speak for the present critically and genealogically. According to Safram’s the features of diaspora are: “Dispersal, collective memory, alienation, respect & longing for the homeland, a belief in its restoration & self – definition in terms of this homeland”(83).

The whole importance of the diaspora and its potential for creating a new kind of culture arise out of such a crossing of boundaries. The diaspora then involve a cross-cultural or cross-civilizational passage. It is only such a crossing that results in the unique consciousness of the diasporic. In other words, there has to be a source country and a target country, source culture and target culture, a source language and a target language, a source religion and a target religion and so on. The crossing may be both forced or voluntary, the passage involves some significant tension between the source and the target culture. It is through this displacement and ambivalence the diasporic is endangered. One of the most important themes in this type of literature is the concern with place and displacement: the special post colonial crisis of identity comes into being with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. These diasporas, displaced, alienated, excluded & oppressed, create their own kind of epistemic disjunction at the heart of the metropolis.

The diasporas constructed their homelands, accordance to their own need and compulsions. In the case of forced diaspora, where the distance between physical, but more so psychological, was so vast, that the motherland remained frozen in the diasporic imagination as a sort of sacred site or symbol, almost like an idol of memory and imagination. The poverty of the homeland, which caused the diaspora in the first place, was forgetten, or over written with the feeling that it was home, a place where the present alienation of the diasporic person did not exit.

While the old diaspora are cut off from the motherland, the new diaspora has unprecedented access to it by virtue of its privileged Non – Resident. Not forced to leave the birthland, these writers have chosen to relocate themselves in the metropolitan centers chiefly for economic gains.

Identity and Woman

"Identity" is one of the most urgent as well as hotly disputed topics in modern contemporary world. For nearly two decades, it has been a central focus of debate for psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and cultural materialist criticism in areas ranging from postcolonial and ethnic studies to feminism and queer theory. Oddly enough, much of what has been written about identity during this period seeks to delegitimate the concept itself by revealing its ontological, epistemological, and political limitations. Activists and academics alike have responded to essentialist tendencies in the cultural nationalist and feminist movements of the 60 and 70s, and to the violent ethnic conflicts of the 80s and 90s, by concluding that (social or cultural) identity, as a basis for political action, is theoretically incoherent and politically pernicious. Because we intend to reevaluate--even to reclaim--identity, and because we want to rescue identity from the disrepute into which it has fallen, the authors and editors of this anthology take seriously the criticisms that have been directed against the concept of identity.

The problem with essentialist conceptions of identity that critics point to is the tendency to posit one aspect of identity (say, gender) as the sole cause or determinant constituting the social meanings of an individual's experience. The difficulty, critics of identity point out, is that identities are constituted differently in different historical contexts. So, for example, a slave woman living in ante-bellum America might experience her "womanness" very differently from a middle-class housewife living in Victorian England. Moreover, the social meanings attached to each woman's gender might be so different as to render the project of describing one woman in terms of the other meaningless. Even two women living in close proximity to each other (such as a Zulu maid and her Afrikaner madam) might be so differently situated in relation to the category of gender that their experiences, and the social meanings inscribed in those experiences, cannot be usefully described in the same terms. These examples illustrate that, contrary to an essentialist view, identity categories are neither stable nor internally homogenous.

The instability and internal heterogeneity of identity categories (such as gender) have prompted critics of identity to point to a range of additional problems. They remind us that insofar as every woman differs from every other woman in more or less significant ways, it is impossible to determine the (racial, class, cultural, etc.) identity of the "authentic woman" and thus to unify different women under the signifier "woman." And because women's experiences are so varied, there can be no such thing as an authentic or exemplary "woman's experience." This situation, the critic of identity suggests, creates an epistemological difficulty: as we do not know exactly what experiences of women can be taken as exemplary, we cannot know with certainty what criteria to apply in analyzing and understanding women's actions, intentions and emotions. As a result, "women's experience" can only be understood as an arbitrary construct. Indeed, any account of "women's experience" risks naturalizing one group of women's experience as normative and thereby marginalizing that of another group's.

This difficulty, in turn, gives rise to a variety of political predicaments: if no one woman can know the experiences of all women, on what authority can she speak "as a woman"? At best, she might be able to speak accurately of her own unique experience of being a woman (and some postmodernist critics would deny even this)--but then she would be speaking as an individual, not as a woman. The issue of authority of experience is thus intimately tied to the problem of representation: if even a woman cannot be trusted to speak accurately for and about "women," then how is it possible to speak for or about "women" at all? In fact, some critics of identity tell us, it is not possible: to speak of "women" in a substantive way is to risk projecting onto all women one socially dominant construction of "woman," thereby distorting the meanings of the lives of more marginalized women. It is to engage, they warn us, in the practice of ideological normalization and exclusion.

These critiques of identity have been articulated by activists and academics coming from a wide range of perspectives. Activist women of color, conservative pundits, postmodernist theorists, and feminists of all colors and theoretical perspectives have noted the very real challenges posed by the concept of identity. The answer to the question of how to respond to these challenges, however, has varied widely. Some critics have retained an allegiance to the concept of identity and have attempted to reformulate or complicate their understandings of it. Ethnic studies scholars and members of various student groups, for example, continue to deploy identity as an organizing principle in their scholarly, political, and activist endeavors. Such scholars and activists have insisted that identity categories do not devolve into essentialist programs. Instead, identity categories provide modes of and examining significant correlations between lived experience and social location. Other critics have advocated the abandonment of the whole enterprise of determining who belongs to what group or what that belonging might mean to the lives of social group members. On the one hand, conservative critics argue for this abandonment on the grounds that paying attention to particular identities will unnecessarily balkanize our society and obscure our shared human attributes. On the other hand, postmodernists claim it is an error to grant ontological or epistemological significance to identity categories.