By Prof. Dr. Khachig Tölölyan,
Professor of English at Wesleyan University, USA, co-editor of Pynchon Notes and editor of Diaspora.
Specially for The Philosophy Club
Тук публикуваме в оригинал интервюто на проф. Хачик Тололян – един от водещите в света изследователи на диаспорите в глобалния свят, специално предоставено за нашия сайт. Неговият труд Stateless Power: Diasporas in the Transnational Moment, както и множество статии, посветени на качествените промени настъпващи в диаспорите на евреи, арменци, японци, китайци и др., в динамично променящият се глобален свят, са сред високо оценяваните, приносни визии за бъдещето.
Крос-културалните взаимовръзки и зависимости между глобалните диаспори, с една в много случаи „имагинерна“ далечна родина, но и новата приемаща страна , възникването на „хибридни идентичности“ – и др. по-малко дискутирани у нас проблеми, със сигурност ще подтикнат просветения читател към една нова рефлексия за „другостта“.И човек неизбежно се пита; „Какво става с нас българите тук и отвъд нашите граници“? И можем ли да говорим още за „нас“, когато за 25 години преход, управляващият елит ни раздели на едни „тук“, и други – „там“?
Първите вървят с друго самочувствие. Дори и хора с по- ограничени възможности, като поживяха в чуждата среда, научиха какво е правото на граждани, правото на труд, достойно заплащане, че и човешко достойнство, ако щете. Вторите си „налягат тук парцала“, както се вика, че ей на – и от лошо по-лошо има. Бежанци, имигранти, потоци от хора и човешки съдби, „пришпорени“ през горнилото на войни, катаклизми и страдания. Все жертви на вопиющ егоцентризъм и бездушие към другия. Но най-вече на една късогледа политика на европейско, да не говорим национално равнище, накъдето сега Брюксел прехвърля огъня.
Към 3 милиона българи са извън страната /по приблизителни данни/. Защото от 2011 родната статистика мълчи. Официално българската държава поддържа контакт със сънародниците ни в чужбина чрез Агенцията за българите в чужбина. Това е другото име на прехвърляне на отговорности на няколко правителства, за нищото им неправене с нашите задгранични общности. Ще ви го кажат във всяка българска общност от Фрайбург, Германия до Торонто – Канада.
И се питаме в тези предизборни дни – как тъй ни „обгрижват“ нашите делегирани „ слуги на народа“, когато по време на работата върху Изборния кодекс, броят на българските граждани живеещи в чужбина допреди 3 години, бе над един милион (без Турция). А тези, по преценка на нашите дипломати, са били 2 милиона /към март 2010/. Много вода изтече от тогава – но тъмата става все по гъста.
• Като общ брой постоянно пребиваващите в Гърция са около 200 хил., но при сезонната селскостопанска заетост достигат 250 хил. души. При това цифрите сочат само регистрирани, а според гръцки експерти в страната има двойно повече имигранти от 500-те хиляди души с редовен статут.
• Още през 2007 г. броят на българите в Испания бе надхвърлил 350 хил. души.
• При 300 хил. българи официално в САЩ, неофициално само колонията ни в Чикаго достига 150 хил. Следват Лос Анджелис с около 25 000, Ню Йорк, Вашингтон, Маями, Финикс, Лас Вегас. Най-много българи има в щата Илинойс (където е и Чикаго) – вероятно над 150 000, и по-малко във Флорида – между 60 хил. и 120 хил., и в Калифорния – между 40 хил. и 120 хил.
• Между 30 и 150 хил. българи има и в Канада, според различни източници. Още по 70-80 хил. души са българските общности в Бразилия и Аржентина.
• Вече няма регион на Великобритания без нашенци, като сочат официалните данни на британските власти на Острова има 50 хил. българи. Реално обаче са много повече, защото няма статистика на всички пристигнали.
• 51 хил. са официално българите в Италия, неофициално надхвърлят 120 хил. души. Най-много са в област Ломбардия с център Милано – близо 10 000 души, следва я Лацио с център Рим.
• Най-големият ръст на живеещи в чужбина българи отчита Германия, като привлича и наши работници от изпадналите в криза Испания и Италия.По официални данни към 2013 г. в Германия живеят 120 000 наши сънародници. 20% от тях са женени за немци. В Германия българите съставляват и най-голямата група от чуждестранни студенти след китайците.
• Няма статистика колко от емигриралите там имат наш паспорт. Най-точни проучвания по въпроса предлага блогърът Боян Юруков. Според негова справка от 2012 г. за последните 7 години германско гражданство са взели 5500 души. . Неофициално обаче в страната има поне още близо 100 000 българи, които идват като сезонни работници, или работят на черно.
• Германското вътрешно министерство публикува неотдавна статистика, според която броят на прииждащите от България и Румъния граждани се увеличава лавинообразно. Властите в Берлин обаче не разделят в преброяванията българи от румънци. Според статистиката им през миналата година само до октомври повече от 153 000 румънци и българи са дошли в Германия. Така броят им за деветте месеца е надхвърлил общия брой за цялата предходна година – през 2011 г. в Германия са пристигнали около 146 000 румънци и българи. От януари до края на октомври 2012 г. 102 000 души са дошли от Румъния, а от България – около 51 400.
• Според германските организации на работодателите, обаче ситуацията с новодошлите не е така драматична, както я представят в медиите. Безработицата сред тях не е по-висока от средната за Германия. Истинският проблем са ромите и всички неквалифицирани работници. Въпросът е кой ще плаща субсидиите за училищно образование и здравеопазване. Местните автономни управи се чувстват изоставени и засилват нагласата срещу българи и румънци.
Но кое прави диаспората? Тя съвсем не е „насипна статистическа бройка“, а специфична форма на съществуване и обмен между етноси, култури и народностни групи във време пространството. За жалост тъкмо това убягва от полезрението на нашите управленци, да не говорим за „народоведи“, антрополози, „прецизни историци“ /няма документ – няма събитие/, и всякакви дилетанти върху полето на един комплексен феномен, какъвто са променящите се идентичности. А той е важен, защото не само защото формира отношението към една, или друга „другост“, етнос, нация, или държава, но и открива /или не/ простор за съзидателна инициатива. Мотивира за интегриране в култури и институции, съчетава уникални традиции с цивилизационни достижения и ценности на човечеството.
Едва след третата генерация може да се говори за елементи на същинска диаспора, твърдят мнозина специалисти. Сиреч, когато се стигне критична маса, определено равнище и качество на интеграцията. Не всеки издържа – мнозина прегръщат асимилацията. Така им изглежда по леко. Но не след кризи на идентичността, загуба на памет.
Не питайте къде са лобистите на нашите български диаспори в чужбина. Къде са ни меценатите зад граница, хората, които милеят за престижа на държава и родина, дори да са на хиляди километри от нея? А тя най- често се отнася към тях като към „номади на съвремеността“. /Мелучи/. И им се отплаща с безразличие, че и неблагодарност. Изводът е близко до всеки здавомислещ българин – нужна е нова политика на приобщаване, а не на „вторично“ и „третично“ отблъскване, прокуждане и отчуждаване на всеки, който се има за българин. И споделена отговорност за българщината в нейните многообразни форми. Но най-вече основаваща се на справедливостта, условие за единението ни като народ и нация.
Бележка на редактора
New Literary Observer, appeared late Aug. 2014
Q: How would you describe briefly the current state of diaspora studies?
KT: The field is very interesting and active, but also quite uneven. First, because the category is highly inclusive now and there are competing definitions at work, as opposed to, say, in 1990, when only the Jewish, Armenian, and Greek diasporas were generally recognized. Second, many scholarly disciplines are involved, ranging from anthropology, sociology and political science to literary analysts of postcolonial literature, specialists in religious studies, human geography, and more. Third, the field is truly international: Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, which is the publication I edit, is typical in that it publishes articles from people working in England or the US, Malaysia or South Africa, India or France, etc, and each of these introduce some differences in terms of the categories of thought they bring to the task, as well as in methodology.
Q: An exterior observer approaching diaspora studies from the Russian context can get the impression that the conceptual apparatus for the comprehension of diaspora studies is still taking shape, is forming, and that the internal boundaries between various aspects of the study of diaspora have yet to be defined. Is this true?
KT: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that diaspora studies is a multi-local field, as I mentioned in the response above; so there is no central authority that dictates what diaspora studies is and how it should be defined or studied. Scholars read the traditions of their disciplines and countries, they read analyses appearing in other countries or some other disciplines, then they write and lecture. If their work is accepted, it complicates the debate at first – but over time, certain approaches persuade many adherents and they become dominant. But there is no full consensus and no one has the authority to impose that. The views that persuade the largest number of scholars win, so to speak.
For example, many influential scholars believe that a diaspora necessarily has an orientation towards the homeland it left behind: quite different groups claim that this is so. Zionists who would like as many Jews as possible to return to Israel affirm this, but so do American State Department and World Bank officials, because they would like diasporas in the West that originate in economically underdeveloped countries to invest in their homelands, to encourage development. These beliefs have conceptual but also political components. By contrast, other scholars believe that diaspora requires only two qualities: dispersion and the maintenance of a distinct identity in dispersion, the successful resistance to assimilation. So the Roma or gypsies, who have no memory of or interest in returning to their northwest Indian homeland, which they left around 800 CE, are a diaspora for the second category, but not the first.
Furthermore, there are categories that every scholar accepts in theory but on which he or she does not concentrate in practice. A diaspora studied in terms of the amount of money that transnational migrants send home (“remittances”) and the same diaspora considered in terms of the flow of cultural products, for example music, that circulates between the homeland and the various diaspora communities, will appear quite different. If one does not concentrate on transnational, cross-border flows but instead studies the practices of diasporic institutions, for example schools, places of religious worship, and political lobbies, the same diaspora looks different again. In theory, these and other features could be synthesized to capture a complete account of a diaspora, but in practice that is very hard to achieve.
Q: How much, or conversely, little, do contemporary conceptions of what is a diaspora accepted by diaspora studies differ from the traditional ones? I mean such interpretations as in the English Wikipedia: “Diaspora is a scattered population with a common origin in a smaller geographic area. Diaspora can also refer to the movement of the population from its original homeland.”
KT: It’s difficult to say, because even traditional definitions differed. Consider some of the important elements debated in most early definitional arguments. First, reasons for departure from the homeland: Jewish and Armenian thinkers emphasized that their diasporas were the result of coercion, of violent expulsion. But this was not always the sole reason. The first wave of Jewish people were indeed transported to Babylonian exile by force; but there were already Jewish communities in Egypt before that, and after the Babylonian exile was over, Jews again “voluntarily” emigrated for economic reasons. The first waves of Armenian dispersion were coerced by the violence of Seljuk Turks, but the later waves of emigration were also due to poverty and the search for opportunity.
Or take another element: the claim, especially important to some Jewish scholars, that diasporas always want to return to the homeland. But most people in most diasporas, once comfortably established in a host country, choose to stay where they are – today, some Jews return to Israel, many leave Israel, and many others stay where they are, in England or Brazil, for example. These multiple behaviors characterize most large, well-established diasporas.
In my view, part of the complication is due to what “coerced departure” means. The Kirghiz and Armenian workers who have come to Russia since 1991 did not come because someone was killing them, but because they had no work or were being paid at a near starvation wage. Is there economic coercion? Is a diaspora that is the result of economic misery the same as a diaspora that emerges from the survivors of massacres and genocides?
Obviously they are not fully alike – for example, the work of memory that holds the diasporic community together will be quite different. But both are dispersed people with transnational connections and some desire to maintain a distinct identity, a desire not to be completely assimilated. In my view and that of many colleagues, they are all diasporas, they just can’t all be conceptualized in one way.
Q: It is widely believed that a diaspora community strongly and consistently tries to remain closed. But to what extent are real diasporas closed? Can we “scale” this closeness, at least approximately? To what extent is the diaspora community closed or open to neighboring cultures and ethnicities?
KT: Again, the answer depends on time and place. It was easier to maintain closed diasporic societies if and when certain factors were dominant: Religious sentiment; ethnic and racial prejudices; difficult and limited mobility; restricted communication; closed economies with niches only available for diasporas; no university education; no military service for all. Under such conditions, which prevailed in much of the world until recently, it was easier for diaspora leaders to develop a strong rhetoric concerning the importance of maintaining closed community boundaries, and to elicit the behavior they wanted: no intermarriage, limited and formalized contact between the diasporic people and the host society, no assimilation. But a great deal depended on the majority host society and the host state: if the society was intolerant and superior in its attitudes, it did not permit or want to integrate its minorities, including the diasporic minorities.
No society in Europe seems to have been eager to integrate the Romas; Americans were far more willing to integrate white Poles or Jews than black African Americans. Some societies and states engaged in religious persecution and conversion attempts – for example, in the Byzantine Greek empire, Armenians in large numbers converted to Orthodoxy because of pressure, but also because profitable careers opened up for converts.
Today, the State in many countries is less narrowly nationalistic and purist, more accepting of hybridity than it used to be, and does not enforce social, cultural and economic norms with the rigidity it used to apply earlier. It often allows social, cultural and economic forces to determine who becomes a migrant, a citizen, and who integrates in the majority society, and how. (I know that there are still many countries where this is not the case. But in the globalizing countries that is the trend). We have evidence of change accelerating when societies celebrate openness and inclusiveness and when contact with the cultural habits of others becomes easy, as in America now.
Today, a majority of Japanese American marriages are with people not of their group – that was not the case until the 1970s. A large percentage of Jewish marriages and a majority of Armenian marriages in America now are with people outside the diasporic group. The uneven decline of religion, the increase in university education, TV, music and the Internet all contributed to a common, almost global youth culture that is more powerful than diasporic culture. But such factors can slow down or even reverse as the behavior of majority societies and the State change. History can seem to be headed irresistibly in one direction, and then abruptly changes course.
Q: What is the real or imagined connection of the diaspora community with the home country? What are the interactions between the culture of the diaspora and the home country?
KT: There can be no single answer, either over the course of history or in the present. The oldest and in some sense paradigmatic diaspora, that of the Jews, for a long time could not have much connection with the home country because the wars with the Roman Empire (66 to 134 CE) led not just to the destruction of the sacred city of Jerusalem but virtually the entire country. For some centuries, small religious communities remained and produced the first, Palestinian Talmud, but by around 500 CE the Jews of Babylon and their Talmud took precedence. It is doubtful that between 500 and 1880 CE there were at any one time more than 3-4,000 Jews in Palestine/Israel. Similarly, for the African slave diaspora in the US, no contact with home was possible; the diaspora persisted because the American state and society did not want assimilation, and because factors like persecution, plus a powerful religious, oral, and musical culture developed by the slaves and their descendants, fashioned a distinct identity. Others, like the Armenians, always maintained contact with the homeland, but the quantity and quality of contact varied a lot.
Part of what makes the post 1960-s diasporas different is that travel to the homeland is easy, so phone and e-mail and video messages circulate daily. Even when the homeland is as far as India is from America, a large number of prosperous diasporic Indians visit home annually. The differences are remarkable. In 1910, a letter from Chicago to Odessa might take three weeks to get there, and an answer three more. There were seven or eight contacts like that in a year at most. Now I know immigrants who talk almost daily with family that is 7,000 kilometers away. They can send money, gifts, videos and selfies. The ease of contact with the homeland is accelerating.
But of course the forms of cultural and other kinds of interaction are more complex than this. Contact with the literature of the homeland disappears fast, because many immigrants are not highly literate, or are too busy making money, or lose the homeland language in one generation. If the homeland government is oppressive politically, this complicates contact. If it is oppressive economically, all contact diminishes. Between 1979 and 1989, after Deng Ziao Ping opened the Chinese economy, 85% of all foreign investment in China came from South Asian Chinese: they were incredibly fast and efficient, once it became clear that they could invest freely and take out profits freely.
Q: From the point of view of insiders, diaspora is a depository of cultural codes, ideologemes, and values that used to inhere in the home country and ought to be preserved. Is this true from the cultural-anthropological point of view?
KT: Yes and no. It is generally the case that open diasporas, the ones that are not forced into ghettoes, rapidly lose some of those codes and values. But it is also the case that some small fraction adheres to them. The best way to think of diasporic social formations is that (as in national societies), the mass of the population is busy at work and leisure, engaging in routine ritual practices that mark their identity. But there are small groups of people who are more committed, more activist, more militant. It is these core groups that continue to maintain shrinking traditions, some of which can be revived from time to time.
To illustrate, some time ago the Israeli government decided to document all diasporic Jewish dances, from those danced in Yemen and Morocco to those danced in eastern Europe before the establishment of Israel. They discovered that in Israel no one any longer knew how to dance a certain dance from eastern Poland, though they remembered its name. But a Hasidic group in Brooklyn still danced it. This example both points to the possibility of preservation of old ways in the diaspora and to the important fact that homeland societies can change very fast, and when they do, confident in their identity, which is rooted in the homeland, they discard old traditions more easily than some small diasporic groups. But on the whole, it is the case that the traditional disappears faster in diasporas.
Importantly, this does not always mean assimilation. The diasporas that endure are the ones that try to retain older cultural practices that define identity, but when these fade, they innovate new ones that continue to mark them as distinct from the surrounding host society. Diasporas survive by continuing to produce difference. In the end, they end up being different not just from the host society of their new homes, but also from the ancestral society of the homeland. This double difference is a key feature.
Of course, there can be more or less continuity with the lost traditions. Thus, from the 1970s on, in youth clubs in London, young Punjabi immigrants from India innovated, drawing on an old agricultural dance from their region, updating it continually by drawing on the dance styles of Caribbean black immigrants to produce bhangra, a diasporically produced dance music that is now popular among some homeland Indian youth as well. Difference is nowadays often produced by the transnational circulation of practices and meanings.
Q: How does a community that is no longer based on the traditional categories of territory-citizenship-national identity organize its cultural identity? What compensatory mechanisms are employed in this production of identity?
KT: I would begin by adding to these three categories two others, economic and religious identity. I don’t think it’s necessary to expand on religious identity. Its effects are manifest. But let me comment about the economic. The one thing about which committed Marxists and hard-core capitalists can agree is that the economy is a foundational category of human life. Today, under the impact of globalization, nations living on their land as citizens of their national, independent state, speaking the national language, are discovering that the conditions in which they live have changed anyway, sometimes drastically, because the economy is no longer national. By definition, this has always been true of diasporas: they lived in someone else’s economy, another nation’s or state’s economy. Primarily, they functioned in economic niches.
There is an old term, “middleman minorities,” which applies especially to Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Chinese and to the Indian diaspora in British East Africa. These diasporic minorities developed not just their commercial practices but their collective identity in niche economic practices, often as middlemen between large agricultural populations and their semi-feudal aristocracies. Jews and Armenians in Poland between 1345 and 1650 were jewelers, money-lenders, skilled artisans, and not peasants. The Chinese fulfilled similar roles in Indonesia and Thailand, although their case is more complex, because they were also “coolies,” agricultural laborers, in some circumstances. Traveling in Europe and North America, one can’t help noticing that money-changers, newspaper kiosque owners, gas station and motel owners and small shopkeepers are very often Indians. All these niche economies help to determine the cultural orientations and identities of a diasporic petty bourgeoisie with strong transnational ties.
It may be useful to add here that the whole question of “identity” is tremendously complicated and almost unmanageable. Two respected American scholars, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, have argued in a long article titled “Beyond Identity” that although we use the term, we do not need it and that it often leads to confusion. Within scholarly discourse, they claim, the work badly done by the term “identity” can be done better through a combination of other, more concrete terms. Nevertheless, most of us still use the terms “identity” and “cultural identity” in our daily conversations, in intellectual debate, in scholarly research. And yet to my knowledge there is no generally accepted and demonstrable theory of identity. There is no plausible account that unites personal and collective identity.
Clearly, if there is such a thing as Russian or Armenian collective identity that continues to exist over time, then we need a good analysis of how society and culture, working through the family and institutional structures, reproduce that identity within individuals, making sure that each newborn child acquires it. We have many observations and ideas, but no coherent general theory. Of course we know that parental and institutional practices matter. But we don’t know why one diasporic family produces two sons, say, two years apart, one of whom adheres strongly to diasporic identity while the other tries to put a great distance between himself and the community that “produced” him. This is not surprising: we also don’t know how the same family might make one of those sons a hard-working, decent person, while the other becomes a drug-addicted thief. How human beings are “made” by biology, family, the larger kinship group and society is more of a mystery that scholars like to admit, and that mystery extends to questions of diasporic identity.
Q: A constructivist conception exists that the diaspora is a kind of imagined community, like a nation. Does this idea work, and to what extent? Is the diaspora a community constructed primarily from the inside, or do outer, external social contexts have an important role in this construction?
KT: When Benedict Anderson launched the notion that nations are necessarily imagined communities, he meant that unlike the community of, say, a village, the members of this larger formation are not linked by quotidian face to face contact or by the interests and commitments that are debated in such interactions. Instead, Anderson, who was a specialist in Indonesia, meant that the people of, say, northwestern Sumatra, who live in an island separated from, say, the island of Maluku by 3,000 kilometers of ocean, developed a shared Indonesian identity, which had never before existed, by learning to imagine themselves as members of an extended but closed community. They were able to do this in part because of many modern features of 19th century society, most prominently print culture.
Diasporas are always and inevitably “imagined,” in Anderson’s sense. To describe them properly requires us to say that there are local diaspora communities, which are linked to each other in various ways. First, intra-nationally: for example, the French-Armenians of Paris, Marseille and Lyon are in touch with each other, as I imagine the Russian-Armenians of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rostov-na-Donu and Krasnodar also are. Second, they are in touch with other local communities transnationally, across the borders of states, as for example some Armenians from Moscow with Los Angeles and Paris with New York. And of course these local communities are in touch with Armenia. It is this combination of the local and the transnational that underpins the abstraction known as the global Armenian diaspora.
This diaspora imagines itself not abstractly, but through various forms of intensive circulation that make possible a far more intense communication than what print culture made possible in the 19th century. Today, Turks in Berlin, Yerevan Armenians in Los Angeles and Lebanese in New York all have 24-hour satellite TV contact with their homelands and many have computer and cellphone contact on an almost instantaneous basis with relatives elsewhere. There are also institutionalized contacts sustained through cheap travel: the clergy, diasporic philanthropists and political activists, scholars, intellectuals and artists all circulate. Money and ideas circulate. Many of the online discussions are in English or French, because Chinese in, say, Singapore, Hawai’i and London, or Indians in Calcutta, Johannesburg and San Francisco, or Haitians in Miami, Montreal and Paris all find it easiest to either argue and agree with each other online in those languages.
Diaspora scholars are often reading these debates and have interesting things to say about how diasporic identity is being re-imagined: online, the local features of a diasporic community tend to matter less than the discourse of the imagined, global diaspora. Sometimes, this is dangerous, leading to a global form of nationalism that is not anchored in the nation-state.
Q: What role do memory practices play in the life of diasporas? How is this memory passed along?
KT: Memory is definitely one of the key features and connective tissues that link diaspora across space and time, but other than that, generalizations are difficult. In some ways, memory in diaspora works as it does in the homeland. When in the homeland there are official commemorative occasions to mark events important to the nation’s identity, similar events are held in diaspora communities: Cinco de Mayo (May 5th) is celebrated in Mexican-American communities with enthusiasm almost as great as that demonstrated in Mexico City. Feast days that were celebrated in more local areas are equally important: Little Italy in New York celebrates Saint Gennaro’s Feast with as much dedication as Napoli (Coppola’s Godfather Part II was not exaggerating). In my small city of Middletown (population 50,000), the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, Poland, and St. Sebastian of Melilli, Sicily, are annually remembered by groups that are ethnic but sometimes display diasporic behavior. (Ethnic groups and diasporas are not synonymous – all diasporas are ethnic groups, but all ethnic groups are not diasporic).
Once again, the question of the personal and collective arises in the sphere of memory. How do collective memories become personal? In the case of diasporas that have been the victims of coercion and violence, memories of the traumatic event endure. But what if I, the son of Armenian survivors of the genocide that the Ottoman Turks committed, and Jewish children of victims of the genocide, like my friend and colleague, the scholar Marianne Hirsch, also claim memory?
Neither of us experienced those terrible events: how does one remember that which one did not experience? Working on old photographs and other texts, Professor Hirsch innovated the notion of “postmemory,’ discussing how familial and other narratives, objects and behaviors implant “postmemory” in those who cannot have a memory of first-hand experience.
Of course, after the first generation of the children of survivors, transmission becomes more complicated with each generation, but memory persists through many devices and practices. There are, for example, “legacy objects” – not art necessarily, but craft objects that reflect the style and origin practiced in the homeland before destruction: a ceramic object in the hands of a German American family that fled from Hungary to Minnesota in 1848; a lacquered box brought from China around 1850; an embroidered handkerchief brought from Armenian Marash a century ago; foods, local songs, and always and above all, narratives (stories transmitted, photographs, letters, diaries, etc). All these contribute.
The study of all forms of cultural memory is now a subdiscipline, with old and new scholars from Maurice Halbwachs to contemporaries like Jan Assmann and Peter Burke, as well as memoirists and novelists, all contributing. Museums, circulating exhibitions, history textbooks for diaspora schools, debates about oral testimony, psychoanalytic discussions of trauma and the unconscious all practice cultural and social memory and implant it as postmemory in diasporic individuals.
Q: When there are major changes in the media available both in homeland and diaspora – verbal, visual, auditory, etc. – how do these changes influence the construction and circulation of identities? How are features that are important to nations and diasporas, such as collective memory or a shared language, transformed by changes in media?
KT: The digitalization of media has changed everything, ranging from sex and crime to diasporas. The impact on diasporas must be analyzed as two distinct phenomena. One has to do with the communication of information, the other with cultural production. In a sense, we have already mentioned this topic: today, diasporic people know with amazing speed and detail what is happening in the homeland, to their families, communities, and to the economy and politics of the entire nation, and they get the information without the control and filtering effect of major organizations.
For example, I subscribe to ANN, a skillfully designed Armenian news service which has a web search engine that picks up every digital news item posted online that mentions the word “Armenia/n.” That means that every morning I receive between 100 to 150 items, many short, some long, in English or French, that inform me about an enormous range of activities, ranging from how Armenians commemorated the genocide in Marseille to how an Armenian football player named Henrik Mkhitaryan of the German team Borussia Dortmund is doing; it also gives me dozens of URLs or web addresses to go to where I can read relevant articles or look at You Tube events. On a normal day, I spend at least an hour reading some of these items, sometimes more.
Of course, this is not for everyone: the estimate is that there are between 2-3,000 Armenians who do this every day: but they are committed, what Gabriel Sheffer called “core” members of the diaspora. As stated earlier, diasporas are not equally maintained by all members, but by the committed, the activist, the militant.
Participation in communication, in the circulation of ideas and images and audiovisual materials, is very important. Over time, even older intellectuals and scholars like me, who normally prefer to read paper, become accustomed to the resources the digital offers. For the young, this is their natural ecosystem, in which they live, work, are entertained, and also develop commitments. The development of digital commitments is now being explored by scholars. How do scattered members of a diaspora who connect online create new links, new conversations, ultimately new diasporic discourses and practices that do not merely communicate older information available elsewhere, but actually invent or produce them?
The German anthropologist Martin Sökefeld has demonstrated how social movements can be generated online, and specifically how the ethno-religiously distinct Alevi community of Turkey, which was crushed by successive Turkish governments between 1923 and 1980, recreated itself. During and after the 1960s, some Alevis arrived, as individuals and not as communities, in Germany, having lost almost all their specific oral traditions and group practices. Sökefeld demonstrates how, starting in the late 1980s, they recreated these foundational traditions and thereby their community through digital work that was not just political but also cultural and religious.
Elsewhere, in a study of diasporic cyberspace, Victoria Bernal has shown how Eritrean exiles and emigrants who fled their homeland during the thirty-year war of independence from Ethiopia (1961-1991) used new media to consolidate a diasporic public sphere and new sites of cultural production while also mobilizing politically. Pnina Werbner, working on Pakistanis in England, and Arjun Appadurai writing more theoretically, have also argued that the growth of diasporic digital public spheres is a key feature of contemporary diaspora life.
Of course, it must also be admitted that there are negative features to this development. Digital posting, which can be anonymous, can encourage ugly political opinions and cultural prejudice. Diasporic Hindu nationalism has developed some of its most negative variants online. In an article titled “Cyberpublics and diaspora politics among transnational Chinese,” the anthropologist Aihwa Ong has shown how a global, digital diaspora that is no longer embedded in local, daily social life can encourage a new cultural discourse that favors problematic essentialist abstractions.
Q: To what extent is life in diaspora determined by cultural stereotypes? When diasporas work to mark their differences from their host society, do they work with stereotypes, as the discourses of host nations often do?
KT: Diasporas do deploy stereotypes. They always have, but not more so than host societies, whose stereotypes are more dangerous because they have state power on their side. It’s both funny and sad to see how often different diasporas use the same stereotypes about themselves, thinking they are unique. “We are family oriented,” for example, is a phrase I have heard from Italian Americans, Armenian Americans, as well as from Chinese and Vietnamese Americans; each thinks they are uniquely loyal to family. All insist that their successes are due to their family orientation and ignore the same feeling in other diasporas.
In practice, stereotypes are used by diasporic minorities to criticize the majorities among whom they live.
For example, I have heard both Armenian and Korean Americans say “we are hard working, family-oriented people, not like the Americans who have been here forever.” Sometimes, this is pure racism directed at African Americans. But it is also more general. Many immigrant diasporas – Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Chinese, Indian – are on average more successful, economically, than indigenous Americans, whether white or black. Some members of these diasporas wonder why the indigenous Americans have not used the advantages of the “blessed” country (the US, or Australia, or Canada) during the centuries they have lived there, and they explain their own rapid success by condescending stereotypes about the native majority as lazy, fond of alcohol and drugs, or undisciplined sex.
Of course, the host majority has equally ugly and more dangerous stereotypes. The “middleman minorities” I mentioned earlier (Jews, Armenians, Chinese and Indians) who in the past succeeded as small and large businessmen in primarily agricultural lands, were stereotyped as greedy and dishonest – the faulty reasoning was “How can they, newcomers, get rich in a generation? They must be stealing from us.” This can lead to anything from discrimination to massacre. So, yes, stereotypes exist. In the US and Canada, at least, they are diminishing.
Q: Can we count liminal social forms as diasporas? On what grounds? Mini-communities are formed through internal migration; transitional labor migrants lacking civil status in the new, host country may lack well-developed organizations and institutions and may exist in a gray zone of invisibility. Is it intellectually, politically and culturally productive to think of them as diasporas?
KT: In this matter, there really is no agreement. Mobility has been part of human life since the first Homo sapiens emigrated from Africa 150,000 years ago. So diaspora, in the sense of mobile dispersion, is ancient. In my own work, I maintain that “dispersion” is the larger category, and “diaspora” is a subset of dispersion that, for historical reasons, has become what in rhetoric is called a synechdoche – a part of the larger phenomenon begins to stand for the whole.
When do communities of the dispersed become diasporas? Are all communities of migrants diasporic? As a scholar, I am in the minority in this matter. My definition requires several criteria: (1) diasporas are people no longer living on their homeland territory but rather dispersed across the borders of states, who (2) retain distinct homeland identities as long as possible and then create new ones that sustain their difference through nurturing cultural and other distinctions. Furthermore, (3) they retain a sense of kinship with others like them, scattered in other countries and, in most but not all cases, with (3b) the people left behind in the homeland. Finally, (4) I think of such people as “transnational communities” in transition who, in and after the third generation, become “true diasporas.”
This seems arbitrary to the majority of my colleagues, but in my view it is not. For the first generation of coerced or voluntary migrants, the memory of home and the links with relatives left behind is very strong – they have transnational families. For the second generation, the link weakens but remains – the little migrant boy or girl knows grandparents, uncles, nieces in the homeland. In and after the third generation, when the links with grandparents or cousins have faded, when personal commitments are not foundational, that is when the choice, the decision to retain and develop distinct identities becomes fully decisive.
Of course this is different in different historical periods. As I said earlier, if the majority of the host society rejects your community, it is relatively easy to remain diasporic. But when, in modern societies, cultural hybridity is accepted, citizenship is granted, economic opportunity possible, and yet a group of people still insist on retaining their difference in some way, then they are fully diasporic.
Most other definitions are less detailed and demanding, and of course there is great variety. Robin Cohen, at Oxford, who has done much to expand the definition of diaspora, identifies some that would be familiar to us, like victim diasporas, trade or merchant diasporas, and labor diasporas, but also imperial diasporas made up of colonial administrators and settlers.
Paul Gilroy, in using the term “Black Atlantic,” identifies a cultural diaspora of black people whose ancestors originated in Africa but for whom Brazil or Jamaica, Guyana or the US, London or Cuba are as likely to be “home” but, even more importantly, for whom the travel, exchange, and circulation of art, artists, and intellectuals was crucial in creating the binding culture of their community. In this view, the social formation that is a “black” diaspora community is animated above all by the circulating culture that a minority makes and a majority may adopt.My own view is that this has been true of many diasporas for a very long time. The debate goes on; for intellectual, psychological and political reasons that now operate transnationally, globally, that debate will remain unsettled.
Source: New Literary Observer/Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
http://www.pecob.eu/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/EN/IDPagina/2099(Appeared late August, 2014)
Authors Background:
Khachig Tölölyan is Professor of English at Wesleyan University, US, co-editor of Pynchon Notes and editor of Diaspora. He has published articles on American novels, particularly those of Thomas Pynchon, as well as on postmodernism, Armenian terrorism, and the history and structure of the Armenian diaspora. He has written, in Armenian, Spurki Mech [„In the Diaspora,“ Haratch Press, Paris], and many articles on Armenian issues and topics. He is the author of Stateless Power: Diasporas in the Transnational Moment and is editing a collection of articles by historians on various diasporas.