The Media of Diaspora

Mapping the Globe

Karim H. Karim

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134467211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Media of Diaspora examines how diasporic communities have used new communications media to maintain and develop community ties on a local and transnational level. This collection of essays from a wide range of different diasporic contexts is a unique contribution to the field.

1 Mapping diasporic mediascapes

Karim H. Karim

The attention of most commentators on globalisation is on powerful intergovernmental organisations and giant corporations; but the myriad economic and cultural activities of transnational groups that are neither government- nor corporate-based constitute a distinct ‘globalisation-from-below’ (Falk 1993; also see Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000). This form of globalisation is characterised by the complex formal and informal intercontinental networking of associations, many of which are loosely organised. The planetary connections produced by transnational migrations contribute significantly to globalisation-from-below.¹ This human activity is not a recent development; it has been occurring for many centuries and has led to the growth of diasporas linked by social characteristics like ethnicity, language, religion and culture. These groups have been developing intercontinental networks of communication that use a variety of media that include mail, telephone, fax, film, audiotape, videotape, satellite television and the Internet. The social implications of such diasporic ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1996) are the subject of scholarly debate and are under discussion in this volume. Its authors analyse the uses of media by various transnational communities originating and residing in six continents.

The manifestations of diaspora

‘Diaspora’ is derived from the Greek diaspeirein, which suggests the scattering of seeds. The term has traditionally referred to the Jewish dispersal outside Israel but is now applied to a growing list of migratory groups. Research on diaspora is conducted from numerous academic perspectives including anthropology, sociology, human geography, migration, culture, race, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, political economy and communication. The multidisciplinary nature of the present anthology seeks to capture some of the complex manifestations and consequences of media use by various transnational groups. An ongoing debate about what ‘diaspora’ should denote has accompanied the increasing focus on this topic. Whereas some scholars have argued in favour of identifying a closed set of characteristics in order to develop social scientific parameters for the study of diasporas (e.g. Cohen 1997), others have acknowledged its use in an increasingly broader range of human dispersals (Tölöyan 1996; Cunningham and Sinclair 2001). James Clifford cautions that ‘we should be wary of constructing our working definition of a term like diaspora by recourse to an “ideal type”’ (1994: 306).

All diasporas do not have homeland myths at the centre of their consciousness, contrary to William Safran's suggestion (1991). The term is frequently conceptualised as being limited to powerless transnational ethnic communities, but the ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993) includes politically marginalised communities in North America and Britain as well as the ruling elites in many Caribbean states. Often viewed through the lens of migration from the southern to the northern hemisphere, ‘diaspora’ tends to be limited to ‘non-white’ peoples who remain distinct as minorities in their countries of residence. But even though some European immigrants like the Irish may find it relatively easy to assimilate into ‘white’ host countries, their cultural identity frequently remains resilient — especially in music and dance forms. The presentation of Macedonians, Greeks and white Rhodesians as diasporas by contributors to this book challenges Asian, African and Latin American postcoloniality as exclusive markers of diasporic status.

A transnational group's non-dominant position in global cultural contexts generally remains a key indicator of its status as a diaspora; the global English or French are usually not treated as diasporas since their languages and cultures have privileged places in the transnational media and other mechanisms of globalisationfrom-above. Similarly, the pronouncements of the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy have relatively easy access to the purveyors of global discourses like CNN and Reuters. But those of primary Muslim institutions do not enjoy equal visibility; hence the conceptualisation of the multi-ethnic, worldwide Muslim ummah (community) in diasporic terms by Peter Mandaville in the present collection. Valerie Alia's chapter presents the circumpolar settlements of the Inuit as constituting a diaspora; she also extends the term to the dispersal of indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands but who remain within the borders of specific countries. These nuances underline contemporary scholarship's insufficient exploration of the numerous manifestations of diaspora and the present prematurity in setting hard limits to its definition.

Diasporas are frequently described as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins present a more fundamental challenge to the use of this concept as the basis of studying diasporic communication by critiquing its tendencies to essentialise diasporas. Anthony King points out in his chapter that Anderson's work was limited to the concept of political community; however, a number of other authors in the collection apply the notion of ‘imagined community’ to emphasise the diasporic connections facilitated by various media and the simultaneous consumption of the same content by members of a transnational group.

Diasporas are presented in several contributions to this volume as deterritorialised ‘nations’. The concept of nation has long been linked to a singular ethnic group's placement within a particular geographic location. This notion is integral to the mythical lore of many groups, establishing strong emotional links to a particular landscape that serve to exclude others' overlapping territorial claims. Forced or voluntary migrations diminish the physical links of those who leave the homeland, but they take with them the mythical and linguistic allusions to the ancestral territory, which they invoke in nostalgic reminiscences. Some hold on to a hope of eventual return. This creates the demand for cultural products that maintain and ritually celebrate the links of the diaspora with the homeland. The dispersed settlements of transnations² also exchange symbolic goods and services, including media content, among each other, thus sustaining global networks.

Homeland politics forms a major topic for the media of some diasporas, especially those consisting largely of first-generation migrants. Ties to the former country remain strong in these cases and individuals seek out the most current information, especially in times of crisis. Events in the news are passionately debated by Rhodesians living around the world, as King discusses in his chapter. Amir Hassanpour and Michael Santianni show how media are used to mobilise support for the homeland causes of the Kurds and Tibetans, respectively. The increasing ease of air travel around the world is encouraging peripatetic tendencies among diasporics, some of whom frequently travel back and forth returning with video recordings of their travels in the old country — which are watched in ritualised ways by the migrant community, as Dona Kolar-Panov demonstrates.

Identity

The diasporic migrations of the last few centuries were largely influenced by colonisation and trading connections as well as by the steady improvements in transport and communications. There also appears to have been a connection between the economic involvement of northern powers in southern countries and the more recent human flows from the latter to the former. Saskia Sassen (1996) indicates that economic links ranging from ‘off-shoring’ of production, foreign investment into export-oriented agriculture, and the power of multinationals in the consumer markets of developing countries has often resulted in the mass movement of people. Organised recruitment of workers by governments or employers has also stimulated emigration:

Ethnic links established between communities of origin and destination, typically by transnational households or broader kinship structures, are crucial after a flow has begun, and ensure its persistence. These recruitment and ethnic links tend to operate within the broader transnational spaces created by neocolonial processes and/or economic internationalization.

(Sassen 1996: 77)

The mass migrations of the 1700s and 1800s led to new economic growth in the countries of the ‘New World’ (while simultaneously displacing indigenous economies). These included movements of slaves from Africa, indentured labourers from Asia and settlers from Europe. Following the lifting of restrictions on race-based immigration in the 1950s and 1960s, Asians and Africans began to emigrate in larger numbers to North America, Australasia and Europe. There has also been substantial migration from Latin America into the United States. These movements have created diasporas that are layered by periods of immigration, the extent of integration into receiving societies and the maintenance of links with the land of origin as well as with other parts of the transnational group. This layering has resulted in the wide variations of connections and attachments that such worldwide communities have to each other. Retention of ancestral customs, language and religion, marriage patterns, and particularly the ease of communication between various parts of the transnational group help determine its characteristics.

This anthology discusses some of the complex historical, social and cultural dynamics within specific groups and in their relationships with other groups that help shape the identities within diasporas. Mandaville views these communities as being continually ‘constructed, debated and reimagined’. The twice-displaced Fiji Indians have recreated their culture under different historical and geographical conditions; Manas Ray explores how this contributes to the distinctions between Indian diasporas in Australia. Not only are there multiple types of linkage between the homeland and the diaspora, settlements of particular communities residing in various parts of the world also develop intricate networks among themselves. Hamid Naficy points to an ‘interethnicity’ between various Middle Eastern communities such as Palestinians and Jews living in Los Angeles that is aided by the consumption of overlapping television content. Stuart Cunningham and Tina Nguyen highlight the hybridity of Vietnamese cultural production in the West. Liza Tsaliki shows how Greeks with an Anglophone background, knowledge of American television and Internet savvy use a unique form of ‘Greenglish’ to communicate among them-selves in Internet chatgroups. Hong Qiu offers the category of the ‘knowledge diaspora’ consisting of Chinese university students and professionals living in the West, who communicate through online magazines.

In an essay on the Chicano diaspora, Angie Chabram Dernersesian notes that

these identities will be encountered from particular social and historical locations, from situated knowledges, from ethnographic experiences of rupture and continuity, and from a complex web of political negotiations with which people inscribe their social and historical experiences and deliver their self-styled counter narratives. I do not think we need to celebrate the transnational movement for its own sake. Just having a transnational identity is not something to be romanticized or something only we have: everyone in the world has one, thanks to the global culture of communications and the far reaching grip of capitalist formations.

(1994: 286)

However, we do need a better understanding of the cultural, political and eco-nomic impacts that the social dynamics of transnational groupings have on their members and on others.

Diasporas are often viewed as forming alternatives to the structures of worldwide capitalism, but in many instances they are participants in transnational economic activity. From the banking network of the Rothschilds, originating in eighteenth-century Europe, to the more recent global businesses like the Hinduja Group, diasporic families have been leading players in global transactions. At 450 billion dollars, the annual economic output in the early 1990s of the 55 million overseas Chinese was estimated to be roughly equal to that of the 1.2 billion people in China itself (Seagrave 1995). Indeed, Joel Kotkin writes that ‘global tribes’ will ‘increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind’ (1992: 4). Thomas Sowell (1996) asserts that similar patterns of economic achievement of some ethnic groups in Australia, the United States, Asia and South America point to the importance of the cultural capital that they bring to these lands. However, studies that focus primarily on the capitalist characteristics of certain diasporas tend to de-emphasize the vast disparities in wealth, education and social status within these communities. Ray's chapter underlines the social disjunctures between the Fiji Indian immigrants to Australia and some of those who arrive directly from India.

Commentators writing from cultural studies and postcolonial perspectives have tended to view diasporas as ranged against global and national structures of dominance — of the empire striking back. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang suggest that for the postcolonial immigrant to Britain ‘what the diasporic position opens up is the possibility of developing a post-imperial British identity, one based explicitly on an acknowledgement and vindication of the “coming home” of the colonized Other’ (1996: 383–4). The diasporic site becomes the cultural border between the country of origin and the country of residence — Homi Bhabha's ‘third space’ (1994). This is the zone of intense, cutting-edge creativity born out of the existential angst of the immigrant who is neither here nor there. She is Abdul JanMohammed's ‘specular border intellectual’ who, ‘caught between two cultures… subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them’ (1992: 97). Guillermo Gómez-Peña seeks to oppose ‘the sinister cartography of the New World Order with the conceptual map of the New World Border — a great trans- and intercontinental border zone, a place in which no centres remain’ (1996: 7).

While the globally dominant Eurocentric cultural structures, particularly media conglomerates, are being vastly strengthened, there has emerged over the last few decades a variety of voices from the South and from diasporas that attempt to present other world views. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have explored a ‘constellation of oppositional strategies, which taken together have the potential of revolutionising audio-visual production and pedagogy’ (1994: 10). They refer to the aesthetics of resistance in the New Cinemas of Cuba, Brazil, Senegal and India as well as to diasporic films made in Canada, the United States and England. Just within the South Asian diaspora, one finds a list of accomplished authors that includes Hanif Kureishi (England), Salman Rushdie (India/England), V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/England), Bharati Mukerjee (India/ Canada/United States), Jhumpa Lahiri (England/United States), Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada), Shyam Selvadurai (Sri Lanka/Canada), Moez Vassanji (Kenya/Tanzania/Canada), Rohinton Mistry (India/Canada), Anita Desai (India/Canada), Anita Rau Badami (India/Canada) and Cyril Dabydeen (Guyana/Canada). Such diasporic artists appear to be at the cutting edge of modernity and cultural life in their countries of settlement. But whereas they do provide other ways of viewing the world, they do not all present stances that actively resist dominant global discourses.

Space

The concept of space is key in the study of diaspora. Doreen Massey views it as ‘the simultaneous co-existence of social interrelations at all geographical scales, from the intimacy of the household to the wide spaces of transglobal connections’ (1994: 168). The debates around the issues of globalisation, cultural identity and the use of new communication technologies have significantly influenced the study of human geography (see Mitchell 2000). Anthony Giddens (1990) suggests that new media have succeeded in ‘emptying’ time and space, allowing social relations to be ‘disembedded’ from their locations and to be carried out at long distance. Manuel Castells (1989) distinguishes the ‘space of places’ from the new ‘space of flows’ that occur in global networks. Massey (1994) highlights the ‘power geometry’ in which various social groups have hierarchical relationships and different levels of access to global capital, goods and mobility. Arjun Appadurai (1996) sees the global cultural economy as characterised by fundamental disjunctures between what he identifies as five dimensions or ‘scapes’ of ‘global cultural flow’: ethnoscapes (people), mediascapes (media content), technoscapes (technology), finanscapes (capital) and ideoscapes (ideologies).

These new ways of conceptualising the relationship of people with landscapes have challenged normative notions in which human identity and community have tended to be linked to the territory ‘originally’ occupied by a group. The naming of an ethnic group is usually based ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Transnationalism
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mapping diasporic mediascapes
• Part 1 Film, radio, television, video
• Part 2 Computer-mediated communication
• Bibliography
• Index