Diaspora Studies

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall's contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

"The Predicament of Culture" is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and "the other" clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late-twentieth century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

Most western political scientists have tended to neglect the ethnic dimension in China, and have overemphasized the development from large empire to unified nation. This bias is partly due to the difficulty of mastering the Chinese language and even more, the generalized view of the People's Republic of China as a totalitarian communist regime focused on the unified state. Most of the contributors to this study use largely Chinese-language sources; five are social anthropologists, three are political scientists. The range of subjects covered includes religious relationships, language, public policy and culture. The essays in this volume will go some way towards remedying the neglect of the ethnic component of the Chinese polity and society.

This book is about an important cultural-political phenomenon: ethno-national diasporas. While these groups try to "feel at home" in their host countries, they maintain at the same time close contact with their homelands to promote their culture and interests. The book analyzes their continuous struggle to maintain their identity, organize, and fight against all wishing to prevent permanent settlement and integration in the host countries. It discusses the complex questions of the groups' loyalties to their homelands and host countries as well as their contributions to them.

Walker Connor, perhaps the leading student of the origins and dynamics of ethnonationalism, has consistently stressed the importance of its political implications. In these essays, which have appeared over the course of the last three decades, he argues that Western scholars and policymakers have almost invariably underrated the influence of ethnonationalism and misinterpreted its passionate and nonrational qualities. Several of the essays have become together they represent a rigorous and stimulating attempt to establish a secure methodological foundation for the study of a complicated phenomenon increasingly, if belatedly, recognized as the major cause of global political instability.


The book opens by reviewing a wide range of scholarship on ethnonationalism. Connor examines nineteenth-and early twentieth-century debate among British scholars on the viability and desirability of the multinational state, the American "nation-building" school of thought that dominated the literature on political development in the post-World War II era, and the recent explosion of literature on ethnonationalism. In the second part of the book, he shows how progress in the study of ethnonationalism has been hampered by terminological confusion, an inclination to perceive homogeneity even where heterogeneity thrives, an unwarranted tendency to seek explanation for ethnic conflict in economic differentials, and lack of historical perspective. The book closes with a consideration of the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group-identity.

the scattering of a people, often described as a condition of helplessness and a pathology to be overcome. It can also be, as Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin assert in this provocative work, a unique source of power and strength. Focusing on Jewish experience, Powers of Diaspora forcefully argues that diasporic communities exercise a distinct form of cultural power in order to maintain themselves. With reference to rabbinic culture and contemporary Jewish ethnography, the authors evoke the cultural strategies of Jewish diaspora-of regeneration through statelessness-that should prove increasingly relevant to the dilemmas and possibilities of the "new diasporas" born in the midst and in the aftermath of the modern world-system. Their work exposes the ways in which peoples in diaspora "legislate" distinctive ways of life and establish formal communal structures, thus creating fluid yet effective boundaries between themselves and the others who surround them, and critiques the internal power dynamics that can sometimes result. Powers of Diaspora strongly reasserts the place of Jewish culture in contemporary discussions of diaspora, where the cultural politics of postcolonialism have remarginalized Jewish experience; at the same time, it brings insights from studies of other diasporas to bear on the study of Jews. In challenging the equation of diaspora with powerlessness, the book questions the modern nation-state ideal and suggests that diasporic cultural formations offer important clues toward an alternative means of relating culture to polity. Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Carnal Israel (1993), A Radical Jew (1994), and Unheroic Conduct (1997). Jonathan Boyarin is an attorney and an independent scholar in the fields of anthropology and Jewish cultural studies. His books include Storm from The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minnesota, 1992) and Thinking in Jewish (1996). Daniel and Jonathan also coedited Jews and Other Differences (Minnesota, 1997).

Chinese Diasporas provides a concise and compelling new history of internal and external Chinese migration from the sixteenth century to the present day. Steven Miles places Chinese migrants and their families at the center of his narrative through a series of engaging case studies taking readers from the heart of Ming China to the global property markets of the twenty-first century. The focus on individual migrants and their descendants reveals the ways in which the “Chinese diaspora” has consisted of distinct paths of migration from specific emigrant communities to targeted destinations both within China and abroad. This is essential reading for those interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and the overseas Chinese, and for those interested in the role of migration in the making of the modern world.
- Introduces concepts and debates in migration history
- Compelling case studies focus on individual migrants and their descendants
- Provides an integrated history of internal and external Chinese migration

Featuring essays by world-renowned scholars, Diasporas charts the various ways in which global population movements and associated social, political and cultural issues have been seen through the lens of diaspora.

Wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, this collection considers critical concepts shaping the field, such as migration, ethnicity, post-colonialism and cosmopolitanism. It also examines key intersecting agendas and themes, including political economy, security, race, gender, and material and electronic culture. Original case studies of contemporary as well as classical diasporas are featured, mapping new directions in research and testing the usefulness of diaspora for analyzing the complexity of transnational lives today.

Diasporas is an essential text for anyone studying, working or interested in this increasingly vital subject.

The first thematic and cross-cultural overview of the experiences of migration and displacement that characterize so much of twentieth-century art.

Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity—and much of twentieth-century art. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers examines life-changing journeys that transplanted artists and intellectuals from one cultural context to another, making clear the critical and creative role that migration, exile, and displacement have played in shaping the story of modern art. Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity. Distinguishing between exile and diaspora, emigration and immigration, and “the stranger” and “the other,” the book examines the different conditions that structure the artist's experience and aesthetic strategies. From indigenous artists and the question of authorship to the influence of émigré art historians on art history, from the aesthetics of the African diaspora to Adrian Piper's metaphorical exile between philosophy and art, these connections and disconnections in a network of traveling cultures continue art history's efforts to come to terms with the postcolonial turn.

"Writing Diaspora" questions aspects of cultural politics, including the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, the media, pedagogy, literature, literacy, sexuality, intellectual labour, the uses and abuses of theory, and popularized notions about 'others'. Essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the 'otherness' ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and victimization; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made in the name of moralist rectitude - all these forces create new 'solidarities' whose ideological premises remain unquestioned. "Writing Diaspora" sets up an oppositional discursive space in the midst of these new solidarities. Chow juxtaposes a range of cultural contradictions in order to rethink the currently dominant conceptualizations of the solidarities themselves.