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Diaspora 8:3 1999 In This Issue Croucher and Haney engage in detail Yossi Shain's important recent book, Marketing theAmerican CreedAbroad: Diasporas in the US and Their Homelands. They summarize his arguments, point to tensions within them, and illustrate and elaborate the implications ofhis key claim that US-based diasporas are more involved than ever with shaping the policy ofthe US towards their symbolic homelands, with interesting and ultimately positive consequences. Like Shain, but not always agreeing with him, Croucher and Haney explore how such involvement challenges and can transform diasporic identity, American foreign policy, American conceptions of the US as a pluralist democracy, and even the homeland's conception of itselfas a cultural and political entity. They look at Shain's examples of Cuban, Mexican, African, Jewish, Arab-American, and other diasporas and demonstrate the complexity ofthe task ofestablishing his claim that in "marketing the American Creed abroad," diasporas actually promote democracy both at home and abroad without increasing tensions or risking "balkanization." Rosello discusses French laws that can make extending hospitality to illegal immigrants into a crime. She begins by offering an account of a specific case in which a woman who hosted a friend and the friend's partner, an illegal immigrant from Zaire, was prosecuted. In analyzing the polyvocal outcry that resulted, Rosello explores the outrage and resistance of some French citizens in response to a law that implicitly charges individuals with the responsibility ofdecoding "the guest's body" because it is the host's "responsibility to find out about the guest's legal status." This introduction of the policing function into the home turns the binary state/immigrant into a triangle: state/immigrant-guest/citizen-host. Rosello then explores the ethical and political dilemmas ofhospitality, which Derrida has also addressed. She speculates on the possibility that as a response to such laws, "chains of solidarity may be created between citizens and foreigners rather than between citizens and their government." Safran's review essay engages Robin Cohen's Global Diasporas, an important, "detailed, and wide-ranging" text (which inaugurates a series of books on diaspora studies, such as Tatla's on the Sikh diaspora—see Singh, below). Safran acknowledges thatwhen discussing the diverse and global phenomenon ofcontemporary diasporization , the creation of large and inclusive categories—which is an 208 Diaspora 8:3 1999 important part ofCohen's project—may be valid. But he also argues that Cohen overlooks the cost of creating such categories. He disputes some of Cohen's efforts to challenge the primacy of the until recently paradigmatic Jewish diaspora, which he regards as specifically anti-Zionist and generally politicized, and which, he also argues, may dilute the concept of diaspora and rob it of its analytical utility by accepting quite dissimilar expatriate groups as diasporas. Safran simultaneously criticizes Cohen's influential arguments, seeks to affirm the continuing usefulness of the Jewish diaspora as exemplary if not paradigmatic, and elaborates his own well-known definition of diaspora and the factors that define it. Schnapper wonders whether the ongoing, more inclusive, and increasingly laudatory réévaluation ofdiasporas is always useful for scholarship, which traditionally has aspired for concepts shaped independently of prevailing values. She considers whether the "semantic break" between pre-1968 and later, more inclusive definitions of diaspora reflects a reality that is "as total as it first appeared." She discusses the logic ofthe nation-state, which earlier tended toward the "nationalization" ofdiasporic minorities, and the limits of such action then and now. Recalling that until recently diasporas were primarily shaped by a dialectic between cultural and political traditions that took place within a national framework, she considers that dialectic within contemporary transnationalism, when the number and kinds of minority communities engaged in it is much larger, and concludes that this increase must not lead us to neglect to reserve a special place for diasporic populations "that maintain institutionalized ties, whether objective or symbolic, beyond the borders of nation-states." Singh's review essay addresses the problems raised by D.S. Tatla's book on the Sikh diaspora and the Sikhs' search for a statehood independent of India. He praises the book's wealth of sources and its "narrative ofthe political activities of...

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