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Diaspora 2:2 1992 In This Issue Chow considers the impending "restoration" of a reluctant Hong Kong—neither Chinese diaspora nor yet China—to the "homeland." While identifying structuring concepts of diasporan discourse, such as "origin" and "return," she focuses on the shortcomings of two tendencies in current postcolonial theory. The first risks becoming complicit with a mainland Chinese nationalist and nativist ideology that exalts the rural folk and posits Hong Kong as alien to that tradition, even as it lapses (unlike Hong Kong) into a naive celebration of western technology. The second is a "postmodern hybridism" that celebrates urban postmodernity while occulting the continuing power of colonialism and racism. Reading the lyrics of Luo Dayou, a popular songwriter, Chow highlights the "self-writing" that attempts to empower the Hong Kong polity while preventing its inscription in others' discourses and political economies. Fletcher's essay surveys the growing literature on the expulsion of the Huguenots from France three centuries ago, in 1685, which led to the introduction of the word "refugee" into English. He offers a survey of their dispersion, analyzes its costs to France and its benefits to host countries, and speculates about the different course French history would have taken had the expulsion of this skilled religious minority not taken place. Helmreich reads Paul Gilroy's work on a black Atlantic diaspora sympathetically but critically, arguing that it may unwittingly recapitulate some of the problems he identifies in nationalism and ethnic absolutism: namely, a dependence on patriarchal images of kinship and on "arborescent" symbols such as the family tree, rooted in soil and territory rather than changing community; and on paradigmatic notions of experience that are androcentric. Helmreich points to the work of Stuart Hall and Benedict Anderson on constantly changing ways of imagining communal coherence as a corrective already allied with the best elements of Gilroy's own argument . Karamcheti discusses both the inscriptions and erasures of Indian diasporic experience through her reading ofReworlding, a collection of essays that seeks to provide a panoptic view of the communities of overseas Indians to which "diaspora" has only been applied recently. After interrogating the diaspora-generated discourse that constructs a global "Indianness," Karamcheti looks at 149 Diaspora 2:2 1992 technological and sociopolitical factors that favor the maintenance ofnew Indian diasporas. Finally, she considers conditions—e.g., the discursive privileging of the experience of earlier diasporas such as that ofAfricans in the Caribbean—which complicate the elaboration of Indian-diasporan narratives and identities. Roberts discusses "world music" as a significant cultural and economic phenomenon that may alter some ofthe relations ofcenter and periphery. He then uses that category to illustrate the ongoing interdisciplinary production ofthe concept of"global culture," and to interrogate some elements of it. Finally, he raises new questions about what is at stake in the production of this new discourse of globalism. Sorenson tracks the challenges to Ethiopian "national" identity that emerged after the overthrow of the Amhari-dominated monarchy and its Marxist successor-state. These events, and the Eritrean struggle for independence, have led to a reassessment of the Ethiopia that many in Africa and its diasporas valued as a model of the uncolonized African "nation." Sorenson explores both the persistence of the national idea and the contrasting appeal of new ethnonational identities (Tigrayan, Oromo, Eritrean) that are constructed differently in homeland and diaspora. Wickramagamage reads two of Mukherjee's novels, Wife and Jasmine, and argues that they reject the ascription of deracination, victimization, and alienation to the immigrant experience without assuming that it automatically leads to emancipatory narratives of self-transformation. Instead, Wickramagamage shows, her novels represent the discovery that identities assumed in the homeland are provisional and a range of disabling or empowering responses to that discovery in diaspora. Mukherjee's fictions claim that both responses are enabled not just by the host country but also by the recovery of suppressed and heterogeneous models of identity that were already present in Hindu culture; paradoxically, they are only made visible and available by diasporan dislocation. 150 ...

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