Reimagining Political Community: Diaspora, Nation-State, and the Struggle for Recognition

Diaspora, Nation-State, And Mass Isolation

In current discussions, diaspora is associated with population movement, the expansion of world markets, advances in communications technology, and flows of capital and labour. The diasporic spread of people seems to move in tandem with the decline of the nation-state as a dominant political system.¹ Evelyn Hu-DeHart has linked the rise of diasporic conditions and sensibility in Asia to the expansion of trade and markets ("Introduction"). Chinese businessmen and professionals, for instance, seem to be riding the wave of the diasporic boom. As economic tigers and dragons, the overseas Chinese are poised to enter a free-floating, prosperous orbit of trade and growth. Shedding their national identities and "freely" crossing territories, they "identify first with their co-ethnics wherever they are rather than submit to the hegemonizing claim of exclusive citizenship demanded by a single country or nationstate" (Hu-DeHart, "Introduction" 4). With flexible citizenship, unanchored to a specific national community, Asian diasporics take great strides in uprooting themselves, trotting the globe, and in times of vulnerability, resorting to families and kin and to a wide-ranging network of personal and professional connections (5).

The rise of Asian-Pacific economies in recent decades has blurred the difference between Asian Americans as a group in the United States and the recent diasporic, "nationless" Asians, less encumbered by a grounded community. The collective self-consciousness of Asian Americans arose as social rather than transnational phenomenon, as part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Striving to find roots in America, Asian Americans tried to reconstruct, not the image of an original home nation, but the experience of Asian immigrants since their arrival on American soil in the nineteenth century. As is well expressed by Maxine Hong Kingston's phrase "claiming America" (qtd. in Dirlik 34), Asian Americans, as Arif Dirlik says, are not transplantations of people to America, a people without history (34). What is their history when they are weaned from their home nation? Rather than a nostalgic throwback to a nation they did not identify with, they find their history and identity deeply embedded in their long-term participation in the making of America and in their experience of oppression and exploitation (Dirlik 34). The fundamental issue for Asian Americans is thus forging communities within the U.S. nation-state framework, opened wider by multicultural politics and social movements since the 1960s.

The diasporic phenomenon, by contrast, seems less grounded in a national community. In the global capital circuit, Asian economies export not only goods, services, and labor but also capital into the United States. Pacificrelated diasporic trends have created a new transpacific professional–manage-rial class that characterizes the new Asian immigrants in the United States. In their fluidity and ethnic affinity with the old timers, the diasporic newcomers tend to obscure the rootedness of Asian Americans as a collective. The latter group is defined by the struggle to forge a community and enter the mainstream political body; the diasporics are free-floating, cosmopolitan, and nonchalant about national consciousness and belonging.

This blurring of the difference between Asian Americans and Asian diasporics is symptomatic of two contradictory views of globalization. If one understands globalization as the magic hand of the world market and the free flow of capital, then diasporics are a compelling example of salutary denationalization and immigration – vanguards of a utopian civil society. If the world is still dominated by the classic balance of the great powers busily redrawing the map of national boundaries in their self-interests, diasporic freedom becomes broken dreams when the "forgotten" nation-states intervene to disrupt and regulate "free-floating" populations, trade, and markets in interstate conflicts, military or economic. If globalization offers a more level playing field of opportunity for people and ethnicities, then diasporics seem to be creatures of a lucky time, cosmopolitan and prosperous. If our times still persist in the Cold-War routine of power blocks with a "transnational" mask on their faces, still governed by economic and military rivalry for resources and markets, controlled by the G8 or International Monetary...