Comparativism, Ethnicity and the United States: A Diasporic History of the Americas

Immigration and the Political Economy of Home; West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992. By Rachel Buff. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001. 255 pages. $48.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper)

While many practitioners of American studies express the importance of rethinking the nation-state and its basic social constructions by recasting our object of study as "the Americas," there remains a series of divides between U.S.-based and Latin American and Caribbean projects, ethnic studies and works on imperialism, and scholarship on race and other social formations. This impasse emerges from the curious simultaneity of the theoretical excesses of transnationalism and a scholarly timidity around different standards for research. How exciting, then, to read Rachel Buff's new book, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home, which offers a fruitful, if unexpected, juxtaposition of West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis to create a point of entry into the very question of how we might devise new projects on "the Americas" that are intrinsically transnational and transcultural.

In exploring the construction of social formations in two different U.S. urban spaces, Buff establishes a refreshingly expansive geography for the production of migrant identity. In some ways an account of multiple yet symbolically connected pan-ethnicities, this book specifically illuminates the significance of borders in everyday cultural politics as well as in our own professional spaces. ¹ In the North American academy, West Indians are seen largely within the category of "Caribbean" studies and American Indians through studies of "indigenous/Native peoples." No less importantly, Brooklyn's urban culture does not often appear in comparison to that quintessential Midwestern city of Minneapolis. It is with some resistance, shaped perhaps by expectations of ethnic similarity and difference and familiarity with the organization of sub-inter-disciplines, that readers approach a text of this sort. But Buff's comparativism directly interrogates that trained response by argument of a political and historical sort: that these groups and their cultural performances participate in a diasporic circuitry of inheritance and influence. When Carnival performers in Brooklyn don costumes that hearken back to Mayan and Aztec figures of the Americas (7), the important point is not about any necessary dialogue between the disparate groups explored but about the intersection of constructed and imagined pasts in the United States, a nation that demands displays of anteriority among groups wishing to make some claim to ethnicity. In suggesting that "comparison" may be more about allegory than about actual or perceived cultural similarity, Buff may free us up, intellectually and methodologically, to think about assembling innovative forms of subject matter that can inspire a true rethinking of the nation(s) that underlie the endeavors that concern us.

The imposition of the slash in Buff's constructed term "im/migration" in the very first chapter of the book is both a self-conscious sign of difference, to say in effect that this is not an immigration history of the traditional kind and also a device to help her audience read the text. Like any unusually placed grammatical mark, this slash slows the process down to produce close and continually interrupted attention to how West Indian and American Indian subjects are constituted and what their movements mean. In remaking the subject who moves across national boundaries, Buff follows here from work on transmigrants, like that of Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc, but somewhat differently, chooses to retain the echoes of meaning in "immigration," of coming into the nation of the United States. ² Recent scholars of migration have tended to downplay integration into the whole, arguing that both the melting-pot and salad bowl metaphors for the United States mistakenly construe inclusivity and do not fully allow for primary connections to the homeland among new arrivals. Buff suggests that West Indians and American Indians engage in crucial negotiations around resources and...