In This Issue

Diaspora 12:2 2003 In This Issue Dirlik “seeks to make sense of two seemingly contradictory” transnational developments of the last two decades: “economic and political globalization that is taken generally to point to unprecedented global integration, and the resurgence of religions or, more broadly, traditionalisms, that create new political and cultural fractures, or reopen old ones.” For Dirlik, the question of religion is not a “Third World” or Islamic question; it is “a question of capitalist modernity” in general, because the resurgence of religion in recent decades is not just a characteristic of developing societies whose cultural legacies are bound to the past but a characteristic and thriving product of capitalist modernity in the United States. In a closely argued article, Dirlik shows that there are now competing claims to modernity and that, as a mode of “articulating public desires and grievances, religion is once again very much a part of the terrain of public culture and politics—not merely as a medium of representation but in informing the manner in which social and political problems are grasped and expressed.” Danforth offers an analytical narrative that begins with an account of the often coerced and sometimes voluntary evacuation of around 28,000 Greek and Macedonian-Greek children to Europe’s Communist countries in 1948, during the Greek Civil War. He then explores the impact of the creation (and attempted reclamation) of this community of “refugee” children on competing governmental and Communist Party discourses in Greece and, above all, on the development of Greek and Macedonian identity discourses in homeland and diaspora. Danforth also touches upon the debate, within his own discipline of anthropology, concerning the decreased role of place and homeland in the development of individual and collective identity. Anand explores the traveling, nomadic, border-crossing, contested , often locally reappropriated and so repeatedly altered concept “Diaspora.” He focuses primarily on its relation to the identity marker “Tibetan.” He shows that “Tibetan diaspora” has the latent potential to raise questions about long-established homeland-oriented historical and religious discourses of Tibetan identity. Simultaneously, he argues, it also has the ability to render problematic some of the current formulations of the concept “Diaspora ,” challenging versions that either promote a purely theoretical xxxxxxxxxxxx 145 Diaspora 12:2 2003 formulation devoid of specificities or use the term too conveniently as a signifier for any people living outside its homeland. Baldwin comments upon the transnational and diasporic social configurations depicted and explored in Brent Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. She sees the book as a wide-ranging and precise piece of scholarship that successfully conjoins “the voices of francophone and black American intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s” and that “traces the circuits of black internationalism through the diverse intersections and divergences of black intellectuals in and around Paris between the wars.” She argues that one of Edwards’s many contributions is to show that the African diaspora must be thought in terms of linkages established across territorialized diversities, not transcending them, but embedded in those various localized differences—national, linguistic, racial, temporal, class, and gender—that together make up the diversity of the African diaspora. Citing Edwards’s claim that diaspora “forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference,” Baldwin wonders whether “woman” serves provisionally as a ground of difference. If so, she wonders, to what degree and in what ways that require further exploration is the particular African diaspora on which Edwards focuses, and others, articulated through the circulation of women? Waldinger welcomes and interrogates Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. He situates the book in the context of the debates of the last two decades, during which the older view of assimilation as both the inevitable and desirable aftermath of (white peoples’) migration to the United States has come to be regarded as not applicable to the post-1965 migration of people of color. Portes and others have argued that the second migration has led to the incomplete, “segmented assimilation” of immigrants of color, who constitute a racially and ethnically constituted “rainbow underclass” of the dispossessed. Waldinger...