In This Issue

In This Issue, our first, scholars from several disciplines write about diasporas, or transnationalism , or both. Their work replicates no template and shares no single theory, precisely because the journal has no preconceived identity or profile apart from its concern with whatever will contribute to the study of all aspects of transnationalism and its classic exemplar, the diaspora. Linked as they are to nationalism and current struggles, these terms are emotionally and intellectually charged. We will publish articles representing diverse and even mutually contradictory ideologies and political affiliations , including those with which we disagree. Rouse examines Mexican migration to the United States and the latter's inability to transform migrants into citizens. He describes the resulting cultural bifocality that affects both the United States and Mexico, and reads this migration as symptomatic of the shift to transnational capitalism. In addition, Rouse demonstrates the inadequacy of images such as Center and Periphery as descriptions of emerging new differences and proposes an alternative cartography of social space, in which transnational migrant circuits and reconceptualized border zones are important. Lowe criticizes representations that have reduced the national diversities of Asian Americans into simple binaries. Such reduction accompanies depictions of generational conflict as the central crisis of Asian American diasporas, which leads either to assimilation or to nativist/nationalist separatism . Reading films, novels, and poems, and deploying the work of Gramsci and Fanon, Lowe argues that Asian American social subjects are the sites of a variety of differences that are complex and politically enabling. Castles simultaneously analyzes the patterns of Italian migration to Australia and sketches out the urgent issues facing nation-states that encourage massive immigration for economic and political reasons. While stressing that empirical measurements ofthe impact of Italian immigration are hard to obtain, Castles argues that monocultural "British" Australia was irretrievably altered by its efforts, first to assimilate Italians, and then to accommodate them in a multicultural society. Rafael discusses several languages—Japanese, English, Spanish, and Tagalog—and two discourses, those of collaboration and rumor, in the Philippines under Japanese occupation. The latter two are contrastive strategies , comparable to some used by diaspora populations, that allow people to imagine and represent their positions of subordination in ways that hold out some possibility of overcoming them. Safran, in the most politically charged essay in this issue, surveys a large number of diasporas (Jewish, Armenian, Polish, Turkish, Palestinian, Corsican, "black American," Gypsy or Romani, Parsi, Polish, Chinese, Diaspora Spring 1991 Cuban, and Indian). He explores the role of the memories and myths of a lost homeland in each of these communities, examining the differences between those that seek a physical return to their homeland and those that only extend support and solidarity to it while struggling to maintain their culture in the host country. Safran regards the Jewish diaspora as a paradigmatic "ideal type" and discusses criteria to judge the varieties of diasporization in other communities. He concludes with a list of questions that he thinks scholars of diasporas should address. Molho evokes and surveys the history of the Jewish community of Salonika , Greece, which was unusually capable of accommodating Jewish and "Salonikan" identities, and of managing tensions between Jews of various regional and cultural origins who flocked to the city after the Spanish persecutions of 1492. Molho argues for the importance of the role of Marrano Jews in creating a vital culture during the sixteenth century and depicts later tensions between Jewish cosmopolitanism and traditionalism, as well as Turkish and Greek nationalism. ...