The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface

The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface Khachig Tölölyan "What ish my nation?" asks the Scots officer Macmorris, speaking a foreign tongue, of his Welsh colleague Fluellen, who also serves in Henry the Fifth's polyglot "English" army in Shakespeare's Henry V (III.ii.121). The question focuses the spectrum of issues this journal will address as it considers the Nation and its Others. We find the query useful, as Shakespeare did when he set out in 1599 to instruct his audience about its fiction of "England" in 1415. He wrote from within a barely secure new nation about a time when English kings still viewed Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, and the inhabitants thereof as their land and their people, though not yet their nation(-state). Writing Ulysses between 1914 and 1921, James Joyce has a Dublin citizen of 1904 ask the ambiguously Jewish Leopold Bloom: "What is your nation [?J" Bloom answers by indirection, defining "a nation [as] the same people living in the same place" (Joyce 331; emphasis added). This fails to satisfy the questioner, a nationalist who bristles at the rule of the British Empire and envisions liberation through a coming struggle in which a "greater Ireland" that includes the Irish diaspora will participate: "We'll put force against force. . . . We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black [18147. . . . Ay, they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember the land of bondage" (Joyce 329-30). To the citizen, Irish emigrants in America are part of the Irish nation, and so Bloom's answer has unacceptable implications . Throughout Ulysses, written as the Irish fought Britain and each other to make the Irish Free State between 1916 and 1921, Joyce uses the story of Odysseus's homeward journey to question the meanings of "home" and "nation," and of keeping faith with a national culture while living elsewhere, in individual or communal exile. Ulysses examines the idea of longed-for but exigent home that the nation-state would become.1 The conviction underpinning this manifesto disguised as a "Preface" is that Diaspora must pursue, in texts literary and visual, canonical and vernacular, indeed in all cultural productions and throughout history, the traces of struggles over and contradictions within ideas and practices of collective identity, of homeland and nation. Diaspora is concerned with the ways in which nations, real yet imagined communities (Anderson), are fabulated , brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on land people call their own and in exile. Above all, this journal will focus on such processes as they shape and are shaped by the infranational and transnational Others of the nation-state. Shakespeare's and Joyce's queries about nationhood bracket the cen3 Diaspora Spring 1991 turies in which European nations forged themselves and their state apparatuses , even as they acquired colonies and empires. These projects were intertwined; both employed military, technological, political, and commercial strategies that extracted an extraordinary human toll, violently expelling some conquered populations while confining others to fractions of their land: the reservation "nations" of Native Americans and the ethnonational republics of the Soviet Union are among some of the products of such actions . Elsewhere, the most monstrous and sustained efforts of the western empires uprooted, killed, or transported millions into slavery, creating the African diasporas. Combinations ofeconomic coercion and incentive encouraged the formation of overseas communities such as those of the Japanese, Indians, and Chinese, which, like the African-descended collectivities, now increasingly represent themselves to themselves and to others as diasporas (Pan).2 Some ofthe entities this history has shaped remain purely infranational: they endure within a particular state and resist the cohesion imposed by it (e.g., the Navajo, the Inuit, the Québécois, the Georgians of the USSR). Others are both infra- and transnational, living disadvantaged lives within reduced territory while reaching out to kindred people elsewhere (e.g., Moldavians, Armenians, Crimean Tatars, Palestinians, Iroquois, Magyars in Romania). Today, the processes of uprooting and dispersion continue, but already by...