In This Issue

Diaspora 1:2 1991 In This Issue, Van Wyk Smith identifies the prominent features and persistent concerns of the pre-abolition diasporan discourse that was produced by the largely autobiographical works of a "relatively small number of Africans, usually freed, unusually literate [and] doubly displaced ." He explores texts by Gronniosaw, Wheatley, Sancho, Cugoano , and Equiano. Arthur analyzes Irish-American attempts to influence US policy in Northern Ireland. He gives an account of the fund-raising and lobbying efforts of the relatively small, activist diasporan segment (NORAID, INC) ofthe very large Irish-American ethnic community. Comparing the impact of these efforts with those of the smaller Jewish-American diaspora, Arthur sketches the limits of intervention in international affairs when lobbyists lack unanimity and their target is a US ally such as Britain, rather than the Arab states. Lipscomb shows that Rushdie's Midnight's Children includes numerous hitherto unidentified, adapted passages from Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India. He argues that such juxtapositions ofthe discourses ofhistory and memory "serve as metaphors of transnationalism" and create an "epistemological dislocation" that is characteristic of the "middle ground" inhabited by diasporan consciousness . Kruger explores the interaction between a New York-centered metropolitan context and South African theater, which has "largely been promoted and received [in it] as . . . testimony to the antiapartheid struggle." South Africa is a multicultural terrain of conflict in which a "hybrid theatrical nationhood" is emerging, inventing traditions even as it debates the possibility of separating an "aesthetic moment" from political struggle. Kruger shows that despite metropolitan attempts to appropriate this theater, the possibility of "talking (of) home in the diaspora" persists. Jusdanis's review essay on Charles Moskos's study of Greek Americans situates that book in a broader context. Arguing that "Greece as a nation-state is to a large extent a creation of the Hellenic diaspora," Jusdanis traces the changes in that diaspora: shifts in geographic focus, material circumstance, and the ways in which it imagines itself in relation to the cultural capital that ancient Greece represents in the West. Tölölyan's "Commentary" about the Armenian diaspora's involvement in the emerging (ex-Soviet) Republic ofArmenia inaugurates a new feature. Each issue oiDiaspora will contain a "Commentary " on a current transnational phenomenon. ...