In This Issue

Diaspora 4:2 1995 In This Issue Ebron and Tsing point to the increasing importance of fictional representations of community and of the interpretive discourses that emerge around them. Naming these as sites for allegories of identity, they argue that community may be definable by its ability to compose its identity around such fictive allegories. Such fictions, together with their interpretations, offer "a key zone of the political ," a site of potential dialogue between such groups as the Asian American and African American. Hitherto, these have imagined themselves as closed, parallel, gendered communities of color and have sought engagement with the dominant white groups, imagined as central, rather than striving for dialogue with each other at various margins. Venturino analyzes "the ways in which literary translation can effectively engage issues of Tibet's cultural survival in its current diasporan and transnational context." Focusing on the Amnye Machen Institute and its theories, politics, and practices of translation, he explores their engagement with western assumptions about translation and transnationalism. This engagement is a response to the fact that Tibetans both in their occupied homeland and in diaspora no longer have the privilege of engaging their own traditions indigenously, untouched by Chinese, western, and global narratives that to a significant extent "determine their identities and future." Venturino shows that Amnye Machen has developed strategies of translating foreign-language texts into Tibetan that simultaneously position Tibetan as a vernacular dialect of global discourse and yet produce not merely "transformed copies of originals" but cultural tools that are unmistakably Tibetan in purpose and meaning. Sharpe interrogates aspects of the emergence of postcolonial studies in the contexts of institutional pressure for an acceptable multiculturalism. She shows that a prevailing brand of postcolonial studies dangerously collocates such various and irreconcilable categories as the experiences and texts of past and present colonized peoples; the diasporan experience of former African slaves; the many and diverse experiences of immigrants from the Third World to the industrialized world; and neocolonial relationships between states and transnational corporations today. This version of postcolonialism too unconsciously takes as its model postcolonial migration and settlement in Europe, and occludes a wide range of differ- Diaspora 4:2 1995 enees and discontinuities. Sharpe proposes instead that the postcolonial situation be theorized as the "point at which internal social relations intersect with global capitalism and the international division of labor." Markowitz provides a provocative overview of questions of identity pertaining to the "Soviet Jews" whose politico-juridical identities were imposed by the Soviet state and whose cultural identity was frequently forgotten or repressed. They now live in 15 formerly Soviet republics, Israel, the US, and elsewhere. Do they live as Israelis , as Jewish citizens of the US, or as a transnational community of their own that is as yet "unimagined"? Markowitz narrates the unraveling of the "Soviet" identity (which was never as unified as the claims made for it), identifies the factors involved in that fragmentation, and indicates the social and cultural basis of a new community that draws on Jewishness and the new hostlands but also, emphatically, on a "Russian" element of culture and experience . Torres begins by providing an analytical narrative of the several trajectories of Cuban exile. She tracks the vicissitudes of US and Cuban foreign policy during the cold war and their relation to the changing internal alignments ofthe Cuban-American diaspora. She shows that the cumulative effect of long cycles of isolation punctuated by attempts at dialogue and reconciliation produced a rethinking and transformation of the idea of the Cuban nation. ...