In This Issue

Diaspora 4:3 1995 In This Issue Sanasarian offers an analytical narrative of the life of a Christian diasporan community in Iran after the overthrow of the shah (1979) and the installation of a theocratic Islamic Republic. She shows that despite the enormous discrepancy between state power and that of the Armenian minority, and in spite of the "impatiently legalistic" approach characteristic of western analysts, a modus vivendi has emerged that differentially constrains IranianArmenians , allowing them the possibility of negotiation and accommodation in several spheres. Her article explores the intriguing implications of communal isolation and communal politics under these conditions. Gold finds in Los Angeles' Israeli immigrant community the "equation of transnationalism," versions of which have been discerned in other immigrant diasporas: enhanced income coupled with a diminished cultural and communal life. Whereas the institutions that make such a life possible are supported by state and society in Israel, they are primarily sustained in the United States by the work of immigrant women. A cost-benefit analysis at the level of the individual, rather than the family unit, shows that benefits are unequally shared and that gender is a pertinent variable. Using in-depth interviews, Gold explores the paradoxical coupling of immigrant prosperity with the devaluing of"the social and human capital of the women involved," and the ambivalences to which this gives rise. Gopinath outlines the ways in which bhangra, originally a Punjabi musical idiom brought to Britain by the Indian diaspora, changed by drawing upon Afro-Caribbean and other non-Indian musics and became "the locus ofa diasporic South Asian youth culture" in London and Toronto, Port-of-Spain and New York, but also in India . She uses this account to interrogate the work of Paul Gilroy, characterized as "unable to fully write Asians into [its] discourse of cultural production" in diaspora because of its reliance on a black/ white binary and a patrilineal narrative of diaspora. She also finds that bhangra's performances of masculinist identity are complicit with Indian nationalism's patrilineal narratives, even when they refigure "the hierarchical relation between diaspora and the nation." Gopinath concludes by referring to the growing number ofwomen in- Diaspora 4:3 1995 volved in bhangra and the challenge their music poses by creating "potentially enabling constructions of gender in the diaspora." Lazarus's analysis of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic sketches the book's argument that slavery has been the paradigmatic bearer of modernity figured as a transcultural and diasporic, rather than a nation-centered, process. The study of the process, so conceived, privileges mobile cultural practices and enables Gilroy's reading of the utopianism embedded in the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of the African diaspora as a counterdiscourse of modernity. However, Lazarus argues, Gilroy's choice of the Black Atlantic over the capitalist world system is not only a productive shift of focus; it also creates a latent, problematic, and indeed unsustainable "antagonism" between the two. Amove surveys, praises, and interrogates Armand Mattelart's oeuvre. Reviewing his most recent book, he outlines Mattelart's view that the historical development of national and transnational communications , media, and media studies were driven by the needs of the military for coordination, of state bureaucracies for social control , and of corporations for profit. Turning to Mattelart's detailed and useful "maps" of contemporary global communications and to his vision of a democratic transnational order, Amove criticizes Mattelart's embrace of an antimaterialist culturalism that rejects the role ofthe working class as an inclusive transnational social category . ...