In This Issue

Diaspora 5:2 1996 In This Issue LaI delineates important aspects of the history of Indian indenture and migration, which during the period 1834-1916 sent over one million Indians into British colonies ranging from Mauritius to Fiji and South Africa to Trinidad. He explores the social background of the migrants, the conditions of their journey from India, and the myriad difficulties with which life and work on the plantations (differently) confronted men and women. Largely unable or unwilling to return, they dealt with disruption, preserved some continuity of cultural patterns, and constructed a postindenture , overseas Indian society out of the fragments of religion and texts they had brought with them while elaborating new forms of cooperation and regulative behavior. Mishra explores the old Indian diaspora ofindentured labor: the origins of its new social forms in the crucial spaces of the ship and the plantation barracks, and the conditions in which women and men of many castes created a new life while clinging to highly mediated fragments of an old one. Mishra's extended exploration of this diaspora is also prologue: a further, essential part of his argument is that "the experience ofindenture is given artistic form in [Naipaul's] works. . . . and the artistic documentation ofthe effects of indenture history is part of their internal structure." In fact, Mishra argues—while reformulating Jameson's much-criticized statement on Third World texts as national allegories—that Naipaul's "East Indian fictions are to be read as diasporic allegories ," and demonstrates the results of such a reading. Lever-Tracy and Ip take as their context the explosive recent development of China and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese businesses which, they argue, has produced a significant, identifiably Chinese current within global capitalism. They explore how far and in what manner a growing density of transnational linkages between smaller diasporan Chinese businesses may have been encouraged by the magnet of an accessible China. Their article is based on open-ended interviews with thirty-six ethnic Chinese Australians trading with or investing in China and looks at why and how such diasporan businesses are entering and operating in China, and with what impact. Diaspora 5:2 1996 Chapín explores the past, present, and future of the nearly two million-strong "Turkish" (in fact heterogeneously Turkish and Kurdish) diaspora of Germany. In a compact but panoramic survey, he traces the economically-motivated decisions that led to the importation ofguestworkers from Turkey, the subsequent attempts to regulate their numbers, their limited integration into German society, and the efforts to deal with the national and international problems their presence has raised. Chapin shows that the conflicts and dilemmas are not due to a single cause, not even "racism," and why they will be difficult to resolve. Duffy wonders whether "it is possible to be a postcolonial critic without being an historical materialist." He reads Ali Behdad's Belated Travellers and David Spurr's The Rhetoric of Empire as "thoroughly and admirably concerned with texts," theory, and some practices. Their very excellence in many indispensable spheres and endeavors enables him to ask whether the postcolonial critic, like those she criticizes, is vulnerable to the charge of neglecting—and even failing—to represent historical and material concreteness in their specificity, even while gaining authority from her critique of failures of representation in the colonial text. Kazanjian and Kassabian focus their analysis of the mass mediation of contemporary diasporas through the lens provided by Hamid Naficy's The Making ofExile Cultures: Iranian Exile Culture in Los Angeles. They show that Naficy's object of knowledge is the diasporic "exile culture" produced "out of the conjuncture of an historically specific population and condition and a similarly specific system of communication, the mass media." They explore Naficy's analysis of the liminality and syncretic quality of exile culture, his psychoanalytic account of television viewing and collective subjectformation , and the connection he seeks to establish between the exilic collective subject and postcolonial studies. While celebrating this work's many contributions, they also point to its shortcomings, for example, in its conception of the differences between exile and diaspora, its tentativeness toward gender, and some nationalist interest in defining...