In This Issue

Diaspora 5:3 1996 In This Issue Bolt explores the ways in which "Overseas" or diaspora Chinese have been an economic asset for the development of China in the past two decades, investing substantially in their homeland. At the same time, he investigates the ways in which some of the Asian states that have substantial diasporic Chinese populations have sometimes viewed the process as a potential problem for the hostland. Stressing that the majority of the very considerable foreign investment in China over the past two decades has come from diasporan Chinese, Bolt weighs the factors that have catalyzed this movement of funds, ranging from diasporic sentiment to the reshaping ofpolicies by the still-Communist homeland government to accommodate diasporan capitalism. Boscagli explores the central questions posed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. In her account, these range from "can mass culture be politically correct?" to can it engage and promote multiculturalism without lapsing "into a reified identity politics?" While exploring possible responses, Boscagli also inquires whether older concepts of politically committed art can be recast to address the uses of "committed media" in an era of postcolonial globalization , in and out of the classroom. Mountz and Wright portray the quotidian life oftransmigrants in a "locale" they call OP, which includes the village ofSan Agustín in Mexico's Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York. They argue that the "interconnectedness within" this space "can no longer be conceptualized merely as circulation or exchange." They vividly illustrate the ways in which air travel, the telephone, and the VCR have in some cases transformed practices (e.g., language) and in others have challenged or reinforced existing institutions (e.g., collective labor for the village, or fiestas and the display of wealth accompanying them). They explore the process of "time-space reassignment" by which the village seeks to uphold traditions while sending a significant portion of its adult males to Poughkeepsie, and they examine the personal dilemma of choosing between community service and individual economic pursuits. Finally, they define the forms of dissent by which some (e.g., women migrants, Seventh Day Adventists) challenge the structures of OP. 337 Diaspora 5:3 1996 Pacini Hernandez notes Paul Gilroy"s discussion of the extent to which musical exchanges participate in the construction of diasporan identity in and across the Black Atlantic as a preface to her exploration of the past and present roles played by Afro-Caribbean music in Cartagena, Colombia, a city with a large population of African origin. She details the ways in which the Colombian recording and broadcast industries resisted the dissemination of such music, and discusses the material practices centered around picos, locally constructed sound-systems, through which AfricanColombians acquired, reproduced, disseminated, and transformed recorded diasporan musics. She notes that the black Cartageneros' production ofsuch music systems preceded the appearance ofworld beat in northern contexts by almost a decade, and traces their acknowledgment ofand participation in a diasporic Afro-Caribbean identity based on música africana. Rosen notes the emergence of a cinema/television opposition which has come to stand for several other oppositions—between the national and international, or transnational, or global; between stringently circumscribed identity and hybridity, and so on. He interrogates the assumption that the era ofdiaspora and globalization represents a post-national, "radical rupture in media history," and argues that "little of the economic and aesthetic history of cinema was ever separated from the international." While receptive to the claim that "notions of hybridity, diaspora identity, and postcoloniality may provide different perspectives on the supposed emergence of a post-national era with respect to cinema," his essay instantiates the many ways in which the post- and trans-national in cinema continue to be inhabited by the facts and assumptions of the national. Stratton explores the "complex continuity" between the "assimilationist and integrationist population management policies of the White Australia" era and the "practices of multiculturalism" in effect in Australia today. He argues that the relationship between discourses of race and ethnicity is significantly shaped by the Australian government's multiculturalism policy, and instantiates that relationship by focusing on changing definitions ofthe JewishAustralian diaspora. This, he shows, was variously regarded...