In This Issue

Diaspora 8:1 1999 In This Issue Hirschkop reads Bruce Robbins's Feeling Global as a post-Cold War attempt to fashion a worldly yet at the same time distinctly American cultural internationalism. Like Robbins, Hirschkop asks how one can acknowledge the importance of location, position, and the impossibility of detachment even as one strives for "an internationalism of action" not paralyzed by a fear ofcomplicity with dominant forces that seek to project and impose US power. He examines Robbins's elaboration of a transnational worldliness that avoids the new American cultural nationalism as well as the errors of misguided internationalisms. He identifies in Robbins's work what he calls a "continuity thesis," whose consequence may be an acknowledgment of differences in scope but not in nature between nationalcommunal and transnational cultures. Hirschkop also examines the related yet different embrace of a continuity thesis in the work of Richard Rorty, concluding with questions about the asymmetries of power and motive that compel some people, commonly situated in "the West," to take up universalist positions. Raley argues that we are witnessing "the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies"into "World Literature in English." Her essay traces the origin ofcurrent claims about "one great English-[language] literature" that "both sutures and exceeds national literary traditions" back to the moment of British colonialism and to Matthew Arnold, even as it explores the emergence—in the commercial and scientific spheres, but also in many parts ofthe academy—of claims that English is now the global language. While looking at the links between the ever greater insistence on that claim and the development of the category of World Literature in English, Raley also examines the new configurations of identity that maintain academically, commercially, and politically convenient differentiations and hyphenations within the field. Rothenberg's article is, first, a direct examination ofhow "women in two Palestinian diaspora communities (in Jordan and Canada) experience social ties to those they have left behind in the West Bank and to others within their adopted communities." It also engages a growing literature on diaspora, deterritorialization, and transnationalism in which mobility is celebrated even as proximity and the logic of the sedentary are undervalued. Her article explores the importance of the notion of closeness (a term of spatial geography as Diaspora 8:1 1999 well as of kinship) in the social life of a West Bank Palestinian village in general, and of its women in particular. The importance attributed to these ties, she argues, persists even as members ofthe community migrate to Kuwait, Jordan, and Canada. Sadowski-Smith questions the assumption that the emergence of cross-border ethnodiasporan affiliation on the US-Mexican frontier leads to a post-national moment ofresistance. Invoking the example of the Berlin Wall, the old border it marked, its apparent disappearance, and the emergence of new re-borderings both in eastern Europe and elsewhere, she argues that Ethnic and American Studies can no longer be satisfied with a US—Mexican, or even hemispheric, perspective: global capital, she argues, crosses borders it only sometimes renders more porous, or eliminates; at other times, "it requires the existence of differential living conditions on a global scale." She notes that just as, in the US-Mexico border zone, increasing permeability to some economic processes coexists with an increasingly anti-immigrant remilitarization of the same border, so also across the globe "there is a proliferation of economic, social, and political borders" that coexists with the emergence of new supranationalisms such as NAFTA and the EU, and, indeed, makes them economically more viable. Watson's essay examines two important new books/arguments (by Winston James and Penny Von Eschen) about the role of migrant Caribbean radicals in African American political activism during the first half of the twentieth century. These books see the gains made by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s as coming "at the expense of an earlier [African]-American politics rooted in transnational solidarities of both race and class." Situating these arguments within ongoing debates in the three fields of American, Ethnic, and Postcolonial Studies, Watson shows how renewed attention to Caribbean migration to the US and to the political interactions between Caribbean radicals...