Comparing Diasporas: A Review Essay

Diaspora 8:3 1999 aring Diasporas: A Review Essay William Safran University of Colorado at Boulder Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Robin Cohen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. The Need to Generalize and the Problem of Conceptual Stretching The diaspora phenomenon has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. This is not surprising: in an age of globalization , which is marked by proliferating population movements, everfaster communication, and cultural exchanges across political boundaries, one becomes increasingly aware that the "nation-state" is an oddity; that the notion of the fixity of cultures is an illusion; and that the fashioning of homogeneous societies is unrealizable, if not undesirable. This development has given rise to numerous studies of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities. In the past several years, the term "diaspora" has come to be used more and more loosely as an inclusive term for these and other kinds of minorities who can trace their origins to a country or region other than that in which they reside. Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, two French scholars of nationalism and minorities, are among those who are not comfortable with that tendency. They point to the need to distinguish between diasporas and indigenous or immigrant minorities (xiii-xix). Beginning with the Jewish diaspora as a paradigmatic one, as do most writers on the topic, they proceed by including under the rubric of diaspora only those minorities that share the following attributes: 1.a collective forced dispersion of a religious or ethnic group, precipitated by a disaster, often of a political nature; 2.a role played by collective memory, which transmits both the historical causes ofthe dispersion and a specific cultural heritage (broadly understood); 3.the will to survive as a minority by transmitting a heritage; 4.the persistence ofan "externally oriented" collective identity after the lapse of several generations of residence in a "host" country. 256 Diaspora 8:3 1999 Despite the fact that Chaliand and Rageau take up a dozen diasporas, they nevertheless raise the question ofwhether minority communities whose origin and nature depart in important ways from the Jewish prototype should be regarded as diasporas in the proper sense. While they include the Armenians and the Palestinian Arabs, they object to referring to overseas Chinese and Indians as diasporas, preferringthe term "semi-diasporas" for them, since the countries from which they originate have had a "continued existence as states where the vast majority of their compatriots live" (Chaliand and Rageau xiii). Robin Cohen has been much less restrictive; in Global Diasporas: An Introduction, a richly detailed and important study, he deals with diasporas comparatively. Beginning with the Jewish one, he refers to several other minority communities that have generally been acknowledged as diasporas—for example, the Armenian, Greek, Indian, Lebanese, and Chinese—and then branches out to deal with more than a score of minorities across the globe. Cohen follows in the footsteps ofa number ofprominent scholars, such as John A. Armstrong, who discusses "mobilized" diasporas, and Hugh Seton-Watson (383-416), who presents a fairly large list of diaspora communities and divides them into four or five types based on cultural identity, economic activity, conditions of settlement , and sociopolitical status vis-à-vis indigenous society, for instance, diasporas descending from conquerors, colonists, or imported laborers. Although for Seton-Watson the Jewish diaspora remains the ideal-typical one, he ends up classifying and describing more than a dozen diasporas. Cohen, too, attempts to arrange diasporas under different analytic subtypes: (1) victim diasporas (such as Armenians and Africans); (2) trade diasporas (Chinese and Lebanese); (3) cultural diasporas (Caribbean); and (4) "labor" and "imperial" diasporas (Italians, Indians, and British). In so doing, he provides an interesting interpretation of the conditions under which diasporas arise and maintain themselves. Casting a wide net, and informed by a spirit of inclusive liberalism, Cohen calls our attention to the fact that the distinction between diasporas and other expatriate peoples is not always clear, and that among the latter a number of diasporic features can be found. For example, constraining economic or political conditions have made expatriation less than voluntary for numerous groups. In many cases, there are continuing links with the homeland; lingering heritages (e...