In This Issue

Diaspora 9:3 2000 In This Issue McKeown describes and dissents from the essentialization ofthe Confucian values and the Chinese culture that have been invoked in recent decades as reasons for the economic successes of the Chinese diaspora. As an alternative, he offers a historical analysis of how Chinese culture and consciousness changed in transnational settings and how the diaspora was substantially reshaped as it adapted to available economic and social niches—changing, in the process, the nature of those niches. He focuses on the variety and changing phases ofoverseas Chinese social formations and economic practices. These included coolies and merchant empires; mining labor and vast revenue farms; enclaves in towns, as well as autonomous rural, territorialized diasporas; labor recruitment and migration, sometimes organized by great businesses and at other times as chain migration sustained by families. While acknowledging the importance of earlier nation-based analyses of ethnic enclaves and middleman minorities, McKeown demonstrates that transnational analysis is now indispensable and must always take into account both the links between overseas Chinese and the global economy, which includes the changing political and cultural economies of Western empires. Roudometof begins by agreeing that transnational studies have contributed much to revising our understanding ofthe relations between migration and globalization; have shown how newly created social fields crossing national boundaries may empower diasporic groups; and have necessitated the rethinking ofthe terms ethnicity, race, and nation. However, he argues, the juxtaposition of transnationalism with nations, whose boundaries the former is seen to weaken, blinds us to the fact that "nationalism and transnationalism are part of the same world historical process of globalization ." These processes have transformed "the older diasporas into transnational national communities." Turning to the dispersion of ancient Greeks and the later diaspora of Greek Orthodox, Roudometof argues that transnational Hellenism is of recent origin. He explores the transformations of the Greek diaspora from the perspectives ofpopulation movements, capital flows, and state-making. In particular, he examines these three factors, plus religion, as they contributed to "transnational nation building" among the Greek 313 Diaspora 9:3 2000 Orthodox communities ofthe eastern Mediterranean from the 1830s on. Finally, turning to Greek migration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, he considers the Greek state's attempts to shape an emerging Hellenic Diaspora and the partly countervailing "return of pan-Orthodox universalism" that seeks to embrace non-Greek Orthodox peoples. Baldwin engages Dale Peterson's Up from Bondage: The Literatures of African American and Russian Soul (Duke UP, 2000), which explores the parallels and cross-pollenization between Russian and African American discourses of "soul"—of identity, essence, and nationhood. She argues that Peterson is correct in locating the parallels' origin in the exclusion of both Russians and African Americans from West European (above all German Idealist) narratives of civilization and, later, from generally held notions of modernity. Baldwin sympathetically yet critically traces Peterson's arguments concerning the ways in which the intellectuals of these two peoples responded to their denigration by a dominant Western paradigm. She shows how the disciplinary exceptionalisms of the US academy, in particular where the study of American literature is concerned, have underwritten a neglect of the relations between Russian and African American views and texts. Her essay offers a synoptic and sympathetic assessment of the possibilities for comparison and a critical evaluation of the theoretical resources available for improving and extending the study of these two cultures. Kaul underscores, like Chakrabarty, that "Europe" very nearly has a patent on the adjective "modern," which leaves postcolonial studies with what Loomba names the "burden of a Eurocentric past" during which capitalism and colonialism shaped non-Western societies, economies, and their knowledge protocols. Within postcolonial literary studies, Kaul argues, revisionist readings find it hard to escape the omnipresent claim of English literature to embody the mutually constructing narratives of modernization and nationalism. Turning to Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans (Duke UP, 1999), Kaul explores how the tropicopolitan mode of postcolonial studies differs from the decolonization discourse that was its historical precursor; swerves away from both Marxist and liberal modernization narratives; and draws upon Freud and Foucault to develop readings that have a revisionist and a therapeutic impact. Kaul explores the rubrics under...