In This Issue

Diaspora 6:1 1997 In This Issue I Gabaccia and Ottanelli explore the history of Italian immigrant labor in countries ranging from France and Australia to Argentina and the USA. They identify several patterns for the incorporation of these migrants. The differences among them are due to differences in the host countries' cultural and racial attitudes , as well as the ideological and organizational particularities of native (often nativist) labor organizations. After offering a brief history and taxonomy ofthese strategies oforganization and incorporation , in which the radical politics of Italian labor and exile intellectuals played a considerable role, the authors consider the appropriateness ofthe term "proletarian diaspora" as applied to the Italian labor migration, which formed neither an international working class to which nationality was irrelevant, nor a classical diaspora held together primarily by national ties. George explores the situation of Indian-Americans in Southern California and identifies insistent forms ofimmigrant self-definition that deploy ethnocultural terms to avoid definition by skin color, chromatics, or race. George argues that the valuable academic and theoretical discourse on race which advocates racial coalitions in and beyond the academy does not fully acknowledge the ways in which skin color—and not race theory—determines the contours of extra-academic racial discourse. She analyses the behavior, language , and concepts employed by middle class Indian-American immigrants who seek to avoid being raced, insist on ethnocultural uniqueness and privilege as a way ofentirely avoiding the spectrum of whiteness, brownness and blackness, and who sometimes choose self-definition in essentialist and religious terms to avoid chromatic visibility and racial discourse. Finally, she discusses past and present racial coalitions that have emerged despite the barriers created by such evasion. Isenbergaddressesthreenestedphenomena. Thefirstistheapparent revival ofinterest in Yiddish. The second is Jonathan Boyarin's Thinking in Jewish and his other, closely related works on the Jewish diaspora,Jewish identity politics, and"critical post-Judaism." The third is the renewed debate on diasporic identity, which matters to both Jewish and cultural studies. Isenberg examines the ways in which Boyarin's attempt to dissociate diasporicity from Diaspora 6:1 1997 national territory and political hegemony is an important if much disputed contribution to these endeavors. Konstan's essay deals with "ethnicity in the culture that gave us the word ethnos" by focusing on Jonathan Hall's Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. He finds Hall's learned arguments for considering genealogy as a fundamental criterion of ethnicity—and for regarding other traits, like language, as more contingent indicia of ethnicity—useful but in need of modification. Konstan argues that "the idea that ethnicity is a discursive phenomenon means just that it depends on ideology, not on facts as such"; that ethnic discourse makes use of "a limited and largely arbitrary spectrum of traits by which to define identity"; and that "ethnicity is a phenomenon of discourse [which] entails socially generalized claims and counterclaims of [both] difference and similarity." Surveying the aggregative and oppositional modes of constructing ethnicity, which Hall periodizes, Konstan concludes that ethnic discourse in Archaic and Classical Greece availed itself of both modes and was motivated above all by the need to elaborate "fictive affinities [which] emerge precisely in response to pressures that put a premium on forms of social solidarity." Stein reflects on the ways in which Jewish Studies (and, by analogy, diaspora studies) constructs one of its objects: Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, the title of the collection of essays she reviews. The extraordinary diversity of conditions and features which characterized North African, Middle Eastern, and Balkan Jewries is matched by the variety (and often confusion) of theoretical assumptions with which, Stein shows, the object of knowledge is constructed. Many scholars see inextricable links between Western Europe, European Jewry and the modernity which the latter sought to bring (and with which they tried to "colonize") nonEuropean Jews. The intellectual descendants ofnineteenth-century European Jews are amongthe scholars who, often shaped byZionism, must struggle to rethink how very differently change is experienced in different diasporas; how diasporas and host populations may be mutually constructing; and above all what notions of being native and alien may have meant outside Europe. Visweswaran investigates the frequently obscured role of class, the contradictory and shifting...