In This Issue

125 Diaspora 6:2 1997 In This Issue Behdad shows that a productive ambivalence has been the central feature of the discourse of immigration ever since Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed as to the kind of nation America should be. He argues that apparent contradictions such as the simultaneous existence of hostile nativism and of receptivity to immigrants were appropriated as enabling ambivalence in cultural-ideological debates and by administrative actions which, together, produced the American nation-state. Exploring the relationship among socioeconomic concerns about immigration, ideology, and the state, Behdad demonstrates that the circulation of ambivalence makes available notions of crisis, of the nation under siege, which legitimize state actions that accommodate or prohibit immigration as “needed.” In effect, he argues, the persistent and necessarily irresolvable ambivalence about immigration is constitutive of the collective identity of the American nation-state. Bolt engages Lever-Tracy, Ip, and Tracy's major recent study of the economic role of the Chinese diaspora in the development of China's economy, which also argues that Chinese diaspora capitalism is a distinctive new form of capitalism. Bolt emphasizes the remarkable and (in the Western media) under-reported role of transnational, diasporic capital; he situates that role historically and politically, and sketches the various efforts of Chinese statesmen and of the state to attract and regulate diasporan capital; he then explores the possibility that diasporic investment leads to more equitable development than other forms of investment by the state and by foreign firms. Finally, while praising the study's attention to sociological and cultural capital and to the distinctiveness of Chinese diaspora capitalism, he offers doubts and alternative ways of thinking about its effects and future. Chan situates the emergence of a new cosmopolitan, transnational, middle-class, and transilient Chinese identity in a historical trajectory. He explores a traditional assumption that migration isolates the migrant and causes family dispersal and counters it with evidence that since the nineteenth century the family has played an instrumental role “before, during, and after” the departure of the individual Chinese migrant. He outlines the role of the “family idea” and of Chinatown institutions in sustaining the xxxxxxxxxxxx 126 Diaspora 6:2 1997 policing power of that idea, then turns to Hong Kong's “astronaut families” to outline the move away from the “ever-vigilant, normative” constraints of family and community. This move does not eliminate, but alters the reach of those constraints and necessitates the development of the new cosmopolitan identity, which is not uprooted but multiply rooted, capable not just of double but of multiple consciousness. Marx analyzes Paul Smith's Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North, simultaneously extending its implications and offering a critique. He focuses on Smith's “central contention [that] globalization is a camouflage version of late capitalism offered up by pundits and professors alike,” a way for “capitalism's apologists to reimagine the world”; that it seeks to conceal the colonial, imperial, and traditionally capitalist realities that linger behind the global market in which, it is alleged, nations and the nation-state mean little. Regrettably, even left intellectuals such as Stuart Hall have accepted some of these claims. Marx contends that Smith's fundamentally correct analysis nevertheless neglects the fact that “professionals actually have a very special job to do” vis-à-vis both the realities of the nation-state and the fictions of globalization. Leontis's essay is simultaneously a contribution to spatial studies; an exploration of the extent to which the topographical imaginary of the new transnationalism remains land-based; an investigation of the concepts of territorialization and diaspora in the work of the nineteenth-century Greek author Vikelas; and an antidote to the relentless presentism of most current notions of transnationalism and globalization. She shows that Vikelas raised the question of how the emerging modern nation-state first drew upon, then challenged and altered an older emporion, a merchant diaspora of relentless circulation. Before this challenge, the Mediterranean world in which that emporion flourished was, for Greeks and others, Leontis argues, not a space “of boundaries that separate but of routes that connect,” one that was never fully encompassed or “occupied” by any national literature. Siraganian explores the relations between Canadian...