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Diaspora 7:3 1998 In This Issue Koshy shows that some South Asian Americans and scholars have neglected "the historical salience of race for South Asians in the US," while other South Asian Americans and many scholars based in the Humanities have treated displays of"South Asian color consciousness as equivalent to white racism." Ironically, she argues, both groups "construct racial identification as a choice, inadvertently reproducing the American ideology of self-making," even though the evidence suggests that South Asian Americans have been "ineluctably racialized." Using census categories and reviewing important cases concerning citizenship, Koshy rethinks the question of South Asian American identity in terms of responses to the frequent assignation of racialized identity by the dominant society. She also examines "the differences in the racialization of South Asians in Britain and the US" and highlights "the limitations of the middle-class minority strategy of refusing racial identification within the United States." Moore examines the term "Africa," which emerged not from within a territory and the people who inhabit it but as a "wandering " name, externally created over time, yet now assigned and appropriated for the task of defining such identities as "African" and "African diaspora." He seeks to "clarify Africa's identity, that conjoining of a name, a place, and a people, by examining two Philosophies associated with it: the contested existing field of African Philosophy, and the as-yet-unnamed discursive practice" that he calls Philosophy of Africa. He argues that the principles he develops in this particular case study may have application for a range ofworld identities that are variously regarded as postcolonial, transnational, and diasporic, such as "Asian" or "Caribbean." Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzmán begin by reviewing some older models of migration and integration (the assimilation school and the cultural pluralism view) and three recent responses to them, characterized as "the new economic sociology," the "context of reception," and the "transnational" approaches to migration theory. They identify the shortcomings of each approach , focusing on the insufficiently materialist interpretation of social networks as equivalent to "cultural practices"; the occulted persistence of some of the assumptions of the culture of poverty approach; the under estimation of the importance of racial determinants and of global hhb 283 Diaspora 7:3 1998 dynamics; and, finally, the subsuming of a heterogeneous reality by the term "transmigrant" in transnational studies. As a corrective, they offer a view oftransnational migration that is more sensitive to regional variations, racial dynamics, structural differences, and the diverse patterns ofthe social reproduction of migrant communities. Murphy begins his analysis of nationalism by juxtaposing the national model, which focuses on allegiance to a "land" or country, with a multiethnic and multicultural "portal state" such as the Byzantine and, especially, Ottoman Empires, which were built around a "porte," the gate of a city, functioning emblematically for The City—Constantinople/Istanbul, in this case. Murphy explores this gate-centeredness and other architectural features and tropes of such a City-oriented discourse in order to foreground what they indicate about Ottoman self-understanding and the exercise ofOttoman power within the empire and vis-à-vis its many peoples. He explores the emergence of a polylicit cosmopolitanism that included under its mantle both territorialized minorities and diasporan peoples that lived within and across the borders of empire. Having established the social, political, and aesthetic model of the portal state, Murphy explores the ways in which its decline, reactions to it, and divergences from it led to the emergence of the nation-states of the Balkans (and, by implication, west Asia) and identifies "the seven pillars of nationalism." Although these seven pillars rise complexly out of his analysis of a particular context, they clearly have implications for a more inclusive analysis of the emergence of homeland and diaspora nationalisms outside Western Europe. Watson's essay begins by examining 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. He shows that 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...

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