Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora

Diaspora 2:2 1992 Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora Stefan Helmreich Stanford University In the literature of traditional anthropology, "community" and "culture" have been privileged units of analysis and have often been considered to be isomorphic with well-defined national or ethnic territories. Recent anthropological attempts to understand constitutions of community and identity in a transnational, postcolonial, and global economic context have questioned this easy relationship between culture, community, and place and have focused on how social worlds can be webbed together across transnational space (see Appadurai, Gupta and Ferguson). Among the many contenders for an analytical concept accountable to the complexities of culture and economy in a transnationally interconnected world are such notions as "the deterritorialized nation state" (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton), "ethnoscapes" (Appadurai), "borderlands" (Anzaldua ), and "diaspora" (Hall; Gilroy, "Cultural Studies"; Safran; Tölölyan). Each of these concepts calls into question the "natural" bond that anthropology historically has presumed to exist between community, culture, and place. In this essay, I would like to give specific attention to the concept of "diaspora," examining Paul Gilroy's particular use of it in "Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism" and in "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack." It seems important to excavate some of the meanings latent in the notion of diaspora at this historical moment because of its increasing importance in the theoretical discourse on transnationalism. I think that Gilroy's vision of diaspora may recapitulate some of the very problems he identifies in nationalism and ethnic absolutism. I will argue here that Gilroy relies on some ofthe same ideas about kinship, nature, and territory that traditional nationalist rhetorics employ to define citizenship and delineate national boundaries. I will also briefly contrast Gilroy's formulation with Stuart Hall's treatment of diaspora. In "Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism," Gilroy warns against narratives of ethnic history that eliminate the experiences of people based on their divergence from ideal-typic life courses; he maintains that constructions of black tradition in terms of nations 243 Diaspora 2:2 1992 or limited geographical areas (as in African-American, African-Caribbean , and African-British studies) inevitably exclude people who do not fit neatly into those spaces. In "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack," Gilroy illustrates how the hegemonic construction of community in the British context has collapsed "nation" into "race" and thereby conflated "cultural" with "biological" heritage. This has been accomplished by citizenship policies that have stipulated that national belonging be an inherited quality. British citizenship law, as it invokes ideas about kinship, also encodes notions of "race" and effectively excludes people from the "national family" on the basis of "racial origin." And the link between "family" and "nation" is reinforced by metaphors that plant "races" in "places" (as Gilroy points out, the British are referred to as "the Island Race" [45]). Gilroy's dissection ofthe logic ofnationalism and racism parallels David Schneider's analysis of how metaphors of kinship provide a store ofsymbolic devices through which the modern nation-state can construct itself. Schneider points out that in the Judeo-Christian conception ofkinship, there are two kinds of kin, those by birth and those by law. Belonging to a family requires falling into at least one ofthese categories. Children, in order to be legitimate, must fall into both, and this can be accomplished by being born into a legally sanctioned heterosexual union. Schneider notes that being a citizen in a nation also relies on conceptions ofbirth and legality. And Bill Maurer observes that under current British citizenship law a child born to a noncitizen mother and citizen father will be conferred citizenship status only if the parents are legally married, that is, if the child is "legitimate" ("The Land"). In the United States, becoming a citizen requires going through a process of"naturalization"—a reference to the "natural" character of birth that symbolically fastens together citizenship, legality, and legitimacy. Gilroy hopes to construct a historical narrative that escapes the conflation of nation with race with place with kin. Because he believes that African diasporic histories must not subordinate themselves to or contain themselves within the borders and histories of nation-states, he...