TOPIA 17 |11

Lily Cho

The Turn to Diaspora

Abstract

This essay argues that diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity

and not as an object of analysis. I propose an understanding of diaspora as first
and foremost a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories
of displacements and genealogies of dispossession. In focusing on the problem
of subjectivity and subject formation, I am suggesting that diasporas are not
just there. They are not simply collections of people, communities of scattered
individuals bound by some shared history, race or religion. Rather, they emerge in
relation to power, in the turn to and away from power. Diasporic subjects emerge
in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self—homeland, memory,
loss—even as they turn on or away from them.
Résumé

Cette étude argumente que la diaspora doit être comprise comme étant
une condition subjective et non comme un objet d’analyse. Je propose une
compréhension de la diaspora comme étant avant tout une condition subjective
marquée par les événements imprévus de longues histoires de déplacements et
de généalogies de dépossession. En ciblant le problème de la subjectivité et de la
formation du sujet, je suggère que les diasporas ne sont pas simplement là. Elles
ne sont pas simplement des collections de gens, des communautés d’individus
dispersés et liés par une histoire, une race ou une religion commune. Plutôt, les
diasporas émergent dans une relation avec le pouvoir, vers celui-ci ou loin de
celui-ci. Les sujets diasporiques, qui en ressortent, se retournent pour faire face à
ces marques du soi—pays d’origine, mémoire, perte—au moment même où ils se
rapprochent ou s’éloignent de celles-ci.
 This essay arises out of my commitment to the promise and possibilities of
diaspora studies. It comes also out of my perplexity regarding the recent rise of
diaspora as a term and a field of study. I have been dismayed by attacks on diaspora
which describe a field of study that bears little resemblance to what I understand
as diaspora studies, surprised by the plasticity thrust upon a term that not so
long ago was fairly rigid in its definition and its disciplinary scope.1 I have found
diaspora to be tremendously enabling and a resource for pushing the boundaries
of criticism in fields such as postcolonial studies, Canadian literature, Asian North
American literature, globalization and cultural studies. And I am troubled by the
claims which divorce diaspora from histories of loss and dislocation. In thinking
through the turn to diaspora in this essay, I do not seek to define diaspora as a
term, nor do I wish to declare the limits of its boundaries. I do not want to claim
it for anyone or anything. I do strongly believe that the turn to diaspora must be
understood within the long history of the term and within specific conditions of
possibility. That is, I advocate for an understanding of the term that focuses less
on who or what is diasporic, than on how it is that individuals and communities
become diasporic. This essay is part of my attempt to follow the trajectory of the
turn to diaspora and to trace its possibilities for literary and cultural studies.
The turn has been remarkable in recent years. Searches on any number of data-
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bases and other on-line resources reveal the increasing prominence of a term
that only a couple decades ago was still used largely as a proper noun describing
12
communities of dispersed Jewish and Armenian peoples. References to various
diasporas in popular media and culture abound. The term has been conflated with
hybridity, globalization, postcolonial and minority, with which it seems to share
critical space. In recent critical writing, diaspora has been used to describe everyone
from 19th-century British imperialist and contemporary transnational elites to
Japanese plantation communities in Hawaii to black communities forged out of
the legacy of slavery. More remarkable still, is the relatively limited consensus
about the meaning of the term and the ways in which it can be used. While there
have been numerous articles, anthologies and conferences, diaspora has travelled
so extensively and so easily across definitional and disciplinary boundaries that it
risks losing any but the broadest and most general of meanings. Indeed, almost
everyone seems to agree that diaspora, in its most basic sense, refers to a scattering
of peoples who are nonetheless connected by a sense of a homeland, imaginary
or otherwise. Beyond that, things get murkier. In order to prevent diaspora from
becoming what Khachig Tololyan notes as a potentially “promiscuously capacious
category” (Tololyan 1996: 8), various attempts have been made at a definition, to
limit the scope of its reach in order to preserve its capacity as a critical term.
The continuing proliferation of the meaning of the term despite these attempts
at limiting its circulation suggests not the futility of definitional exercises, but
the powerful desire for diaspora in contemporary criticism. Despite verging on
capriciousness and falling wholly into a dangerous plasticity, diaspora is undeniably
here to stay. The turn to diaspora in contemporary criticism is more than just a
faddish adoption of a new critical language for the sake of newness. The turn to
diaspora signals a demand for finding a way to speak about the complexities of
connections between communities, of the unredressed griefs and disarticulated
longings from which collectivities emerge. The turn to diaspora responds to what
David Scott, citing Kamau Braithwaite, calls “an obscure miracle of connection”
(Scott 1999: 106). Diaspora brings together communities which are not quite
nation, not quite race, not quite religion, not quite homesickness, yet they still
have something to do with nation, race, religion, longings for homes which
may not exist. There are collectivities and communities which extend across
geographical spaces and historical experiences. There are vast numbers of people
who exist in one place and yet feel intimately related to another. While this
current historical moment is not unique, in that there is a long history of settler
colonialism and the displacement of peoples and communities in its aftermath,
there is a particularity about the legacies of these displacements and longings
in the present. The complexities of living in the wake of colonialism mark not
the failures of the decolonization movements of the mid-20th century, but the
urgency of recognizing the persistence of colonialism’s intersections with questions
of immigration and citizenship.

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Diaspora responds to this urgency. Diaspora offers one powerful way of think-
ing through the displacements engendered by colonialism. It allows a way of
understanding the role of uprooting vast communities in the service of Empire as 13

a mode of connection. Thus, African transatlantic slavery, for example, engenders

movements as diverse as the Haitian Revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture,
the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the black British cultural
resistances in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Similarly, Asian indenture prod-
uces communities as diverse as Japanese sugar cane workers on the plantations of
Hawaii, Chinese guano pit diggers in South America and South Asian labourers
on the plantations of the British West Indies. These movements and communities
are connected in some way. The revolts in 18th-century Haiti are connected to the
struggles for civil liberties in the United States in the mid-20th-century which are
in turn connected to the revolutionary interventions by black British subjects in the
late 20th century. Despite important differences in culture and history, Japanese
communities in Hawaii are connected to Chinese communities in South America
who are in turn connected to South Asian communities in the West Indies. The
problem then becomes one of finding a way to make these connections, to find the
continuities within these disparate experiences and histories, without losing sight
of the specificities of these various and varying communities and movements.
I believe that the turn to diaspora and diaspora’s persistence in contemporary
criticism is due to its promise as a mode of theorization which enables connections
between the traumas of colonialism even as it marks distinctions.
 Diaspora’s persistence poses an urgent need for critical engagement. There have
been numerous efforts to situate the (re)emergence of diaspora in terms of socio-
political moments or crises (Clifford 1997; Cohen 1997; Safran 2004). While
these analyses offer insights into the development of diaspora, a number of
questions remain unresolved by current explorations: What is the relationship
between diaspora and race? How does diaspora account for the multiplicity of
displacements and dislocations? What, for instance, is the difference between
an overseas Chinese community and a Chinese diasporic one? Do diasporas
have to have a sense of being unhomed in order to be diasporic? Are diasporas
necessarily transnational? What is the relationship between the transnational and
the diasporic? Where does postcolonialism or globalization fit in the context of
diaspora? It is not that current diaspora criticism does not address these questions.
On the contrary, the responses to these questions tend towards definitional
criteria. That is, the tendency has been to attend to the capriciousness of the term
by limiting its circulation through the establishment of various sets of definitional
criteria. Thus, Robin Cohen has broken diasporas down into various types and
formations (Cohen 1997). Tololyan offers us a dozen criteria and a coda for
identifying diasporas (Tololyan 1996). James Clifford’s attempt to move out of
defining diasporas by ideal types moves in something of the opposite direction
when he suggests that we might understand diasporas diacritically by defining
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them as “caught up with and defined against (1) the norms of nation-states and
14 (2) indigenous, and especially autochtonous, claim by ‘tribal’ peoples” (Clifford
1997: 250). This definitional tendency understands diasporas as objects whose
major features and characteristics can be catalogued and classified. In the process
of defining diaspora, diasporic communities tend to be reduced to a sampling of
distinguishing features and histories of migration. Definitions that are too narrow
risk excluding communities that some critics might argue are unambiguously
diasporic. Definitions that are too broad risk being far too inclusive, and thus
evacuating the term of any real meaning. Whether the argument is for broad
definitions or carefully limited ones, definitional debates reduce diasporas and
diasporic communities to the status of objects.
Diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of
analysis. Thus, my primary aim is not to define diaspora, but to argue strenuously
for an understanding of diaspora as first and foremost a subjective condition
marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies
of dispossession. Diaspora is not divorced from the histories of colonialism and
imperialism, nor is it unmarked by race and the processes of racialization. It is not
defined by these histories and social practices, but these histories and practices
form a crucial part of the condition of diaspora’s emergence. Diaspora is related
to globalization, transnationalism and postcolonialism, but differentiated from
these processes, not by the objective features of demographics and geography,
but by the subjective conditions of demography and the longings connected to
geographical displacement. Some diasporic subjects do indeed emerge from the
processes of globalization, but not all. Some diasporic subjects are indeed trans-
national, but not all. Diaspora emerges as a subjectivity alive to the effects of
globalization and transnational migration, but also attuned to the histories of
colonialism and imperialism. Diaspora is not a function of socio-historical and
disciplinary phenomena, but emerges from deeply subjective processes of racial
memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings
which hang at the edge of possibility. It is constituted in the spectrality of sorrow
and the pleasures of “obscure miracles of connection.”
In focusing on the problem of subjectivity and subject formation for diaspora, I
am suggesting that diasporas are not just there. They are not simply collections of
people, communities of scattered individuals bound by some shared history, race
or religion, or however we want to break down the definitions and classifications.
Rather, they have a relation to power. They emerge in relation to power. This
power is both external to the diasporic subject and internally formative. As
Judith Butler understands, “power that at first appears as external, pressed upon
the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that
constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (Butler 1997: 3). Crucially, Butler highlights
the centrality of turning in relation to the power of subjection: “The form this

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power takes is relentlessly marked by a figure of turning, a turning back upon
oneself or even a turn on oneself..., the turn appears to function as a tropological
inauguration of the subject, a founding moment whose ontological status remains 15

permanently uncertain” (3-4). In exploring what I have noted as the diasporic

turn, I am not just talking about the turn to diaspora in academic discussions; I
am also proposing that diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon
those markers of the self—homeland, memory, loss—even as they turn on or away
from them. In understanding power’s relation to diasporic subjectivity as both
internal and external, I find Butler’s querying of that classic instance of turning
in subject formation, Althusser’s policeman’s hail, to be particularly instructive.
“Why,” she asks, “does this subject turn towards the voice of the law, and what
is the effect of such a turn in inaugurating a social subject?” (5). She goes on to
argue that,
the inaugurative address of state authority presupposes not only that the
inculcation of conscience already has taken place, but that conscience,
understood as the psychic operation of a regulatory norm, constitutes a
specifically psychic and social working of power on which interpellation
depends but for which it gives no account. (5)
Thus, it is not just that power presses upon, hails and forms diasporic subjects. It
is also the case that diasporic subjects emerge out of psychic relations to power
which do not come from without, but are integral to that which is within the
processes of subject formation. As Butler understands, “no subject comes into
 being without power, but that its coming into being involves the dissimulation
of power, a metaleptic reversal in which the subject produced by power becomes
heralded as the subject who founds power” (15-16). This metaleptic reversal func-
tions as a possible answer to the important concerns that Kazanjian and Nichanian
raise via Fred Moten when they note that “accounts of subjection risk becoming
‘an obsessive recording of mastery’ if they do not also attend to the scenes in
which subjection is ‘cut and augmented’” (Kazanjian and Nichanian 2003: 7). One
possibility of cutting and augmenting subjection lies in the ambivalent temporality
of subjectivity.
Butler’s discussion exposes the ambivalent temporality of subjectivity. It is this
temporality which reveals the problematic relationship between diasporas and
the conditions of their emergence. Do diasporas exist prior to the experience of
scattering? When do people cease to be diasporic? As Butler understands, “The
paradox of subjection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must
refer to what does not yet exist” (Butler 1997: 4). This quandary illuminates the
strange circularity of the many attempts at defining diaspora. They are at once
already there and yet also in the process of becoming and yet again also in the
process of dissolving. We cannot presume that a diasporic subject exists prior to
the external forces which have produced diasporas. And yet, we cannot also talk
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about this subject without assuming some kind of prior relation to power. These
quandaries signal the necessity of understanding the temporality of diasporic
16
subjectivity as that which is profoundly out of joint, neither before nor after a
particular event or experience, haunted by the pastness of the future.
David Kazanjian’s conversation with Marc Nichanian about Armenian diasporic
experience beautifully illustrates the complexity of diasporic relationships to
pasts which refuse to remain in the past and futures which have already hap-
pened (Kazanjian and Nichanian 2003). Differentiating between genocide and
“Catastrophe,” Aghed, Nichanian marks loss as a relation to the forms of memory,
to the denial of mourning as a form of remembering for survivors, and thus to
a loss of a particular relation to the future: Catastrophe “is a past event but it
does not belong to our past. It defines the past of the future” (128). Thus, for
him, diasporic loss is constituted within a relation to the future which is defined
by “a past event that is still to happen” (128). For Nichanian and Kazanjian, a
recognition of genocide and the search for some form of calculable reparation
cannot be the basis of the formation of national Armenian identity. Rather, there
must be an understanding of the memory of genocide as an archeological feature
of the future. Loss is both in the past and in the potentiality of the future. This
understanding of loss takes diaspora out of a relation to land and territory and
into one which is bound to the problem of history and memory. In giving a proper
name to Catastrophe, Nichanian neither metaphorizes a singular historical event,
nor denies the specificity of history. The history of the pogroms becomes both a
constitutive trauma and a proleptic memory of the future. It is this relation to
the past of the future that the language of genocide denies. Nichanian offers a
way of understanding how these histories are part of the processes of becoming,
of the past of the future: “Aghed is the name-to-be, the name that will come in
the future, in a nonassignable future” (128). And in that which is to come, that
which has already happened and that which defines the future, loss is constitutive
of subjectivity. Nichanian’s meditations on loss in the context of the Armenian
diaspora help to mark out a relationship between diasporic pasts and diasporic
futures. Diasporas emerge through losses which have already happened but which
also define the future. These losses come both before and after the emergence
of diasporic subjectivity. In thinking about diaspora and loss, there might be
temptation to understand the substance of diasporic loss as that of the loss of
homeland. However, as Nichanian reveals, diasporic loss signals a relationship to
history, not land or territory.
I derive my understanding of the conditions of diasporic subjectivity, conditions
marked by sorrow and loss as well as by the pleasures of connection, from the
specific histories of the classical Jewish and Armenian diasporas. A recognition
of the subjective dimensions of diaspora requires a recuperation of the classical
principles of diaspora from the histories of Jewish and Armenian communities.
While many discussions of diaspora note that Jewish and Armenian diasporas

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are “ideal” diasporas, this observation suggests that these ideal types of diaspora
are outdated and function as little more than an originary point. These gestures
toward the origins of diaspora do little to acknowledge the genealogy of the 17

term. Against the language of origins, I follow Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin in
understanding diasporic consciousness as something which is marked both by
genealogy and contingency (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002: 4). I situate Boyarin and
Boyarin’s engagement with origins within Walter Benjamin’s refining of the term
in The Origins of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin writes:
Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has,
nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is
not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being,
but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming
and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in
its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That
which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of
the factual; its rhythm is only apparent to dual insight. On the one hand it
needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but,
on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect
and incomplete. (Benjamin 2003: 45)
Thus, the question of origins is not one of genesis for an established and fixed past,
but of a dialectical emergence from a history that is both restorative and incomplete.
Diasporas disappear and reappear through this process of emergence.
 Diasporas do not come from nowhere, nor are the conditions of diasporic subject-
ivity whimsical devices of differentiation. My commitment to locating conditions
of diasporic subjectivity within the long histories of Jewish and Armenian
diasporic experience emerges from my sense that any theorization of contemporary
diaspora must acknowledge and engage with the history of the term and the
ways in which this history continues to haunt the construction of contemporary
diasporic community. In arguing for an engagement with the classical Jewish and
Armenian diasporas, I am not suggesting an unquestioning recuperation of these
historical dispersals for the present. Rather, a critical engagement with experiences
of Jewish and Armenian diaspora enables an understanding of diaspora as a
subjective condition bound by the catastrophic losses inflicted by power and,
in the spirit of Butler’s metaleptic reversal, productive of power. For example,
Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin’s reading of diaspora as foundationally queer and
feminized in their call to rethink the role of the fable of Masada for Jewish
culture illuminates one way in which diasporic subjectivity emerges as a response
to power even while it generates the power of diasporic difference. Arguing that
the valorization of “the account of the honourable suicide to avoid surrender at
Masada was another step in Josephus’ self-Romanization” (Boyarin and Boyarin
2002: 49), they contend “that the choice of ‘death with (so-called) honour’—as
in the Zionist appropriations of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, harking back to the
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Masada ideal—represents a cultural capitulation that does not honour Jewish

18 difference, while the choice to live however one can and continue to create as Jews
is resistance” (53). Recuperating the queer and the feminine, they further argue:
The notion of dying with a weapon as more beautiful and honourable
than dying without one is a surrender of Jewish difference to a “universal,”
masculinist consensus. Modern Jewish culture (not only Zionist) has
assimilated to the macho male ethos of Western civilization. (53)
Thus, for Boyarin and Boyarin, the power of Jewish diasporic difference lies in
understanding “resistance not as the accession to power and dominance, but
as resistance to the assumption of dominance” (102). This critical engagement
with Jewish diasporic difference suggests one way in which the losses inflicted
by power, the murders of Jews committed by the Romans at Masada, is a violent
instance both of subjection and of the power of diasporic subjectivity generated in
this resistance to the “masculinist consensus” of Western civilization. I do not turn
to this re-examination of Masada in order to privilege Jewish diasporic experience
as exemplary, but rather to engage critically with history and memory in turning
to diaspora. As Boyarin and Boyarin propose, “It is important to insist not on the
centrality of Jewish diaspora nor on its logical priority within comparative diaspora
studies, but on the need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history
within the contemporary diaspora rubric” (10). That is, engaging with diaspora’s
genealogy within Jewish and Armenian experiences is not a process of claiming
origins, but one of attending to the ways in which these histories are inextricably
bound to contemporary diasporas. I turn to the classical diasporas not because they
came first, but because they mark the contingencies of diasporic subjectivity.
Drawing from the models of the Jewish and Armenian diasporas, I propose that
there is a vital difference between the transnational and the diasporic. While
many discussions of diaspora emphasize the ways in which diasporas challenge
national borders and national identities through their crossing of borders, I argue
that diasporas are not constituted by transnational movement. Indeed, diasporic
subjectivity does not necessarily emerge from the traversing of national boundaries.
The subjective experience of what Homi Bhabha calls unhoming, with all the
resonances of an uncanny haunting and loss, depends less upon moving from one
national space to another than it does the experience and memory of becoming
unhomely. In his introduction to The Location of Culture, Bhabha explores the
“unhomeliness of migrancy” proposing that “[t]o live in the unhomely world,
to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its
sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound
desire for social solidarity” (Bhabha 1994: 18). Bhabha’s proposal highlights the
psychic dimension of diaspora which is so often overlooked in socio-historical
examinations. His mapping of the loss of home to the uncanniness of feeling out
place understands dislocation and dispossession as both an affect and an effect. To

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live in diaspora is to be haunted by histories that sit uncomfortably out of joint,
ambivalently ahead of their time and yet behind it too. It is to feel a small tingle
on the skin at the back of your neck and know that something is not quite right 19

about where you are now, but to know also that you cannot leave. To be unhomed
is a process. To be unhomely is a state of diasporic consciousness.
Diaspora must be differentiated from transnationalism, not only because the
crossing of national borders does not necessarily define diasporic subjectivity, but
also because to be diasporic is to be marked by loss. In differentiating the diasporic
from the transnational, I am thus differentiating between migration and what it
means to be marked by the memory of migration. I want to reserve diaspora for the
underclass, for those who must move through the world in, or are haunted by, the
shadowy uncertainties of dispossession. The difference between the transnational
and the diasporic lies in the difference between those whose subjectivities
emerge out of the security of moving through the world with the knowledge
of a return and those whose subjectivities are conditioned by the knowledge of
loss. Of course, there are, and always will be, exceptions and situations which
contradict and challenge this differentiation. But what, you might ask, of the
Iranian diasporic community in Los Angeles whose complex relations to home
have been made visible through the work of thinkers such as Hamid Naficy (cf.
Naficy 1999)? Is the impossibility of their return nullified by their class positions?
Or, similarly, what of the Chinese intellectuals in Rey Chow’s exploration of
the lures of diaspora who have taken refuge in the West after the horrors of
Tiananmen Square (Chow 1993)? Even though many of these intellectuals may
 move through the world within the security of their university postings, surely
the threat of persecution that they face upon return annuls their status among
the transnational elite? These questions raise the issue of class and mobility. It
is not that wealth and multiple passports render one transnational rather than
diasporic. My commitment to this differentiation between the transnational and
the diasporic is not a rule but a condition of possibility. I understand that there
will never be straight and clear definitions of diaspora, nor do I want them. In this
essay, I am not interested in cookie-cutter definitional exercises. I do not want to
get into the game of declaring one community to be diasporic and another one
not. It is a concern for the conditions of diasporic subjectivity that motivates my
enquiry. It is within these conditions that I seek the limits of diaspora and in
particular its differentiation from the transnational. In this sense, it matters less
to me whether one community might be classified as diasporic and not another,
than how diaspora as a rubric might help scholars to understand the conditions
of dislocation.
Another condition marked by “ideal” diasporas lies in the foundational role of
traumatic dislocation. In Jewish and Armenian diasporic experience, Jewish
and Armenian peoples have been forcibly scattered. While there are numerous
accounts of these histories, what matters for my argument is not the specific
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events of the scattering itself, but its effect as a subjective experience. I recognize
the dangers of a perpetual return to a narrative of wounding and victimization.
20
In particular, I recognize the possibility of clinging to these narratives as a mode
of retrenchment, as a claim to singularity and as a justification for conservative
insularities. But these are the dangers of a fossilized approach to history which does
not take into account the ways in which the past lives in the present. An emphasis
on subjectivity makes possible a mode of engaging with these histories not as
immutable expressions of victimization and wounding, but as crucially productive
of subjectivities which straddle the divide between past and present. One of the
major challenges to thinking about the formation of diasporic subjectivity lies in
understanding the legacies of displacement and dislocation as crucially mutable
features of the present. What form does the memory of the Middle Passage take
in contemporary diasporic subjectivity? How do we understand the experiences of
incarceration in the barracks and the barracoons as part of memory in the present?
One of the wagers of this essay, a wager that is shared by many postcolonial and
diaspora critics, is that these histories are not merely narratives of a faraway past
disconnected from contemporary subjectivities and memories. The question then
becomes one of thinking through how it is that these histories are also histories
of the present. How do historical experiences of incarceration and bondage in the
service of Empire emerge in the formation of contemporary identities? What are
the forms of transmission? Who carries these histories into the present? What
transformations in these histories occur in the process of transmission and how
are these histories transformative?
These questions can be addressed by thinking through the conditions and formation
of diasporic subjectivity. Diasporic subjectivity calls attention to the conditions of
its formation. Contrary to studies of diasporas as objects of analysis where race
or religion might be considered a defining feature, I have been arguing that no
one is born diasporic. Rather, one becomes diasporic through a complex process of
memory and emergence. Thus, to be black, for example, does not automatically
translate into a state of being within the black diaspora. Blackness is not inherently
diasporic. Black diaspora subjectivity emerges in what it means to be black and
live through the displacements of slavery and to carry into the future the memory
of the losses compelled by the legacy of slavery, to be torn by the ambivalences
of mourning losses that are both your own and yet not quite your own. Black
diasporic subjectivity emerges in relation to other diasporic communities and
through the depths of histories that will not rest because they have had no peace.
Diasporic subjectivity requires both a lateral engagement across multiple diasporic
communities and identities and vertically through long histories of dislocation.
In lateral terms, diasporas do not emerge in isolation, but are defined through
difference. In contemporary debates, diasporas tend to be discussed in their singu-
larities. Thus, there are extended discussions of the black diaspora, or the Chinese
diaspora, or the Indian diaspora. When critics take up explorations of more

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than one diasporic community, these multiple diasporas tend to be discussed
as examples of various types of diasporas. There is relatively little discussion of
diasporas as they emerge in relation to one another. And yet, we know from Stuart 21

Hall that diasporic identities emerge through difference and not as singular and
self-evident manifestations of diasporic experience (Hall 1990). The tendency
toward thinking through diasporas in isolation results in a definitional morass.
Rather than discussions of how one diasporic community emerges subjectively
in relation to another, we are left with objective declarations of diasporas as
representative types and debates about true versus false diasporas. What is needed
is a finer understanding of diasporas constituted through difference. This means
not only adequately understanding how diasporas are internally complicated and
divided in this complexity, but also how diaspora as a term and critical force has
emerged in relation to other emergent fields and disciplines. As Jonathan and
Daniel Boyarin so evocatively note, “if a lost Jerusalem imagined through a lost
Córdoba imagined through a lost Suriname is diaspora to the third power, so is
a stolen Africa sung as a lost Zion in Jamaican rhythms on the sidewalks of the
Eastern Parkway” (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002: ix). These losses are not only shared
across geographies and communities, but are also constitutive of each other. For a
lost Zion sung in Jamaican rhythms can only be imagined within the knowledge
of a lost Jerusalem and a stolen Africa. These are not parallel losses, but losses
which inform each other, losses whose songs of remembrance call forth one loss
even as they commemorate another. They share continuities even as they persist
in their differences.
 Within this commitment to this understanding of diasporas as constituted in
difference, the final part of this essay engages in a preliminary exploration of
two distinct diasporic communities in their specificity and in relation to each
other. One way of understanding the condition of diasporic subjectivity lies in
thinking through how the memory of oppression lives on in the present through
the processes of racialization. These processes do not emerge in isolation but
through difference. In examining black and Asian diasporas, I hope to investigate
the relations between them and to contest the current mode of discussing these
diasporas in their singularities.
Even as differences “within” and/or constituting diasporas need to be investigated
more critically, so too do seemingly distinct diasporas need to be compared. I turn
to a consideration of the legacies of black slavery and Asian indenture in order
to illustrate the necessity of thinking through these two distinct histories and to
locate their overlaps and connections. While black slavery is generally understood
as being foundational to the formation of black diasporic communities, Asian
indenture occupies a very different position in Asian diaspora studies. When
indenture is discussed at all, it tends to be referred to as an event in the past curiously
divorced from the formation of contemporary Asian diasporic identities. Indeed,
part of the work of my explorations of Asian diaspora is that of injecting back into
TOPIA 17

the discussion the role of indenture as a formative event for contemporary Asian
diaspora. Contrary to understanding of indenture as an event in the past, I suggest
22
that Asian indenture is not only formative of the present, but also a crucial clue to
the deep and vibrant relations between black and Asian diasporas.
I understand the urgency of examining Afro-Asian diaspora connections within
the context of making connections between old and new diasporas. In two separate
articles which put forward strikingly similar terms, Vijay Mishra and Gayatri
Spivak both suggest that diasporas can be understood as falling under two broad
categories, what they termed the old and the new: old diasporas are connected
with histories of indenture and slavery, whereas the new can be understood as
products of transnational cosmopolitanism (Mishra 1996; Spivak 1996). Where
the former experience displacement because of various forms of oppression,
the latter are exemplary subjects of the hyper-mobile global order. In Chinese
diaspora criticism, these categories have come under a number of different names
but broadly mean the same thing. For example, in Ma and Cartier (2003) Carolyn
Cartier puts forward the idea of first and second wave diasporas and Laurence
Ma suggests that there are cultural and clandestine diasporas; more broadly,
Asian American discussions distinguish between pre- and post-1965 immigrants.
These distinctions are important because they foreground the issue of class. It
is generally understood that modern Chinese migrants are different than their
indentured predecessors. Again and again, we are told that these new migrants
have more capital, cultural or otherwise, than those who first sojourned across the
oceans in search of work and possibilities of improving their lives.
While these distinctions foreground class, they do not question the historically
progressivist narrative which divides Chinese diasporic subjects into neat, tempor-
ally sequential categories. These distinctions between old and new make sense of
Fujian refugees by implying that they are somehow more backward, less modern,
than their multiple-passport transnational capitalist counterparts. It allows that
same transnational capitalist to declare themselves to be different from the
supposed queue jumpers, invoking a Chineseness that is somehow dissociated
from those who arrive clinging to the sides of boats without the safety or security
of money or citizenship. Perhaps the Chinese will one day, like the Irish, become
white. But this bleaching of Chineseness is clearly an unsatisfactory solution for
anyone interested in social justice and progressive politics. Distinctions such as
Ma’s between cultural and clandestine diasporas are useful in that they highlight,
as Akash Kapur puts it, “the men and women who arrive in Europe [and arguably
other parts of the First World] not safely buckled into their seats, but clinging
frozen to the undercarriage of aeroplanes and trains, or suffocating in the backs of
lorries and vans” (Kapur 2002: 10). However, these distinctions also risk excluding
the diasporic underclass from our understanding of the culture of diaspora—after
all, if there is a cultural diaspora and a clandestine diaspora, does this mean that
the clandestine diaspora is not cultural? These categories do not hold when they

TOPIA 17
are taken up as exclusive entities.
Old and new diasporas are crucially constitutive of each other. Asian diaspora
criticism needs to take seriously the history of indenture, not as a feature of a past 23

long since buried, but as a palpable component of contemporary Chineseness.

Part of that work lies in understanding the category of “coolie” in relation to that
of “slave.” Through his exploration of the rebellions and resistances of slaves and
coolies in the Caribbean in Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, Prashad beautifully
notes the connections between black and Asian communities in the Caribbean
and rightly observes that it is the legacy of colonialism and imperialism which
maintains the boundaries between these racialized communities (Prashad 2002).
Writing of Hosay in Guyana, a festival similar to Carnival in which Asians,
Africans and Amerindians crossed the colour line, Prashad traces the polycultural
potential of the festival and its tragic demise in the face of a racialized retrenchment
instigated by the colonial authorities. The festival had once been a rare opportunity
for workers to freely transit between plantations and across the colony. This inter-
mingling culminated in protest in 1884 that left twelve people dead and more
than one hundred injured. Despite having their petitions for a Hosay rejected
that year, the workers had gone ahead with the festival. Officials locked the gates
in an attempt to forestall the festival, but the workers broke them down and were
met with gunfire. “Faced with the combined rage of the Africans, East Indians,
Chinese and others, the colonial state moved fast to reduce contacts between them”
(81). In a frightening echo of contemporary cultural nationalism, the colonial
state reasoned that “coolies and ex-slaves had ‘forgotten’ their ‘original’ cultures”
 and actively promoted the development of religious and cultural boundaries. The
example of Hosay in 1884 Guyana not only reminds us of the dangers of cultural
and religious retrenchment, but also of ignoring the possibilities of understanding
indenture as crucially formative of contemporary Asian diasporic subjectivity.
Suppressing or denying the ways in which the experience of indenture shapes
and is productive of Asianness in contemporary culture risks losing a sense of
connection between black and Asian communities. Without indenture, the
connection between these communities is lost. Without indenture, discussions
of Asian diasporic culture become unmoored from these intertwined histories of
dislocation. I understand that it is not easy to talk about Asian indenture. Unlike
slavery, its definition as a historical event, as a legal category and as an experience
of subjection is not obvious. The legacy of slavery has produced specific forms
of black diasporic subjectivity. I am acutely aware of the important differences
between slavery and indenture—not the least of which is, as Evelyn Hu-Dehart
notes in her work on the Chinese in Cuba, the difference between being identified
as chattel property in the exercise of the law and that of being a subject of the law
(Hu-Dehart 1993). There are crucial differences between indenture and slavery,
and many questions as to what Asian indenture actually constitutes. Clearly,
the experiences of the labourer on the railways of western Canada are different
TOPIA 17

than those of the guano pit worker in Peru, whose experience is not the same as
those of the miner in South Africa whose conditions of work are not the same as
24
those on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. The proliferation of definitions
surrounding what it means to be indentured, its very slipperiness as a category
and a history, need not mean that we do not talk about it at all or that we cannot
think through the relations between them.
It is precisely Asian indenture’s lack of fixity that reveals Asian diasporic subject-
ivity as produced within and through the contradictions of voluntary migration
for racialized diasporic subjects. Diaspora studies has wrestled with the question
of voluntary and involuntary migration. As William Safran observes, “neither
poverty nor oppression is necessarily perpetuated in diaspora ... oppression is not
a sine qua non of the diaspora condition” (Safran 2004: 15). While it is generally
acknowledged that there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary
migration, there is little sense of how we might theorize the relation between
them. In accordance with Tololyan, I also believe that diaspora as a term must
be reserved for particular communities, that its liberal application to any and all
mobile groups only works to diminish the power of the term. Paying attention
to indenture, both in history and in its continuing presence as a reality for
many migrant subjects, rules out any easy distinction between voluntary and
involuntary migration. As the debates over “illegal” immigrants reveal, even the
most conservative and racist interpretations of their status as “authentic” refugees
demands an assessment of what voluntary migration actually entails. After all,
when someone is desperate enough to leave their home by travelling for months
in a locked shipping container with little food or water, sweltering in filth and
fear, the voluntariness of this migration is, at best, relative.
Clearly, indenture, even in its multiplicity, is not responsible for all Asian
migration. And yet, we have to learn from black diaspora studies in order to
understand how indenture produces constitutive effects. Not all black people were
affected by slavery. But the production of blackness through the experience and
legacy of slavery remains crucial to understanding contemporary black diasporas.
I suggest that the same kind of attention needs to be afforded to the experience
of indenture for Asian diasporas. The old diasporas of indenture and bondage
cannot be separated from the new diasporas of the transnational elite, for the old
diasporas continue to exist in the newness of our globalizing world, and the new
diasporas have never been new. They are constitutive of each other and we risk
shoring up a colonialism that never ended when we lose sight of these constitutive
effects of indenture on Asian diasporic subjectivity.
Losing sight of indenture also means losing sight of Afro-Asian connections
which continue to reverberate across contemporary culture. Even as memories of
the injustices of the past live on in movements such as the call for slave reparations
and head tax redress, the divide between black and Asian communities seems

TOPIA 17
to widen. As part of her Notorious C.H.O. performance, the Korean-American
comedienne Margaret Cho screened a cartoon short entitled Grocery Store which
opens with the following dialogue narrated by Margaret Cho and Bruce Daniels 25
as cartoon versions of themselves:
Cho: Korean people and black people don’t get along. This has got to end.
Daniels: Yeah, we’re sick and tired of it.
Cho: When we hate each other...
Daniels: …we’re taking valuable time away from…
Cho: …hating white people.
Daniels: And we don’t want to do that, do we? (Cho 2002)
In the still-undulating wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, the dialogue
has a particular resonance with U.S. race relations. Its cheeky call for coalition
revisits one of the central scenes of the riots, the Korean-American grocery store.
The animated short examines the encounter between an African-American man
and a Korean-American woman grocery store owner. When the black man walks
into the store, the woman immediately suspects him of wanting to cause trouble.
He flips his middle finger at her in the security mirror. She demands that he
leave the store. When he reaches into his jacket pocket, she immediately reaches
under the counter for a rifle. This action results in a miniature arms race across the
counter. He whips out a machine gun. She counters with cannon. He responds
with a bomb. She takes out a Molotov cocktail. He takes out a skunk. They end
up in group therapy. The scene is both humorous in its hyperbolic approach to
 inter-racial violence, and tragically accurate in its understanding of the tensions,
resentments and suspicions which fuel this violence.
I am struck by Grocery Store not only for the biting and dark humour of its depiction
of contemporary Afro-Asian race relations, but also for the way in which the
scene of grocery store violence resonates with so many other scenes of violence,
perhaps in grocery stores, between black and Asian peoples across geographies
and through histories. The Korean-American grocer’s experience echoes that of
the Chinese grocer in Jamaica as depicted in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1999),
or the Tulsi family in Trinidad in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1969).
The positioning of Asian diasporic communities as merchants by critics such as
Robin Cohen who suggests that the Chinese diaspora is best understood as a
“merchant diaspora” has obscured not only the connection between indenture
and slavery (Cohen 1997), but also the connection between the Asian indentured
labourer and the Asian merchant. I understand that it is risky to collapse particular
experiences, to suggest that there might be a connection between a Korean-
American grocer in late-20th-century Los Angeles and a Chinese-Jamaican
grocer in 19th-century Jamaica. But this is a risk I want to take. I want to risk
connection over disconnection, relation over division.
TOPIA 17

The positioning of Asians as ideal, passive, more suitable to the demands of

capital, is not new, nor is the fomenting of violence between blacks and Asians,
26 nor is the Asian business as the target of resentment and the site of violence.
While Korean-Americans may not be directly associated with the histories of
Asian indenture that we have been contemplating, the racialization of Asians
in America continues to be marked by these histories. While I understand the
necessity of keeping in mind the specificities of Asian diasporic experiences, I am
also mindful of the ways in which Asian diasporic communities persist through
the legacies of Asian coolie subjection. It matters that Korean is not Chinese, but
it also matters that Korean cannot be separated from processes of racialization
rooted in the subjection of Asian diasporic peoples. One way of attacking racism’s
tendency to generalization has been to insist on specificity. But we must also think
through the connections between racialized subjects in order to make visible the
relation between the positioning of Asians across histories and geographies.
Margaret Cho’s Grocery Store does not give us easy resolutions. It will take more than
everybody kung fu fighting to carry us through and out of diasporic dissolution.
Even as Grocery Store expresses ambivalence toward the uses of therapy, closing
as it does with the Korean-American woman’s look of sad ambivalence when she
admits that she doesn’t really know how it makes her feel when the black man
refers to her through racist epithets, it also calls for sustained dialogue across black
and Asian communities. Not only is this dialogue essential so that we can stop, as
Margaret Cho and Bruce Daniels sassily note, “taking valuable time away from
hating white people,” it also points to the ways in which diasporas are constituted
through difference. Asian diasporas do not exist in isolation. They emerge in
and through their interactions with other diasporic communities. Diasporic
communities carry forward the damage of dispersion and dislocation.

Conclusion
In my explorations of diasporic memory and affect as well as my examinations of the
relation between black and Asian diasporas, I hope to illuminate the relationship
between diaspora and cultural studies. Not only do many key diaspora critics
claim significant affinities with cultural studies, including Ien Ang, Rey Chow,
Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, but diaspora studies shares with cultural studies a
methodological commitment to the everyday and a sense of the need to rethink
history as what Mieke Bal terms “cultural memory in the present” (Bal 1999). As
Bal notes, cultural studies, through the practice of cultural analysis,
entertains an ambivalent relation to history as it is or has been traditionally
practiced in our faculties. Far from being indifferent to history, cultural
analysis problematizes history’s silent assumptions in order to come to
an understanding of the past that is different. This understanding is not
based on an attempt to isolate and enshrine the past in an objectivist

TOPIA 17
‘’reconstruction,” nor on an effort to project it on an evolutionist line not
altogether left behind in current historical practice. Nor is it committed to
a deceptive synchronism. Instead, cultural analysis seeks to understand the 27
past as part of the present, as what I have around us, and without which no
culture would be able to exist. (3)
Diaspora shares with the work of cultural analysis this commitment to a history
which is all around us and yet is also suppressed by the imperatives of progressivism
and synchronism. I understand that this commitment to other histories is not
unique to the discipline of cultural studies and embrace the connections to
postcolonial projects such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to provincialize
Europe and Homi Bhabha’s (1994) understanding of the time lag; to minority
and ethnic studies projects such as Robin Kelley’s work on everyday forms of re-
sistance in African American communities and David Eng, David Kazanjian and
Anne Anlin Cheng’s work on racial melancholia (Eng and Kazanjian 2003; Cheng
2001; Kelley 1994); to the projects for reconsidering the legal constitution of race
by Patricia Williams (1992) in critical race studies. Clearly, the archeological work
of cultural memory in the present does not belong to diaspora alone, nor is it
disciplinarily solely within the provenance of cultural studies. In the connections
between these various projects and disciplines, I celebrate their dedication to
understanding the possibilities of memory in everyday objects and gestures.
Even as I argue for the specificity of diaspora studies, I do not want to lose sight of
these crucial connections between diaspora and other related disciplines such as
 postcolonial, ethnic, minority, critical race and cultural studies. As the specificity
of one diasporic formation is not compromised by understanding its relation to
another, emphasizing the relation of diaspora studies to other fields of inquiry
renders it no less unique. In fact, I see this relation as one of the tremendous
strengths of diaspora studies. As Edouard Glissant so eloquently notes, it is in
the poetics of relation that I might find the undercurrents which connect the
unmarked underwater graves of unforgotten bodies to the remarkable persistence
of Black diaspora culture (Glissant 1997). It is also in the space of relation that
I track the currents of disciplinary turns and seek to understand the persistence
and possibilities of diaspora culture. Despite Vijay Mishra’s provocative and
instructive suggestion that all postcolonial texts have drawn their source texts
from diasporic archives (Mishra 1996: 426, n. 23), diaspora studies is neither an
originary disciplinary formation, nor is it divorced from other disciplines, nor yet
is it entirely of them. It is, rather, a confluence of disciplinary movements as well as
a singular contribution which emphasizes the relation between these movements.
The turn to diaspora illuminates the urgency of and the desire for an engagement
with the legacies of colonial displacement which attends to the emergence of
subjectivities bound by the disparate geographies of home and away, the past
and the present. Diaspora touches upon and is marked by the colonial and the
TOPIA 17

postcolonial, race and redress, culture and history. For if cultural memory in the
present is the work of the future in the name of losses not yet redressed and
28
sadnesses not yet recognized, it is also the work of embracing the unrelenting
homesickness of the unhomely denizens of diaspora. To turn to diaspora is to
turn to the power of relation and the enabling possibilities of difference. To turn
to diaspora is to turn away from the seemingly inexorable march of history and
towards the secret of memories embedded within the intimacies of the everyday.
To turn to diaspora is to turn to restless specters of sorrow bound by that which
is lost and to obscure miracles of connection marked by that which is found. Let
us turn then to diaspora.

Note
1. The most compelling recent criticism of diaspora studies that I have encountered
emerges from a recent paper by Lee Maracle. Maracle argued that diaspora shares many
features with colonialism and that its valoriziation of migration and mobility works
against the claims of indigenous cultures. While this criticism of diaspora’s focus on
mobility and movement at the expense of rootedness is not new, I believe that Maracle’s
point is an important one in that it calls attention to the intersection of diaspora and the
work of indigenous studies (Maracle 2005). Maracle’s critiques highlight the desperate
need for a finer understanding of diaspora which differentiates it from the transnational
and situates it inextricably within long histories of dislocation including that of the
dislocation of First Nations peoples of Canada.
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