CHAPTER 19: TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES: MIGRANTS & DIASPORAS
The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface (Khachig Tölölyan)
> The Nation and its Others
• Diaspora is concerned with the ways in which nations, real yet imagined communities, are made and
unmade, in culture and politics, both on land people call their own and in exile.
o Takes the nation-state and its transnational Others into account
> Origins
• European empires and colonies
• Violently expelled of conquered populations and confined others to fractions of their land
o Native Americans
o Ethno national republics of the USSR
• Slavery and the creation of African diasporas
• Economic coercion and incentive encouraged the formation of oversees communities
o the Japanese, Indians and Chinese
Infranational entities
• Endure within a particular state and resist the cohesion imposed by it
o the Navajo, the Inuit, the Québecois, the Georgians of the USSR
• The Irish in Britain and the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire
o Uprisings that heralded the possibility of remaking old collectivities into new nations
o Challenging the claims of existing states
Both infra- and transnational
• Living disadvantaged lives within reduced territory while reaching out to kindred people elsewhere
o Moldavians, Armenians, Crimean Tartars, Palestinians, Iroquois, Magyars in Romania
Individual exile and collective dispersion
• Migrations have led to:
o a proliferation of diasporas
o a redefinition of their importance and roles
• These dispersions acquired a different meaning by the 19th century
o Triumphant nation-state
§ Claims special political and emotional legitimacy
§ Representing a homogeneous people
§ Speaking one language
§ In a united territory
§ Under the rule of one law
§ Constituting one market(?)
Transnational communities
• New forms of economic and political interaction, communication and migration erode the nation-
state’s borders
o Plural societies? Porous boundaries?
• Some collectivities strive for nationhood through struggles conducted in homeland and diaspora
o Eritreans, Kurds, Palestinians, Sikhs, Tibetans, Armenians
• Transnational communities are sometimes the Other of the nation-state and sometimes its ally
• Diasporas are sometimes the source of ideological, financial, and political support for national
movements that aim at a renewal of the homeland
o Sun Yat Sen, Yasser Arafat
• Diaspora is concerned with all of the other forces and phenomena that constitute the transnational
moment
o Massive and instantaneous movements of capital
o Introduction of previously “alien” cultures through “media imperialism"
o Issues of the double allegiance of populations
o Plural affiliations of transnational corporations
• Example: Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
o Impulse to enlarge the Iraqi “nation” of Kurds and Arabs
o Make a united Iraq and Kuwait that would serve as a prototype of the Arab nation
o Triggered a flood of refugees
