Page 100 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

UNDOING DIASPORA

The metropolitan space of the contemporary global city is more representative
of this state of affairs than the nation–state as a whole (where non-metropolitan
areas, such as rural Australia, are typically still more characterized by real and
imagined homogeneity, and militantly protective of it). A crucial difference between
nation–states and cities is that the latter, spaces characterized by the constant
circulation of various types of locals and non-locals, cannot police their territorial
boundaries: there is no border patrol at the perimeter of cities. At the same time,
many metropolitan cities today are becoming so deeply internationally oriented,
sustained by the rampant border-crossing activities of their dynamic and hetero-
geneous populations (in trade, finance, media, tourism, and so on), that they can
be described as ‘translocalities’, spaces with a sense of place and identity which is
‘substantially divorced from their national contexts’ (Appadurai 1996b: 44). In
this sense, the global city may indeed be appropriately described as a transnational
formation par excellence, in the sense that at any one time its ‘membership’, both
permanent and temporary, typically consists of individuals and groups of myriad
ethnic and racial backgrounds with ongoing connections all over the world. But
in contrast with global diasporas (named by Tölölyan as the exemplary communities
of the transnational moment), the imagined community of the global city is
principally unbounded and open, in the sense that no one is a priori excluded from
its space on the basis of predetermined kinship criteria such as race and ethnicity. 6
Indeed, as transnational formations global cities and diasporas may stand as
contrasting metaphors, as Figure 4.2 shows.

Diaspora Global city
Ethnic unity, spatial scattering Ethnic diversity, spatial convergence
Transnational nationalism Local hybridity
Virtual deterritorialized space Actual social/territorial space
Sameness-in-dispersal Together-in-difference

Figure 4.2 Diaspora and global city as transnational formations
While diasporas are constituted by ethnic unity in the face of spatial scattering,
global cities are shaped by ethnic diversity through spatial convergence. While what
matters for a diaspora is a connection with a symbolic ‘elsewhere’, a long-distance,
virtual relationship with a global community of belonging, what grounds the global
city is its firm orientation towards the ‘here’, the local, this place. While the
transnationality of the diasporic community is one of ‘sameness in dispersal’ across
global space, the transnationality of the global city is characterized by intense
simultaneity and co-existence, by territorial ‘togetherness in difference’. The global
city, in this sense, is one large and condensed contact zone in which borders and
ethnic boundaries are blurred and where processes of hybridization are rife
inevitably because groups of different backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise, cannot

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