Page 86 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

4

UNDOING DIASPORA

Questioning global Chineseness
in the era of globalization

If, as Armenian-American scholar Khachig Tölölyan has claimed, ‘diasporas are
the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ (1991: 3), then what
can diasporas say about the social and cultural processes of globalization we are
experiencing today? Globalization, as we know, is pre-eminently characterized
by the increasing interconnectedness of disparate parts of the world through the
intensification of transnational networks, relationships and flows. In this sense,
the growing visibility of diasporas – formations of people bound together, at least
nominally, by a common ethnic identity despite their physical dispersal across
the globe – makes them without doubt one of the key instances and symptoms
of today’s globalizing world. As such, they are also suitable sites for a reflection on
the ramifications of globalization for social relations in contemporary societies,
societies which we still tend to define predominantly in national terms, even though
the eroding effects of globalization itself are felt by all national societies as their
borders are transgressed and worn down by ever-increasing transnational social
and cultural traffic.
Tölölyan made his claim that diasporas are the exemplary communities of the
transnational moment in the editorial of the first issue of the journal Diaspora:
1
A Journal for Transnational Studies, which he set up in 1991. Since then, he
has continued to edit this increasingly influential journal, an influence which
resonates with the increasing popularity of the term diaspora itself. While this term
was once reserved as a descriptor for the historical dispersion of Jewish, Greek
and Armenian peoples, today the term tends to be used much more generically
to refer to almost any group living outside of their country of origin, be it Italians
outside Italy, Africans in the Caribbean, North America or Western Europe,
Cubans in Miami and Madrid, or Chinese all over the world. Indeed, as Tölölyan
remarks:

the significant transformation of the last few decades is the move towards
re-naming as diasporas . . . communities of dispersion . . . which were
known by other names until the late 1960s: as exile groups, overseas
communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth.
(1996: 3)

75