Page 87 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

To put it differently, the burgeoning language and consciousness of diaspora are
a manifestation and effect of intensifying cultural globalization. While migrations
of people have taken place for centuries and have been a major force in the creation
of the modern world of nation–states since the nineteenth century, it is only in the
past few decades, with the increased possibilities of keeping in touch with the old
homeland and with co-ethnics in other parts of the world through faster and
cheaper jet transport, mass media and electronic telecommunications, that migrant
groups are collectively more inclined to see themselves not as minorities within
nation–states, but as members of global diasporas which span national boundaries.
It is clear, then, that the discourse of diaspora owes much of its contemporary
currency to the economic, political and cultural erosion of the modern nation–state
as a result of postmodern capitalist globalization – what Tölölyan calls ‘the trans-
national moment’. Tölölyan even nominates diasporas as the paradigmatic Others
of the nation–state: the increasing assertiveness of diasporic groups in representing
and organizing themselves as transnational communities forces nation–states to
‘confront the extent to which their boundaries are porous and their ostensible
homogeneity a multicultural heterogeneity’ (1991: 5). Seen this way, diasporas
not only are placed in direct opposition to the nation–state, but are also implicitly
designated as key socio-cultural formations capable of overcoming the constrictions
of national boundaries, the means through which people can imagine and align
themselves beyond ‘an oppressive national hegemony’ (Clifford 1997: 255).
Much contemporary work on diaspora, both scholarly and popular, represents this
transnational diasporic imaginary as a liberating force: simply put, the nation–state
is cast as the limiting, homogenizing, assimilating power structure, which is
now, finally, being deconstructed from within by those groups who used to be
marginalized within its borders but are now bursting out of them through their
diasporic transnational connections.
This diametrical oppositioning of nation–state as site of oppression and diaspora
as site of liberation is obviously an exaggeratedly simplified depiction of current
theorizing on these issues. Yet it serves to elucidate what I wish to problematize in
this chapter, namely the privileged status of ‘diaspora’ as a metaphor for trans-
national formations characteristic of the globalized, presumably post-national world
(Appadurai 1996a; Cohen 1997). At the end of this chapter, I will contrast the
metaphor of diaspora with that of the multicultural global city, to sketch an
alternative, more open-ended model for analysing social relations in the age of
globalization. The global city, as various authors have pointed out (Sassen 1991),
is a key physical manifestation of contemporary globalization, and migrations
are an important factor in the formation and make-up of global cities. Global cities
are points of destination for large numbers of migrants from many different parts
of the world, and as such they are spaces where disparate diasporic groups settle
and operate from, rubbing shoulders with each other and with locals on a daily
basis. As a result, intense processes of cultural hybridization are rife in the global
city, leaving no coherent identity and community untouched and putting all of
them under erasure, so to speak. Interestingly, the very notion of diaspora as a

76