Notes of Today Reading

Diaspora and Cultural Memory by Anh Hua in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity, A search for Home, edited by Vijay Agnew, University of Toronto Press (2005)

Diaspora

Diaspora the word suggests networks of real or imagined relationships among scattered peoples whose sense of community is sustained by various communications and contacts, including kinship, trade, travel, shared culture, language, ritual, scripture, print, and electronic media (Peters 1999, 20, see also Hua, 192)

Diaspora subverts nation states. Although they are not innocent of nationalist aims, diasporas are not exclusively nationalistic. (Clifford 307) (192)
They exist in tension with the norms of nation states and with nativist identity formations. They are ‘dwellings-in-displacement’. Disaporic communities live out a mediated tension: ‘the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/ desiring another place’(311)

Usefulness of diaspora as a concept

Diaspora theorizing opens up the discursive or semiotic space for discussion of many ideas: identification and affiliation, homing desire and homeland nostalgia, exile and displacement, the reinvention of cultural traditions in the New World Order, and the construction of hybrid identities, as well as cultural and linguistic practices, the building of the communities and communal boundaries, cultural memory and trauma, the politics and return, and the possibility of imagining geographical and cultural belonging beyond and within the nation-state formation. (191)

Diaspora is useful concept because it permits feminists, cultural theorists, and social scientists to think through some vexed issues: identity and solidarity, belonging and geography, spatialization and subject personalities, the politics of representation, and relation between roots and routes, transnational and intercultural forms and productions, and the politics of home. (197)

Diaspora theorizing is urgent and important as it allows us to reconfigure the relation-ship between citizens, nation states, and national narratology.

Some cautions notes on theorizing

It is important to differentiate between specific historical diasporas and diaspora as a concept (179)

Moreover, it is important to challenge and rethink earlier versions of diasporic narratives with their fixed notion of home, identity, and exile, where the homeland is perceived nostalgically as an ‘authentic’ space of belonging, and the place of settlement as somehow ‘inauthentic’ and undesirable.

It is critical to remember that diaspora identities and communities are not fixed, rigid or homogeneous, but are instead fluid, always changing, and heterogeneous.

Radhakrishnan (1996) also warns us against the uncritical nostalgia found in some diasporic narratives about the home country. Often when we are dissatisfied with the place of settlement and its unwillingness to change the dominant injustices, we turn our gaze back to the homeland.

Yet as Radhakrishnan notes, this uncritical, nostalgic gaze may ignore the realities of the homeland that has nothing to do with contemporary history, or one may pretend that the homeland has not changed since one left its shores (211-212) (196)

Working process of memory, why memory is significant to diaspora studies and to feminism

Separate from their homelands by geographical distance and political barriers

To resist assimilation into the host country, and to avoid social amnesia about their collective histories, diasporic people attempt to revive, recreate, and invent their artistic, linguistic, economic, religious, cultural, and political practices and productions.

Such interconnection is made possible by changes in the new technologies, global communication, and increased travel in our present world of late capitalism. As a result, collective memories, myths, and visions of the homeland become manifest. (193)

Theorizing memory

Memory refers to the capacity for converting certain information’ or ‘a group of psychic functions that allow us to actualize past impressions or information that we represent to ourselves as past’ (Legoff 1991, 51). Rather than mental imprints or iconic likeness, memory is formed through elaborate mental mappings that change over time. Memory is the construction or reconstruction of what actually happened in the past. Memory is distorted by needs, desires, interests, and fantasies. Subjective and malleable rather than objective and concrete, memory is emotional, conceptual, contextual, constantly undergoing revision, selection, interpretation, distortion, and reconstruction (Bertman 200,27).

Cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history. Because cultural memory is political, and because different stories and representations struggle for a place in history, memory is crucial to understanding a culture since it reveals collective desires, needs, self-definitions, and power struggles.

For feminists Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, cultural memory involves acts of transfer in which individuals and groups construct and perform their identities by recollecting a shared past if contested norms, conventions, and practices. These memorial acts of transfer involve the dynamic negotiation between past and present, the individual and the collective, the public and private, recalling and forgetting, power and powerless, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, consciousness and unconsciousness, fears and desires.

Remembrance is not simply to document but to construct the new to move us into a different mode of articulation

Some cautions notes on theorizing

There is the need to differentiate between memory and nostalgic yearning and memory as an intention to remember critically, to understand our relation to the past, history, and time (M.Jacqui Alexander, 2002)

Can we intentionally remember, all the time, as a way of never forgetting, all of us, building an archeology of living memory which has less to do with living in the past, invoking a past, or excising it, and more to do with our relationship to time and its purpose. There is a difference between remembering when – the nostalgic yearning for some return – and a living memory that enable us to remember (96)