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Diasporic Nationalism
John Lie Cultural Studi es es <=> Critical Methodologies 2001 1: 355 355 DOI: 10.1177/153270860100100304 The onli The online ne version of this article can be found at: http://csc.sagepub.com/content/1/3/355 http ://csc.sagepub.com/content/1/3/355
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>> Version of Record - Aug 1, 2001 What is This?
Diasporic
Nationalism
John Lie Harvard
University In the
the significance of the external and origins of nationalism. To illustrate the argument, the author the examples of modern Japan and Korea.
article, the author
diasporic draws
on
stresses
In the 1990s, the concept of diaspora emerged human sciences. In effect, it sought to replace-or
language of migration
as a
major
theme in the
least supplement-the (see Lie, 1995). As exemplified in the dominant historiat
of United States immigration-associated, above all, with Oscar Handlin’s (1951/1973) The Uprooted-the idea of migration, and its two
ography
com-
emigration population ponents,
immigration, presumed a particular imaginary of People uproot themselves from their country of origin
and
movement.
and restake themselves in the land of destination. Needless to say, the movement need not necessarily be international-hence the cardinal distinction between internal and international migration-but both the popular and scholarly emphasis highlighted cross-country movements. In the dominant or less irreversible. imaginary of migration, the sojourn is singular and There are return migrants, to be sure, but the proverbial poor, hungry, and tired United States. The drama of emigrated from the old Europe to the land of destination. The linear trajectory envimigration continues in the sions the telos of assimilation. Meanwhile, the incomplete insertion into the character type: the immigrant. This conception of society evokes the migration presumes and privileges the place of the nation-state and the meaning of national identity. Although the Italian immigrant may have regarded himself or herself as a villager or a Tuscan, her identity as immigrant is conjoined by her ethnonational category. With the partial exception of Jewish immigrants, every immigrant becomes sorted into a national or a supranational more
masses
new
new
new
new
new
racial group (such as Asian
or
an
Oriental). Subnational identities largely disap-
Japanese immigrants may be classified as Japanese or Asian, but their premigration identities, such as Okinawan or Burakumin, are expunged in the pear.
course
of the trans-Pacific passage.
Author’s Note: This article originally presented as a keynote address at the Third International Conference Diaspora. I wish to thank the organizer, Mary Yu Danico, for her kind invitation. Direct all correspondence regarding this article to John Lie, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; e-mail:
[email protected]. was
on
Cultural Studies @
2001
Sage
H
Critical
Methodologies, Volume
1 Number 3, 2001
355-362
Publications 355
356
The idea of diaspora, in contrast, questions the teleological narrative and the nationalist presumption of the dominant migration narrative. Rather than the singular journey from one country to another, the concept of diaspora makes space for multiple and complex trajectories. Indeed, the very possibility of transnationalism denies the irreversibility of the migration process or the inevitable assimilation of the migrant. Instead, the idea of diaspora is inextricable from the idea of transnationalism, redolent with the possibility of myriad identities and multifarious networks. Furthermore, rather than presuming and reifying the nation-state, the concept of diaspora questions the assumption of national homogeneity. Instead of the homogeneous Italian or Japanese, it seeks to reveal the heterogeneous constellation of people who transform themselves from peasants or Tuscans into Italians or Okinawans or peasants into Japanese. In so doing, rather than the homogeneous space of the nation, it gives glimpses into a variety of heterogeneous terrains, including borderlands and subnational identities. Instead of the grand narrative of migration and assimilation, it recuperates a variety of personal voices of sojourns and shifting
identities. In brief, the
language and imaginary
of diaspora
provides ample
space
to
and identities. To be sure, explore the complex realities of human at times be diaspora studies risks being empty signifier, but imprecision emancipatory, liberating us from the straitjacket of the migration narrative. At the very least, open the possibility of empirical investigations hitherto closed off by the unquestioned acceptance of the migration imaginary and its movements
an
can
we
reification of the nation-state. In this article, I wish to suggest that the promise of diaspora studies remains achievement. Most significantly, many precisely a promise rather than the reified, scholars working under the sign of diaspora continue to rely essentialist, and nationalist conceptions of human flows and identities. In are still far other words, against the complex reality of diasporic processes, from achieving a nonessentialist and nonnationalist understanding. The grip of nationalism remains evident in an area that most trenchantly offers to emantime, I also wish to suggest sociological imagination. At the cipate that it is precisely nationalist historiography and social sciences that would stand to benefit most from diasporic studies. In this article, I will draw the examples of the Korean and Japanese diasporas to illustrate my argument (see Abelmann & Lie, 1995; Lie, 2001). an
on
we
same
our
on
The Nationalist Reification of Diaspora
generated by the recent outburst of writings nationalism, it is the assertion of the modernity of nationalism (e.g., Calhoun 1997). From the empirical work of Eugen Weber (1975) to the academic blockbuster by Benedict Anderson (1983/1991), few question the post18th-century invention and dissemination of popular national identity. Until If there is any
on
consensus
now
357
the diffusion of popular national identity, the vast majority of people assumed circumscribed and concrete identities, ranging from family and occupational roles to village and religious affiliation. In this regard, what have to see as a quasi-natural state of migration, such as national borders and bureaucratic surveillance, turns out to be very much a recent institution, the product of the very realization of the nation-state and nationalism. The passport-to take a ubiquitous document of modern life-is largely a 19th-century phenomenon (Torpey, 2000). In the federal immigration restrictions until United States, for example, there then noncitizens could vote in various elections (King, 2000). 1875, and This is all very far away from the demonization of the undocumented immigrants popular in the very late-20th-century United States. Certainly, what call international travel without the passport or the right of alien residents to vote the most visionary of immigrant rights advocates. utopian to Border patrol and population accounting constitute the condition of possibility of the language of migration. Without clearly demarcated and enforced borders and means of accounting for people’s movements, cannot sustain the very the distinction between internal and international migration or language of immigrants and assimilation, except perhaps at the very local level of the neighborhood or village. The institutionalization of the modern state made possible the supervision of territory and people. In search of wealth and power, national identity became at once a legitimating and mobilizing ideology of the nation-state. It is not surprising, then, that immigration history tends to begin in most nation-states with the rise of the modern state. The distant past-that is, before border surveillance-is retrospectively reconstructed as relatively free of major population movements (cf. Noiriel, 1992, chap. 1). Nonetheless, many scholars continue to reproduce the nationalist myth that has been shattered by the recent scholarship on nationalism. For example, in a recent book on the Japanese Americans, the authors argue that Japanese &dquo;are among the most homogeneous people in the world, on both physical and cultural dimensions&dquo; (O’Brien & Fugita,1991, p. 3). In fact, at the height of modern Japanese emigration, principally to the Americas, in the late 19th century, only beginning to emerge as a culturally unified nation-state. It did Japan not feature a well-disseminated national identity and was not culturally or ethnically homogeneous. Yet the authors uncritically reproduce the contemporary ideology of Japanese homogeneity and monoethnicity and fail to note the diversity of the actual diaspora. They miss, for example, the immediate source of emigrant organization, which largely regional, or the frequently circuitous and labyrinthine path of the Japanese emigrant. More important, the nationalist frame conflates the diverse constitution of diasporic flows from the area that today unproblematically call Japan. The so-called Japanese emigrants were disproportionately discriminated minorities, such as Burakumin, who descendants of premodern outcastes. Symptomatically, in the classic work of Japanese literary naturalism, Shimazaki Toson’s Hakai (Broken Comwe
come
were no
even
we
now
seems
even
we
even
was
was
we
were
358
mandment), the protagonist ultimately
comes
out
of the ethnic closet
to
declare his Burakumin identity. At the end of the novel, find him emigrating to Texas. If Burakumin are not simply Japanese, then note that might he goes to Texas, not the United States. That is, might refer to him as Burakumin Texan, not Japanese American. Another major group is Okinawans. Although many contemporary Japanese-as well as non-Japanese-are wont to pronounce Okinawans as we
we
even
we
quintessentially Japanese, such
an
assimilationist
assumption elides the
ele-
mentary fact that Okinawa was an independent kingdom until the modern Japstate annexed it through military conquest in the 1870s. The Japanese government policy transformed Okinawa into a classical colonial economy, replete with land-hungry farmers who sought their fortune outside of the islands, resulting not only in a massive migration to the main Japanese islands but also in Okinawans becoming a significant part of the Japanese diaspora to anese
the Americas. In this regard, I conducted a particularly vivid interview with a Japanese Brazilian who had returned to Japan as a migrant worker in the early 1990s. She said that in Brazil, she faced serious discrimination from ethnic Japbecause of her Okinawan ancestry. In Japan, however, she simply cared about her labeled Nikkeijin-sort of ex-Japanese-and no Okinawan ancestry. Instead, she experienced discrimination as Nikkeijin who hailed from Brazil. Quite clearly, the shifting ethnonational identity does not necessarily emancipate people from the thrall of ethnic discrimination. have no sysIn spite of the significance of subnational identities in Japan, tematic demographic records of this fact. The dominance of the nationalist mindset is not restricted to historians and social scientists; it is, rather, exemplified by administrators and bureaucrats who establish the very categories for describing and counting people. National population accounting-both in Japan and the United States-has tended to privilege the nation-state as the fundamental unit of description and analysis (cf. Desrosi~res, 1993/1998, anese
was
one
we
chaps. 5-6).
suggests is that the concept of diaspora should avert the essentialist reification of the nation as a privileged unit of analysis and identity. This is just as true for the study of the Korean diaspora. Even if we should restrict gaze to the post-1965 period, when South Korea had emerged as a hypernationalist country in which South should still be able to Korean national identity was increasingly paramount, recuperate the fundamental differentiation of the population outflow from What my brief consideration of the
Japanese example
our
we
South Korea. Consider only the disproportionate number of people from northern Korea, the discriminated Cholla province, the Chinese minority (who in turn hailed from particular areas and regions of the vast Chinese cultural sphere), or the Korean minority in Japan who entered the United States as Koreans. If the origins of the Korean diaspora are diverse, so too are their itineraries and destinations. Many Korean Americans, for example, had spent considerable time in
359
Asia, Europe, and Latin America before their eventual (and far from final)
set-
tlement in the United States. In summary, should take
seriously the achievement of nationalism studies and apply it to population movements. Rather than presuming the national homogeneity of emigrants, should describe and analyze their actually existing heterogeneity. Although they may be unproblematically identified as Japanese or Korean once in the United States, their premigration identity is usually far from settled or singular. we
we
Diasporic Intervention in Nationalist Historiography socioHaving lodged a case against the hegemonic hold of the nation logical imagination, let suggest-as my second point-something of antithesis. Diasporic studies is important not only in and of itself but also in the history and sociology of the nation. That is, diaspora studies is not somehow marginal-something of interest only to the numerical minority who left homeland and their descendants-but quite central to homeland history and society. The conventional, nationalist view portrays national history as endogenous. Diasporic outflow is merely a dispersal of a marginal minority outside of the national borders. Although massive emigration and immigration may have on our
an
me
happened long ago-a matter for archaeology and mythology-national of development constitutes lineage of pure descent, not hybridity. In the case
a
Korea, for
example, perhaps people from present-day Manchuria and elsewhere may have entered the Korean peninsula millennia ago, just as people from the peninsula moved to Japan, but national development occurred fundamentally within the closed national borders. Territoriality and peoplehood are inextricably intertwined in this view. National development entails the history of a particular, well-defined territory and people within it. autochtonous view of national history is problematic because, as I Such argued in the previous section, popular national identity is a belated achievesome
an
of the modern nation-state. The presentist bias should be clear if we shift historical starting point beyond the purview of the nationalist myth. In human origins-we are all sense-if we believe the contemporary wisdom Africans (or African Americans, for those living in the United States). More proximately, the vision of the homogeneous nation dispersing people at the margins fundamentally distorts the past and present. Consider in this regard the Jewish diaspora. Its origin is shrouded in originary Jewish nation. Judamythistory, but it is safe to say that there a slave religion at the outset (Gottwald, 1979), and Moses ism, after all, to follow our contemporary ethnonational would be Egyptian if know solid historical grounds, classification (cf. Assmann, 1997). On ment
one
our
on
was no
was
an
we were
more
we
that the diaspora-with the unintended aid of the Nazis-created Israel, not the other way around. Palestinians, many of who were pushed out of
360
present-day Israel, in turn solidified their identity in exile and, as the Palestinian
diaspora, Khalidi, 1997). nationalism.
seek the establishment of the Palestinian state (cf. In either case, diasporic nationalism precedes homeland now
Although the cases of the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas
seem
extreme, I
wonder whether it would be so far off the mark to say the same about the Korean diaspora and Korea. At least, in Korea-hitherto not a nation known for massive migration-we confidently conclude that the diaspora played a significant and constitutive part in national origin and development. In fact, nationalism in Korea was fundamentally diasporic nationalism. In the genealogy of modern Korea, the making of the nation virtually can
was
coeval with Japanese colonialism. Indeed, it is difficult to disaggregate the two processes. More concretely, the epic nationalist struggles-the dream of an independent Korea-occurred mostly outside of the Korean peninsula. This is true for the very origins of the anticolonial, independence movement, exemplified by the March First Independence Movement, led by Japanese-educated intellectuals. Even in the hagiographic reconstruction of post-World War II North and South Korea, diasporic nationalist struggles central, whether in Manchuria or Rhee Syngman’s lobbying for Kim 11 Sung’s guerilla efforts in Hawaii. In any case, diasporic Koreans in Japan and China were certainly central in the imagination and organization of the anticolonial, nationalist aspirations of the Korean people. Polemically put, the very conceptualization of the Korean people as such owed to nationalist discourses generated by were
wars
diasporic
Koreans (Lie,
forthcoming).
that often forged in the colonial
Beyond Korea, the anticolonial, nationalist ideologies and
movements
characterized much of the Third World metropolises. The very ideas of anticolonialism and nationalism were imbibed think of Ho Chi Minh or Leopold Senghor. in the belly of the beast, whether Diasporic nationalism, in this sense, is nationalism tout court for many postcolonial societies. The very idea of the nation becomes imagined in the language and framework of the colonizers, dialectically transforming colonial unishould not deny indigeversalism into anticolonial nationalism. Although should also not expunge the nous ideas and endogenous developments, importance of external inspirations and exogenous struggles. to suggest that all cases of postcolonial Needless to say, I do not nationalism demonstrate the centrality of diaspora. Yet, more often than not, diasporic imagining and struggles played a significant role in national development. National development cannot be understood purely and solely as endogenous ; diaspora is central and constitutive. were
we
we
we
mean
Synthesis,
or
Conclusion
Because I have mentioned that very
clude with some sort of
19th-century term dialectics, let a synthesis. If diaspora studies is still under the thrall of me
con-
361
the nationalist
imaginary and if nationalism itself is product in part of diasporic imaginings, then what is the point of diaspora studies? What is to be a
done?
Theoretically-ironically-we have temptation of seeking essences and to
choice but to avoid the Hegelian cast off the legacy of 19th-century
no
nationalism in which the social sciences remains so deeply steeped. We need to of the pierce through the reified exterior of the national frame and recover fluxes of national construction and population movements. should avoid the temptation for a facile, mechanical synIn this regard, thesis, which is to reify the role of diaspora and to commit diasporic nationalism. The scholarly attention diasporic peoples has often elevated various diasporic communities as transhistorical. Consider the Jewish and Christian diaspora-two such movements that often insist the garb of antiquity and continuity. Yet, asserted continuities are in fact merely formal and erase the constant movements in and out of these identities, whether because of conversion, apostasy, intermarriage, or migration. Ifwe reify these diasporic would miss the constant flows in and out of these identities. We nities, would also bypass considerable heterogeneity under the unity that usually nominal, if not ideological. Consider the imminent formation of the European Union. Should its appearance give us a license to redraw the past in the image of the present? Certainly, historians would have little trouble drawing a singular lineage of Latin Christendom, and sociologists should be able to generate significant generalizations about European identity. We would also be awash with talk of the European diaspora. Yet, how meaningful would it be to talk of Europe as a should not substantiate and reify nation or diaspora? To put it negatively, the nominal character of the Chinese diaspora or the Jewish diaspora that somatic differences among the flates profound linguistic, cultural, and putatively unified peoples. A moment’s dip into world history should allow us to see that the fundamental force of globalization in the last half millennium has been colonization, that globalization and nationalism evolved together, and that nationalism and diaspora did so as well. Hard-headed empiricists make mockery of the concept of diaspora, but they remain trapped in the equally grandiose, albeit successful and naturalized, category of nationalism or diasporic nationalism. There are no are condemned to trace concrete historical transhistorical essences, and important, for what is developments. This makes the role of theory all the theory but a way to make sense of patterns? We cannot, however, sit in a dark room and ponder the underlying unity of it all. Practically, then, need to encompass the complex and expansive reality of concrete networks of peoples and ideas. This poses a profound challenge to the usual way of doing the human sciences, divided as it is by disciplines; national, area, or ethnic studies; and language groups. We must, alas, become at once interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, do area studies and ethnic studies, and some
we
on
on
commu-
we
was
we
con-
even
we
more
we
362
learn a language or two. This is all hard work, but the past and present of diasporas demand nothing less. even
References
Abelmann, N.,
&
Lie, J. (1995). Blue dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles riots.
Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
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Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined
Assmann, J. (1997). Moses the Egyptian: The memory of Egypt in bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
western
monotheism. Cam-
Calhoun, C. (1997). Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. A history ofstatistical reasoning (C. Naish, Desrosières, A. (1998). Thepolitics of large numbers: Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1993) Gottwald, N. K. (1979). The tribes of Yahweh: A sociology of the religion of liberated Israel 1250-1050 BCE. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
Handlin,
O.
(1973). The uprooted (2nd ed.). Boston: Little,
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lished 1951)
Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.
King, D. S. (2000). MakingAmericans: Immigration, race, and the origins of the diverse democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lie, J. (1995). From international migration to transnational diaspora. Contemporary Sociology, 24, 303-306. Lie, J. (2001). Multiethnic japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lie, J. (forthcoming). Diasporic struggles and the making of the Korean nation. In H. Em (Ed.), Between colonialism and nationalism. Noiriel, G. (1992). Le creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration XLYe-XXe siècle [The French melting pot]. Paris: Seuil. O’Brien, D. J., & Fugita, S. S. (1991). The Japanese American experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Torpey, J. C. (2000). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship, and the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, E. (1975). Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
John Lie is a visiting professor of sociology at Harvard University (2001-2002). His recent publications include Han Unbound: The Political Economy ofSouth Korea (Stanford University Press, 1998) and MultiethnicJapan (Harvard University Press, 2001).
