Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment

Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment

Khachig Tölölyan

1996

Journal Article

Khachig Tölölyan

Journal Article

10.1353/dsp.1996.0000

1911-1568

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:


Khachig Tölölyan  
Khachig Tölölyan is Professor of English at Wesleyan University,
co-editor of Pynchon Notes and editor of
Diaspora. He has published articles on American
novels, particularly those of Thomas Pynchon, as well as on
postmodernism, Armenian terrorism, and the history and structure of
the Armenian diaspora. He has written, in Armenian, Spurki
Mech ["In the Diaspora," Haratch Press, Paris], and many
articles on Armenian issues and topics. He is at work on a book,
Stateless Power: Diasporas in the Transnational Moment
and is editing a collection of articles by historians on various
diasporas.


Notes



This essay draws upon a work in progress, Stateless Power:
Diasporas in the Transnational Moment. I am grateful to
Ellen Rooney for her scrupulous and helpful reading of several
drafts of this work.




1. Only some nation-states have done so. While subnational,
territorialized minorities (for example, the Catalans in Spain, the
Québécois in Canada) and some diasporan groups (for example, Jews
in post-Soviet Russia, Cubans in America) have recently experienced
an unprecedented range of linguistic, religious, cultural and even
political choices, other ethno-national groups (for example, the
Kurds in Turkey, the Chechens in Russia) and diasporan populations
(for example, Palestinians in Kuwait, Indians in Uganda) have been
persecuted by nation-states. Forms of discrimination less direct
than such persecution remain pervasive.


2. The fact that nation-states are often problematic should not
lead to a hasty celebration of multinational states, however. There
have been a number of multinational polities (the Soviet Union, the
Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Yugoslav
Republic). Each did relatively well for a time, satisfying some or
many of the smaller nations that lived within the system without
equal access to its state-apparatus and high culture. Each
eventually felt disadvantaged or oppressed by some aspects of the
system. In several, the collapse of the system was accompanied by
the scapegoating and ethnocide of one of the discontented polities
(arguably the Chechen and Bosnian cases) and even their genocide
(Armenians in the Ottoman Empire).


3. Of course, some form of global socialism once offered such a
vision, and may again do so some day. But, at the moment, both
discourse and political action are failing to reformulate that
order plausibly. Furthermore, much of diasporist discourse is all
but explicitly based on a rejection of socialism even when it pays
some lip-service to class; its real hope is placed in a fierce
advocacy of other types of transnational coalition. The enthusiasm
of diasporists for non-socialist, transnational political activity
has recently been deplored by Bruce Robbins, who is skeptical about
the possibility that the US government will "listen and learn from
its hyphenated citizens" and feels that Diaspora
itself is host to a "politically complacent internationalism"
(98).


4. To be fair, the capitulation to transnational elites has been
preceded, for nearly two decades, by a "pioneering" capitulation to
other anti-national, anti-statist interests within the
US. As the Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley recently
noted, the ideological basis for the crippling of the American
State has been the notion of empowering states and ordinary
citizens. But, as he writes, "modern society has many centers of
concentrated power, of which the Government is only one and not
always the most important. The large interests that shape our world
are more numerous and more powerful even than those the populists
of the late nineteenth century decried: corporate bureaucracies,
the great institutions of the media, banks and financial
institutions, trade associations and lobbying groups, and many
others" (37). The absence of transnational elites in this list is
suprising, but can be explained by the fact that the great
corporate bureaucracies specialize in the care and feeding of
same.


5. For the differences between intra- and inter-state diasporas,
see Tölölyan, "Exile Government."


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2013-07-30 12:09:46

1996

<p>Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1996</p>

1

Project MUSE

3-36

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies

Rethinking Diaspora(s)

Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diaspora_a_journal_of_transnational_studies/v005/5.1.tololyan.html

5

Project MUSE Snapshot