Diasporic Nationalism John Lie 2001

Diasporic Nationalism 

John Lie  Harvard University 

Cultural Studies H Critical Methodologies, Volume 1 Number 3, 2001 355-362 @ 2001 Sage Publications 

Author’s Note: This article was originally presented as a keynote address at the Third International Conference on Diaspora. I wish to thank the organizer, Mary Yu Danico, for her kind invitation. 

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In the article, the author stresses the significance of the external and diasporic origins of nationalism. To illustrate the argument, the author draws on the examples of modern Japan and Korea. 

In the 1990s, the concept of diaspora emerged as a major theme in the human sciences. In effect, it sought to replace-or at least supplement-the language of migration (see Lie, 1995). As exemplified in the dominant histori ography of United States immigration-associated, above all, with Oscar Handlin’s (1951/1973) The Uprooted-the idea of migration, and its two com ponents, emigration and immigration, presumed a particular imaginary of population movement. People uproot themselves from their country of origin and restake themselves in the land of destination. Needless to say, the move ment 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 imaginary of migration, the sojourn is singular and more or less irreversible. There are return migrants, to be sure, but the proverbial poor, hungry, and tired masses emigrated from the old Europe to the new United States. The drama of migration continues in the new land of destination. The linear trajectory envi sions the telos of assimilation. Meanwhile, the incomplete insertion into the new society evokes the new character type: the immigrant. This conception of migration presumes and privileges the place of the nation-state and the mean ing of national identity. Although the Italian immigrant may have regarded himself or herself as a villager or a Tuscan, her new identity as an immigrant is conjoined by her ethnonational category. With the partial exception of Jewish immigrants, every immigrant becomes sorted into a national or a supranational racial group (such as Asian or Oriental). Subnational identities largely disap pear. Japanese immigrants may be classified as Japanese or Asian, but their premigration identities, such as Okinawan or Burakumin, are expunged in the course of the trans-Pacific passage. 

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 inextrica ble 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 assimi lation, it recuperates a variety of personal voices of sojourns and shifting identities. 

In brief, the language and imaginary of diaspora provides ample space to explore the complex realities of human movements and identities. To be sure, diaspora studies risks being an empty signifier, but imprecision can at times be emancipatory, liberating us from the straitjacket of the migration narrative. At the very least, we open the possibility of empirical investigations hitherto closed off by the unquestioned acceptance of the migration imaginary and its reification of the nation-state. 

In this article, I wish to suggest that the promise of diaspora studies remains precisely a promise rather than an achievement. Most significantly, many scholars working under the sign of diaspora continue to rely on the reified, essentialist, and nationalist conceptions of human flows and identities. In other words, against the complex reality of diasporic processes, we are still far from achieving a nonessentialist and nonnationalist understanding. The grip of nationalism remains evident in an area that most trenchantly offers to eman cipate our sociological imagination. At the same time, I also wish to suggest that it is precisely nationalist historiography and social sciences that would stand to benefit most from diasporic studies. In this article, I will draw on the examples of the Korean and Japanese diasporas to illustrate my argument (see Abelmann & Lie, 1995; Lie, 2001). 

The Nationalist Reification of Diaspora 

If there is any consensus generated by the recent outburst of writings on 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 block buster by Benedict Anderson (1983/1991), few now question the post 18th-century invention and dissemination of popular national identity. Until 

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 we have come to see as a quasi-natural state of migra tion, 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 United States, for example, there were no federal immigration restrictions until 1875, and even then noncitizens could vote in various elections (King, 2000). This is all very far away from the demonization of the undocumented immi grants popular in the very late-20th-century United States. Certainly, what we now call international travel without the passport or the right of alien residents to vote seems utopian to even the most visionary of immigrant rights advocates. 

Border patrol and population accounting constitute the condition of possi bility of the language of migration. Without clearly demarcated and enforced borders and means of accounting for people’s movements, we cannot sustain the distinction between internal and international migration or even the very 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 cul tural dimensions&dquo; (O’Brien & Fugita,1991, p. 3). In fact, at the height of mod ern Japanese emigration, principally to the Americas, in the late 19th century, Japan was only beginning to emerge as a culturally unified nation-state. It did not feature a well-disseminated national identity and was not culturally or eth nically 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 was largely regional, or the frequently circu itous and labyrinthine path of the Japanese emigrant. More important, the nationalist frame conflates the diverse constitution of diasporic flows from the area that we today unproblematically call Japan. The so-called Japanese emi grants were disproportionately discriminated minorities, such as Burakumin, who were descendants of premodern outcastes. Symptomatically, in the classic work of Japanese literary naturalism, Shimazaki Toson’s Hakai (Broken Com 

mandment), the protagonist ultimately comes out of the ethnic closet to declare his Burakumin identity. At the end of the novel, we find him emigrating to Texas. If Burakumin are not simply Japanese, then we might even note that he goes to Texas, not the United States. That is, we 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 quintessentially Japanese, such an assimilationist assumption elides the ele mentary fact that Okinawa was an independent kingdom until the modern Jap- anese state 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 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 Jap- anese because of her Okinawan ancestry. In Japan, however, she was simply labeled Nikkeijin-sort of ex-Japanese-and no one cared about her 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. 

In spite of the significance of subnational identities in Japan, we have no sys tematic demographic records of this fact. The dominance of the nationalist mindset is not restricted to historians and social scientists; it is, rather, exempli fied 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, chaps. 5-6). 

What my brief consideration of the Japanese example 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 our gaze to the post-1965 period, when South Korea had emerged as a hypernationalist country in which South Korean national identity was increasingly paramount, we should still be able to recuperate the fundamental differentiation of the population outflow from 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 ori gins of the Korean diaspora are diverse, so too are their itineraries and destina tions. Many Korean Americans, for example, had spent considerable time in 

Asia, Europe, and Latin America before their eventual (and far from final) set tlement in the United States. 

In summary, we should take seriously the achievement of nationalism stud ies and apply it to population movements. Rather than presuming the national homogeneity of emigrants, we should describe and analyze their actually exist ing heterogeneity. Although they may be unproblematically identified as Japa- nese or Korean once in the United States, their premigration identity is usually far from settled or singular. 

Diasporic Intervention in Nationalist Historiography 

Having lodged a case against the hegemonic hold of the nation on our socio logical imagination, let me suggest-as my second point-something of an 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 endoge- nous. Diasporic outflow is merely a dispersal of a marginal minority outside of the national borders. Although massive emigration and immigration may have happened long ago-a matter for archaeology and mythology-national development constitutes a lineage of pure descent, not hybridity. In the case of Korea, for example, perhaps people from present-day Manchuria and else where may have entered the Korean peninsula millennia ago, just as some peo ple 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. 

Such an autochtonous view of national history is problematic because, as I argued in the previous section, popular national identity is a belated achieve ment of the modern nation-state. The presentist bias should be clear if we shift our historical starting point beyond the purview of the nationalist myth. In one sense-if we believe the contemporary wisdom on human origins-we are all 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 mythistory, but it is safe to say that there was no originary Jewish nation. Juda ism, after all, was a slave religion at the outset (Gottwald, 1979), and Moses would be an Egyptian if we were to follow our contemporary ethnonational classification (cf. Assmann, 1997). On more solid historical grounds, we know 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 

present-day Israel, in turn solidified their identity in exile and, as the Pales tinian diaspora, now seek the establishment of the Palestinian state (cf. Khalidi, 1997). In either case, diasporic nationalism precedes homeland nationalism. 

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 can 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 was virtually 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, exempli fied 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 were central, whether for Kim 11 Sung’s guerilla wars in Manchuria or Rhee Syngman’s lobbying efforts in Hawaii. In any case, diasporic Koreans in Japan and China were cer tainly central in the imagination and organization of the anticolonial, nation alist aspirations of the Korean people. Polemically put, the very conceptualiza tion of the Korean people as such owed to nationalist discourses generated by diasporic Koreans (Lie, forthcoming). 

Beyond Korea, the anticolonial, nationalist ideologies and movements that characterized much of the Third World were often forged in the colonial metropolises. The very ideas of anticolonialism and nationalism were imbibed in the belly of the beast, whether we think of Ho Chi Minh or Leopold Senghor. Diasporic nationalism, in this sense, is nationalism tout court for many postcolonial societies. The very idea of the nation becomes imagined in the lan guage and framework of the colonizers, dialectically transforming colonial uni versalism into anticolonial nationalism. Although we should not deny indige- nous ideas and endogenous developments, we should also not expunge the importance of external inspirations and exogenous struggles. 

Needless to say, I do not mean to suggest that all cases of postcolonial nationalism demonstrate the centrality of diaspora. Yet, more often than not, diasporic imagining and struggles played a significant role in national develop- ment. National development cannot be understood purely and solely as endog- enous ; diaspora is central and constitutive. 

Synthesis, or Conclusion 

Because I have mentioned that very 19th-century term dialectics, let me con clude with some sort of a synthesis. If diaspora studies is still under the thrall of 

the nationalist imaginary and if nationalism itself is a product in part of diasporic imaginings, then what is the point of diaspora studies? What is to be done? 

Theoretically-ironically-we have no choice but to avoid the Hegelian temptation of seeking essences and to cast off the legacy of 19th-century nationalism in which the social sciences remains so deeply steeped. We need to pierce through the reified exterior of the national frame and recover some of the fluxes of national construction and population movements. 

In this regard, we should avoid the temptation for a facile, mechanical syn thesis, which is to reify the role of diaspora and to commit diasporic national ism. The scholarly attention on diasporic peoples has often elevated various diasporic communities as transhistorical. Consider the Jewish and Christian diaspora-two such movements that often insist on 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 conver sion, apostasy, intermarriage, or migration. Ifwe reify these diasporic commu nities, we would miss the constant flows in and out of these identities. We would also bypass considerable heterogeneity under the unity that was 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? Cer tainly, historians would have little trouble drawing a singular lineage of Latin Christendom, and sociologists should be able to generate significant general izations 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 nation or diaspora? To put it negatively, we should not substantiate and reify the nominal character of the Chinese diaspora or the Jewish diaspora that con flates profound linguistic, cultural, and even somatic differences among the putatively unified peoples. 

A moment’s dip into world history should allow us to see that the fundamen tal force of globalization in the last half millennium has been colonization, that globalization and nationalism evolved together, and that nationalism and dias pora 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 transhistorical essences, and we are condemned to trace concrete historical developments. This makes the role of theory all the more important, for what is 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, we 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 even learn a language or two. This is all hard work, but the past and present of diasporas demand nothing less. 

References 

Abelmann, N., & Lie, J. (1995). Blue dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles riots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread ofnationalism (Rev. ed.). London: Verso. (Originally published 1983) 

Assmann, J. (1997). Moses the Egyptian: The memory of Egypt in western monotheism. Cam bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Calhoun, C. (1997). Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Desrosières, A. (1998). Thepolitics of large numbers: A history ofstatistical reasoning (C. Naish, 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, Brown. (Original work pub 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 democ racy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Lie, J. (1995). From international migration to transnational diaspora. Contemporary Sociol ogy, 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: Indi ana 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 Uni versity Press, 2001).