Diaspora Criticism

DIASPORA CRITICISMRepresented by Nazila ManafiM.A students of English literature at Azad university of Tabriz2013Professor JAMALI CRITICISM12/10/2013
DIASPORA CRITICISM
Represented by Nazila Manafi

M.A students of English literature at Azad university of Tabriz

2013
Professor JAMALI
CRITICISM
12/10/2013


In the name of the god

Acknowledgements
Sudesh Mishra's Diaspora Criticism is a meta-critical immersion into the field of diaspora criticism by meta-critical we mean that it's a criticism of the criticism of diaspora, theory maker. In this book which is not exactly and original theory, Mishra gathers existing theories to create a critical survey of the field.
Definition of diaspora
It's the community that are formed far from hometowns. This term is used to show scattering immigration or homelessness of a group of people who leave far from their own homeland and are scatter all around the world.
This term originate from Jewish texts and refers to Jewish exodus from babel but recently the meaning of this word has become bigger to be used to indicate scattering of a group of people who have the same route and have either exiled or escaped from their own homeland. The creation of society far from home can be voluntary or involuntary. Today an immigrant is someone who experiences a kind of wondering. The theory of diaspora is related to topics like the nature of immigration the relationship and interaction among immigrants, with each other and with other people. It also deals with the role of immigrants in formation of art redefinition of language in immigration and the important role of translation in immigration and an immigrant is a person who faces attention within the symbolic order which he experiences in the new place. Before immigration, an immigrant encounters a type of alienation in his homeland. In other words, immigration and the process before it are a luminal type of experience. There are various reason for immigration:
Capitalism(which means there is need for work force)
Financial benefits
Escaping the current situation
War
Famine
Colonizing a nation.
Therefore, it can be said that it is either optional or obligatory. (Like: exile)
Mishra believes the phenomenon of immigration is accompanied by resistance, pain and final adjustment.
In the mind of an immigrant homeland changes to the picture frame. It means that he is left with the only one picture has at the time of leaving his country. In other words, the immigrant forms an imaginary relationship with her homeland. This picture becomes fixed after sometime since he stops having any real living experience in his homeland.
Introduction
In this 20 page long work, Mishra has invited many scholar to his dinner party and has given lots of quotation from famous figures. Like: Derrida, Foucault, and Barth…
Mishra's goal is to ultimately determine the relationship between events, witness, statement which leads to the definition of the generic event.
His strength emerges in his identification of three scenes of exemplification, separated by epistemic "turn" within the larger scene of the genre.
First scene is"dual territoriality"
Dual territoriality is the oldest framework in diaspora criticism which means the early critics started this type of criticism with this concept and still there are critics who deal with it dual territoriality is based on dichotomies and stable entities such as: homelands and host lands.
Diaspora moves are also two types:
Voluntary( where one is attracted to the host land)
Involuntary (expelled from the homeland).
The problem is that Mishra doesn't fall for such binaries. There are complexities that are n't explained by dual territoriality.
In this chapter Mishra names people like: Cohen, Walker Conner and William Safran.
They are mentioned as people who has focused on dual territoriality. Then Mishra goes on to skillfully clarify the generalization and exclusion, which form the different modes of subjectivity and cross- subject alliances determined by class, gender, education, religion, sexual, preference, accent and language are left out. Finaly dual territoriality is excluded from the scene due to its lacks.
Second scene is "Situational Laterality"
In this chapter important theory makers are Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, and Stuart Hall.
This scene incorporates more complexity and factors. Like: gender and class which Mishra thinks are necessary. He says that in the first chapter I wanted to mention that the supporters of dual territoriality try to repeat and ideal logical factor through showing diasporas that were ethnic minority who had left their homeland and had come to the host land where the dominant migratory of another ethnic group ruled.
However, Hall in contrast comes up with a perspective on cultural identity that makes room for "compositional unities" based on the meaningful "cut" across the restive current of discontinuity, hybridity and difference.
Mishra decides that the dual territoriality theory makers are rigid but in turn the theory makers are laterality are more flexible and inclusive (which means that there ideas include a wider range of complexities).
Therefore with an idea based on flexibility. Mishra moves toward new possible space that can be formed by diaspora. In this movement Mishra is inspired by Homi Bhabha "The third space" and he says that the trick, it seems, is to occupy the hyphen between a rock and a hard place. Mishra defines the function of the hyphen:
In marking the joint/rupture between one space and another (or several others), the border is clearly devoid of its own space and yet indispensable to spatial categories. It is the function of the border/hyphen to break up structured unities and pre-given stabilities while positing them on every side. When one is inhabiting the hyphen, one is neither absolutely one thing nor another but is multiply constituted in the line of fracture which, as logic would have it, is also the line of suture. From the vantage point of the hyfen/border, one is never solely one thing or another, but altogether sth else a veritable third.
Therefore a diaspora never really and completely belongs to the new host land but makes a third type which is the combination both the new land and the old land. Furthermore despite his explanation about the hyphen and the third type Mishra explains that diasporic subject are never completely coherent.
Third scene is "Archival Specifity"
This is a quantity approach which seems more comfortable to Mishra, Here relying on current diasporist. There are hopes for the theory diaspora.
Archival specify offers the chance to avoid generalizations, Western and Eurocentric assumptions and imposed continuity.
Archival specify scene sees Diasporas as the complexly unique events, although frameworks may not be universal enough. It means that in the relationship of the seemingly of the unimportant moment.
Mishra finds three concepts in the wholly trinity of diaspora criticism:
Transnationalism
Modernity
Globalization
Diaspora's witness all types of social, political and culture reaction under the dominance of new economic regim.
In the penultimate chapter
The three pillars of diaspora criticism Mishra investigates how these concept which from powerful discourses in their own right, contribute to the pursuit of diaspora criticism.
In this chapter the world transnationalism is epistemologically broken down and Mishra discuss that Diasporas show transnational moments because they violate the imagine nation state. Transnationalism breaks down the language border and rigid which Mishra reject by violating the stablish frame. Like: wise.
Modernity has a vertical and horizontal domination. Horizontal suggests chronological break between past and present that happened through the Industrial Revolution. Vertical suggests spatial breaks.
In these breaks, Globalization, the third pillar, emerges. Under globalization, Mishra explains the economic implications and basis of globalization.
He also talks about the fact that globalization possibly had a great role in creating and immobilized army of reserved label characteristics of the fourth world. He continues that global economic practices can have paradoxical and abnormal effect. These paradoxes are only understood by few diasporist.
He argues that the overall point is that by treating global economy as an established category rather than as a field of controversies and contradictions, the implied links between the social. The aesthetic, and the economic remain highly conjectural.
The overall point of diaspora criticism is that in order to achieve theoretical framework which can be dominant or to achieve categorical distinction or to have definition in this case there are too many complexities.
In short, a theoretical framework cannot be easily made in the last part. He talks about a critic Appaduari and his theory which is called this disjuncture (which means lack of coherence). Mishra praises the imaginative attempt to approach Diasporas without definitive factors.
Appaduari has five analytic unities for his system of disjuncture.
Ethno scapes (scape due to ethic issue)
Media scape
Techno scape
Finan scape
Ideo scape
Mishra consider the interaction between these five segments has a series of minimally intersecting excentric circles and he explains that each of these five segments have their own limitations and motivations but sometimes they have a restrictive. This theory, Mishra decides, is discontinues and doesn't have a cause and effect bases but at any rate it is a chaotic constellation but it is linked.
Mishra criticizes Appaduari because of limiting his theory to just theory and not practice but he says Appaduari was of few diasporist that dealt deeply with the socio economic of globalization.
Conclusion
Throughout the book Mishra searches for theory that is complex imaginative and original but in this work Mishra on diaspora and through some case studies: Mishra successfully show that each individual diaspora contains a cacophony of complexities. So he emphasizes the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Diasporas.
Reference: (Julian Wolfreys Book)


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