Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the Everyday

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Becoming Strangers Travel, Trust, and the
Everyday

• Day 25 Diaspora

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Beginning Again What Is a Map?

• Cartographers differentiate between three
  distinct but related conceptual tools that we
  tend to lump together under the term map
• PLAT. A graphical representation that
  clarifies ownership.
• CHART. A graphical representation that
  indicates how to get from one place to another.
• MAP. A graphical representation that
  codifies a worldview and conveys its ordering
  principles.

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Beginning Again Again DG PolySci

• Deleuze and Guattari are not thinking about the
  nation-state when discussing the state.
• By state they have in mind the totality of
  socioeconomic, governmental, military, and
  cultural entities that constitutes what we might
  today refer to as the world system or global
  capitalism.
• Another pair of thinkers, Hardt and Negri, have
  recently influentially revived DGs arguments.
  Instead of state they use the term empire.

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Why DG? The Cold Wars Over
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Mid-20th Century Are We Them?

• The absolute distinction between 1st and 2nd
  world nations blurs after 1950.
• The poet Allen Ginsberg demonizes all
  governmental authority as Moloch in Howl
  (1956), the best-selling poem of the 20th
  century.
• In 1961 during his farewell address, Pres.
  Eisenhower warns against the military-industrial
  complex.

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The New World Order

• The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the
  dissolution of the Soviet Union (1992) ended the
  bipolarity that dominated world politics after
  the Russian Revolution (1917).
• In the resulting multipolar system nation
  states appeared weak when compared to global
  capitalism, the technology-abetted flows of
  money information people across all national
  borders.

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The Challenge to the Humanities

• The humanities have traditionally been divided up
  along nation-state lines.
• The contemporary university retains these
  divisions English literature, French
  history, Mexican art.
• DGand other thinkersand history!show us that
  we cant think that way anymore. We are in
  danger of missing the big picturethe functioning
  of Empire in general.
• Worse. We might have been wrong all along.

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Turn to a New Unit of Analysis The Diaspora

• DIASPORA. Greek for dispersion or
  scattering.
• Originally used to refer to those Jews who live
  outside of their ancestral homeland of Palestine.
• Subsequently used to refer to any people
  scattered across national boundaries who do not
  physically inhabit the territory or nation-state
  of their or their ancestors origin.
• The Armenian diaspora, for example, would
  include all people of Armenian descent living
  outside of that part of Central Asia
  traditionally called Armenia.

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Defining Diaspora

• Diasporas are difficult to define.
• Who should be included? Everyone who
  self-identifies as Jewish, Armenian, etc? Do
  adoptees count? Do assimilated people count?
• What about the slipperiness of identity
  categories? Is there an Asian diaspora in the
  U.S.? If according to Chinese definitions,
  anyone of Chinese descent is Chinese, can one
  speak of a diaspora?
• And if one can isolate a diaspora what is it,
  exactly, that one is studying? A culture? A
  nation? A race? A collection of . . . stories?

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Consider the Original Diaspora The Jews

• We discussed before the Exodus, the journey
  through the wilderness led by Moses from Egypt to
  the Promised Land of Palestine.
• The Exodus serves as a story of the creation of a
  people (and a nation state) we were Pharoahs
  slaves, then we entered a middle world, now we
  are remade as a free people with a land that is
  ours.
• The early kings made Jerusalem the governmental
  center of this new state. Solomon built the
  chief Jewish temple there ca. 957 BCE and during
  the 7th century BCE King Josiah makes the
  Jerusalem temple the exclusive and only temple.

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The Babylonian Captivity

• Nebuchadnezzar II conquers Judah in 597 BCE and
  forcibly removes thousands of Jews to the city of
  Babylon.
• In 586 he destroys Jerusalem and razes the
  Temple.
• During the next decades, every revolt in Judah is
  followed by further large scale deportations.
• In 538, Cyrus the Great allows the Jews to return
  to Judah and rebuild their Temple.

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Aftermath of the Babylonian Captivity

• Before 586 BCE, Judaism was a state religion
  centered on Jerusalem. A priestly caste
  performed elaborate ritual sacrifices at a temple
  that had been built by a king.
• From 597 to 538 there was no Judah. From 586 to
  515 there was no temple. Judaism changed
  fundamentally.
• The focus shifted from a placethe Jerusalem
  Templeand its associated hierarchy to a sense of
  collective responsibility for remembering the
  past and participating in a living tradition.
• The focus shifted to preserving texts (Scripture
  and commentary) a language (Hebrew) and
  communal ties. Educated elders (later called
  rabbis) supplanted priests, and meeting halls
  (later known by the Greek word synagogues)
  supplanted the Temple as the crucial sites for
  the creation maintenance of identity.

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Post-Captivity Judaism

• 515 BCE to 70 CE. A very large number of Jews
  remained in Babylon. Jewish scholars wrestled
  with how to distinguish the religious duties of
  diasporic Jews and those who lived in Judah.
• 70 CE to 1948 CE. After a rebellion, the Romans
  razed the Second Temple. For two millennia, Jews
  were a diasporic people with no homeland. Two
  narrativesthe Exodus and the Babylonian
  Captivityserved as guides to the long middle
  world of being a people with no place.
• The poetic name for JerusalemZion (one of the 2
  hills on which the city is built) became
  shorthand for the future utopian place where the
  diaspora could gather again.

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Another Diaspora The African Diaspora
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The African Diaspora

• Unlike most diasporas, the African diaspora does
  not originate from a particular nation. The
  Middle Passage was intended to strip people of
  their former identities. They lost their goods,
  their families, their names, and even their
  languages.
• People who had been through the Middle Passage,
  though, managed to pass along stories and music.
  And they shared them with other peoples of
  African descent.
• The result was a creative, hybrid, though long
  underground culture. Jazz, for example,
  appeared in New Orleans in the early 20th
  century long after it had been invented and
  perfected by slaves who spent their free time
  drumming with each other in public squares.

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The Black Atlantic

• In the 1990s, scholars began to realize that they
  couldnt study, say, African American culture in
  isolation.
• People of African descent in Europe, North, and
  South America had long thought of themselves as
  sharing a history and culture.
• Musical innovationsjazz, blues, dub, samba,
  reggae, calypso, bosso nova, rap, go-go, etchave
  moved freely between the West Indies, the US,
  Brazil, the UK, etc. So too have novels, poetry,
  political polemics, and autobiography.
• Scholars realized that they had to begin thinking
  in transnational terms about The Black
  Atlantic if they were ever to understand some of
  the most important cultural innovations of the
  last 100 years.

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Defining Diaspora Middle Passage as a Starting
Point

• Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is known as the
  greatest blues guitarist.
• In Crossroads Blues, Johnson plays with the old
  belief that crossroads are dangerous middle
  worlds where chance encounters collisions
  occur.
• He was said to have met Satan at a crossroads and
  sold his soul for the ability to play the guitar
  like no one else. Identity begins at a
  crossingselfhood is founded on travel and
  hybridity.

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Defining Diaspora Stealing from the Master

• Bob Marley (1945-1981) grew up in out of the
  slums of West Kingston, Jamaica.
• During the 1970s he became the best-known reggae
  artists in the world.
• His song Exodus employs a biblical vocabulary
  (Babylon, tribulation, Fathers land) to advocate
  an uprising of African peoples against the white
  colonial powers.

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Defining Diaspora Remembering Where Youve Been

• In the late 1980s, the rap collective Arrested
  Development was inspired by Public Enemy to use
  music as a vehicle for serious political and
  intellectual commentary.
• The rise of West Coast gangsta rap in the early
  1990s eclipsed such cerebral New York rap.
• Songs such as Tennessee (1992) though are worth
  remembering as statements about the need to
  revisit and re-sample the past, however painful
  or embarrassing, if one is to understand the
  present.