Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

In our postmodern world, the complex global economic interdependence and cultural interpenetration complicate the notion of national identity/subjectivity for those who geopolitically/culturally straddle more than one nation-state, hence the postmodern revival of diasporas.  Characteristically, according to Cohen in Global Diasporas, diasporas emotionally/physically inter-traverse between two cultures: their homeland and adopted land.  Cohen says that diasporas “are positioned somewhere between nation-states and ‘traveling cultures’ in that they involve dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense, but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the nation-state’s space/time zone” (135).  The increased awareness of the postmodern diasporas who have bi-cultural locality, then, necessitates a re-conceptualization of “nation-state” as not a homogenous cultural site, but an amorphous instrumental location of plural subjectivities.  Whereas, Cohen in Global Diasporas brings the definition of “diasporas” up to date to reflect their postmodern transnational reality, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” locates the cultural production site of the contemporary diasporas.  Bhabha’s examination of contemporary diasporas reveal that their subjectivities are formed in an interstitial cultural space called “the space of beyond,” where one’s past and present conjoin in a pluralistic sense.  Though Cohen and Bahba’s approach may vary, both of their cultural analysis of diasporas acknowledge the complex transnational subjectivity of the postmodern diasporas, and believe that cultural cosmopolitanism, not homogenous nationalism, is the inevitable course in our international world.

As an anthropologist, Cohen sees diasporas as the “dispersed” people, but he also acknowledges the postmodern reality of diasporas as being builders of transnational community. In the past, the term has carried apocalyptic connotations.  It designated those who are victimized by being forcefully/traumatically uprooted from their homeland to another, and was commonly associated with the dispersion/extermination of the Jews, Armenians, or Africans, to name a few.  Historically, diasporas in their adopted land, literally and psychologically struggle between their old and the new cultures.  If in the past the term has had race-specific regional ramifications, Cohen says now the word “diaspora” extends to transnational scope.  It now includes all races of modern day’s “traveling cultures”—the cultures that has lost their territorial moorings due to today’s affordable and efficient means of communications and transportations (128).  Cohen states that contemporary diasporas “bridge the gap between the individual and society, between the local and the global,” syncretizing the diverse cultures in a complex ways (196).  Thus, “traveling diasporas” of the post-modernity, with the help of today’s high-tech culture, have unshackled themselves from their historically subdued/servile status to being today’s builders of transnational communities.

If postmodern diasporas, at best, are perceived as builders of transnational communities, at worst, their transnational intercrossing of cultures can be seen as a menace to national solidarity.  Cohen articulates that postmodern cultural diasporas have dubious political allegiances.  By not fully assimilating to their host countries and maintaining sociopolitical ties with their homeland, diasporas, according to Cohen, live in the “no-group lands” (189) of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, where they both “accommodate to, but also resist, the norms and claims of nationalist” (135).  For postmodern diasporas, “the nation-state is not only (or at all) an oppressive form of social organization, but also one that protects free expression, [and] political diversity” (196).  Diasporas are thus neither assimilators nor separatists but are those with multiple cultural attachments whose subjectivity cannot be contained in one national location.  Their political and cultural ambiguity, however, can work against them: Their existence can “represent a threat to the nation-state and the liberal-democratic order” (192).  More bluntly, they can be seen as a force of dismantling nationalism.  Ultimately, the transnational nature of diasporas does aid, in varying degrees, in de-territorialization of nation-states and de-authentication of established social identities, thus rendering the nation-state “impossible to realize the nineteenth-century dream of a place for each ‘race’” (196).  

While Cohen seems bemused by and merely accepts the fact that postmodern diasporas influence and re-map national and transnational landscape, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” insists on legitimization of the transnational subjectivity of diasporas in contemporary cultural production.  Bhabha believes that regional/racial identification and division of people can no longer be substantiated in our cosmopolitan era. He thus proposes a “radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (1335). While it is true that capitalism on a global scale has brought different cultures geopolitically in closer proximity, Bhabha insists that unless we drastically abandon our provincial mentality, “the great connective narratives of capitalism… do not, in themselves, provide a foundational frame for those modes of cultural identification and political affect” (1335).  Instead of trying to divide and contain sundry identities into different national/cultural types, Bhabha argues that what is most critical in our contemporary cultural production is not a mere recognition but a legitimization of  complex subjects who fall out from the mainstream—the diasporas.  By legitimizing diasporas’s extra-territorial cultural location, Bhabha demystifies diasporas’s sociopolitical ambiguity, and by extension, the myth of the supposed national homogeneity.

Bhabha’s call for legitimization of the diasporas’s cultural bi-locality, then, in essence, reveals their anti-nationalistic existence.  In terms of diasporas’s cultural location, Bhabha sees that their cultural subjectivities are formed “in the…interstices—the overlap and displacement of” their past and present cultures (1332).  In other words, diasporas’s borderline subjectivities are formed “in-between” national and cultural boundaries.  Here, diasporas’s “intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (1332).  Diasporas’s interstitial nature of their subjectivity keeps them from being fixed to any one location.  Rather, they serve as the “connective tissue…between [the] fixed identifications.” (1333). Diaporas as a connective tissue modulate the constant flux and mutability caused by bipolar national forces (1333).  In the process of their juggling act of two (or more) nation-states, they become the “cultural hybridity” that obviates national territories and “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1333).  Thus, Bahbha’s observation of diasporas confirms Cohen’s sociological concerns that diasporas are not situated in the core of one fixed geopolitical position, but in the “liminal” space where they pledge to neither of the nation-states completely, and thus becomes a potential danger to nationalism.

Both Cohen and Bhabha recognize that today’s high-tech culture and the force of cosmopolitan market contribute to cultural hybridization.  If in the past, nation-state has sought racial homogeneity, diasporas of the postmodern world challenge such pure nationalism. As Bhabha remarks, now “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334).  If in one sense, contemporary diasporas’s cultural bi-locality is seen positively as builders of transnational communities, on another sense, their politically dubious subjectivity can be seen as a threat to pure nationalism.  Nonetheless, in our cyberspace age, nationalistic intolerance of cultural hybridity must be replaced by cosmopolitan pluralism.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition.  Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1331-1344.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle, WA: University of Wshington Press.