Beyond Diaspora: Roundtable on Diaspora as Pedagogy, Theory, & Method for Minoritarian Studies: American Studies Association 2017
In the transnational turn within American studies, the framework of diaspora dominates pedagogy, theory, and method and becomes centered across disciplinary interventions in Black, Feminist, Queer, Latina/o, Asian/American, Postcolonial, and Middle Eastern Studies. This roundtable reflects on diaspora’s intersections across these fields: what limits emerge when theorizing and teaching diaspora, considering how race circulates in an Americanist frame that we rely on to engage a growing number of students raised in the aftermath of colorblind ideologies; what theoretical ruptures does diaspora smooth over, considering how models of fluidity undergird the frame; and what methodological and disciplinary tendencies might diaspora replicate, considering the way it often solidifies the nation-state as a predetermined form? Although critical interventions from queer of color and feminist studies have enabled new ways to imagine diaspora (David Eng; Gayatri Gopinath), it nonetheless becomes a default framework. Following the work of Katherine McKittrick, Alexander Weheliye, Nadia Ellis, and Sylvia Wynter, this roundtable renegotiates diaspora from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
For participants in this roundtable, diaspora constitutes a pedagogical, intellectual, and disciplinary question. As scholars working in multiple political and cultural contexts, our objects, including literature, performance, visual arts, and the law, often exceed the terms made available through the discourse of diaspora. National belonging and exclusion falter underneath the pressures of subjects and objects that, following José Esteban Muñoz, disidentify with the nation form. We interrogate diaspora’s dependence on the lexicon of liberalism, which evades the social, cultural, and political particularities experienced by subjects at the interstices of nation, community, and the self. In addition to these critiques, our roundtable reconsiders how interdisciplinarity offers an alternative to these limits. Our conversation investigates how those of us placed within multiple minoritarian formations negotiate the boundaries of our (inter)disciplines across area and ethnic frameworks. Beyond the area and ethnic divide, however, our broader training in cultural studies often demands a more expansive approach that diaspora tends to limit.
How might we dissent differently if the grounding for which we imagine the transnational is rendered unstable? How might we further queer the queering of diaspora, where it enables us to imagine otherwise? In this spirit, roundtable participants propose a variety of approaches that help engage these questions.
Neetu Khanna (USC) reimagines the project of decolonization for the contemporary moment by recovering a forgotten archive of Muslim internationalist art of the 1930s as a rich experimental staging ground for the study of racialized emotion. In so doing, Khanna unearths and considers anew a critical pre-history to the bandung cultural moment of the 1960s, eclipsed by the dominance of diasporic anglophone literatures within the postcolonial studies moment in the humanities.
Ianna Hawkins Owen (Williams College) offers a conception of black diaspora theory as the “ordinary failure” of recognitions and solidarities founded on ideological and ancestral ties to new world formations of blackness. She takes particular interest in acts of recitation and repetition of failure by artists and writers of the black diaspora.
Iván Ramos (UM College Park) looks beyond the logics of diaspora implicit in Latina/o studies to survey the modes of hemispheric collectivity that aesthetic work offers. He turns toward alternative modes of cultural distribution, such as piracy, to understand how minoritarian subjects enact trade beyond the limits of the nation.
Evren Savci (SFSU) thinks about the predominance of the Muslim diasporic subject in queer studies’ discussions of Islam, positioning Muslims as always the immigrant Other and victims of Islamophobia, leaving us with little analytical tools to analyze, or teach about Muslim-majority contexts.
Hentyle Yapp (NYU) considers how Asian American studies often relies on diaspora to render Asia stable in ways that replicate the disciplinary fractures across area and ethnic studies. Yapp compares the discourses surrounding how Chinese artists as opposed to Asian American ones circulate on the global art market in order to reevaluate the disciplinary investments in diaspora.
