What does Diaspora Mean to You?

Tersely speaking, the diaspora is the movement of bodies from their “native” territory to a new territory. Originally applied to describe the dispersal of the Jewish people from the territory called Israel or Palestine, it has been applied to various other populations such as Blacks, Pilipina/os, or any immigrant population under the sun. For myself, the notion of diaspora holds significant meaning. As a second generation Pilipino-American, I feel diaspora is a term that explains the nature of the majority of my identity. A good portion of my experience as an individual is based upon the interactions I have with my parents. At times there have been large amounts of conflicts and I feel it is because we have different diasporic experiences.

In describing the relationship between my family, the diaspora, and I; two important notions are that of the “imagined community” and the concept of “home.” Home, or more specifically, the feeling of the existence of multiple homes for oneself, is a marker of a diasporic experience. I identify home not only as the U.S., but the Philippines as well. This is interesting in that I have only been to the Philippines once as a child. How is it that I have an attachment to a land that I have only been to once? If my parents also identify the same two homes, how can they still consider the Philippines a home after they have left it? This question ties directly to the idea of the “imagined community,” a term coined by Benedict Anderson. The Philippines is a land that dwells within the imagination of our minds, for my parents it also dwells within their memory. It is a place that I have given value and attachment to; not only does it have a completely autonomous existence in reality, but I have added in my own ideas of what the Philippines is and created an alternate reality of what that land is for myself.

The difference between the diasporic experience of my parents and I lies in our immigrant status. As a second generation immigrant still living in the U.S., the experience of living in the Philippines is one that can only exist in imagination. Therefore, the land becomes a symbol of all the ideals that I have conferred upon it; and having a more radical, anti-colonial mindset, the country became an idealized symbol of resistance and struggle. As first generation immigrants, the Philippines exist as a completely different land of imagination for my parents. Having prescribed to pro-western colonial values, they view the Philippines as a land of decadence, a perspective which had influenced their decision to flee to the U.S. for employment opportunities. In addition to their imagined view of the Philippines, the country becomes locked in stasis existing within memory. While time flows on the other side of the globe, the Philippines remains what they remember it to be. Thus, changes that they may learn of become unsettling as they try and consolidate the home in their memory and the other reality they learn through newspapers, television, or the internet.

While the Philippine diaspora was created through U.S. imperial force and “benevolent” coercion, in the neo-colonial setting, U.S.-Philippine relations are marked by the contemporary trend towards globalization. According to Arjun Appadurai in his work Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, globalization is more than just merely cultural homogenization. He argues that there are five “-scapes” of movement that do not flow in just one direction, but intersect and flow back and forth across boarders. The ethnoscape, or movement of people, shows just that with the case of the Philippines. While Pilipina/os have been moving away from the Philippines, citizens of other countries, with interests in the archipelago, have moved in; whether they be missionaries or workers of multinational corporations. Although having moved away, my parents have also made return visits. The technoscape is the global configuration of technology, which has connected the world and has in essence made it “smaller.” This allows for communication across boarders, and has been a source of exporting labor in the technological field. While the Philippines has made great strides in engineering and technology and has had much worked outsourced to it’s shores, a large portion of the country has yet to experience it, as my relatives do not even have their own telephone line. Financescapes are the movement of global capital, and as Appadurai states, is dependent on the movement of the ethnoscapes and technoscapes. As the movement of people and labor in technology move away from the country the value of the Philippine peso is greatly effected as it has been decreasing in value to the dollar at a steady rate. The media and ideoscapes are particular subjects of interest when dealing with the Philippines. The mediascape is the flow of popular cultural and imaged based stories, while the ideoscape deals with the ideologies and beliefs. While the Philippines is known to consume American popular culture and reproduce it, sometimes more faithfully than reproduced in it’s country of origin; Philippine media is also emulated by second generation Pilipina/os here in the United States. The mediascape is one venue to help push the ideoscape, as it has been a pathway for U.S. ideology to take hold in the Philippines by presenting a certain image of the U.S. However, for second and 1.5 generation Pilipina/o-Americans, it is also through the mediascapes that radical Philippine ideology reaches the shores of the U.S.; through the news and video.

Rewriting a Rewritten Past

The Modern Era was the age which had laid the foundation for the present, one could argue this had begun with the age of enlightenment. However the exact starting point is irrelevant, more importantly this age was embodied as giving birth to scientific method as a result of the classical revival, the revival of the so called great civilization of Greece. As Gordon points out with his quotation of Hegel, Western Modern thought was deeply rooted with Anti-Blackness, as well as failing to discuss issues of gender and sexuality. Using Antonio Gramsci’s definition of hegemony, the consolidation of rule through coercion and consent, Modern thought with its emphasis on scientific truths combined with the underlying theme of Anti-Blackness has served to promote Western if not White Supremacy in the vast majority of the world, thus generating consent of rule. Many works have come out as a critique of Modern thought such as various writings by Michel Focoult, Jaques Derrida, and Franz Fanon. These writings have been labeled as Post-Modernist works, though Fanon would mainly fit into the Post-Colonial category as it applies Post-Modern thought to a critique of colonialism. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena rekindled a long standing debate about the significance of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece because it deconstructs the Modern notion of the conception of civilization.

Fanon argues that Anti-Blackness arises from the “sociogenic” dimension of the situation, which refers to the role of human institutions in the constitution of what human beings regard as “natural” in the features of social life. In the denial of Africa as the cradle of civilization and instead the promotion of Greece and the West as the birth of civilization, there is an implication of White/Western Supremacy as being natural; that it always was this way, that it was meant to be this way, and that it always will be. In another contemporary context this sociogenic situation fuels attacks on Cultural Studies by feeding claims that the West is the only place where anything that mattered occurred. Thus Black Athena aims at the crux of the argument posed by the Western Supremacist.

A point was made in the film by a critic of Bernal that his work has the opposite effect of promoting Whites rather than Blacks by arguing Bernal favors Western thought though merely wishes to give credit to Blacks. By implying the superiority of Western thought, Bernal’s work leaves an impression of the goal of Blacks laying claim to what is considered Whiteness. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that an oppressed people’s ideal is to be human, but their sociogenic situation leads them to believe to be human is to be what their oppressors are, which could also be described as the poststructural parlance of the black chasing the signifier in hope of becoming the signifier. However, Fanon writes: “A total retreat from Western rationality as rationality leads to a glorified blackness that inevitably realizes its self-deception: An essentialized blackness that intensifies white hegemony.” Fanon goes on to say: “Let us decide not to imitate Europe but combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us create the whole human being, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.” Therefore, the goal of a true Anti-Racist is to seek liberation not just for the oppressed, but the oppressor as well and ultimately create that whole human being.

4/26/05

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comments from jollene:

1) are we living in a time where Western Modern thought is no longer deeply rooted with Anti-Blackness?

2)here is where i think post-modernism is basically impossible. how are we to start right at the beginning w/o a past? i dont think that erasing the past is the answer to creating a just future. i think revolutions are contingent on the fact that peoples are able to finally write and interpret their own histories. i think "moving beyond the modern era" is impossible materially at this point when we are barely realizing our own past and ignorant of our present (outside of our own experience in an imperialist country). what do you think?