Diaspora: A Useful Idea

Kevin Kenny*

The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean? 

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived

outside the biblical land of Israel.”

A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement,
Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of
the New York Public Library.

By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion.

Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group that moves from one place to another.

The key period of expansion in the usage of diaspora was the half-century after World War II. The reasons are not hard to find. During the era of decolonization, globally scattered populations of African origin forged new transnational bonds of solidarity. Migrant and ethnic communities of Asian origin (e.g., ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Vietnam or South Asians in East Africa) were expelled from their adopted countries. Global migration assumed a massive new scale. And the international recognition of refugees brought new attention to involuntary migration in particular.

Public Scholarship

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.  He's also the

author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995).

Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this past weekend at Karlstad University in Sweden. Jacobson's talk dealt with a fascinating website cum archive he and others have developed called the Historian's Eye. This expansive visual and oral history project is described on the site:

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the "Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 3000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide and the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

I caught up with Jacobson in Karlstad to discuss his work and how he became a historian.  In the interview above he speaks about his interest in cultural history, his early understanding of the possibilities of historical study, and describes how he chose to work in the field.

For other interviews in this ongoing series, click here.

The Greatest Migration of All

Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from

A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.

World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

The Long Career of Immigration Control in America

Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis
Island immigration station. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943. 

Black History Month?

Heather Cox Richardson

Any high school history teacher knows that February is Black History Month. And almost any American high school student can tell you who Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was, because schools tend to focus on him around the time of the federal holiday that honors him.

But, sadly, many Americans know little else about black history.

In an interview with Mike Wallace, Morgan Freeman objected to Black History Month, pointing out that black history should not be relegated to a single month. Black History is American history, and should be taught as generally as any other kind of American history.

Easy, huh?

The last thing high school teachers need is more extra lessons tacked on to old histories. They don’t have time for what they have to do now. So how can we tackle Freeman’s legitimate complaint?

A Nation of Minorities

Chris Beneke  

With the present birthrate, the Nordic stock will have become a hopeless minority within fifty years, and will within two hundred have been choked to death, like grain among weeds. Unless some means is found of making the Nordic feel safe in having children we are already doomed.

- Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

When Evans, the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard and Emperor, offered this non-scientific demographic projection in the pages of the respectable North American Review in 1926 he wasn’t far out of the mainstream. Two years earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed an immigration restriction bill that severely narrowed the gates through which immigrants from eastern and southern Europe passed. The impending, relative decline of the Nordics was a leading justification for the measure.

Evans’ apoplexy contrasts with the relative equanimity that greeted the recent news that non-white births now outnumber white births in the U.S.—presaging a non-white majority by midcentury.* While the initial frenzy of reporting dripped with anticipated angst, the nation largely managed to keep its composure.

Interestingly, much of Evans’ vitriol—and much of the contemporary KKK’s general vitriol—was aimed at the Roman Catholic church. Anti-Catholicism didn’t come to an immediate end when the Klan imploded in the late 1920s. But it never again reached such heights.

While religion and ethnicity are very different social categories, and early 21^st domestic and international politics much different than those of pre-Great Society, Cold War America, we can still discern some revealing parallels between the conditions under which white Catholics were successfully integrated into American society and those now surrounding the growing Hispanic population. In other words, we have a historical precedent for the accommodation of a large block of new immigrants in the U.S., despite the hyperbolic fury of the extreme right and the dour pessimism of the extreme left.

Setting aside the fact that nearly one-third of all U.S. Catholics are now Hispanic, there are at least five easily identifiable parallels between 21^st-century Hispanics and 1920s-era Catholics:

1. As early 20^th-century Catholics were a diverse group bound together by an ancestral  faith, so are Hispanics from a variety of backgrounds bound together by an ancestral  language; 
2. Hispanics are approaching one-fifth of the U.S. population—as were Roman Catholics in the first decades of the 20^th, but their birth rates are likely to level off as they did for 20^th-century Catholics; 
3.The Hispanic population now includes a predominant nationality (Mexican American) that will, like Irish American predominance among early 20^th-century Roman Catholics, diminish as illegal immigration slows; 
4. Hispanics are marrying members of other ethnic groups at a rate comparable to 20^th-century Catholic religious exogamy; 
5.Explicit prejudice against Hispanics is increasingly confined to the extreme, economically marginal right—just as it was for early-mid-20^th-century Catholics.

This ad-hoc collection of rough analogies doesn’t guarantee anything about the next few decades of course. The investment firm’s stipulation that past performance is no guarantee of future results also goes for social change. And we should worry about the effects that the return of pre-World War II-levels of economic inequality might have.  Still, the case of early 20^th century Catholics is instructive and  encouraging. 

______________

* There are problems with the accounting, mainly because those Hispanics who identify as whites were included in the “non-white number.”  On this see Jeff Jacoby’s piece in The Boston Globe and Matthew Yglesias’s piece in SLATE.

History for the Public, or, Does the Center Hold?

Randall Stephens

NYU professor of history Thomas Bender's engaging on-line essay, "Historians in Public," at the SSRC has been making the rounds. He notes the worries of historians and social scientists, who think "that academic intellect has turned inward, cutting itself off from a role in public life."

Says Bender: "In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole. Bookstores organized American history by these identity-driven markets, often with no place for general histories. The challenge not taken up was how to narrate a whole made up of diverse and unequal parts. . . . Historians must bring the state back into relation to society, and along the way they need to rediscover the public. It will be, however, very different from [w]hat the early AHA . . . had in mind. And historians must make themselves a part of that public."

Unlike earlier calls for a unified history, this doesn't sound like a canon shot on the battlefield of the culture war. Though Bender's recommendations do bare some resemblance to those the late Arthur Schlesinger made in his 1991/1998 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Schlesinger's polemic makes what Bender writes look almost tame, though. And, of course, Schlesinger was writing about the nature and function of American identity.

Here's Schlesinger: "[P]ressed too far, the cult of ethnicity has had bad consequences too. The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history." (Disuniting of America, 20-21.)