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Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256 www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review Essay
Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism
Steve Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Eds); Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK
Northampton, MA; 1999, pp. 663, ISBN 1 85898 869 1
Nations unbound? Migration, culture, and the limits of the transnationalism-dias-
pora narrative
Introduction
‘Transnationalism’ and ‘diaspora’ have become increasingly popular concepts over
the past decade, and, along with terms such as ‘transmigrants’, ‘deterritorialization’,
‘ethnoscape’, and ‘hybridity’, have formed a new lexicon of cultural globalization.
These new concepts are intended to represent empirical shifts in contemporary cul-
tural formations and to challenge the seemingly tired-out vocabulary of traditional
academic inquiry. Traditional concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘ethnic group’, and
‘locality’, these theorists argue, presuppose fixed boundaries of cultural and spatial
difference. Culture, locality, and ethnicity are no longer neatly contained but are
instead unbound by circuits of people, commodities, capital, images, and ideas. A
new vocabulary has thus emerged to ‘register the constitutive potency of space,
spatiality, distance, travel, and itinerancy in human sciences that have been premised
on time, fixity, rootedness, and the sedentary’ (Gilroy, p. 207, 1994).
In Migration, Diaspora, and Transnationalism, editors Steven Vertovec and Robin
Cohen have compiled over thirty key writings that trace the emergence of this new
vocabulary in the social sciences. While the volume sadly (and tellingly) contains
no works by geographers, it articulates important theoretical claims that are being
made about issues near and dear to the hearts of geographers-place, locality, nation-
states, and globalization. As concepts such as diaspora and transnationalism make
their way more and more into ‘mainstream’ geography (evidenced in the proliferation
of sessions on transnationalism and diaspora at disciplinary conferences), it seems
worthwhile that geographers critically examine the ways in which they been
explained and utilized.
This review essay is a synopsis and an evaluation of the empirical, theoretical,
and normative arguments emerging from this collection of works. The main point I
will make is that concepts such as diaspora and transnationalism, while attempting
to loosen conceptual boundaries, often revert to very rigid and traditional understand-
ings of culture, ethnicity, and locality. A related problem in this literature is that
while it sets out to disrupt hegemonic discourses of the nation-state, it does very
little to challenge the state-centric focus of contemporary social sciences. On a more
PII: S0962 -6298(00)00058-5
248 Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
positive note, this literature, despite its shortcomings, has brought the study of cul-
ture, representation, and identity into the study of globalization. As geographers and
others begin to wrest concepts of diaspora and transnationalism from their current
theoretical constraints, the potential of this vocabulary to challenge our thinking
about culture, politics, and place is enhanced.
Summary of works
The transnational moment
In each section of this volume, Vertovec and Cohen have included several articles
written in the 1970s and 1980s on chain migration, remittances, ethnicity, and kinship
networks, presumably to indicate the conceptual precursors to transnationalism and
diaspora. With the benefit of hindsight, these earlier works appear as the small aca-
demic rumblings that would eventually give way to a new analytic framework in
the study of migration and culture. While these works presumably appear dated and
passe
´, most of them (including Orlando Patterson’s 1975 piece on ‘ethnic allegiance’
among Caribbean migrants and Harvey Choldin’s 1973 article on chain migration)
are very insightful. The insistence in more recent works that ‘earlier conceptions of
immigrant and migrant no longer suffice’ (Glick Schiller, Basch & Blanc-Szanton,
1992, p. 1) therefore seems somewhat overstated.
Regardless, a new vocabulary of culture and space has been justified with the
assertion that contemporary migrants no longer break ties with their home society
nor undergo a process of assimilation, but instead, ‘build social fields that link
together origin and settlement’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992). Immigrants, in other
words, can now be thought of more accurately as ‘transmigrants’ who develop and
maintain ‘multiple economic, social, political, and organizational relations that span
borders’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, p. 1). The shift to these circumstances, these
theorists suggest, is rooted in a ‘global system of capitalism’, in which a lack of
security has ‘stretch[ed] images of communities beyond their limits, bringing differ-
ent ways of life into vivid, often violent juxtaposition’ (Rouse, 1991, p. 18).
These readings reveal a distinction that has been made implicitly between the
‘international’ and the ‘transnational’. If the international signifies relationships
between states or actors representing different states, then the transnational refers to
linkages forged by social groups who exist seemingly in spite of the nation-state
and who, through their transnational activities, undermine state sovereignty and the
hegemony of national borders and ideologies. Transnationalism, as one subheading
suggests, is ‘globalization from below’ — that is, at a local, grassroots level. The
‘local’ and ‘the grassroots’, however, are now situated across the boundaries of
nation-states.
Diaspora
Diasporas, as one commentator describes them, are the ‘exemplary communities
of the transnational moment’ (Tololyan, 1991, p. 5, cited in Introduction). That is,
249Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
they are the communities who enact ‘globalization from below’ through their daily
social practices and interactions.
The term ‘diaspora’, of course, has a much older provenance than the term ‘trans-
nationalism’, having been used, as Cohen (1996) notes, to refer to Greek settlements
scattered around the ancient Mediterranean, and later to dispersed Jewish communi-
ties. The historical significance of the term has fuelled some debate among scholars.
Safran (1991), for instance, contests the wide usage of diaspora as a metaphorical
designation for all sorts of groups living away from ‘home’, and insists upon a tighter
set of criteria for determining whether or not a group is indeed a diaspora. Using
the Jews as his ideal type, Safran defines as those groups who are dispersed from
a center to a periphery or foreign nation, who retain collective memory or vision of
homeland, who are committed to restoring their ancestral homeland, and who believe
they cannot be accepted by the host society and therefore remain separate from it.
James Clifford (1994), in contrast, argues that the concept of diaspora should not
be constrained by criteria based on ‘ideal types’ (indeed, he contends, even Safran’s
ideal diaspora, the Jews, do not fulfill the criteria he sets forth). For Clifford, diaspora
refers more to a consciousness of displacement and a phenomenon of multi-local
attachment. Diaspora, he suggests, is a “loosely coherent adaptive constellation of
responses to dwelling in displacement” and a form of resistance among those who
are excluded from their place of settlement (Clifford, 1994, p. 310). In this respect,
it is a form of cultural politics that sets itself against nationalism and ‘assimilation’.
Judging from most recent literature, which applies the term to virtually any migrant
group regardless of circumstances of migration, it would appear that Clifford’s
expansive definition has won out over Safran’s ‘ideal type’.
Evaluating cultural globalization
The writings selected for this volume reveal a wide range of interpretations of the
implications of transnational phenomena and globalization. For some, like Kearney
(1991, 1995), Clifford (1994), and Rouse (1991), the conditions giving rise to dias-
pora and transnationalism reflect the marginalization, exclusion, and polarization
generated by globalization. But the networks, linkages, and identities that constitute
diaspora and transnationalism represent an effective mode of resistance to oppressive
global conditions. Diaspora, moreover, challenges the hegemony of the nation-state,
and diasporic identities serve, Clifford argues, as “counter-histories that support stra-
tegies for non-totalizing globalization-from-below” (p. 327). As Gilroy (1994) states,
“the diaspora idea invites us to move into the contested spaces between poles of
local and global, to proceed in ways that do not privilege the nation-state and its
institutional order over the subnational and the supranational networks of communi-
cation” (p. 211).
Shain (1995) is also positive, though for different reasons. Shain’s article evaluates
the contention that transnational activities and ethnic politics among immigrants have
balkanized the United States. Drawing on the examples of African American and
Arab American lobbyist groups, Shain contends that, in fact, ‘transnational’ activism
250 Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
brings excluded ethnic groups into the political mainstream in the US and therefore
mitigates against social fragmentation.
Others are more wary of diasporic identification and transnational activity. In a
more dated article, Stack (1981), for instance, views the resurgence of ‘primordial’
ethnic sentiments and the transnational organization of ethnic groups as a threat to
national security. Finally, some waver on the issue. Appadurai (1991), for example,
suggests that deterritorialization generates many forms of ‘fundamentalism’ and an
unhealthy attachment to home country politics. But the constant movement of people,
images, ideas, and cultural forms across national borders also opens up a wider set
of ‘possible lives’ and opportunities for people to follow.
A radical approach?
Viewed in their entirety, then, these works offer divergent interpretations of dias-
pora and transnationalism. But two arguments run to a greater or lesser degree
through all of these articles. The first argument, as I have indicated above, relates
to claims of fundamental changes in social organization wrought by globalization.
Concepts of transnationalism and diaspora suggest that the nature of the nation-
state has been transformed not only by economic globalization and transnational
corporations, but by the multi-local social networks of migratory groups. The activi-
ties, identities, allegiances, and material linkages of these group defy the hegemony
of the nation-state and challenge its power and sovereignty, even where the state
has been instrumental in the formation of communities of its citizens abroad (as in
the case of the Philippines). Very few commentators, in this respect, claim that the
nation-state or state institutions have been rendered wholly irrelevant. But they do
assert that the role of the nation-state as an impervious container of social life is a
thing of the past.
The second line of argument is more theoretical in nature, and relates to dissatis-
faction with the bounded notions of culture and ethnicity found in traditional social
sciences. The use of concepts like diaspora and transnationalism reflect an effort to
break free of bounded and often teleological thinking on culture, embodied, accord-
ing to some, by ideas such as ‘assimilation’, ‘ethnic minority’, and even ‘immigrant’.
It is also an effort to re-work the idea of ‘locality’ by emphasizing spatially-extensive
communities and the re-creation of ‘home’ in multiple locales.
These two components underlying transnational/diaspora literature are problem-
atic. To begin, the contention that we are in a new historical epoch of globalized
economies and cultures is highly debatable. Many have demonstrated that the expans-
ive patterns of exchange and production we associate with globalization and trans-
nationalism are in fact not new (Foreman-Peck, 1998; Abu-Lughod, 1989). Labor
and capital mobility have characterized Western and non-Western societies for cen-
turies. And large-scale displacement, social polarization, cultural exclusion and other
phenomena interpreted as part of a ‘post modern condition’ are, in reality, hardly
novel (see Sassen, 1999). The editors, by including older works on chain migration,
remittances, and the like, seem, in part, to be suggesting that continuities exist
251Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
between past and present social patterns. But the emphasis in the works in this vol-
ume and in the editors’ preface is on historical rupture rather than on continuity.
I do not wish to suggest that the context in which migrants (and people in general)
formulate identities and social worlds is the same as it was 100 or 200 year ago or
even twenty years ago. Labor and capital markets have been radically restructured
in recent years, and technological changes, moreover, have clearly transformed the
ways in which we are able construct ‘community’ and identity. So to quibble over
what is ‘new’ and ‘not new’ is not entirely useful and misses the point that social
geographical context is constantly in flux. However, this empirical issue of continuity
and historical rupture is connected to a more fundamental set of claims found in
diaspora/transnationalism literature.
Many of the more recent articles in this collection justify a new vocabulary on
the basis that old social science concepts and classifications no longer valid because
they do not apply to contemporary circumstances. Cultures are no longer static and
homogenous, localities are no longer bounded and fixed, migrants no longer stay in
one place and assimilate to the majority population, nations no longer exercise con-
trol over populations and their allegiances. But neither ‘cultures’ nor places nor ident-
ities have ever been static, bounded, fixed, or homogenous, and very few human
communities have ever been describable as ‘pristine’ or untouched by the effects of
wider networks of trade, production, cultural exchange, and human mobility. Even
the most isolated of communities have been stratified by the ‘politics of differ-
ence’ — that is, by gender, class, status, caste, and so on.
By implying that cultures were at one time more bounded and contained, the
concepts of diaspora and transnationalism represent not a rejection of old social
science concepts, but rather the application of these concepts to a historical epoch
that supposedly preceded globalization. In fairness, some of the contributors do
recognize the complexities and the cosmopolitanism of ‘pre-globalization’ societies.
Clifford (1994), for instance, encourages us to remember the ‘world systems, econ-
omic and cultural, that preceded the rise of an expansionist Europe’ (p. 240), and
John Armstrong (1976) in an early work gives detailed historical accounts of politics
in multi-ethnic societies. But there remains a sense that bounded notions of culture
and society and place were once valid and relevant.
Interpretations of ‘assimilation’ found in several articles in the volume (see
especially Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Clifford, 1994; Rouse, 1991; Kearney, 1995)
likewise reveal a problematic historicization of ethnicity. These theorists suggest
more or less explicitly that 19
th
century immigrants ‘assimilated’ into American
society while today’s immigrant do not have this option (hence the formation of
diasporas). But there is little recognition here of the political struggles that sur-
rounded this supposedly easy assimilation process. In fact, ‘assimilation’ in the
United States was a highly contentious process, fraught with racialized notions of
‘nationhood’ and ‘deviance’. The groups today held up as models of assimilation,
such as Irish and Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews, were viewed as mem-
bers of inferior ‘races’ and were subject to exclusionary legislation well into the 20
th
century (Jacobson, 1998). The fact that they are today ‘assimilated’ reflects decades
of political struggle and re-formulations of the idea of American nationhood and
252 Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
identity. Such struggles and transformations continue to this day with current immi-
grants, as we can see in recent debates over bilingualism in the United States
(Zolberg & Woon, 1999). Ironically, the politics underlying assimilation were recog-
nized by ‘traditional’ assimilation theorists such as Milton Gordon (1964) (see also
Waldinger & Perlmann, 1998). Yet current theorists of transnationalism and diaspora
have consistently misinterpreted and over-simplified these older concepts rather than
considering their continued relevance.
The propensity in this literature to set an idealized past against an unstable, uncer-
tain present represent a form of fin de sie`cle thinking. As Gledhill (1999) notes,
‘Western accounts of “the global” have always tended to be ways of projecting
perceptions of crisis and transformation in Western societies onto a global context’
(p. 13). Parallels can be seen, for instance, with early 20
th
century dichotomies of
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, tradition and modernity, which imbued this percep-
tion of crisis with ‘world historical force and a watershed quality’ (ibid.). The irony
is that even in emphasizing the fluid, unbounded, and shifting nature of contemporary
culture, this literature does not necessarily move away from very bounded and dichot-
omous conceptions of ethnicity, place, and society. While they may be multi-local
or ‘glocal’ or transnational or whatever, cultures tend to be treated as ‘cultures’-as
unified, discrete, pre-existing social entities who bring their customs and traditions
and ‘their place’ with them, as if in a suitcase. There is little indication that ‘culture’
is itself contested within, that social networks, relationships, and identities change
radically over generations (this, of course, would smack of assimilation) or that ‘eth-
nic groups’ and ‘diasporas’ are cross-cut by multiple power relations, interests, or
political agendas. Accounts of immigrant experiences thus often appear as a re-hash-
ing of tales of old country ethnics facing identity crises and clinging to each other
for group preservation (though this time in the face of ‘global capitalism’).
A related problem is that this literature does not successfully challenge the nation-
state focus it has set out to undermine. While describing diasporas and transnational-
ism as resisting state hegemony and subverting the nation-state centrism of academic
analysis, many of these accounts are stubbornly state-centric, in that all cultural and
social change is interpreted vis-a
`-vis the nation-state. The term transnationalism, in
particular, is defined (quite obviously) with respect to the nation-state. This persistent
state-centrism leads to paradoxical arguments, as scholars continue to highlight the
role of the nation-state and its institutions even as they claim to embrace a new,
post-national analytical framework. Glick Schiller et al. (1992), for instance, promote
the concept of the ‘transnational’ as an alternative to state-centric analysis, but define
transnationalism in terms of the involvement of ‘transmigrants’ in the nation-building
projects of the sending and host countries. So while they are concerned with the
linkages between more than one country (rather than a single bounded national
society), the analysis remains focused nonetheless on the nation-state. A slightly
different paradox can be found in Kearney (1995), who contends that the power of
the state to impose differences through national boundaries is being eroded, but then
shows in his analysis of undocumented migrants that geopolitical boundaries in fact
have a profound impact on migrant experiences and opportunities. The whole concept
253Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
of undocumented migrant, he indicates however unintentionally, depends on the con-
tinued ability of the state to impose differences and to limit the rights of citizenship.
In light of the confusion and ambiguity surrounding transnationalism and diaspora,
it is worth asking whether these concepts represent a step forward or a step back-
whether diaspora and the transnational represent the casting off of old conceptual
shackles or simply recycling of Western scholarship’s panicky approach to ‘mod-
ernity’. One certainty is that these concepts will remain problematic until they are
approached from a more abstract perspective that avoids historical dichotomies and
which adopts a more complex understanding of ‘culture’ and locality. What, then,
would be a more fruitful way of approaching transnationalism and diaspora? A few
selections from the volume under review and from the growing body of more critical
approaches to diaspora and transnationalism point the way.
Culture, locality, and nation-state
In one of the few critical perspectives on transnationalism to be found in this
volume, Gupta (1992) argues that transnational (and subnational) movements speaks
not to the demise of the nation-state but to the continued pervasiveness of the nation-
state ideal in the post-colonial world. Transnational activities and organizations in
fact reinforce nationalism and the nation as the dominant form of political and social
organization. But the significance of transnational movements is that they prompt us
to take notice of the ‘structures of feeling’ that bind people to geographical units
that are both larger and smaller than nation-states and to question the ‘naturalness’
of the nation-state. People, Gupta argues, have always been members of many social
and geographical units, and nation-state citizenship should be conceived of as
one of the multiple subject positions occupied by people as members of
diversely spatialized, partially overlapping, or non-overlapping collectivities. The
structure of feeling that constitutes nationalism needs to be set in the context of
other forms of imagining community, other means of endowing significance to
space (Gupta, 1992, p. 513).
Nationalism from this perspective has served as one mode of imagining community
and of structuring social difference that is historically linked to the development of
capitalism. Gupta suggests that to challenge a nation-state-centered perspective does
not necessitate historical claims about the alleged decline of nation-states. It necessi-
tates, rather, that we understand the nation-state as a historically-contingent political
space which does not hold a monopoly on power, ‘structures of feeling’, or subjec-
tivity.
The works of Gilroy (1991, 1994) and Hall (1990) also present an abstract under-
standing of transnationalism and diaspora within their more normative commentaries
on black politics in Britain. Rather than connecting diaspora to a ‘post-modern’ phase
of history, these authors use the term to explain what they mean by ‘culture’. Hall
(1990) in particular contests the taken-for-granted way in which we speak of ‘cul-
254 Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
tures’, emphasizing that cultural identities, subject to the continuous play of history
and power, are constantly in flux. ‘Culture’ signifies the construction of difference,
the positioning of groups as different or the same. It is, as he calls it, a ‘politics of
position and of positioning’ which varies over time. The power and significance of
imagining or ‘rediscovering’ homeland and cultural coherence should not be under-
estimated, as they have had an important role in post-colonial politics. But ultimately,
notions of ‘home’ and ‘memory’ are always problematic and contestable, in that
they are caught up in a wider set of politics about exclusion and belonging. In this
respect, Hall suggests that ‘diaspora’ does not refer so much to displaced ‘cultural
groups’, but to the construction of shared cultural codes and memories, in which we
are all implicated.
Conclusion
I have argued in this review essay that in many regards, the writings compiled in
Migration, Transnationalism, and Diaspora have not gone far enough to challenge
‘traditional’ conceptions of culture. As geographers, we must pay particular attention
to the ways in which this ‘formative literature’ has embraced a simplistic sense of
locality as a site of reaction against seemingly placeless global forces (Cox, 1993).
On a more optimistic note, recent works by geographers and others have addressed
the shortcomings of the literature from the 1990s, and have, like Gupta, Hall, and
Gilroy, attempted to approach the issues of diaspora and transnationalism more criti-
cally. These works are notable for the complex ways in which they explore the
intersections between the transnational activities of multiple social actors and the
politics of cultural production in diverse contexts.
K. Mitchell (1997) for instance, has challenged the romanticized image of ethnic
groups resisting the hegemony of capitalism and the state. Her research on Chinese
immigrants in Vancouver demonstrates instead the ways in which transnational link-
ages between Canada and Hong Kong have been integral to the globalization of
Vancouver’s economy and have infused the local politics of citizenship, ‘race’, and
national identity. ‘Transnational processes and spaces’, she argues, “have led to new
kinds of manipulations of community and nation, and narratives and counternarra-
tives of essentialized identities are used strategically by the state as well as by a
multitude of other actors”, (K. Mitchell, 1997, p. 538).
Similarly, Yeoh and Willis (1999) in their research on skilled migration in Singa-
pore have approached diaspora as a discourse tied to nationhood rather than in con-
flict with it. The ‘diasporic imagination’, they argue, presupposes the existence of a
‘nation’ and ‘homeland’ to which fragments of the ‘community’ relate and aspire
to return. In the case of Singapore, efforts to promote transnational Singaporean
communities as an economic development strategy are bound up with ideologies of
nationhood, which in turn reflect gendered conceptions of work and social repro-
duction. Many others have attempted to re-work ideas of transnationalism and dias-
pora by challenging assumptions of unitary interests among diasporic groups and by
revealing the ways in which they are stratified by class and gender and varying
political agendas and interests (Labelle & Midy, 1999; Hardill & Raghuram, 1998).
255Review Essay / Political Geography 20 (2001) 247–256
What these and other approaches indicate is that diaspora and transnationalism
need not rely on questionable historical claims about what life was like before and
after globalization to convey a sense of fluidity, interconnectedness, and transform-
ation. They show also that adopting an approach that is not nation-state centric does
not require that we remove the nation-state from our analysis. It necessitates, rather,
that we scrutinize the ways in which different actors are implicated in the social
construction of nation, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘culture’. It also necessitates that we recognize
politics as located in multiple, overlapping socio-spatial entities, including but not
limited to the nation-state.
In positing transnationalism as ‘globalization from below’, theorists have sug-
gested that in a global era, ‘cultures’ and not just states or corporations participate
in politics. But a far more important observation is that ‘culture’ itself is political
(D. Mitchell, 2000). Despite the efforts by theorists of transnationalism to challenge
‘traditional’ analytical categories, conceptions of ethnicity and cultures as bounded,
unitary entities contained within nation-states, remain largely intact. Until we grasp
that culture reflects the constant production and reproduction of social meanings
through relationships of power, located not only in the nation-state but also in house-
holds, neighborhoods, workplaces, a truly non-state-centric approach to the social
sciences will remain an elusive goal.
Caroline Nagel
Department of International Studies, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane,
Clifton, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK
E-mail address: caroline.nagel@ntu.ac.uk
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