Book Club: Cartographies of Diaspora

The Centre for Cross-cultural Studies Book Club recently met to discuss “Cartographies of Diaspora” by Avtar Brah. The general consensus was that, although a difficult read, this was a highly stimulating book, which succeeded in presenting challenging ways of thinking about ‘difference’ in its broadest sense.

This is a brief summary of some of our specific responses:

• Since our last meeting there had been an article in the Guardian Society section, 25.4.07, which mirrored some of our misgivings about our last book, “The New East End”, particularly regarding its underlying polemic (which was linked to Margaret Hodge’s recent call for privileging indigenous population housing claims). Not only did book club members seem more at ease with Avtar Brah’s politics but, moreover, we appreciated how thoroughly she placed herself at the outset in terms of her own history and politics.
• The book was informative about Asian cultures across a wide range, incorporating India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. This informative approach was useful in breaking down stereotypes (e.g. that Asian women are non-militant, that Asian families experience particular inter-generational conflict).
• There was interest in one of the central themes of the book, “that racism is always a gendered and sexualised phenomenon” (p.156), including the observation that although racism is particular to local contexts, these contexts invariably “articulate with patriarchal class structures” (p. 110).
• Discussion gravitated towards ideas about locality: interest in the locality in which migrants settle as well as the locality from which they come, and how culture/identity thereby evolves; “If the circumstances of leaving are important, so, too, are those of arrival and settling down. How and in what ways do these journeys conclude, and intersect in specific places, specific spaces, and specific historical junctures?” (p. 182)
• From a clinical point of view, the importance of diaspora was described in terms of diaspora as the crucible in which identity is formed, conveyed by the phrase “diasporic imagined community”.
• The book ended with an ambitious (and, some found, over-ambitious and scattered) chapter subtitled “The politics of difference, commonality and universalism”.  This argues for a “new collective politics”, in which the idea of ‘diaspora space’ helps to take “cultural, economic, political, psychic and social intersectionality fully on board” (p. 248).

However, such summarizing can do justice neither to the richness of detail or breadth of such a book; so there’s no getting away from it: it’s definitely worth reading yourself.

Text by Robin Ewart-Biggs

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