Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

Review
Author(s): Diana Leonard
Review by: Diana Leonard
Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1997), pp. 597-600
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393062
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 of Education,Vol.18, No. 4, 1997
BritishJournalof Sociology 597

EXTENDED REVIEW

DIANA LEONARD, Instituteof Education,Universityof London, UK

Cartographies of Diaspora: contesting identities

AVTARBRAH, 1996
London and New York, Routledge
Hard and paperback

Cartographiesof Diaspora is collection of previously published articles together with two

important new ones. The former include several which were associated with the key
Open University courses on Minority Experience (in 1982) and 'Race', Education and
Society (in 1992); others derive from empirical studies of employed and unemployed
'South Asian' young women and men in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s; and a final
group focus on the changing politics of organising around class, race and gender under
the influencing of/influencing the reframing of 'culture' by post-structuralism and
postmodernism. This theoretical work is taken up again in the two new chapters.
There is, therefore, much in the book which will be familiar to readers of this journal,
since Avtar Brah is well known in her field; and there is also a certain amount of overlap
between the (revised) previously published chapters, welcome as it is to have them
together in one volume. I propose therefore to concentrate on the stimulating last
chapters, which seek to theorise the new phase of mass population migrations across the
globe since the 1980s and to further decentre the analyses produced in western societies,
though I shall also draw on the earlier chapters to clarify some of the problems I have
with the work.
Before starting, it should be said that Brah's theoretical chapters do not make easy
reading. The writing is very dense and her meanings compacted. She makes a number
of sidetracks to show how she differs from other writers, which waylay her central
argument; and her empirical examples are eclectic-from the Burnage Report to the
Gulf War- tantalisingly short and under-developed. As a result the thesis builds slowly.
While my last comments make clear my preference for seeing theories applied in
sustained analyses of particular localities and events, and these specifics then being used
in turn to build up theory, Brah would probably disagree. She specifically criticises the
embeddedness of previous work on migrations, and the place the Jewish diaspora holds
in European cartographies of displacement, as the diaspora par excellence.She wants to
produce an interpretive frame referencing the economic, political and cultural dimen-
sions of all contemporary forms of migrancy of communities-those 'multiple journeys
[which] configure into one journey via a confluenceof narrativesas it is lived and re-lived,
produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory
and re-memory' (p. 183, stress in original):
the concept of diaspora should be understood in terms of historically contin-
gent 'genealogies' in the Foucauldian sense; that is, as an ensemble of
0142-5692/97/040597-04 ? 1997 Carfax PublishingLtd

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598 Extended
Review

investigative technologies that historicise trajectories of different diasporas, and

analyse their relationality across field of social relations, subjectivity and
identity. (p. 180)
the term should be seen as conceptual mapping which defies the search for
originary absolutes, or genuine and authentic manifestations of a stable,
pre-given, unchanging identity; for pristine, pure customs and traditions or
unsullied glorious pasts. (p. 196)

She stresses we all (now) live in a matrix of migrations: in a 'diasporic space' inhabited
not only by those who have migrated and their descendents, but equally by those who
are constructed and represented as indigenous; in an intertwining of the genealogies of
dispersion with those of staying put. Also that border crossings (she avoids the term
'hybridity') occur not just across the dominated/dominant dichotomy, but equally within
and between dominated groups, and not always mediated through the dominant
culture(s). She argues we should stop thinking in terms of 'minority' identities, located at
the periphery of something central, since this serves 'to reinforce the hegemonic relations
that inscribe this dichotomy' (p. 189), and instead engage 'with complex arrays of
contiguities and contradictions; of changing multilocationality across time and space'
(p. 190); with relationality between populations groups, between diasporas.

'Diasporic space is the intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as

a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural, and psychic processes. It
is where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or
disavowed.' (p. 208)

My first problem with this is that while there are strengths there are also weaknesses in
such a broad definition. Where everyone is in diaspora, there is no differentiation
between exile or forced migration, and colonisation, and immobility . As with theorising
violence, while it is initially illuminating to expand and expand-to include first
psychological violence, and then differential child mortality as structural violence,
etc-and so to see things in a different light and to realize that wherever a line drawn
is always arbitrary; in the end one either goes back to a narrow definition (in the case
of violence to physical injury) or one looses a term to describe a particular(ly bad) form.
Albeit there is a continuum-of violence and of migrations/diasporas-the extreme ends
are very different and to lose sight of this is a depoliticization. So, while I would want
to keep Brah's insights, I would favour finding another word.
My second problem with this book is that, like other work on diasporas, whether the
authors are using the term descriptively as an ethnic studies approach; or to speak of a
community held together by both the experience of exile and its sense of itself as the
Chosen, or with a postmodern/post colonial theory/cultural studies stress on identity and
change; it actually gives little space and no explanatory force to gender [1]. Brah too
often ignores gender or treats it as just another add-on element-despite her involvement
with feminist groups and her clear and repeated statement that 'Structures of class,
racism, gender and sexuality cannot be treated as "independent variables" because the
oppression of each is inscribed within the other-is constituted by and constitutive of the
other' (p. 109). Moreover, while she insists that one should not assign primacy or
privilege in analyses, reading through her collected work in the volume makes clear that
her main concern has been and remains very much 'race'/ethnicity/nationality; and that
she does not see gender and sexuality as linked through heterosexuality.

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 Extended
Review 599

This paradox is possible partly because of the very general level at which the book is
pitched. For instance, Brah says the context of diaspora embodies a subtext of 'home',
of another territory, and that this will be shaped by gender relations; but she never
explores how and why, because she does not deal with the specifics of particular
migrations or the differences in men's and women's lives in such situations. There is no
account of gender differences in forms of belonging to/of cultural identification with both
'home' and the current location; nor any consideration of who heals the traumas of
separation and dislocation and/or who builds hopes and new beginnings.
Other parts of the book suggest, moreover, that while Brah sees the 'opposition' of
groups as 'contingent' in race/ethnicity, she sees gender differently:
ethnic groups do not constitute a category of primordial ties [though] under
particular political circumstances, they [can] come to be represented in such
terms. Ethnic groups are both formed and exist within and through discursive
and material practices inscribing economic, political and cultural modalities of
power. (p. 164, stress in original)
but
Patriarchal relations are a specific form of gender relation in which women
inhabit a subordinated position. In theory, at least, it should be possible to
envisage a social context in which gender relations are not associated with
inequality. (p. 109)
I think this has to be read as indicating the writer sees a sex/genderdivisionas given (as
primordial?), though inequalitybetween men and women is contingent. This means that
although she is critical of the opposition of 'we' and 'Other' in respect of ethnicity, she
allows 'a binary that should properly be an object of deconstruction [to] gain acceptance
as an unproblematic given' (p. 184) as regards gender. Hence, although she reiterates the
need to theorise intersectionality in the final chapter, she doesn't analyse gender because
she takes this division as given (seeing only its culturally variant modalities).
So, to give an example, when illustrating multiple positioning, Brah uses Minnie Bruce
Pratt's unravelling of 'the operations of power that naturalise identities inscribed in
positions of privilege' vis a vis her own white but also lesbian mother identity in a
Southern US community. And she compares this with Angela Davis's account of growing
up Black in a similar location (pp. 205-207)-but she makes no comment on Davis's
sexuality in her positioning and in her construction of her experiential landscape. Being
heterosexual or remaining silent about one's homosexuality is not seen by Brah to be a
social power relation/ in need of deconstruction (or at least not as much as 'race').
My final problem with the book is that I want diaspora studies (narrowly or broadly
defined) to look not only at the significance of 'home' as the place from which one has
come, but also at the importance of ones 'home' in diasporic space/ in the place where
one is now living (ie at relations between men and women-by marriage and across
generations-and the group structure of households) in constructing new identities.
However, Avtar Brah's current book says little on the domestic group/home, except
in chapter 3 ('Gendered Spaces: women of South Asian Descent in 1980s') which was
advanced for its time (it was originally published 1987 and again in 1992) but now looks
very dated. It stresses the racism of many critiques of 'the Asian family' and seeks to
counter stereotypes by reporting empirical findings showing that Asian and white
15-year-olds are equally likely to be influenced by the ideology of housework and
childcare as women's work, and equally as critical of hierarchical household organisation
and male power. It also talks of the importance of the family as a support against

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600 Extended
Review

racism and the means (in the absence of viable alternatives) of providing for women's
desires for intimacy and belonging; whilst commenting (but keeping a distance from this
view) that feminists argue it is a key site of women's subordination-hence women may
feel ambivalent about it (p. 76). That is to say, Brah held/holds a somewhat middle line
in the overly dichotomized 1980s debate, where the family tended to be seen as eithera
site of exploitation or one of resistance and solidarity against racism (and classism). Most
would agree now that such simplistic either/or positions are untenable, and underline
Brah's point about ambivalence. They would also agree her point in later chapters about
the need for 'whiteness' itself to be investigated, to reveal the ways in which particular
versions of white familial femininity are constitutive of racist social relations.
However, what I would like to see put into the debate, and into grand theories of
diaspora, is consideration of how women are differently placed from men in the family-
household because it is a site of construction of ethnic belonging and simultaneously a
site of appropriation of women's labour. Moreover it is a specific part of (all) women and
girls' responsibilities to be the guardians of traditions and upholders of propriety. How
does this affect women's sense of identity(ies) in diaspora: as maintainers of relationships
with 'home'and at home,as creators ideologically and materially of senses of belonging, and
as constructors of boundaries which are sites for struggle and negotiation?
Beyond this, I would like theories of the global, the local, of hybridity or diaspora, to
build in a recognition that one of the emerging characteristics of postmodern societies is
that many individuals (adults and children) already, and more and more to come, will
share a home (live with: be married to or parented by) those who came from different
'homes' (places of origin). Households are not ethnic/diasporic units/unities.

Diana Leonard, Centre for Research and Education on Gender, Institute

Correspondence:
of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL, UK.

NOTE
[1] I am gratefulto Elaine Unterhalterfor elaborationof this point.

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