Session 3(a): Negotiating Placements
Session 3(a): Negotiating Placements
Chair: Andy Byford
Are National Minorities of the Former USSR becoming new Diasporas? The Case of the Tatars of Kazakhstan
Yves-Marie Davenel
EHESS, Paris, France
Tatars of the Volga region belong to an ethnic group disseminated all over the former countries of the USSR and in a numerous states of the world. Nevertheless, they have never been studied as a diaspora. Until recently they were considered just as ethnic (or national) minorities among others in the soviet republics. Since the collapse of the USSR, this situation has changed. In Kazakhstan, the state’s official policies have developed a pragmatic approach on the issue of nationality policy promoting the ethnonational diversity. While promoting ethnic pluralism, however, the State has made the promotion of the “natives”, firsts among equals, and raised the question of autochthony for the other groups.
At the same time, the term diaspora has become widespread in the former USSR and in contemporary Kazakhstan to refer to the former national minorities. The use of this term questions the relationship between the titular nation and the national minorities in introducing a differentiation between “we” and “they”.
Thanks to materials of field works, this paper aims at demonstrating how the Tatars, who lived in Kazakhstan for more than two centuries, are facing these new questions about their own identity and place in the kazak society.
I analyse what kind of discourses about their identity the Tatars living in Kazakhstan produce today and how these discourses reflect their position as a diaspora or as an ethnic minority. Do they belong to the new civic category of kazakhstani or do they consider themselves as nationals of the new independent Tatarstan? The responses to these questions are plural and open and can change according to the different regions of the country and inside the group of Tatars.
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From Pam-Nationalism to cosmopolitanism: Epistemological Tensions and contending Global imaginaries in Filipino Diasporic Activism
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt
University of Western Australia, Australia
Although listed under the common rubric of globalisation, diasporas and transnational social movements have mostly been treated as mutually exclusive phenomena. This paper seeks to remedy this oversight in its examination of transnational social movements within the Filipino diaspora. As early as the 1890s, diasporic Filipinos were organising in Spain for the Philippine nationalist revolution. Again, in the 1970s, Filipinos in the diaspora played no small part in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship. In the 1990s, the central issue to emerge was that of holding the US military accountable for the toxic waste it left behind after the closure of its Philippine bases. This paper is interested, in particular, in the implications of the passage from modernity (characterised, most importantly for this paper, by the pre-dominance of the nation-state system) to postmodernity (characterised by new supranational, or post-national, forms of sovereignty), or, in short, in ‘globalisation.’ Many diasporic Filipinos are modifying their politics in light of globalisation, creating new transnational epistemologies and practices in order to more adequately challenge the ever-increasing transnationalisation of capital. Meanwhile, others continue to cling to nationalist ideologies of the past, thereby arguably rendering them increasingly ineffectual in struggle. The question that emerges as central in this paper is that regarding the tensions between the increasingly global and cosmopolitan lives of diasporic Filipino activists (not to mention the increasingly globalised character of the forces they are fighting against), and their seemingly anachronistic nationalist ideologies. This tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism could in fact be considered one of the most crucial questions of our time, being symptomatic as it is, of the epochal watershed that we currently find ourselves in.
In the Shadow of the Shamrock: the tension between the Irish diaspora’s collective memory of dispossession and the reality of dispossession in colonial NSW
Paddy (Pat) Cavanagh
School of Education, Australian Catholic University (Strathfield Campus), New South Wales, Australia
When an Irish diaspora began to develop in New South Wales after the establishment of a British colony there in 1788 its prior history of dispossession, disempowerment and discrimination under the English Ascendancy and the Penal Code had already forged a group identity based on a sense of injustice and oppression that was deeply embedded in the collective imagination.
The Catholic Church, which was simultaneously establishing its institutional identity in NSW, had an interest in maintaining the cohesiveness of the Irish diaspora. Throughout the colonial era the Church was the most significant influence in maintaining and reinforcing the diaspora’s cultural identity while at the same time encouraging its economic, social and political advancement in the host country.
This created some tension between the diasporic imagination and reality for both the Church and the community had been transformed from being the colonised and oppressed in the home country to being the colonisers and oppressors of indigenous people in the host country. This paper explores the origins of this tension by examining the relationship between the pioneering Irish Catholic priest, John Joseph Therry, his Irish diasporic flock, and Aboriginal people.
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