When they leave it after their visit they feel that they have left something of themselves behind, yet they also realise that they could never live there. Deep in their hearts they know that they love China best when they live well away from the place.[1]

Never mind Pan's overgeneralised 'they', her construction of the 'overseas Chinese' as an overly homogeneous collective subject - although it is precisely this imagined and imaginary unity that I would like to problematise in this paper. To begin with, it is the troublesome double-bind invoked by Pan as the common experience of members of the Chinese diaspora that interests me here. It is the kind of double-bind shared by millions of people throughout the world today, where migration has become an increasingly common phenomenon. The experience of migration brings with it a shift in perspective; to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, for the migrant, it is not 'where you're from' but 'where you're at' that forms the point of anchorage in everyday life.[2]

However, in a world in which the modern nation-state still forms the dominant framework for cultural identification and construction of imagined community, the question of 'where you're from' tends to overwhelm and marginalise that of 'where you're at'. As any migrant knows whenever she or he is asked the deceptively simple and innocent question, 'Where are you from?', the compulsion to explain, the inevitable positioning of oneself as deviant vis-a-vis the taken-for-granted, remains. Whenever no singular and straightforward answer to this question can be given, the hegemony of nationality as key marker of cultural origin and belonging is both exposed and reproduced. In other words, for migrants, the relation between 'where you're from' and 'where you're.'at' is a deeply problematical one. To be sure, it is this very problem that is both constitutive of the idea of diaspora, and for which the idea of diaspora attempts to be a solution. As William Safran has put it, 'diaspora consciousness is an intellectualisation of an existential condition',[3] an existential condition that becomes understood and reconciled through the myth of a homeland from which one is removed but to which one imagines one actually belongs. But I would argue that this diasporic solution, at least at the cultural level, is by no means sufficient or unambiguously effective. As Lynn Pan's description of the overseas Chinese double-bind towards China illuminates, the diasporic imagination is steeped in continuous ambivalence. This ambivalence, I would suggest, highlights the fundamental precariousness of diasporic identity-construction, its positive indeterminacy.

This is not to endorse the formalist, poststructuralist tendency to overgeneralise the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented and deterritorialised subjectivity in the postmodern world. Such nomadology, as James Clifford has dubbed it,[4] only serves to decontextualise and flatten out 'difference', as if 'we' were all, in fundamentally similar ways, always-already travellers in the same postmodern universe, the only difference residing in the different itineraries we undertake. Such a gross universalisation of the metaphor of 'travel' runs the danger of reifying, at a conveniently abstract level, the infinite and permanent flux in subject formation. This kind of thinking only results in what Lata Mani calls an abstract, depoliticised, and internally undifferentiated notion of 'difference'.[5] Against this tendency, which paradoxically would only lead to a complacent indifference toward real differences, I would like to stress the theoretical importance of continuing to pay attention to the particular historical conditions and the specific trajectories through which actual social subjects become both different and similar. That is to say, in the midst of the postmodern flux of nomadic subjectivities, we need to recognise the continuing and continuous operation of 'fixing' performed by the categories of race and ethnicity, as well as class, gender, geography and so on, on the formation of 'identity' (although it is never possible, as determinist theories would have it, to decide ahead of time how such markers of difference will inscribe their salience and effectivity in the course of concrete histories, in the context of specific social, cultural and political conjunctures). It is in this overdetermined sense that the precariousness of any identity construction should be theoretically understood.

However, this precariousness is only experienced as such when the processes of identificatory 'fixing' are denaturalised, as it were - that is, stripped from their smooth taken-for-grantedness. The experience of migration is one such site. Where actual, physical travel, a one-way trip to another place, has disrupted the 'natural' sense of'home', 'identity' becomes glaringly linked to, and explicitly constituted by, difference - in very basic, tangible ways. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie has put it like this:

The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than in places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves.[6]

Of course, migration itself is not a singular experience; it takes place under a multitude of conditions and circumstances, for different - economic, political, personal - reasons, in vastly varied contexts. The Hong Kong businessman emigrating to Australia while importing much sought-after investment capital is in a different position from the students from the People's Republic who feel forced to remain outside that country after 4 June, 1989; and their situation is very different again from that of the desperate, dispossessed 'boat people' who attempt to enter Australia in ways not accepted as legitimate - not to mention the Chinese people who came to the country decades ago, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, and who have since developed, for better or worse, Chinese-Australian identities. There is, in other words, no ideal-typical migrant, and it would therefore be unwarranted to collapse this diversity of experiences into a master-narrative of the migrant experience. However, what all migrants do share in a general sense, is precisely the need to establish, in one way or other, in more or less culturally effective ways, the 'strange fusions' Rushdie is talking about. It is here that the idea of diaspora, of diasporic identification and imagination, takes on subjective significance.

Diasporas, then, are commonly understood as transnational, spatially and temporally sprawling, sociocultural formations of people, creating imagined communities whose blurred and fluctuating boundaries are sustained by real and/or symbolic ties to some original 'homeland'. As the editors of Public Culture have put it, 'diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about anotlier place and time and create new maps of desire and of attachment'.[7] It is the myth of the (lost or idealised) homeland, the object both of collective memory and of desire and attachment, which is constitutive of diasporas, and which ultimately confines and constrains the nomadism of the diasporic subject.

But what is the status of this 'homeland' myth? Why this clinging to a place one has left behind, sometimes even centuries ago? Here is Lynn Pan again (and, for the sake of argument, let's forgive her again for her overgeneralisation):

China has repeatedly dashed their hopes, and remains to this day a country to occasion despair, a country to get away from, so limited still are its material and social possibilities, so harsh and despotic its political exactions. Even so, the millions who live outside it will never cease to wish it well, to want for it a place among the great nations, not only for the sake of their own pride and dignity, but because they find it hard to resist its power to compel tribal feeling. If they revolt against it, that itself is a reference and a tribute to the potency of what has been left behind.[8]

And, indeed, it is well known that strong institutionalised links continue to intimately connect China with overseas Chinese communities in South East Asia, the Americas, Western Europe, Australia and elsewhere. The current economic boom in southern China, for example, is largely due to capital investments of overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, leading Pan to say that 'not philosophy but money and methods have been the chief contribution of the emigrant Chinese to China'.[9] But this says nothing about the strong emotional pull China exerts on its diaspora. Why this passionate attachment to the 'homeland'? Where does this extraordinary 'power to compel tribal feeling' come from?

There is, of course, the legendary commitment to one's ancestral home and devotion to family, coupled with the important value of filial piety, which are often foregrounded as key characteristics of traditional Chinese culture. Such traditional isms would presumably account for the high level of what Pan calls 'clannishness' among overseas Chinese communities.[10] Furthermore, 'tribal feeling' can be aroused among people when they feel ostracised in the place 'they're at' as a result of rampant racial discrimination - an experience any person of Chinese descent living in the West will know. That is to say, their permanent racial visibility, like that of blacks, makes it all but impossible for Chinese people to fully integrate or, worse, assimilate in mainstream society. You cannot pass. Speaking about Chinese-Americans, Pan describes the psychological effects of this predicament in her usual sweeping language:

Robbed of his singularity as Chinese, the ABC [American-born Chinese] is yet denied his Americanness by what he calls, too frequently to non-American ears, 'white racist stereotypes'.... Having aspired to Americanness and failed, or rather having succeeded and still harbouring feelings of failure, he hates himself all the more because deep down he knows that while it takes more than ordinary determination to keep one's identity intact in the United States . . . he has become detribalised partly from choice: he has renounced his Chineseness, not wanting to be identified with what was for many years a despised community.[11]

According to Pan, then, 'being an acculturated Chinese American is unsatisfying',[12] or at least is often experienced as such, and this is why there is a new emphasis on diasporic identification with Chinese origins among many overseas Chinese today, in the United States and elsewhere.

However, I would suggest that there are also more structural, historical reasons for the extraordinarily strong command of the idea of China on the Chinese diaspora. This has to do with how 'East' and 'West' are discursively positioned in relation to each other in the global cultural order. Chinese history has been persistently dominated by the notion of the uniqueness of the Middle Kingdom, exemplified by the age-old Chinese habit of designating all non-Chinese as 'barbarians', 'foreign devils' or 'ghosts'. This is a form of cultural self-centredness expressed in the famous inward-looking aloofness of Chinese culture, an attitude which was criticised a few years ago, in China itself, in the controversial television series, River Elegy. This historically-rooted Chinese ethnocentrism is complemented and reinforced by the prominent place of 'China' in the global imagination. The West's fascination with China as a great, Other civilisation began with Marco Polo and remains to this day.[13] In the Western imagination, China cannot be an ordinary country, so that everything happening there is invested with more than 'normal' significance. We only have to think of the intense and extreme dramatisation of the 'Tienanmen massacre' in the Western media. There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to 'China'; 'China' has often been useful for Western thinkers as a symbol, negative or positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi has noted, even Jacques Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was seduced into treating the non-phonetic character of the Chinese language as 'testimony of a powerful movement of civilisation developing outside of all logocentrism', that is, as the sign of a culture totally different from what he conceives as Western culture.[14]

This construction of 'East' and 'West' as mutually exclusive seriously complicates the sense of identity of Chinese people throughout the world. Overseas Chinese people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China's elevated status as privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. In this sense, Rey Chow's observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an 'obsession with China' is an astute one.[15] For example, it is this obsession which made millions of overseas Chinese all over the world feel so inescapably and 'irrationally' sick and nauseous when the tanks crushed the students' movement at Tienanmen Square on 4 June, 1989 - as if they felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite the fact that many, if not most of them would never think of actually 'returning' to this distant 'motherland'. The desires, fantasies and sentimentalisms that go into this 'obsession with China', says Chow, should be seen, at least in part, as 'a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed internationally in multiple ways, to such a [collective, "Chinese"] identity'.[16] In other words, the subjective processes of diasporic identification are not just a 'natural' reflex of nostalgia towards the 'homeland'; importantly, they articulate and confirm, in a more fundamental sense, a position of subordination in relation to Western hegemony, on the one hand, and the cultural absolutism of Chinese Otherness on the other.

But this symbolic orientation toward the 'homeland' tends to amplify, not reduce, the problem of identity for the diasporic subject. 'China' is presented as the cultural/geographical core in relation to which the overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own 'impurity'. As Chow has observed, 'Chinese from the mainland are [often felt to be] more "authentic" than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been "Westernised"'.[17] But the problem is exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, such as for the Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia or for second-generation Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Australians, whose 'Chineseness' is even more diluted and impure.

This brings us back to the wide diversity and heterogeneity within the imagined community of the Chinese diaspora, a diversity and heterogeneity related to the dispersal of where 'they're at'. It is in these concrete localities that viable ways of being Chinese, however impure, must be forged, negotiated and articulated. And it is only by taking into serious consideration the specificity of local context, the 'where you're at' - and the constraints it imposes and the opportunities it offers - that the impure can be understood in its own terms, rather than as a sign of inauthenticity, of Chineseness manqué. There is a wealth of literature on specific histories of particular Chinese communities in different parts of the world, much of which is referred to in Pan's book. Here, I will limit myself to emphasising, at a theoretical level, that Chineseness is not a static essence; instead, what should be pointed out is the indeterminacy and changeability of the meaning of Chineseness as a niarker of and for 'identity'.

Being Chinese in South East Asian societies, for example, carries very different social and cultural meanings from being Chinese in white, Western societies. For example, in today's Indonesia, where people of Chinese descent make up a small part - some 3 per cent - of the population, Chineseness is a more or less forbidden cultural identity. The official policy of assimilation has pressured the Chinese minority to erase as many traces of Chineseness as possible - by having them adopt Indonesian names, for instance, or abstain from Chinese customs, or through intermarriage. Under such circumstances, exploring Chinese ethnicity has become all but impossible, at least in a collective and cultural sense, despite the fact that, in Indonesia as much as in other South East Asian countries, the Chinese minorities are over-represented in the economically successful 'new middle class' that forms the backbone of the rapid capitalist development of these countries today.[18]

The situation of the Indonesian Chinese has evolved in very different ways from that of their relatives in the Netherlands who largely migrated from postcolonial Indonesia in the I 960s, especially after the 1965 coup that brought Suharto to power. Since then, the Indonesian Chinese community in the Netherlands, while generally well-integrated in Dutch society, has re-ethnicised itself tremendously, especially in the last decade or so. What is interesting is that it is Chineseness, not Indonesianness, that forms the primary focal point of ethnic identification, especially for the older generation. Most of them had their formative years when the Dutch colonisers were still in power and, consequently, Indonesian nationalism is more or less alien to them, not least because the indigenous Indonesians, in response to Dutch apartheid strategies that separated the 'foreign Orientals' (the Chinese) from the 'natives', chose to construct the Indonesian nation as an imagined community that excluded the non-natives such as the Chinese, but also other migrant groups such as the Arabs.[19]

Once they had emigrated to the Netherlands (the former coloniser!), these overseas Chinese did not have many reasons to sustain their cultural and personal ties with Indonesia (except for the fact that they might still have family living there); instead, when they realised that they could not become thoroughly Dutch (or Western) either, they, like the Chinese-Americans described by Pan, reached back to their more primordial notion of origins: Chinese culture. As a result, there are now Indonesian Chinese associations, sports and entertainment clubs, discussion evenings, lessons in Chinese language and culture, and special trips to China are being organised. Some of them familiarise themselves with the imputed homeland by collecting and exchanging large numbers of video films and documentaries about China and China-related subjects, mostly taped from television (and it is amazing how often European public television features programmes about China!). So, whenever I visit my parents these days, I am assured of a new dose of audiovisual education in Chineseness, as together we watch films about the Yellow River, the Silk Route, Taoism, Chinese village life, the Great Wall, the Chinese Red Army, the history of Chinese communism, the Tienanmen Square massacre, or any Chinese feature film recently televised (the Fifth Generation films loom large there), and so on and on.

This is just one example - drawn from my personal experience - of how the assertion of a Chinese ethnic identity is currently being made in Western societies. As has been said before, Lynn Pan signals a similar 'obsessive preoccupation with etlinicity',[20] as she calls it, in the United States and Britain (she doesn't speak about Australia). And as is well known, the ethnic Chinese are by no means alone in this. It is important to historicise these developments; they coincide with more general cultural transformations in these postindustrial and postmodern societies from the 1960s onwards: the coming of ex-colonised people to the capital cities of the former colonial empires in Western Europe; the breakdown of the 'melting pot' in the United States and its replacement by the notion of cultural pluralism; and, in this country, the abolition, in the early 1970s, of the White Australia policy in favour of an official policy of multiculturalism. If anything, these developments have, in specific ways, fuelled the desire for ethnic identification among non-dominant minority groups everywhere, and provided the context for the emergence of what is now commonly called 'identity politics'.

This is not the place to enter into a full discussion about the predicaments of identity politics.[21] The point I want to make here is that such (self-)ethnicisation, however empowering it can be for the individual subjects concerned, is in itself a confirmation of one's minority status in white, Western culture. Furthermore, it can paradoxically serve as an alibi for what Rey Chow has called 'prescribed "otherness"'.[22] Thus, in and through the desire to mark out Chineseness as privileged sign of a separate identity, 'Chinese' ethnicity runs the risk of being confined to essentialist and absolute notions of 'Chineseness', the source of which can only be 'China', the mythic homeland which one is supposedly ultimately 'from', and to which the ethnicised 'Chinese' subject must adhere to acquire the stamp of what Trinh Minh-ha has called 'planned authenticity'.[23]

One example: a common frustration shared by many third- (or more) generation overseas Chinese is the response to their negative answer to the question, 'Do you speak Chinese?' The very assumption that a person of Chinese descent should be able to speak Chinese is a presumption born of a conflation of race and ethnicity, and puts the overseas Chinese in a no-win situation: she is either 'too Chinese' or 'not Chinese enough'. It exemplifies the fact that when tIle question of 'where you're from' threatens to overwhelm the reality of 'where you're at', the idea of diaspora becomes a disempowering rather than an empowering one, a hindrance to 'identity' rather than an enabling principle.

I am not saying, here, that diasporic identifications are intrinsically oppressive - on tlie contrary. It is clear that many members of ethnic minorities derive a sense of joy and dignity, as well as a sense of (vicarious) belonging, from their identification with a 'homeland' that is elsewhere. What I'm saying is that this very identification with an imagined 'where you're from' is also often a sign of, and surrender to, a condition of actual marginalisation in the place 'where you're at'. As Safran has put it,

diaspora consciousness... is a defense mechanism against slights committed by the host country against the minority, but it does not - and is not intended to - lead its members to prepare for the actual departure for the homeland. The 'return' of most diasporas... can thus he seen as a largely eschatological concept: it is used to make life more tolerable by holding out a utopia - or eutopia - that stands in contrast to the perceived dystopia in which actual life is lived.[24]

In his introduction to the launch~in 1991 of the new journal, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Siudies, Khachig Tölölyan claims that diasporas are 'the exemplary communities of the transnational moment', which interrogate the privileged homogeneity of the nation-state.[25] At the same time, however, the very fact that ethnic minorities within nation-states are defining themselves increasingly in diasporic terms, as Tölölyan indicates, raises some troubling questions about the state of intercultural relations in the world today. The rise of militant, separatist, ethnic nationalisms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the world signals an intensification of the appeal of ethnic absolutism and exclusionism which underpin the homeland myth, and which are based on the fantasy of a complete juncture of 'where you're from' and 'where you're at' leaving those whose identities cannot be framed in this structure of sameness in a limbo. Such developments also highlight the enormous obstacles that the liberal-pluralist project of multiculturalism - as implemented in a number of nation-states, including Australia - is bound to encounter.

But it is also precisely against the background of such developments that the idea of diaspora can play a constructive cultural role. Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope, always linking the local and the global, the here and the there, past and present, they have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of 'national culture' or 'national identity' with origins firmly rooted in fixed geography and common history. But in order to seize on that potential, diasporas should make the most of their 'complex and flexible positioning ... between host countries and homelands',[26] as it is precisely this complexity and flexibility that makes for the vitality of diaspora cultures. In other words, a critical cultural politics of diaspora should privilege neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative tension between 'where you're from' and 'where you're at'. I emphasise creative here to foreground the multiperspectival productivity of that position of in-between-ness. The notions of 'biculturality' and 'double consciousness', often used to describe this position, hardly do justice to this productivity. Such notions tend to construct the space of that in-between-ness as an empty space, the space that gets lost in the cultural translation from one side to the other in the bipolar dichotomy of 'where you're from' and 'where you're at'. But the productivity I am referring to precisely fills that space up with new forms ofculture at the point of collision/ collusion of the two: hybrid cultural forms born of a productive, creative syncretism. This is a practice and spirit of turning necessity into opportunity, the promise of which is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Salman Rushdie: 'It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained'.[27]

Let me give another simple example here. 'Westernised' Chinese people are often called 'bananas', a term of abuse, meaning 'yellow skin, white inside'. Perhaps it is time for bananas to stand up for themselves, and attach positive meanings to banana identity!

It is by recognising the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of particular overseas Chinese cultures that 'China', the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute norm for 'Chineseness', against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora are measured. Instead, 'Chineseness' becomes an open signifier which acquires its peculiar forms and contents in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people construct new, hybrid identities and communities, both in the places where they're at and, where possible and desired, in connection with each other. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American invention utterly unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or, for that matter, in China itself. In Malaysia, one of the culinary attractions is nyonya food, a cuisine developed by the peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices and ingredients. A few years ago, I was at a Caribbean party in Amsterdam, full of migrants from the Dutch West Indies. To my surprise, the best salsa dancer of the party was a young ethnic Chinese man, who grew up in Suriname. There I was, with my previously held prejudice that Chinese bodies can't dance ...

Such inventions are not signs of inauthenticity, but only add to the repertoire of modes of being that can be included in the open-ended and polysemic rubric of 'Chineseness'. These examples suggest that we need to emphasise the irreducible specificity of diverse and heterogeneous diasporic identifications. This, in turn, means that the 'imagined community' of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned in any unified or homogeneous way. Chinese ethnicity, as a common reference-point for this imagined community, cannot presume the erasure of internal differences and particularities, as well as disjunctures, as the basis of unity and collective identity.

In this thoroughly mixed-up, interdependent, mobile and volatile postmodern world, clinging to a traditional notion of ethnic identity is impossible. Inasmuch as the stress on ethnicity provides a counterpoint to the most facile forms of postmodernist nomadology, however, we might have to develop a postmodern notion of ethnicity. This postmodern ethnicity can no longer be experienced as naturally based upon tradition and ancestry, on a single origin. Rather, it is experienced as a provisional and partial 'identity', which must he constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated. In this context, diasporic identifications with a specific ethnicity (such as 'Chineseness') can best be seen as forms of what Gayatri Spivak calls 'strategic essentialism',[28] which enable diasporic subjects, not to 'return home' but, in the words of Stuart Hall, to 'insist that others recognise that what they have to say comes out of particuIar histories and cultures and that everyone speaks from positions within the global distribution of power'.[29]

Notes

[1] Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor. London: Mandarin, 1990, p.379.

[2] Paul Gilroy, "It Ain't Where You're From, It's Where You're At... The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification" Third Text 13, Winter 1990/91, pp.3-16.

[3] William Safran. 'Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths or Homeland and Return' in Diaspora 1-1, 1991, p.87.

[4] James Clifford. "Travelling Cultures" in Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds). New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.96-112.

[5] Lata Mani. "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning" in Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg et al (ed), pp.392-93.

[6] Salman Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1991, pp.124-25.

[7] "Editors' Comment: On Moving Targets" Public Culture 2-1, 1989, p.1.

[8] Pan, p.379.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, p.20.

[11] lbid, p.288.

[12] Ibid, p.287.

[13] See, for example, Cohn MacKerras. Western Images of China. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991.

[14]' Zhang Longxi. "The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West" Critical Inquiry 15-I, Autumn 1988, p.127.

[15] Rey Chow. Woman and Chinese Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

[16] Ibid, p.25.

[17] Ibid, pp.28-29.

[18] About ihe position of the Chinese in Indonesia, see, for example, Lao Suryadinata. Primubi lndonesians, the Chinese Minority and China. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann, 1975.

[19] For an analysis of the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, see, for example, Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, I 983). Chapter 7.

[20] Pan, p.289.

[21] On this subject, See, for example, Jonathan Rutherford (ed.). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

[22] Chow, p.xvi.

[23] Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

[24] Sarran, p.94.

[25] Khachig Tö1ölyan, "The Nation-State and its Others" Diaspora I-1, 1991, pp.3-7.

[26] Sarran, p.95.

[27] Rushdie, p.17.

[28] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In Other Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1988, p.205.

[29] Stuart Hall. "The Meaning of New Times" in New Times. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds.). London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989, p.133.