people who belonged to a single home nation in
every way.
Even as postcolonial nation-building attempts
to territorialize and naturalize diasporic encoun-
ters produced by colonialism and coax stable
social formations out of them, the forces of glob-
alization have thrown up further mobilities of
people across borders, detaching them from the
home nation and inserting them elsewhere, this
time facilitated by the space–time compression
of an even more interconnected globe wrought
by modern transportation and communications
technology. Terms such as ‘diaspora’ and
‘transnationalism’ have stirred the imagination
of commentators describing the transience and
ambivalence of movements across spaces today,
as illustrated in John Lie’s description:The idea of diaspora – as an unending sojourn across
different lands – better captures the emerging reality
of transnational networks and communities than the
language of immigration and assimilation ... It is no
longer assumed that emigrants make a sharp break from
their homelands. Rather, premigration networks,
cultures, and capital remain salient. The sojourn itself is
neither unidirectional nor final. Multiple, circular, and
return migrations, rather than a singular great journey
from one sedentary space to another, occur across
transnational spaces. People’s movements, in other
words, follow multifarious trajectories and sustain
diverse networks. (1995: 304)As many authors have recently argued (see, for
example, Anthias, 1998; Brah, 1996; Clifford,
1997; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1995; articles in
Huang, et al., 2000), the concepts of diaspora
and diasporic identities provide for a less essen-
tialized and more historically and analytically
informed framework to understand not only the
large and complex range of transmigrant move-
ments that is taking place today, but also the
ability to challenge our existing conceptions of
culture, place and identity as closed, fixed and
unchanging.
The kaleidoscope of diasporic spaces pro-
duced under the mobilities associated with colo-
nialism, and further subjected to the disciplining
gaze of nationalism with its concerns over terri-
toriality and the inviolability of the social body
within the nation’s borders, is hence once more
shaken up by globalizing forces. Not only must
nations and nationalisms be problematized in the
context of colonial and postcolonial experiences,
as Winichakul (1994) argues in the case of
Asia in general and Thailand in particular, migra-
tions and diasporas which disrupt the nation’s
‘geo-body’ must also be understood in a similarly
multifaceted context. Even as ‘colonialism’sgeographies’ are already highly complex –
‘overlain with other cartographies of indigenous
exchange, dependency, accommodation, appro-
priation, and resistance’, as Anderson (2000: 384)
notes – each turn of the kaleidoscope continues
to fracture previous patterns and introduce new
instabilities. This leads Cohen to conclude
that ‘globalization and diasporization are sepa-
rate phenomena with no necessary causal con-
nection ... [but] they do “go together”
extraordinarily well’ (1997; 175), albeit in ways
which obfuscate the ironic twists in history. As
Kang notes,It is an irony of history that Japan, the former colonial
power and aggressor in Asia, has been reborn as an
‘ethnically homogenous’ [sic] nation-state, while the
victims of colonialism and fascism have been sundered
apart and separated. However, with globalization and
the gradual breakup of the Cold War, the history and
memories of the colonized peoples who have been sun-
dered apart [and scattered around Asia] have emerged
in the form of history with a small ‘h’. (2001: 137)Identity formation and its postcolonial
‘migrancy’ have to be understood not as captive,
or traced in some unilinear fashion, to colonialism,
but instead constituted by a skein of tangled
threads, of which the ambitions of colonial
empires and the diasporas of their imperial sub-
jects form one significant strand. Indeed if
‘roots’ always precede and are inextricably inter-
twined with ‘routes’, as Clifford (1997: 3)
observes, then it has to be added that these
‘roots’ are intricately rhizomatic ones. Returning
to the case of Japan, despite the fact that the
Japanese empire was ‘once burdened with the
complexities and inequalities of an ethnically
and culturally mixed population’ and complicit
in the creation of ‘diasporic existence’ among
people of Korean descent, for example, post-war
national history has attempted to reduce these
complexities to ‘the history of a single ethnic
identity’ played out within the geography of the
four ‘home islands’, thereby forgetting the other
peoples of empire (Kang, 2001: 141). It is
against this history of selective remembering and
forgetting, and as part of the unfolding tensions
between ‘empire’/‘nation’ on the one hand and
‘diasporas’ on the other, that contemporary
transnational migrations are taking place, trou-
bling the complexly fractured but concealed
history of the nation.
This is central to Vera Mackie’s (2002) analy-
sis of the ‘spaces of difference’ formed as a result
of the insertion of immigrant others into the
fabric of Japanese society, once thought to be
homogeneous. She argues that ‘the relationships374 AFTER EMPIRE3029-ch19.qxd 03-10-02 10:58 AM Page 374