The Media of the Diaspora

Abstract

In contrast, Amir Hassanpour's study of media in the Kurdish diaspora emphatically does not support poststractural claims about a radical shift in the exercise of state power, or an intercultural Kurdish liberation. Hassanpour provides a rich analysis of Med TV, the first Kurdish satellite TV station, suggesting it did indeed contribute to a first-ever articulation of pan-Kurdish dialogue and dissent, undermine Turkish rule, and provoke reprisals. He discloses how the Turkish embassy moblized Kurds in England to rail against Med TV's "terrorism" or "hate propaganda." Particularly disgraceful is the use of international special forces to attack the network in Brussels and London during the mid-1990s. France "cracked" under public pressure and did not renew the channel's lease in 1999. By making extensive use of the diaspora and diasporic media opportunities in an interstate world order, then, Hassanpour argues that the Kurds were able to react swiftly in protest - but failed in their efforts to achieve statehood. John Downing, the noted US critical commentator (Downing & Husband, 2005), was of the view that Hassanpour's article above all others represents new challenges to theorization of diasporic studies, and this author concurs. In his study of how Bollywood places the doubly displaced viewers of the Fijian Indians in Australia, author Manas Ray argues that the study of transnationality has to abjure the master narrative of diaspora as a "slip zone" of indeterminacy and shifting positionalities. The challenge instead is to explain hybridity as the nameable held under the sign of erasure (p. 34). Importantly, Ray's dialectical analysis "clubs" different postcolonial diasporas together as parties to an original historical contract to understand "Pan Indianness," but works simultaneously to understand the particularities of different trajectories and multi-level alienation that diasporas experience in the multicultural West. Ray explores Zizek 's thesis (1997) that such study proposes a profoundly different ordering of public space as a product of growing migration and a criss-cross of different primordia. Disparate groups are tied together by the universal function of the market as constructed by the homeland and by local diasporic politics. (Bollywood's clever exploitation of constitutive myths in changing market patterns at home and abroad is textually explored at length.) Given the reverence with which [Homi Bhabha]'s concept of "third space" (1994) is held in the field (and by [Karim H. Karim] as well), it is interesting to see how Ray argues that Bhabha's focus on the intellectual in exile is only a minor part of how the South Asian dynamics of the diaspora work in general.