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Asian Diaspora Commentaries & critiques, essays & reviews
 The site is devoted to a wide range of issues of interest and relevance to the South Asian Diaspora settled in the West and elsewhere.
 

 Diaspora perspective

We use the term 'host' or receiver to denote the country where the diaspora have  settled. Diaspora-related issues can arise from three broadly based categories:

 

a) Life in the receiving country
    Formerly the colonised, now we are minorities in the metropolitan centres.

  - How did we get here? How have we been received?

  - What have we achieved so far - in education, Arts, business,...?

  - What sort of society is this? What are its values? Is it multicultural?

    How tolerant, just or equal?

  - How are we relating to the host society, state institutions & local communities?
 

b) Relating to the homeland.

  - through professional contacts, community projects, cultural exchanges, responses to political & economic developments of concern to the diaspora.

 

c) Relations between (i) host & homeland, (ii) West & Third World

    This category throws up a huge range of issues: colonial history, imperialism, religion, media etc.

 

Comments welcome.

 

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 Main Categories

Here are broad areas to be explored:

  • Community - our origins, demography, our Arts, etc
  • Discourse - colonial history, western  worldview, concepts & thought categories
  • Religion - history & state of Christianity, what religious leaders say, morality, ...

  • Media - relations with state, business & people, propaganda, representation of  minorities,...

  • State - foreign policy, the new imperialism, immigration, social justice issues
  • Economic issues - neo-liberalism, globalisation, EU issues, ...
  • Society - youth culture, decadence, racism, ...


      Coverage is in the form of short commentaries & critiques, essays & reviews.

   

 

What they said and did
 Read what the colonial and other 'heroes' of empire and imperialism (like Churchill) had to say.
Be prepared to be surprised and shocked.

 

 What they said

 

Noam Chomsky, political analyst and social critic (1969):
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to seek the truth lying behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest…”

 

Salman Rushdie, novelist, about TV misrepresentations  (1984):
“It always matters to label rubbish as rubbish; to ignore it is to legitimise it… passivity always serves the interests of the status quo…”

 

A Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations, London (1992):
“We live in a disinformation society…and those of us who have had the privilege of an education must use it for the good of the community… telling the people like it is”.

 

Edward Said (1935-2003) renowned scholar & literary critic
"Resistance is an alternative way of conceiving human history... Writing back to the metropolitan centres, replacing the European narratives of the Orient and Africa is a major way of breaking down the barriers between cultures."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read about  the New Diaspora Forum
  To join this group, send a blank email to  newdiaspora-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Contact: info@new-diaspora.com

 

 

Selected Topics

Capitalism, the Market, Neo-liberalism
 General Introduction
 Capitalism is one of the products of the Enlightenment of 18th century, together with the primacy of reason, exaltation of individualism & private property, the promotion of progress through science & rationality.
Capitalism is an economic system run by a mutually supportive network of business & political elites. The driving force is institutionalised greed: the aim is to accumulate & control resources, and to produce goods and services to be sold for profit. Capital accumulation is the supreme goal. The notion of market is used to describe the processes and players involved.

Neo-Liberalism - an introduction

The whole point of neo-liberalism is that the market mechanism should be allowed to direct the fate of human beings. The economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. 
1) So how did neo-liberalism ever emerge from its ghetto to become the dominant doctrine in the world today?
2) Why can the IMF and the Bank intervene at will and force countries to participate in the world economy on basically unfavourable terms.
3) Why is the Welfare State under threat in all the countries where it was established?

Democracy

Western version
It is representative democracy that is found in the capitalist countries of the West and their followers like India. We don't hear of the real thing – participatory democracy in which people are active participants in decision-making.

In the West, people are allowed to choose from a party-selected list of representatives every 4 or 5 years. These reps have been selected by political parties not by consulting the people but who are acceptable to the state and corporate elites. The winning party forms the government but the people have no power to monitor the performance reps who remain under the control of the party

 

.UK democracy in crisis
In February 2006, a panel led by Labour peer and QC Helena Kennedy published a report titled 'Power to the People - an independent inquiry into Britain's democracy' (www.powerinquiry.org).

The Independent (27 Feb 06) commented:
"Democracy faces meltdown in Britain as the public rejects an outdated political system which has centralised more authority than ever in a tiny ruling elite, the Power inquiry warns today. The inquiry says that there is a 'very widespread sense that citizens feel their views and interests are not taken sufficiently into account'."

 

Equality
 General introduction

 

Freedom
 General introduction
Freedom of Speech

 

Grief & Compassion
 Grieving for one's own 1

Grieving for one's own 2

 

History
 History writing - introduction

History writing - what historians say

 

Justice

General introduction

 

Language in the service of power

Language & propaganda
Literary canon

 

Liberalism
General Introduction

 

Morality

General introduction

Moral responsibility
[To add views of Richard Dawkins]

 

Orientalism

General introduction

Said's Introductions 1978 & 2003
Orientalist view of India prior to conquest

 

Nation & Nation-State
General Introduction

Nation & Autonomy
 

Modernity

General introduction

 

Rationality
General Introduction
 

 Natural Selection
General Introduction
Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The term was introduced by Darwin in his groundbreaking 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which natural selection was described by analogy to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favored for reproduction.
The concept of natural selection was originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity; at the time of Darwin's writing, nothing was known of modern genetics. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical and molecular genetics is termed the modern evolutionary synthesis. Natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution.