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National Interruption: Diaspora Theory and Multiculturalism in the UK

Harvard University

This essay explores the limitations of diaspora theory by engaging the forms of knowledge production that intersect domains of diaspora studies and the modern nation-state. The murder of a Sikh community member and the ensuing debates over multiculturalism in the UK in the late 1990s illustrate the extent to which the constitution of diaspora-as-problem deflects attention from more precise analysis of the nation-state's relations to alterity. The analytic of national interruption interrogates the ways in which the nation-state sees the difference of diaspora as a threat and simultaneously desires to interpellate diasporic difference into a multicultural vision of the nation's people. The construction of diasporic communities as a threat presumes that the latter is 'Other' and, as such, is separate, separable, and isolable from a national people. On the other hand, the diasporic subject as a figure of promise uncritically recuperates a capitalist fantasy of productive labor and commodity circulation and reinforces a nationalist fantasy wherein diasporic difference may be abstracted into national equivalence.

Key Words: diaspora • nation • race • South Asians • UK

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