National Interruption

Abstract

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.