RP2: Always Moving

The idea of movement is something that has stuck with me over these past few weeks. Beneath everything we read, there is a sense of mobility, as if a river swirls below theories and ideas we read about and discuss. I have been taught to stabilize everything. To understand where in time, where in a physical space, something exists and place it there. Once that something is nailed to the ground, I am able to take it apart, dissect it, study it, document it, strive to understand it. This is how I've been taught to learn. It has been interesting to see a reversal of that lesson. All of a sudden everything is moving. I’m reading, talking, and thinking, but nothing is standing still for me and I’m beginning to realize I have to learn from that movement—that movement is just as crucial as the details observed when forcing something to stand still.

In Parreñas and Sui’s introduction to Asian Diasporas, they juxtapose this stagnancy with movement in various ways. They use the example of culture and culture within diaspora as one way expose this juxtaposition. First, Parreñas and Sui address the common way to view culture: “We think of culture as a heuristic device to examine a dimension of everyday life that ‘attends to situated and embodied difference’…Culture is not a laundry list of properties that make up a bundle we categorize as X culture or Y culture” (Parreñas and Sui 22). Here, Parreñas and Sui are negating the easy way to think about culture. Decategorizing and destabilizing culture, they remove the object and view culture differently: “It is not a thing but a process by which differences are mobilized to articulate boundaries between and within groups. It is a process that is ongoing, contested, and constantly changing; it involves negotiation, production, and transformation” (22). Instead of separating culture into categories and dissecting it, making it easier to understand and put in a drawer, culture becomes un-graspable. It is not a thing but a process. Within that process is mobility, and through that mobility differences arise and create boundaries between groups, between cultures. These are not, however, two separate groups. They are a web of groups with intersecting similarities and distinctive differences. These boundaries are constantly changing as situations change. They change with the movement of the river. This idea of culture is essential to the mobility of diasporas in various ways. One way is through the amnesia of diaspora.

The Parreñas and Sui chapter examines “multifaceted ways in which the meaning of being in diaspora is actively constructed through memory and forgetting, performance, and ritual…[and] asks how the Indian diaspora remembers; forgets; and reconstructs tastes, aromas, sentiments, and affiliations in the twenty-first century” (22). This amnesia has many facets, one of which is directly linked to the idea of mobility. Diaspora is not about a fixed time, with a fixed origin and a fixed destination. It is based on memory and forgetting, on performance or action, and ritual and tradition. It is based on culture and the ever-transforming, ever-changing nature of culture. It is not a single point in time. You cannot claim diaspora as history, pin-point its location and place it in a box. It seeps through time and space and is always moving, swirling—a river soaking into the soil, continually changing course.