Діаспора

Let the record state: I love subcultures. Big ones, small ones, ones as big as your head. I love the simultaneous exclusivity and community-building of flashily displayed signifiers, be they dyed hair, Ed Hardy T-shirts, Timberland boots, or LOLspeak. My favorite thing about spending time in large, open areas through which herds of people migrate -- airports, train stations, mall food courts -- is watching the unspoken interaction of all these signifiers, the chaotic jostling of colors and brands. I especially love the zeal showcased by the younger members of the species, whose entire bodies, in spite of an insistent outward display of boredom, act like quivering antennae, submitting a dozen urgent signals to everyone in range: Hello, world. I may look young, but I'm actually really into The Clash, and also I like old-school gaming systems, but not ironically, unlike this SpongeBob T-shirt, which is sort of ironic, but if you look closely, you'll see there's actually a delicate vein of innocent, childlike love, too, which you'll find I also exhibit in relationships, and you may find charming if you're the Prince Charming type. But as evidenced by this studded belt, I'm obviously too smart to fall for the Disney princess cliche, because I'm actually very mature for my age. Even though it has very little to do with what I'm working on for my PhD, my favorite work done in an academic setting has been stuff on subcultures, and despite feeling somewhat dated, the Bibles of my inner bibliography include such sine qua nons as Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus (unabashed shill for Lipstick Traces, the wackiest, most engrossing pseudo-academic, quasi-Marxist, mostly-memoiristic cultural study ever published by Harvard University Press).

...which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to diaspora communities; aka, the reified remains of old foreign subcultures.

I've never seen it cohesively stated, but I'm almost certain that someone has already made the comparison between marginal ethnic communities and contemporary subcultures. The similarities are too seductive: both arise as a product of a too-broad and thus somewhat alienating dominant culture. For ethnic communities, it's the big multiethnic empires of the past two centuries (which is why Bavarians, with their Weißwurst and lederhosen, seem so much more authentically German than the cosmopolitan Berliners, giving us two German archetypes in the American popular consciousness -- quaint, robust lederhosen-clad peasants and soulless Bauhaus urbanites in black turtle-necks), and for subcultures, it's the global juggernaut of bourgeois conformity and capitalist mass culture. Also, both are created by a system of signifiers that turn the dominant hierarchies on their heads -- for example, ethnic communities subvert the official state religion by injecting it with old pagan practices, and subcultures revel in taking ordinary objects (sneakers, safety pins) and turning them into signs of rebellion. And, finally, both are selectively celebrated and repressed, according to the political climate of the day. Sometimes, it's in the dominant culture's favor to trot out the subculture as a symbol of diversity and freedom, and other times the subculture represents too much of a challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of the dominant culture and needs to be stamped out. Sometimes, the time-table for these cultural mood swings is incredibly narrow: one day, Stalin is singing the praises of the diverse Soviet nationalities, and the next, it's terror and the Gulag for Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainians. Similarly, one day the Putin administration is heaping scorn on the cultural degeneracy of the Western-influenced Russian rap phenomenon, and the next day, this:



So, okay, the affinities are legion, but what complicates the matter is when ethnic communities emigrate and form diaspora communities, which are a strange hybrid of the ethnic and cultural categories. Take, for instance, this New York Times article on Veselka, the East Village Ukrainian diner. There are repeated mentions of hippies and beatniks who used to frequent the place in the 60s -- ostensibly, for the Counterculture Grand Central location and good, cheap food. But, obviously, I think there's more to it than that. I think subcultures naturally gravitate to ethnic joints because their signifying systems are extremely compatible. Moreover, these days, both the New York subcultures and Veselka have gone mainstream; the place was featured in the abysmal Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, for god's sake. Age-old story: something a few people love becomes something marketed to the masses, and all of a sudden you get Michael Cera selling you a Hollywood hipster fairy-tale.

Which brings me to my last point about the similarities between ethnic and contemporary subcultures: an uncomfortable dynamic of authenticity and artifice. Contemporary subcultures, as constantly evolving, living-breathing things, tend to cycle through signifiers at a dizzying rate. While it's fun to trace their trajectories (the reggae of the British slums moving to high-class London art students moving to American rock bands moving to Bob Marley posters on 1 out of 3 college students' walls), it's hard to ignore the artifice behind the whole subcultural enterprise. For instance, there may be some small percentage of early adopters or true aficionados who could argue that reggae was their music, or that punk was their style, but for the majority of the members of these subcultures, it was theft, pure and simple. Of course, that's part of the fun -- would dyeing your hair electric red and pretending to be an alien be so captivating if it weren't for the underlying acknowledgment of ridiculousness, sham, performance? But artifice and ethnic community don't mesh quite so well. Part of the marginalized ethnic project is, again, to continually insist on the authenticity of its cultural experience, in contrast to the artifice of the dominant culture. In diaspora communities, this insistence on authenticity continues to play out -- except the dominant culture is now American mass culture, with the ethnic acting as the marker of authenticity against the conformity of corporate capitalism. See: Gogol Bordello.

As someone with a toe in both worlds, I find the overlap equal parts fun and disturbing. Fun because, hey, my personality was forged in ethnic kitsch, and there will always be some part of me that gets off on foreignness as elite, exclusive subculture. But also disturbing, because this just hammers home how tendentious culture really is, and how insignificant ethnicity really is, except in self-deluding fantasy. And these days, I'm more comfortable with that level of self-delusion in the form of an American teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt, rather than a folk costume, if for no other reason than the disposability and mutability of the former as compared to the latter. But maybe that's just the impending citizenship test talking.