South Africa, China, India, and other industrializing countries are receiving increasing numbers of frontier heritage migrants—those who were raised in “First World” countries like the United States and who are now moving to their ancestral ethnic homelands. The primary aim of this article is to offer a conceptual definition of (frontier) heritage migration to interrogate its ability to illuminate the rapid shifts wrought by neoliberal globalization and to illustrate why it is imperative to redefine “economy” in broader cultural terms, rethinking it as the global ethnic economy. Drawing on semistructured in-depth interviews with heritage migrants to the new South Africa and scholarly and media accounts documenting this trend to other emerging economies such as Ghana and Vietnam, the article analyzes how Asian and African heritage migrants from Euro-America mobilize their First World cultural capital and their ethnic heritage to seek out opportunities in their globalizing ancestral homelands. The narrations by and about these heritage migrants contribute to a changing global imaginary in the post–Cold War world in which race and ethnicity function as both push and pull factors for these migrants.
Exploring the relationship between capitalism and the discourse of multicultural democracy that animates the New South Africa's notion of itself as Rainbow Nation, this article attempts to understand why it is impossible for politically progressive postapartheid South African fiction, centrally concerned with social justice, to launch an effective critique of neoliberal capitalism in present day South Africa. Because South Africa's entry onto the global stage in 1994 was conditioned by the pivotal moment of globalization in which its Rainbow Nation democracy was forged, I argue that close readings of three texts—the 1955 Freedom Charter, which formed the basis of the New South African constitution; Phaswane Mpe's 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow; and the 2006 film Catch a Fire—shed light on globalization as a political-economic-cultural strategy. I suggest that Rainbow Nation democracy enables a sense of metaphorical “belonging” to the nation but not a material redistribution of national belongings in the concrete sense of possessions, private property, and land. Neoliberal globalization working through Rainbow Nation ideology performs a deft, dangerous conflation of capitalism with democracy that serves to further legitimize the persistence of economic injustice, and this conflation has wide reaching consequences for all (aspiring) democracies.
First, I begin by interrogating why blood as kinship, ethnicity, nationality, identity, etc., has been so clinically removed from so much Humanities-oriented poststructuralist and postcolonial diaspora theory, rendering it both bloodless and hostile towards the notion of a return to an ethnic homeland. Second, I analyze policies based on the “migration-development nexus” promoted by organizations like the World Bank with its reliance on a conception of bloody roots and an enduring ethnic homeland that is both essentialist and static. To point out the limitations of these theories, I examine some recent frontier heritage migrations in which Asian and African diasporic elites raised in Euro-America are “returning” to their ethnic homelands. Finally, I attempt to lay out some of the parameters of a more fluid, supple theory of diaspora for the twenty-first century that explores blood as an analytic tool that takes into account not only mobile yet bloody identities but also mutable places, dynamic economic change, and new forms of spatiotemporality. In other words, returning to the homeland is not what it used to be, hence new constructions of blood identification are now possible.
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