1. In August 1991 a car driven by Yosef Lifsh, a Lubavitch Hasid, wentout of control in Crown Heights and fatally injured a seven-year-old Guyanese-American boy, Gavin Cato. Lifsh was part of a motorcade that was returningfrom escorting the Lubavitch leader, Rebbe Menahem Schneerson, on his weeklyvisit to his wife's grave in a cemetery in Queens. Several hours later, a crowd of Black youths surrounded a Hasidic yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum, and community and the largely Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights. (See New York Newsday, September 3, 1991; Village Voice, September 3, 1911.)

2. As of the 1990 census, 18.5% of Black people in New York County wereforeign-born. Of these, 33.1% were naturalized, while 66.8% reported that theywere “not a citizen.” This figure compares to 42% foreign-born among Hispanics,

3. Irma Wviding health and funeral benefits have long been a component of Afro-Caribbeanand African-American im/migrant society in New York (Blood Relations, 65).

4. Asians were ineligible for citizenship from the Exclusion Act of 1882 untilthe McCarran-Walter Act in 1954.

5. Hongo, “America Singing.”

6. The cosmology of Haitian vodou sees the dead as having access to Ginen, or Africa. See Brown, Mama Lola. See also Ng, Bone, on the disruption of Chinese-American burial traditions as a result of “paper” identities taken on tosatisfy anti-Chinese immigration regulations in California.

7. Benedict Anderson's now classic Imagined Communities is of course the source of this phrase. But many critics have extended both the site of the community and the source of the imaginings beyond Anderson's formulations. See especially Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation” and “Dissemi-Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” both in his Nation and Narration; and Partha Chatterjee's useful postcolonial counter to Anderson in Nationalist Thought.

8. Counting illegal immigrants is, of course, a dicey business: how does thestate account for those most likely to elude its technologies?

9. Yellow Bird and Milun, “Interrupted Journeys,” 20.

10. Cities of the Dead, 38.

11. Immigrant Acts, 2

12. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 37.

13. Nora, “Between Memory and History.”

14. Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation.”

15. Noel, “Politics of Carnival.”

16. It is estimated, for example, that about half of the Cherokee people diedas a result of removal during the 1838 Trail of Tears. See Stiffarm and Lane, “Demography of Native North America”; Thornton, “Cherokee Population Losses.”

17. See Thomas, “Pan-Indianism.”

18. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 4.

19. Ibid., xi.

20. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Lott, Love and Theft; Rosaldo, Culture and Truth; Green, “Pocahontas Perplex.”

21. See my “Teaching Crown Heights”; Slotkin, “Buffalo Bill's ‘Wild West’”;Moses, Wild West Shows.

22. Winokur, American Laughter, 10.

23. See Powers, War Dance.

24. Black Atlantic, 102.

25. Ibid., 37.

26. In 1966, before the decolonization of the British West Indies, the number of immigrants admitted from the United Kingdom who intended to make

27. See Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights. For an example of relationship between Garveyism and Rastafarianism, see Nelson, “Rastafarians and Ethiopianism.”

28. Goldberg, Racist Culture.

29. Balibar writes about this contradiction:

This fiction, however, also derives its effectiveness from everyday practices, relations which immediately structure the “life” of individuals. And, most importantly … the race community dissolves social inequalities in an even more ambivalent “similarity”; it ethnicizes the social difference which is an expression of irreconcilable antagonisms by lending it the form of a division between the “genuinely” and the “falsely” national.(“Fictive Identity,” 167)

30. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 162.

31. The heading for this section, “Stories That Could Be True,” comes fromthe title of William Stafford's collected poems. The same book includes the lovelyand applicable phrase: “We owe the rain/a pat on the back—barefoot, it haswalked/with us with its silver passport all over the world” (5–6).

32. Johannes Fabian argues in Time and the Other that in struggling to create a discourse of expertise, ethnographic practice forces a distance from the world of the “informants,” thus creating them as the objects rather than the subjects of our accounts. For Fabian, the separation between researchers and the researched creates the “denial of coevalness,” a deep rift between the social spaces each inhabits.

Interviewers and informants inhabit different systems of time: the Times reporter and photographer were on an overnight deadline; I was on the somewhatmore lenient but also exacting schedule of dissertation research.

33. The article that came out of this encounter does a good basic job of interviewing the public figures involved in West Indian–American Day Carnivaland in the Caribbean community in general. It makes osme very general speculations about the climate in Crown Heights, and actually quotes Randy Brewster very briefly. My point here is not necessarily to criticize journalists but ratherto point to the collective problematic in the representation of social experienceby “official discourses,” such as the New York Times and academic dissertations. See New York Times, August 30, 1991, B1, B3.

34. Traditional practices of “salvage anthropology” (Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique) documented primitive cultures displaced by the progress of colonization and modernization. Implicit in this notion of salvaging and preserving the primitive is the idea that ethnographers are separated from their subjects by time—the ethnographer is a modern interloper bringing the harvest of colonialist research back to the museums and archives of the bring west. The contradictions of salvage anthropology are particularly pronouncedfor im/migrant or diasporan cultures. Traditional ethnography misses the 184 Notes to Pages 18–24

35. In Orientalism, Edward Said broke important theoretical ground, arguing that the Western academic traditions that study nonwestern cultures often perpetuate colonial domination rather than advancing more rose-colored goals of humanist knowledge and mutual understanding. Influenced by such postcolonial criticism, anthropologists have turned to consider the role of the social sciences in promoting domination, questioning the practices of cultural salvage as well as the relationship between ethnographer and informants. At the same time, feminist and poststructuralist scholars have revolutionized the notion of subjectivity itself, pointing to the multiple discursive constructions of the roti eater as authority, consumer of culture, white person, woman, and to the effects of such divided subjectivity on the relationships among researchers and ethnographic “subjects.” This critique of the unitary subject has promoted self-reflectiveness amongethnographers about their position among those they study, and about the disci-selves what our scholarship promotes on a political level, and what we are reallyable to see and say about other cultures at all.

This encounter of the “West and the rest,” where traditional methodologies meet the multiply conscious subjectivities of internal colonization and exile, has changed ethnographic practice. Recent critical work elucidates the contradiction between the desire of scholars to understand and recount consciousness (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) and what Trinh calls “the positivist dream of a perfect double” (Woman, Native, Other, 55).

Waking up from this dream, or from what many would argue comprises the long Enlightenment nightmare of positivist social science, we realize with a start that the institutions from which scholars draw our knowledge and authority do not necessarily produce expertise across cultural boundaries. What, then, becomes of our desires to understand consciousness; to narrate the conflicts that have comeabout in the long Western history of contact, mutual influence, and colonization?