11 May 2003. As I was preparing to write the Editorial for this, my last issue as Senior Editor, three seemingly unrelated incidents of transnational significance impinged on my consciousness. First, a Nigerian woman asylum-seker in Ireland was granted a stay of deportation, a direct challenge to a ministerial change in the Irish constitution which now decrees that foreign-national mothers of Irish-born children no longer have any residency rights. Her choice is stark, like that of Grusha in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle: she can either take her child back to Nigeria with her, or (since the child is an Irish citizen) leave him behind in an orphanage. No sooner had I read of this woman's plight than I discovered the case of four Kosovan Albanian asylum-seekers in the UK who had fled as much for reason of persecution of their homosexuality as an escape from ethnic fighting, but who ended up, because of their statelessness and immigrational illegitimacy, being forced to prostitute that same sexuality in order to pay off their unscrupulous traffickers. And then at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport's railway station I watched in despair as a Romanian woman risked her life to retrieve a €1 coin from the tracks, dropped inadvertently by an American tourist moments earlier.

Burmese-Australian choreographer/performer Rakini Devi is informed by her diverse skills in the areas of classical Indian dance, visual arts and contemporary performance practice. She uses these skills as well as her satirical wit and storytelling abilities to create an intricate portrait of the lived experiences of a contemporary diasporic subject. This is a portrait that is not only aesthetically stimulating but also politically inflected and provocative at the same time. Through her work Devi encourages us to remember that diaspora is more than a theoretical trope, that it is a complex and often contradictory experience which results in joy as well as pain as it is played out on live bodies.

The Hindu festival of Taipucam celebrated in honour of the male god Murugan is one of the public festivals that Hindus in Singapore celebrate with a great deal of aplomb and ceremony. It takes on the hue of a carnival and is a major tourist attraction. At the centre of the festival is the male kavadi bearer. Beside him walks the docile woman carrying her pot of milk. In the Taipucam festival procession, there is clearly apparent an empowered male versus a subsidiary female space, which appears determinate and confined, marking a tentative emergence of a subversive ‘feminist’ space that attempts to grasp at a measure of empowerment for women.

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

German American theatre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City became a model for both a national American theatre and other diasporic theatres in the US. This theatre aspired to an autonomous, class-free, universal culture, which was seen as the legacy of a German Enlightenment tradition epitomized by Schiller's national(izing) theatre. German Americans were thus exceptionally positioned to claim the ideology of a universal culture as a national characteristic. At the same time, however, the theatre was structured by market demands and the need to appeal to a diverse German American constituency. This oscillation between idealistic and commercial culture made the German American theatre attractive. In the end, the theatre not only helped legitimize New York City's cultural periphery, but became a model when a new American ‘national’ culture, the national theatre, was being imagined, which ultimately illustrates the importance of the concept of legitimacy for hybrid public cultures.

The history of the earliest documented Chinese opera performances in California (1852) and their successors during the following decades reveal how Chinese theatre in the diaspora was produced and consumed by Chinese immigrants, European visitors and Americans. On the one hand, a familiar repertoire eased the nostalgia and reinforced the national consciousness of Chinese immigrants, while on the other, the ethnocentric reading and writing of Chinese theatre helped establish an eternal frontier in the ‘old West’ to protect American national identity in late nineteenth-century California's periods of economic and political turmoil. Finally, the exoticism of California's Chinese theatre in America contributed to a European sense of American cultural uniqueness. Chinese opera performances played a crucial role in the invention of Californian identity.

Among the cultural forms of the Indian diaspora in the West, the radical obscurity of drama and theatre in comparison with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry suggests a complicated relation between genre, location, language, and experience. As a collaborative public medium theatre depends on material resources, institutional networks, and specific cultural contexts which place it at several removes from the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres. Moreover, while novelists often employ diaspora as the enabling condition but not the subject of narrative, immigrant playwrights can create original theatre only when they distance themselves from their cultures of origin and embrace the experience of residence in the host culture, with all its attendant problems of acculturation and identity. In Canada, where the Indian immigrant communities are older, often visibly underprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the home-nation as well as of conditions in the diaspora. In the United States, in contrast, where large-scale immigration from India is relatively recent, socially privileged, and unencumbered by colonial baggage, original drama is virtually absent, and various forms of ‘travelling’ theatre dominate the culture of performance, reinforcing a powerful synonymy between ‘diaspora’ and ‘nation’. These two North American locations are paradigmatic examples, therefore, of the historically grounded interconnections between diaspora, nation, and theatre in the modern Indian context.

In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman's 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.