Diaspora (Anthropology)

As a concept once used to describe Jewish, Greek and Armenian dispersion (Toloyan 1991: 4) diaspora has a venerable history. But it is the appropriation of this term to denote a much wider range of collectivities that has animated much of the scholarly discussion of diaspora over the last twenty years. This wide-ranging invocation can, however, pose difficulties in the definition of diaspora with the corollary risk that the term will become an unwieldy "catch-all phrase" (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 3).

One of the most frequently cited issues in delimiting this wide-ranging version of diaspora is its overlap with transnationalism, a concept that has also achieved popularity in accounting for mobile, especially migrant populations. For some scholars this overlap is intentional, as the title of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies indicates. Braziel and Mannur delimit diaspora as a specific subset of transnational movements between nation-states. They argue that while diaspora is specific to the movement of people, transnationalism can also include the movement of information, goods, products and capital across state borders (2003: 8). However Portes et al.’s delineation of transnationalism as those activities, exchanges and transactions that require sustained cross-border travel and contacts (1999: 93), would disqualify many of the more diffuse, sporadic and symbolic connections that are associated with claims of diasporic identity. Hence "James Clifford makes a distinction between the transnational aspects of, respectively, diaspora and border paradigms. Transnational borderlands presuppose a specific, regulated territorial boundary that is being repeatedly traversed, whereas diasporas can entail longer distances, ‘multiple communities of a dispersed population’, more exile-like separations without necessarily involving an association with a particular geopolitical boundary (1994: 304).


But amidst the various renderings of diaspora, the notion of a population dispersed across space which maintains a sense of difference, are recurrent motifs (Lukose 2007). A much more contested element, however, is the relationship between diaspora and an orientation towards a real or imagined homeland. While for William Safran (1991: 83—4) homeland is a key organizing index of diasporic consciousness, James Clifford (1994) argues that too strong an emphasis on this element would, at least in part, exclude the African and South Asian diasporas. For Clifford, these diasporas are oriented less around the notion of ‘roots’, i.e. a sense of continuous connection and eventual return to a point of origin, than around ‘routes’, i.e. an awareness of the multiple locations in and lateral connections through which a transnational culture and identity can be recreated.

The issue of homeland is a vexed one because it raises questions about whether diasporas are more or less likely to give rise to nationalist and essentialist movements. Thus Daniel and Boyarin argue that diaspora presents a model of cultural identity that can provide an alternative to national self-determination (2003 [1993]: 100). Countering the modernist story of Israel, they offer a rabbinical reading of Jewish diasporic identity as a ‘disaggregated identity’, one that decouples people and land, is dependent on ‘principles of respect for difference’ and is constantly being mixed and remade (p. 108). The emphasis by the Boyarins on ‘mixing’ as a key underpinning of diasporic culture has also been a major feature in influential accounts of Black diasporas by cultural theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. Thus Paul Gilroy posits the ‘Black Atlantic’ as an historical diasporic formation drawing on transatlantic cultural influences and exchanges, one that rejects ethnic absolutism in favour of a ‘story of hybridization and intermixture’ (1993: 199). Stuart Hall stresses that in characterizing Afro-Caribbean people as diasporic, he is not relying on a form of ethnic unity secured by reference to a sacred homeland. That paradigm, asserts Hall, pertains to the old imperialistic form of ethnicity and is in contrast to the diaspora experience as defined by ‘the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of "identity" which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity’ (2003 [1990]: 244, italics in original).

A more expansive interpretation of diaspora thus appears to have been taken up in the hope that it could redress some of the difficulties inherent in earlier predominant concepts of ethnicity. First, diaspora displaces a primary emphasis away from nation-state minority/ majority relations towards a concurrent emphasis on transnational connections, influences, histories and imagined identities (Clifford 1994: 311). Second, diaspora can include populations, such as African Americans, which cannot be encompassed through either the concept of ‘immigrant’ (p. 311) or transmigration/transna-tionalism. Third, the emphasis on the hybrid elements of diaspora also draws attention to the variation between and distinctiveness of its local incarnations (p. 308).

It is, however, the apparent effort to reconcile claims of categorical difference with anti-essentialism that appears to be the most appealing but also the least persuasive aspect of the contemporary scholarly enthusiasm for diaspora. For if diasporic populations do not necessarily share an orientation towards a common homeland, if they are defined first and foremost by their internal heterogeneity, hybridity and local specificities, what then holds them together, beyond an assertion of shared categorical difference? And categorical difference stripped of substance begins to sounds rather more essenti-alist than otherwise. Forty years ago, Fredrik Barth argued that ethnic categories could persist despite considerable cultural change over space and time, a position that resonates with Gilroy’s notion of ‘a "changing same," something endlessly hybridized and in process but persistently there’ (Gilroy cited in Clifford 1994: 20). Perhaps then the ‘new’ diaspora is not as different from the ‘old ethnicity’ and therefore no less or more anti-essentialist than Stuart Hall might wish to admit.

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