Diaspora

Diaspora means dispersal, the scattering of a people. Originally referring to the Jewish peoples, diaspora dates from ancient times. Commenting on the revival of the concept in the late 1980s, Khachig Tölölyan observed that diaspora was now used as a synonym for distinct terms such as expatriate, exile, ethnic, minority, refugee, migrant, sojourner, and overseas community. The term now operates as a significant sociological and critical category imported into communication studies that puts into play the human and social dimensions of globalization through the increasing movement of peoples demographically across and around the globe.

This angle on globalization—globalization-from-below—has been often neglected in the focus on the latest exploits of the American, British, European, or Japanese world-spanning multinationals. Arjun Appadurai, in an influential analysis, lists the new flow patterns of media and people (which he calls mediascapes and ethnoscapes, respectively) alongside the flows of technologies, capital, and ideas as constituting the current globalizing era. Importantly, he sees all these flows as disjunctive—they are occurring together in related, but unsystematic, ways.

Communication, media, and cultural studies about contemporary diasporas have been a corrective to critical analyses that focus on the inadequacies of media representations of minority cultures in Western societies. Indeed, a number of basic theoretical shifts well underway in these fields reflect the significance of global flows, or movements, of audiovisual media for actually existing diasporas. These theoretical changes are important because they show how peoples displaced from homelands by migration, refugee status, or business and economic imperatives use video, television, cinema, music, and the Internet to rebuild cultural identities. Such shifts could move from a social problem or welfare conception of the migrant to an appreciation of cultural difference; from a view of the media as an imposed force to a recognition of audience activity and selectiveness; and from an essentialist or “heritage” model to a more dynamic, adaptive model of culture.

There is considerable research on the problems associated with diasporic cultures. As one example, Hamid Naficy's study of what he calls the exilic television produced by Iranians in Los Angeles in the 1980s is a model for how communication media can be used to negotiate the cultural politics of both home and host. Naficy's is the most theorized account of diasporic, hybrid cultural identity yet produced in its relation to audiovisual media. Naficy incorporates both the industrial and the narrative features of the television services and program genres developed by the Iranian exile community to show the relationship, as depicted on television, between the transnational experiences of displacement and migration, which in this case was enforced, and strategies of cultural maintenance and negotiation within the borderline “slipzone” between home and host.

The same attention that Hamid Naficy pays to the threshold experiences of exile from a broken national community is seen in Dana Kolar-Panov's research. Kolar-Panov's work goes below the level of consumption of mainstream media in capturing the role played by video letters used by overseas citizens of the former Yugoslavia to convey news as their country broke up during the early 1990s. This work illustrates the politics of discord between communities in the homelands as they are played out in the diasporas and the dramatic alternative textual representations of “atrocity videos,” which show [Page 307]the real-time destruction of the homelands. These videos perform the role of virtual palimpsests—old “writings” that show through new ones—demonstrating the powerful role of the media in contemporary diasporas.

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