Diaspora

The term diaspora, deriving from the Greek speir (“to sow,” “to scatter”), refers to a people dispersed by whatever cause to one or more foreign destinations who may never be fully assimilated in their host countries and may harbor thoughts of return. The term interprets, as well as the people who are dispersed, the land across which dispersal occurs. Along with related terms addressing complex flows of goods and people, diversity and multilocality, the category of diaspora can cause conceptual confusion between what are different experiences and practices as, for example, the diaspora caused by the compelling desire to move and that prompted by a voluntary migration. However, at its simplest diaspora points to the forms of hybrid consumer cultures that emerge as different ethnic cultures mix and interact, as demonstrated by varieties of cuisines and clothing found within societies across the globe.

Although scholars have pointed out that the verb diasperein was used to describe the Greek colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean (800–600 BC), it is now widely accepted that the origin of the term can be found in the translation of the Hebrew scripts by Alexandrian Greek-speaking Jews in the third century BC. They adopted the term in order to interpret Jewish exile outside Palestine, after the destruction of Solomon's temple in 586 BC by the Babylonian empire. Residing outside the Holy Land was understood as a transitory, however miserable, sojourn; it was an intermediate stage, pending until the final divine gathering in Jerusalem. The concept of diaspora was thus born out of an interpretation of history with respect to God's saving grace, favoring the development of a Jewish theology of exile and religious and ethnic identity. In the first century AD, Christians adopted the term to their eschatology, whereby the early church was depicted as a pilgrim and dispersed community. More than a millennium later, once Christianity became the established dominant religion, the term came into usage again, as, in the course of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Protestant minorities had to live in Catholic environments, and vice versa, as Catholic minorities were “dispersed” in Protestant cultures.

The modern disciplinary application of the term to non-Jewish and non-Christian people was first undertaken within African studies as early as 1965, when George Shepperson spoke of the enforced expatriation of sub-Saharan Africans through the colonial slave trade as the African diaspora, accompanied by a longing to return to the homeland. Later, African diaspora subsumed the global dispersion of Africans throughout history and the consequent emergence of a cultural identity based on origin and social condition. As the term took off, it also became applied within social sciences; in 1976, John Armstrong's Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas investigated migrant groups with regard to their socioeconomic position and the range of tolerance and repression they faced in multiethnic states. Diaspora came to be understood in its social and political relations to homeland and the hosting nation-state and culture.

The Jewish and the African exiles represent two cases of prototypical diaspora, along with those suffered by Armenians and the Irish. The late-nineteenth-century massacres and forced mass displacement of Armenians by the Turks during 1915–1916 and the migration of the Irish from 1845 to 1852 following the famine are examples of “victim diasporas” (Cohen 2008), whereby the forcibly dispersed group conceives its scattering as arising from a trauma central to a historical experience of victimhood.

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