Diaspora

Paths toward Definition

The notion of diaspora has been progressively widened over the past century from the classic Jewish, Greek, and Armenian cases to potentially include almost everyone. Its colloquial use suggests affiliations given by virtue of biological descent, which allegedly transmit “blood” continuity across space: The Jewish diaspora from this perspective is the set of people whose families were from, but then were exiled or otherwise departed from, Palestine in the distant past during dispersions under Babylonia, Rome, or other conquerors. The Irish diaspora is built of the descendants of the families that left the green isle during the potato famines of the 19th century, and so on.

For analytical and comparative purposes, this folk meaning falls short on at least two counts. First, in this view there exist perennially stable groupings of humans who under conditions of emigration inevitably turn into diasporas. The problem with this is that there are no such naturally existing groups and, it follows, no natural diasporas either. The maintenance of sentiments of affinity linking even apparently highly cohesive social groups requires enormous cultural work and is never simply “given.” The second problem with everyday uses of diaspora is that the category is overly broad. It is not helpful to say that everyone is diasporic, though it is true that if one expands the temporal horizon widely enough, all human beings are descendants of East Africa. The reason most people are not East African diasporans, though all have ancestors from there, is because that memory is not part of their conscious experience: Neither is it constitutive of their bodily habitus, nor are they viewed by others as members of that category. Folk invocations of diaspora fail to specify the cultural particularity of a diaspora—that this cultural form depends not merely on having a family tree that sprouted in another place but also on the fact that the double consciousness in relation to place is central, even actively conjured in their lived experiences. Diasporans feel a gap between here and there, where they are really from. Often, they even value and cultivate that gap, finding in it a unique and vital distinction.

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