Understanding migration in a globalized era: How postcolonialism views diaspora (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This essay ventures into the notion of diaspora in the present day as a physical and conceptual space of transformation, first by situating diaspora as a ‘travelling term’ to describe the dispersal of people as a unifying experience, and, second, by mapping the current dispersal of people in and of Southeast Asia onto three moments of the diasporic condition: to exit, or to leave the home country for personal reasons or economic improvement; to be exiled, as an individual or as a community, to be refused return for oftentimes political reasons; and to move in exodus, as a group of stateless and dispossessed people fleeing crises or war. In this essay and the exhibition DIASPORA: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia these three moments constitute the three curatorial propositions to frame, through contemporary art, diaspora as a platform for productive thinking.
The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies
The word ‘diaspora’ has leapt from its previously confined use – mainly concerned with the dispersion of Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Africans away from their natal homelands – to cover the cases of many other ethnic groups, nationalities and religions. But this ‘horizontal’ scattering of the word to cover the mobility of many groups to many destinations, has been paralleled also by ‘vertical’ leaps, with the word diaspora being deployed to cover more and more phenomena and serve more and more objectives of different actors. With sections on ‘debating the concept’, ‘complexity’, ‘home and home-making’, ‘connections’ and ‘critiques’, the Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies is likely to remain an authoritative reference for some time. Each contribution includes a targeted list of references for further reading. The editors have carefully blended established scholars of diaspora with younger scholars looking at how diasporas are constructed ‘from below’. The adoption of a variety of conceptual perspectives allows for generalization, contrasts and comparisons between cases. In this exciting and authoritative collection over 40 scholars from many countries have explored the evolving use of the concept of diaspora, its possibilities as well as its limitations. This Handbook will be indispensable for students undertaking essays, debates and dissertations in the field.
Diaspora, Exile, and Displacement: Literary and Theoretical Perspectives
Violent upheavals of the twentieth century -imperialism, the two world wars, struggles for national independence, decolonization, and the Cold War --have made exile and dislocation the great preoccupations of literary works, autobiography, and theoretical writings. Globalization, driven by unprecedented trade and new technologies of communication, information, and travel, has accelerated the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. Diaspora is thus treated here not as a singular but rather historically varied and heterogeneous phenomenon. The transnational mobility of people may be the result of forced or voluntary migration, self-exile or expulsion. Refugees, people in transit, are the product of war, ideological heterodoxy and persecution, ethnic conflict, and natural calamity.
Diaspora Studies: Roots and Critical Dimensions
Diaspora discourse involves at least two critical dimensions: the first concerns the issue of naming, guided by such questions as whom to call diaspora and under what criteria; the second extends this process of naming to the establishment of diaspora as a comprehensive theory for studying multiple forms of migrations. This article outlines the insights of some of the most repetitively consulted scholars in diaspora studies. My attempt is to synthesize their conceptualizations into a representative research framework.
Stuart Hall famously summed up the painful predicament of international migration as the dawning realization that one can never return home. 1 Overseas migration sets in motion a process of dislocation along with the encounter with new social environments and landscapes. Over time, these change migrants' consciousness, their intimate knowledge, and taken-for-granted expectations, while in their absence the countries and friends they left behind change too, often to the extent that on their return they find they are no longer in the same country. Describing himself as a "cosmopolitan by default," Hall (2008) reflects on the sense of loss, noting that "every diaspora has its regrets": Although you can never go back to the past, you do have a sense of loss. There is something you have lost. A kind of intimate connection with landscape, and family, and tradition, which you lose. I think this is the fate of modern people-we have to lose them, but [we believe] we are going to go back to them. (pp. 349-350) The sense of lost intimacy-the knowing of a place and all its taken-for-granted ways of thinking, interacting and "systems of relevancies"-was first theorized by Alfred Schütz in "The Homecomer" (1945), a foundational article on the sociology of everyday life: Home means one thing to the man who never has left it, another thing to the man who dwells far from it, and still another to him who returns. "To feel at home" is an A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, First Edition. Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani.
A narrow, state-centric, and ahistorical approach to the definition and study of Diaspora cannot be justified by the dangers of promiscuous categorization, a desire for simplicity or practicality, or even lacunae in theories of migration. In addition to reconstructing a definition and typology of Diaspora that is applicable to a post-positivist view of the social sciences, and in particular international political economy, this article is an attempt to ‘rescue' Diaspora from its own entrenched victimhood, as well as from the elements of an overarching discourse that conspire to hide its applicability to the wider global political economy.