Diaspora, Globalization, and the Politics of Identity

Abstract

Diasporic subjectivity bridges the gap between modernity’s demands for racial heterogeneity and hybridity, on the one hand, and capitalism’s demand for racial exclusivity to support its imperative of a racial division of labor on the other. Neo-globalization and transnational capitalism have intensified this contradiction with a resultant deepening and widening of diasporic consciousness. The paper makes this case through an analysis of West Indian immigrant presences in California USA as a concrete example of the ambiguities and contradictions of diasporic imagination. As a collective, these West Indians have relinquished their claims to American peoplehood and belonging by accommodating themselves to their roles as permanent foreigners. At the same time, they are impelled into political identification with African Americans under the broad rubric of black diasporic consciousness in a politics of representation as they engaged in struggles against discrimination and repression stemming from their racialization as Black.