Notion Of Diaspora Research Articles

Diasporic romances gone bad: Impossible returns to Africa in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane, Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de Mon Père

This article looks into the thematic of homecoming to the African continent in the novels Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta and Loin de Mon Père by Véronique Tadjo. This reading sets out to bring together the notions of diaspora and nationhood, which are often conceived as mutually exclusive. It argues for the importance of an emphatic reintroduction of the African nation state and its disturbing failures of decolonization onto the postcolonial theoretical agenda, which is currently more concerned with somewhat unidirectional manifestations of transnational mobility. The novels under scrutiny rewrite the diasporic romance of return from a gendered viewpoint, exposing the inhospitable nature of the postcolonial African nation state towards the female revenants. While the novels’ settings vary greatly from each other, they all represent the gendered diasporic return to the national home as a practical impossibility. Read together, the novels display an interesting continuum of postcolonial disillusionment by giving voice to the failed narrative of the postcolonial African projects of nation-building. While the dream of return literally dies in Juletane and is understood as a realistic impossibility in Kehinde, it seems that Loin de Mon Père, in its outright disillusionment, paradoxically articulates the most hopeful vision of the three novels.

Indigenous Diaspora and the Prospects for Cosmopolitan ‘Orbiting’: The Warlpiri Case

This paper introduces one of the first attempts in anthropology to apply the notion of diaspora to Fourth World circumstances—namely, the Warlpiri of central Australia, many of whom have permanently migrated to towns and cities, but retain strong connections to their home settlements. Coincidently, the research project on the Warlpiri diaspora (2009–12) overlapped with an intensified public policy debate about the decline in social conditions on remote Aboriginal settlements and controversial governmental responses. Prior to those responses, Aboriginal public intellectual Noel Pearson had already proposed ‘orbiting’ as a solution to some of the social problems in remote settlements. These conjunctures set the scene for a comparison to be made between the results of ethnographic enquiry and policy advocacy covering similar ground. Results from the Warlpiri diaspora project indicate that some Warlpiri women have acted well in advance of any official endorsement of orbiting to move permanently to distant locations. But the success or otherwise of such a venture seems to depend on intimate factors that fall outside the usual purview of government policymaking. While the Warlpiri diaspora research is supportive of some of the assumptions of the orbiting policy, it also suggests other kinds of successful orbiting outside of workplace careers and the understating of the cultural implications of orbiting. Ultimately, experience-near ethnography, including that which is orientated to the intercultural, as necessitated by the realities of diaspora, stands in a critical relationship to the oversimplifying tendencies of policy advocacy.

The Notion of Creolization: An Attempt at Theoretical Clarification

In this article, I hope to show how the general idea of “creolization” extends to some very different meanings, in spite of its apparent semantic consistency, often involving the ideas of intermixing and blending. Starting with a review of various texts which have given different interpretations of the term creolization, I shall identify four major fields of meaning. Those fields are defined by the way in which the authors envisage creolization in relation to two pairs of notions. The first pairing sets the cultural process against the cultural product, while the second concerns temporality, with creolization either seen as an “original” (or starting) phenomenon or as constantly moving (or becoming). The ideas which have been forged out of the perception of these pairings “divide up” knowledge of creolization across well-characterized regions, regions which this work will try to describe. In doing so, it will be a question of looking at the notion of diaspora that these different meanings involve. This article will conclude with some thoughts questioning the universality of the creolization phenomenon and suggesting that it remains dependent upon historical contexts.

Close encounters of a migrant kind: Of mirages,peripheries and orthodoxies

This article studies human migration in relation to ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’ (as ideas, spaces and places) via the problematic of Eurocentrism. Its premise is a strong sense that the emerging European populations will soon be those whose heritage is from the South, who have grown up with and continuously access knowledge about different types of non-European cinemas, who view differently configured visual references, who bring a potential for new knowledge to film/visual culture studies. Specifically,the article experiments with three encounters – UK (United Kingdom) academia, so-called peripheral cinema, and historical connections between Europe and Africa – through wide factual contexts, specific historical trajectories and the notion of diaspora,so as to place migration studies and film/visual culture studies in dialogue. At the same time, it rejects liberalism and fundamentalism, and questions methodological orthodoxy in studies of human migration. The article is a (methodological) contact zone that draws from varied sources, including Derrida’s notion of contretemps/being out of step; Paul Feyerabend’s (in)famous concept of ‘anything goes’ (essential to enriching one’s look at the material of history); Slavoj Žižek’s take on fatality as a critical notion; film theory and migration theory; European histories; and African philosophers. Thus, the article attempts to make disciplines borderless, while calling for ‘film’ to be repositioned within the wider field of ‘visual culture’ so that, between it (i.e. film) and migration, multiple transformative border crossings, rather than the usual splits and retreats into fortified (sub-)discipline(d) camps, may take place.

Banal diasporic nationalism: Ghana@50 celebrations in Berlin

Although it has been highlighted by several authors that the notion of diaspora has become a politicized identity discourse, little is known about how it becomes a banal part of migrants’ everyday lives. Based on a theoretical understanding of banality, the article focuses on the interaction of the banal and the non-banal within this context of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence in Berlin in 2007. It is argued that diasporic nationalist rituals are spaces of intersection between politicized and banal spheres of social life. By enacting and institutionalizing particular forms of interaction that are ‘banalizing’ dissent and conflict among migrants the examined series of public rituals contributed to give life-worldly relevance to the otherwise questionable and contested identity category of diaspora. In this sense, the primary product was not group formation but the banalization of diasporic nationalism as a category of identification.

(ALL THE) SINGLE LADIES

In the film fragment Smart B**ch, two women—a black Sudanese-Australian and a white American-Australian—share what it means to be diasporic travellers and explore their similarities and differences within evolving feminist discourses which have in some ways abandoned the subaltern for the subdivided. No longer content to criticise the ways in which we speak for and to each other, and to accommodate hierarchies of class, race and sexuality, this ethnocinematic dialogue prefers these film personae to speak with each other and their audience using Conquergood and Denzin as performance ethnography guides, while challenging hegemonic notions of diaspora to include such diversities as adoptees, queers, and others.

Whiteness and Diasporic Irishness: Nation, Gender and Class

Whiteness is often detached from the notion of diaspora in the recent flurry of interest in the phenomenon, yet it is a key feature of some of the largest and oldest displacements. This paper explores the specific contexts of white racial belonging and status over two centuries in two main destinations of the Irish diaspora, the USA and Britain. Its major contribution is a tracing of the untold story of ‘How the Irish became white in Britain’ to parallel and contrast with the much more fully developed narrative in the USA. It argues that, contrary to popular belief, the racialisation of the Irish in England did not fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but became transmuted in new forms which have continued to place the ‘white’ Irish outside the boundaries of the English nation. These have been strangely ignored by social scientists, who conflate Irishness and working-class identities in England without acknowledging the distinctive contribution of Irish backgrounds to constructions of class difference. Gender locates Irish women and men differently in relation to these class positions, for example allowing mothers to be blamed for the perpetuation of the underclass. Class and gender are also largely unrecognised dimensions of Irish ethnicity in the USA, where the presence of ‘poor white’ neighbourhoods continues to challenge the iconic story of Irish upward mobility. Irishness thus remains central to the construction of mainstream ‘white’ identities in both the USA and Britain into the twenty-first century.

African homecoming: Pan-African ideology and contested heritage

African Americans and others in the African diaspora have increasingly come home to Africa to visit the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved and shipped. In this nuanced analysis of homecoming, Katharina Schramm analyzes how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced among African hosts and Diasporan returnees and at the same time contested in practice. She examines the varying interpretations and appropriations of significant sites (e.g. the slave forts), events (e.g. Emancipation Day) and discourses (e.g. repatriation) in Ghana to highlight these dynamics. From this, she develops her notions of diaspora, home, homecoming, memory and identity that reflect the complexity and multiple reverberations of these cultural encounters beyond the sphere of roots tourism.

‘Just give us the bones!’: theatres of African diasporic returns

Repatriations of dead African bodies, ritualistic reburials, and commemorative practices of remembering bodies elaborate African practices of cultural memory and collective identification. The repatriations of the bodily remains of Sarah Baartman, the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’, from France to South Africa, and ‘El Negro’ from Spain to Botswana, are emblematic and define instances of such African dramas. This article interrogates these embodied rituals and examines their relevance to the diaspora experience. It seeks to theorise an African-centered conceptualisation of the notion of diaspora, by using the term ‘diasporic returns’ to explore the non-slave exchange of black bodies. It also examines contemporary theatrical moments of trafficking African cultural practices using the critical tools of performance theory, anthropology and ethnography.

You will never again be a Chilean like the others

In this paper we focus on repatriation of refugees who came to Norway after the coup d'état in Chile in 1973. The Chilean refugees formed part of a diaspora during exile. The authors’ concern is the returnees' relationship with the diaspora upon return. The purpose of the article is to discuss whether the notion of diaspora may contribute to an understanding of the situation of the returnees. Diaspora is widely used in migration studies, although the concept is not particularly related to studies on refugees and their return. The article is based on interviews with Chilean returnees from Norwegian exile. The authors argue that their situation may be best understood as one of continued diasporic identity and diasporic consciousness.

HERE-NESS, THERE-NESS, AND EVERYWHERE-NESS: THE JEWISH LABOUR BUND AND THE QUESTION OF ISRAEL, 1944–1955

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.

In anticipation of tomorrow: Globalisation and ‘transnation’ in Mongane Wally Serote's history is the home address

In view of the collapse of institutional apartheid, post‐liberation South African literature can be appropriately limned as literature of return, going by the preponderance of its engagement with exile in the years of the struggle. I read Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address (2004) against the backdrop of migration, paying attention to the way the poem anticipates what should be the right attitude of those it may affect, especially with respect to the nation‐state. I argue that the assumptions of this anticipation are true for South Africa as they are for all other postcolonial African states. While privileging the idea of space and time, my position in this paper benefits significantly from Bill Ashcroft's concept of “transnation” and the way it makes for the inadequacies of the notion of diaspora and other similarly configured abstractions.

From Nostalgia to Nirvana: A Buddhist Epistemological Approach to Diasporic Literary Forms

Like the diasporian, the Buddhist knows the displacement from home to homelessness. Practicing, the Buddhist makes homelessness her home. Writing, the diasporic writer (re)constructs a movable home in words. Using the Buddhist five thesis on form, this paper attempts to apply these principles to the notion of diaspora. Five new insights to the experience of diaspora are gained from this approach. The method is then applied to the diasporic Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa’s poem “Before, One, becomes, One.” In conclusion, it is argued that the Buddhist perspective offers a new critique useful in understanding the challenges of the postmodern world.

New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora

Art of the African diaspora has become the focus of various curatorial interests in displaying and documenting an expanded, circum-Atlantic geography of blackness based on a notion of diaspora that once seemed promising for imagining an inter- or transnational community. However, the recent application of the diaspora concept to curatorial spaces has become susceptible to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States-centered experiences. This essay interrogates the ways in which such a U.S. locus for the African diaspora generates a hegemonic spatio-temporal scheme of new “margins” and “centers.” With reference to visual examples, it recognizes attempts among artists and curators in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean to dismantle and disavow the hegemonic use of race and the diaspora concept as founding categories of art historiography and of public memory.

Autobiographical representations of the Rwanda genocide and black diasporic identities in Africa

This article uses the example of the Rwandan genocide to deconstruct notions of African diaspora based on margin to centre and pull and push factors. Representing patterns of African migrations and diasporas through the autobiographical mode reveals multiple genocides that took place not only in Rwanda but in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Umutesi's novel, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004) complicates our standard understanding of what is known of genocide in Africa, forcing us to revise our notions of diaspora because the autobiographical narrative highlights differences within a single refugee diaspora. Umutesi's personal account of the links between genocide and diaspora in the Great Lakes Region interrogates the very authority that is accorded individual subjectivities in autobiographical works of Africa. The contingent nature of African politics, particularly, within the unnatural context of genocide renders African identities transient and perpetually diasporic.

Common Law and Jewish Law. The Diasporic Principle of dina de-malkhuta dina

Medieval rabbis conceived of a legal framework for the relations between Jews and non-Jews according to a principle: dina de-malkhuta dina, ‘the Law of the Kingdom is Law.’ Thus, the notion of Diaspora, which in the last century came to be used to refer to the fate of migrants in general, bears a dual legal connotation in Judaism. This article tries, by tracing back the origin of the word galut or golah (translated as exile) in Antiquity, to demonstrate how Diaspora is related to the core of Jewish definitions of the present and questions the purely theological and particularly Jewish evolution of this concept.

The Notion of Creolization: An Attempt at Theoretical Clarification

In this article, I hope to show how the general idea of extends to some very different meanings, in spite of its apparent semantic consistency, often involving the ideas of intermixing and blending. Starting with a review of various texts which have given different interpretations of the term creolization, I shall identify four major fields of meaning. Those fields are defined by the way in which the authors envisage creolization in relation to two pairs of notions. The first pairing sets the cultural process against the cultural product, while the second concerns temporality, with creolization either seen as an original (or starting) phenomenon or as constantly moving (or becoming). The ideas which have been forged out of the perception of these pairings divide up knowledge of creolization across well-characterized regions, regions which this work will try to describe. In doing so, it will be a question of looking at the notion of diaspora that these different meanings involve. This article will conclude with some thoughts questioning the universality of the creolization phenomenon and suggesting that it remains dependent upon historical contexts.

Re-imagining the Diaspora: History, Responsibility, and Commitment in an Age of Globalization

The past two decades have witnessed the intensification of globalization and the unprecedented exodus of Africans to developed countries. The two trends have profound implications for the North and South and also for Africans and their relationship to their homeland. This paper examines the relationship and explores the challenges of engaging, interrogating and re-imaging the notion of Diaspora.

Diaspora as Process: (De)Constructing Boundaries

AbstractThis article discusses different conceptualisations of diaspora, as bounded, unbounded and as a process, in order to help highlight the useful role diaspora can play in explorations and (de)constructions of nation‐state, community and identity boundaries. There are two main ways in which diaspora has been theorised. The first theorises diaspora in relation to defined homeland‐orientated ethnic groups and identities and the second theorises diaspora in relation to fluid, non‐essentialised, nomadic identities. This article argues that it is necessary to look beyond such conceptualisations of diaspora as nomadic/fluid (unbounded) or homeland‐centred/ethnic‐religious (bounded). This article advocates a flexible use of diaspora as process that is able to examine the dynamic negotiations of collective, strategic and politicised identities based around constructions of ‘sameness’ and the homeland, as well as individual identities that are malleable, hybrid and multiple. It stresses that it is within this notion of diaspora as process that geographers, with their emphasis on place, space and time, have an important role to play.

Diasporic Hegemonies: Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora

"Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogues organized by Deborah A. Thomas and Tina M. Campt as part of a project titled "Diasporic Hegemonies." In this dialogue, Jacqueline Nassy Brown and Bayo Holsey draw from their ethnographic research within Liverpool, England and coastal Ghana respectively to discuss the processes by which and places within which notions of the African diaspora are produced. They also address questions of how particular notions of diaspora are politicized, how they move between and among communities, and how they are used at specific moments in time.