9 Emergence and Evolution of the Field of Diaspora Studies

1. INTRODUCTION

Those who find themselves working in the field of ‘Diaspora Studies’ will quickly notice the broad scope of a discipline whose subject matter seems to be in state of flux with changing and contested definitions of the term ‘diaspora.’ Yet the term has become an important part of how we make sense of the experiences of people in the modern globalised transnational world. This module traces the genesis of the concept in the social sciences and the emergence of the field of ‘diaspora studies’.

The word ‘Diaspora’ has its origin in the ancient Greek word speiro meaning to sow or to disperse (Anteby-Yemini and William 2005: 262; Cohen 2008: xiv; Dufoix 2008: 4). While the earliest occurrence of the word ‘diaspora’ has been traced to its use by Sophocles, Herodotus, and Thucydides in the 5th century B.C. its modern interpretation is more closely linked to its use in the Jewish tradition. Dufoix (2008: 4-5) painstakingly traces the genesis of the term and points out that

“Contrary to what has often been claimed, “diaspora” was not used to translate the Hebrew terms galut, galah, and golah. These were rendered in the Septuagint by several Greek words: apoikia (emigration), paroikia (settlement abroad), metoikia (emigration) or metoikesia (transportation), aikhmalosia (wartime captivity), or apokalupsis (revelation). Instead, “diaspora” always meant the threat of dispersion facing the Hebrews if they failed to obey God’s will, and it applied almost exclusively to divine acts…it was only in later Jewish tradition that the meaning of “diaspora” changed to designate both the scattered people and the locale of their dispersion.”

Image: Depiction of Jewish Exile: Roman Triumphal arch panel copy from Beth Hatefutsoth, showing spoils of Jerusalem temple.The siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. that is commemorated here marks the displacement of the Jews from the ‘promised land’.
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Arch_of_Titus_Menorah.png
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Today the word diaspora has a much wider application. It is used to describe a number of groups, situations, and processes that are implicated in cross border migrations. While the term ‘ diaspora’ has a long history, its use in the social sciences is much more recent. One of the earliest appearances, Dufoix (2008) points out, is in 1931 in the American Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences where a historian named Simon Dubnov, who authored the entry on ‘Diaspora’ tried to demonstrate that its use could go beyond the religious meaning. However, despite attempts by scholars to take forward this broadened definition, it continued to have a largely religious meaning up until the 1950s (For a more detailed look at these early engagements with the concept of diaspora, see Dufoix 2008: 17-19). One possible explanation for this is that prior to the 1960’s, migrants were expected to give up their old identity and assimilate into the culture of their new home (Shuval 2002 cited in Anteby- Yemini and William 2005: 262); the notion of a diaspora caught between two cultures is recent. By the 1960s, newspapers and dictionaries began to accept a wider usage of the term. Despite this, it was a long time before the term entered the social science vocabulary. As Dufoix (2008: 19) says “….. except for the article by Simon Dubnov cited above, ‘diaspora’ as a concept is almost absent from the social sciences lexicon before the 1960s”.

2. FOUR PHASES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIASPORA STUDIES

It is only in the 1960s and 1970s that we see the emergence of Diaspora Studies with an exponential growth in the interest in the concept. This interest can be seen from the rise in the incidence of ‘diaspora’ as a keyword from “only once or twice a year in dissertations from the 1970s, [to] about thirteen times a year in the late 1980s, and nearly 130 times in 2001 alone” (Brubaker 2005: 1). Robin Cohen (2008) tries to draw out a chronology of diaspora studies by identifying 4 phases that the discipline has passed through (See Table 1.1). In the first stage, the concept of diaspora is strongly tied to the Jewish prototype and scholars are focused on studying groups that closely resemble this model. The second stage represents a move away from a definition of diaspora linked with victimhood to include a number of groups that lived outside of their country of origin and had a engagement with their homeland. The third stage see a further broadening of definition that resulted from scholars questioning those concepts that were used to frame the concept. Realising that the concept may lose it’s potential as an analytical concept, the fourth stage makes an attempt to reclaim the concept. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss each of these stages in more detail.

2.1 Prototypical Diaspora

In the first phase, that Cohen (2008) calls the Prototypical Diaspora, a phase which comprises the 1960s to the 1970s, the term ‘diaspora’ still carries the weight of its religious meanings and is limited to describing certain dispersed groups – particularly the Jews, Greeks and Armenians, who are considered to be the ‘classic diasporas’(Vertovec 2000). Gradually others like the Africans and Irish also began to be studied under the ambit of the concept of Diaspora. These groups, whose displacement is characterised by a moment or period of trauma that caused their initial dispersion from their homeland, was the focus of diaspora studies in this first phase. Cohen (2008: 2-4) calls these ‘victim diasporas’ that are characterized by two important features; the first, traumatic exit from the homeland, and the second, the centrality of this homeland for the group.

2.2. Broadening Scope

The second phase, that extends from the 1980’s to mid-1990’s, witnessed a broadening of the scope of diaspora studies. As scholars began to realize that there were a number of groups besides the prototypical victim diasporas, that were encountering similar situations – either being compelled to leave or voluntarily leaving their homelands or not being accepted in the places that they settled in – the concept of diaspora expanded to include different categories of people like “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities tout court” (Safran 1991: 83). According to Dufoix (2008), until the mid-1980s the term diaspora was used in two distinct ways; first to refer to certain groups living outside of a ‘reference territory’ and second, to refer specifically to African trading networks. However, he notes that this was without any real effort to define diaspora. At this point, two important publications that got people talking about diaspora were Modern Diasporas in International Politics by Gabriel Sheffer (1986) and The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy (1993). But the setting up of the International Journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies by Khachig Tölölyan in 1991 marked the coming of age of the concept of diaspora and Diaspora Studies as it served as a clarion call to scholars to think about and discuss diasporas, and helped to propel that discussion forward (Brubarker 2005; Mishra 2006; Cohen 2008; Dufoix 2008). In the very first issue of the Journal Diaspora William Safran (1991: 83-84) presents his definition, which is among the earliest and most influential definitions of the term and concept of Diaspora. Rather than have a one-fits-all definition for the many different diasporas, he crafts an ‘ideal type’ of diasporas from a set of six characteristics. These may be summarised as follows:

1.      dispersion from a single ‘centre’ of origin to two or more foreign ‘peripheries’

2.      retention of a collective memory of the ‘homeland’

3.      yet feeling a degree of alienation from it

4.      hope of eventual return for them or their descendants

5.      belief that the homeland should be supported

6.      maintenance of a relationship with the homeland

This allowed for a broader definition of diaspora. Scholars now found themselves looking at many different groups under the term ‘diaspora’ – some of whom had adopted the term themselves and others to whom the term was applied. These include groups such as Cubans and Mexicans in the USA, Pakistanis in Britain, Maghrebis in France, Turks in Germany, Poles, blacks in the North America, Corsicans in Marseilles, Ukrainians, Italians, Afghans, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Iranians, Tibetans, Russians, Germans, Tamils, Sikhs, Hindus, Somalis, Kurds, Japanese, Roma, Hungarians, Croatians, Serbs, British, and Caribbean peoples living outside of their ‘homeland’(Cohen 2008: 5). In the first seven years since it began, from 1991 to 1998, the Journal Diaspora had recorded some 36 communities that were identified as ‘diasporas’ either by themselves or by the scholars studying them (Vertovec 2000: 3-4).There were efforts to classify these groups into types and subtypes and extrapolate lists of characteristics by which to mark out the limits of the concept. The ‘homeland’ became an important focal point, not only as a place of origin but also in terms of ethnicity, history, cultural memory, continued engagement, and hope of return. Cohen (2008) also argues for a recognition of the positive side of diaspora who in spite of, or perhaps because of, the anxiety of their situation are driven to succeed, and towards this, encourage co-ethnic solidarity.

Image:        Cover         page         of         the         first         issue         of         the         Journal        Diaspora

Source:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diaspora_a_journal_of_transnational_studies/toc/dsp.1.1.html

2.3. Social Constructionist Critiques

From the mid-1990s, the term ‘diaspora’ began to find more frequent and varied usage. As the editor of the Journal Diaspora, Khachig Tölölyan collected and published a number of “odd, sometimes interestingly nuanced, and at other times outrageously inappropriate uses” (Tölölyan 2000: 309) under the heading ‘Diasporama’; “corporate diaspora”, “egg cream diaspora” and “anatomical diaspora” are some examples that seem to stray furthest from the conventional meaning (Tölölyan 1994; Tölölyan 2000). This feeling was echoed by other academics studying diaspora such as James Clifford (1994: 304)    who noted that “for better or worse, diaspora discourse is being widely appropriated.” The growing popularity of the concept caused it to expand to a point where it became a buzz word even among academics that began to stretch the concept far beyond its earlier meanings. This was made possible by the criticism particularly from social constructionists who pointed out that scholars had hitherto privileged the etic over the emic in diaspora research and that diaspora was centred around essentialist notions about ‘homeland’ and ‘ethnic/religious community’ (Cohen 2008: 2-11). The works of Stuart Hall, James Clifford, and Paul Gilroy have been key in setting the foundation for this perspective by shifting the focus from “point of departure and maintenance of an identity” to “paradoxical identity, the noncenter, and hybridity” (Dufoix 2008: 24). The focus on ‘ethnic/religious community’ that was one of the preoccupations of diaspora studies came under critique. It was suggested that the study of diasporic groups should go beyond the ethnic and religious communities, and should also be concerned with their constituent parts – such as race, class, caste, gender, etc. The ‘homeland’ that was hitherto a cornerstone to the concept of ‘diaspora’ came under criticism from social constructionists (Cohen 2008: 2-11). The idea of the ‘home’ was no longer an actual space. For scholars like Avtar Brah (1996: 108) home was more about a desire to belong and the ‘homeland,’ which is a place in the diasporic imagination that cannot be visited or returned to. An important usage of diaspora in this regard is its use to refer to queer or gay diasporas. As Tölölyan explains in an interview with Robin Cohen (https://vimeo.com/25020401), those people who identified as gay/lesbian/ queer might be forced to immigrate to escape harsh social conditions and laws but when this is not possible, they are forced to go underground. It therefore becomes possible now to talk about diaspora without migration since this is also a kind of displacement and the people so displaced can be considered a diaspora.

In his article titled The ‘diaspora’ diaspora, Rogers Brubaker (2005) points out that the concept ‘diaspora’ has been dispersed and that the broadening of the concept to include more and more groups runs the risk of rendering the concept useless as an analytical tool. He says “If everyone is diasporic, then no one is distinctively so” (Brubaker 2005). This sentiment is reflected by others such as Robin Cohen (2008) and Lily Cho (2007) who see this watering down of the concept as a threat to its efficacy as a workable concept. But with this recognition that “diaspora has travelled so extensively and so easily across definitional and disciplinary boundaries that it risks losing any but the broadest and most general of meanings,” (Cho 2007) there is also an effort in the 2000s to retain meaning in the concept of ‘diaspora’ by considering the social constructionist critiques and finding a middle ground. Cohen (2008) calls this period the Consolidation Phase.

2.4 The Consolidation Phase

Safran (cited in Cohen 2008: 12) looking at the notion of ‘homeland’ finds that the more rigid understanding of it has given way to softer notions like ‘found home’. Moreover as life in the diaspora becomes more secure, both physically and emotionally, there is a need felt for identifying with a ‘homeland’ elsewhere. Cho’s (2007) solution is to think of diasporas not as an object of analysis but rather as a ‘condition of subjectivity’. In this way, she draws attention to the conditions that give rise to diasporas. Particularly the relationship to power; whether that is power which diasporas are striving towards or struggling against. Sökefeld (2006 cited in Cohen 2008: 13) draws parallels between social movements and the formation of diasporas, and uses literature on social movements to gain insights to understand diasporas. Similarly, Chariandy (2006 cited in Cohen 2008: 13-14) sees in diaspora a subversive tactic by which marginalised communities can challenge their subordinate status.

3.MORE CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATIONS

With the broadening of the definition of concept, there is also a shift from negative associations with the term such as ‘exile’ ‘loss’ and ‘suffering’ to more positive connotations such as ‘opportunity’ and ‘mobility’. (Schnapper 1999; Dufoix 2008) Or to use an often cited quote by Tölölyan “where once there was displacement, now there is Diaspora.”

Mishra (2006) , whose focus is more on diaspora criticism, doesn’t attempt a chronological mapping of diaspora studies, but instead identifies three nodes around which scholarship on Diaspora has centred. For him, these three nodes were formed out of two shifts in the thinking about diaspora. The first shift moves away from thinking about diaspora with reference to their countries of origin and destination. The second shift moves towards a more specific and contextualised study of diasporas. He calls the resulting nodes, “scenes of exemplification”– namely the “scene of dual territory”, the “scene of situational laterality”, and “the scene of archival specificity”. However, he is quick to point out that “these scenes do not constitute neat temporal blocks. Rather they intersect across the same temporal axis and some participants end up contributing to more than one” (Mishra 2006: 15 -16).

In the scene of dual territory, scholars focus on the split between the ‘homeland’ and the ‘hostland’ treating these as stable entities and seeing diasporic groups as being suspended between the two in a way that they are “living without belonging in one, [and] belonging without living in the other” (Mishra 2006: 16). Scholars in this scene are involved in broadly three projects. The first is to try to identify a new kind of being that makes up a diaspora – an ‘uprooted ethnic cluster’ – that fluctuates between the homeland and the hostland. The second is to identify, organise, and categorise the characteristics of these clusters. And the third, to study the role of memory, through the social, cultural and aesthetic practices of the cluster, in the formation of their identity and their linkages between the homeland and hostland.

This premise of a well-bounded homeland and hostland with a diaspora caught in between, didn’t sit well with some scholars. The upsetting of this premise is what Mishra (2006) sees as creating an ‘epistemic riff’. In the second scene, the scene of situational laterality, “homogenised, circumscribed and nationalised territories no longer function as privileged referents for identity formation” (Mishra 2006: 17) , instead diasporic identity is seen as being the result of a process of becoming that is specific to the situation in which it arises. Therefore, in this scene, a territory defined by a geopolitical boundary is not necessary for the formation of identity of diaspora. This makes it possible to account for multilocal diasporas.

The third is the scene of archival specificity; it draws on both the previous scenes with one major difference. In this scene scholars are no longer interested in developing general theories of diaspora but busy themselves with performing “archaeology on specific diasporas” (Mishra 2006: 17). This comes with a recognition that the ‘idealist scenarios’ presented in the earlier scenes need to be questioned and critiqued through the study of the individual histories of specific diasporas. For Mishra (2006), this recognition marks the second epistemic riff in diaspora criticism.

When looking at the evolution of diaspora studies and the changes that have occurred in the meaning and usage of the term, it is important that we also look at the conscious and intentional efforts to avoid its use altogether. While this is much more difficult to trace since the term is being avoided, it is important that we mention this here since it also contributes to the evolution of Diaspora studies.

4. DIASPORAS AND BORDERLANDS

One situation where the word diaspora is not considered to be the most apt, even if it is technically correct, is when two countries – the homeland and hostland share a common border. When dealing with transnational migrations, Diaspora overlaps with the concept of Borderland. In these borderlands, where homeland and hostland are geographically contiguous, there is constant going and coming by migrants. Migrations across the border of India and Nepal or those across Mexico and the USA are a continuous give-and-take between communities on either side, of “people, money, goods, and information” (Rouse 1991:14). Clifford (1994: 304) emphasises however that “borderlands are distinct in that they presuppose a territory defined by a geopolitical line: two sides arbitrarily separated and policed, but also joined by legal and illegal practices of crossing and communication”. Diaspora on the other hand involves transnational migrations that are not centred on any particular geo-political border and may involve linking of multiple communities across a number of different borders. Diasporic migrations also tend to be over longer distances with return to the homeland more frequently aspired to rather than actually undertaken.

5. HOMELAND

It is plain to see from the above discussion that the concept of Homeland is central to the concept and the discourses of the discipline of diaspora studies. This has been recognised by scholars such as Brah (1996: 187), who notes that “diaspora embodies a subtext of ‘home,’” and Tölölyan (2012: 9-11) who, in his mapping of diaspora studies, sees it as one of the three ‘formative binaries’ – the other two being dispersion/diaspora and subjective/objective. The ‘homeland’ has been a persistent defining characteristic of diasporas. However, the understanding of the ‘Homeland’ and the relationship that the diaspora has with it has undergone significant change in the evolution of diaspora studies.

In earlier approaches to migration, where migrants were expected to assimilate within their host country, there was no conceptualising of ‘homeland’ (and also no talk of diaspora) because it was seen as merely point of origin. However scholars began to realise that migration did not sever ties that people had to their country of origin (Cohen 2008: xiv; Dufoix 2008: 4). This resulted in attempts to understand and theorise these relationships between diasporas and their ‘homelands’. As we have seen, Mishra (2006) points out that diasporas were seen as being caught between the ‘homeland’ and the ‘hostland’. Here the homeland was understood as a geographic space to which diasporas felt a sense of belonging to, coupled with a feeling of exile from and also a shared hope of return. This conception of ‘homeland’ flows from the Jewish prototype where there was a hope that they might find themselves ‘next year in Jerusalem’ (Tölölyan 2012: 9). Return to this homeland, that exists in geographic space, is not only aspired to but also attempted and carried out. The creation of the state of Israel and the return of many Jews is an example of this.

However as the concept of diaspora broadened, this idea of a homeland linked to a territory to which the diaspora hopes to return someday began to be questioned on two counts. The first was the idea of return and the second was the link between the idea of a ‘homeland’ and geographical space; and both of these go hand in hand. Safran (1991: 89-90) demonstrates that while there are many diasporas that maintain a ‘myth of return’ to the homeland not all are not interested in actually going home. Clifford (1994:305-306) point out that this idea of a homeland linked to a specific geographical space does not hold true in many cases and that constructions of homeland are more oriented towards maintaining a sense of community than towards any single territory. Further, Hall (1990) points out that the current age is characterised by ‘hybridity’. This means that it is possible for people to comfortably maintain hybrid identities of belonging to their (new) home and also to the ‘homeland’. Another significant contribution in this regard was the idea of a ‘homing desire’ suggested by Brah (1996: 16), who argues that “the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins while taking into account a homing desire as distinct from a desire for a ‘homeland’”.

Thus we see that the concept of the ‘homeland’ has undergone much change in the history of Diaspora Studies. Moreover the experiences of different diasporic groups and individuals, with regard to their relationship with the ‘homeland’ have been very different. It is for these reasons that Tölölyan (2012:11) warns that “we must be careful not to locate the diasporic’s home in the ancestral homeland too easily.”

CONCLUSION

We have seen in this module how the concept of diaspora has undergone change; being first too narrow and then too wide before attempting to settle on a middle path. This conceptual mutation was both the product of as well as accompanied by theoretical and methodological reorientations. These will continue to take place, and they must, since the phenomenon of migration and diaspora formation continue to happen in fresh ways under new circumstances. After all “ ‘diaspora’ is just a word. Like all words, it serves only to denote part of reality, one that isn’t always the same each time it is used” (Dufoix 2008: 2).

REFERENCES

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