African Transnational Diasporas

Fractured Communities and Plural Identities of Zimbabweans in Britain

D. Pasura

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137326560
• eBook ISBN: 9781137326577
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

Pasura proposes a framework for understanding African diasporas as core, epistemic, dormant and silent diasporas. The book explores the origin, formation and performance of the Zimbabwean transnational diaspora in Britain and examines how the diaspora is constituted in the hostland and how it maintains connections with the homeland.

1

African Transnational Diasporas: Theoretical Perspectives

African diasporas

Over the last five centuries, mass migrations have played a significant role in colonization, industrialization, the emergence of nation-states and the development of the capitalist world market. What is characteristic of contemporary migration is its global reach, centrality to domestic and international politics and its enormous economic and social consequences (Castles and Miller, 2003). There are few issues more relevant to today’s society than those relating to migration and diasporas, and their impact on identities and cultural practices. For instance, in the migration–development nexus, transnational diasporas are increasingly seen as agents for developing their countries of origin (De Haas, 2005; Levitt and Jaworsky, 2007). The African transnational diasporas, for example, regarded by the African Union as Africa’s sixth region, are responsible for an estimated US$50 to 150 billion remittance flows per year to the continent (Davies, 2010; Mohan and Zack-Williams, 2002; Zeleza, 2010). The emergence of new communication technologies, satellite and cable networks, and low-cost travel have fostered the apparent increase in the regularity and intensity of cultural and social exchanges across borders.

The expression ‘African diaspora’, however, raises a prior question about what is ‘Africa’ and who are legitimate members of the African diasporas. What defines Africa, as Zeleza (2005) tells us, are the particular attributes of its history, its geography, its material and imagined places, and its people. Beyond its geographical contours and boundaries, Africa is also a product of colonial and postcolonial inventions and constructions (Mudimbe, 1988; Ranger, 1983). However, we must be wary of racialized and restrictive construction of ‘Africa’ as ‘sub-Saharan Africa’, neglecting, for instance, five million North African diasporas in France, mainly Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan, who remain socially excluded from the French society (Esman, 2009; Zeleza, 2010). The histories of Africa, constituted negatively by experiences of imperialism, slavery, colonialism and racialized capitalism, are intimately connected to the dispersal of its people around the globe. But what are African transnational diasporas? Moreover, what do the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’ mean? How are diasporas differentiated from transnational communities? It is necessary to answer these questions to provide a theoretical foundation and conceptual clarity for the book.

A number of scholars have contributed to debates on putting conceptual boundaries to the term ‘African diaspora’ (Alpers, 2001; Manning, 2003; 2009; Palmer, 2000; Zeleza, 2005; 2010). The term African diaspora, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s,¹ describes histories of dispersal of African people from and within the continent (Mercer et al., 2008; Zeleza, 2005). Recently, scholars have emphasized the need to go beyond the narrow focus on diasporas outside the continent but also to identify and locate diasporas within Africa, and not cast these two as separate entities (Bakewell, 2008). The study of the African diaspora as a concept and field of study, dominated by Historical and Cultural Studies, has tended to focus on the experiences of Africans in the North Atlantic (see, for example, Gilroy, 1993), specifically the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, neglecting migration patterns to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and new contemporary migration from within and without the continent (Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, 2003; Larson, 2007; Zeleza, 2005). As Koser (2003, p. 3) argues, ‘a preoccupation with slavery and its descendents has diverted our attention from striking new patterns and processes associated with recent migrations’. Responding to this gap in the literature, Zeleza (2005) mapped four historical strands of the global African diasporas in terms of their places of dispersal thus: intra-Africa, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and Atlantic diasporas (see also Palmer, 2000). What makes the work of Zeleza (2005; 2010, p. 5; see also Akyeampong, 2000; Jayasuriya and Pankhurst, 2003) useful is that it attempts to ‘de-Atlanticize and de-Americanize the histories of African diasporas’. As Akyeampong (2000, p. 183) correctly noted, the meaning of the term African diaspora has shifted from ‘the forced migration of African captives of the Old and New Worlds to the voluntary emigration of free, skilled Africans in search of political asylum or economic opportunities; from a diaspora with little contact with the point of origin (Africa) to the one that maintains active contact with the mother continent’.

Typologizing African diasporas by the location of their dispersal, as Zeleza (2005; 2010) has done, would export the concept to heterogeneous groups of people in all countries and continents, thereby diluting its distinct meaning and relevance for practical application. Similarly, by differentiating between Africa’s domestic diasporas² and the continent’s international diasporas, Mercer et al. (2008) follow Zeleza’s analytical frame of reference by categorizing diasporas according to the location of their dispersal. Bakewell (2008) cautions academics about the danger of looking for diasporas within and outside Africa, which may, inadvertently, help to ‘invent’ diasporas by naming them just as colonialists did in inventing tribes on the continent. Besides, contemporary African diasporas,³ for example, the Eritrean (Bernal, 2006), Ghanaian (Henry and Mohan, 2003), Moroccan (Loukili, 2007) and Somali (Kleist, 2010; Lindley, 2010) diasporas, are defined according to their countries of origin and not their location of dispersal. From the broader literature on diasporas, scholars use a variety of heuristic devices to define and name diasporas. For instance, Cohen (2008), one of the eminent scholars on the subject, categorized diasporas as victim, trade, labour, imperial and cultural based on migrants’ reasons for migration. By contrast, Esman (2009) classifies diasporas as settler, labour and entrepreneurial on the basis of functions migrants perform in hostlands. Building on this vital earlier scholarship and in response to the emerging field of applied diaspora studies, I want to shift the analytical focus slightly and use the transnationality of diasporas as a point of reference. My particular concern is on the connections, linkages and identities that diasporans form, enact and reinvent in destination countries and how these relate to their homelands. In this age of transnational diasporas, it can be argued, the challenge is to map out how these diasporas develop and maintain ties and relationships with their countries of origin (real or imagined), hostlands, as well as among diasporans themselves (Zeleza, 2005). In the following sections, I will revisit this discussion on African transnational diasporas but only after examining meanings of the terms diaspora and transnationalism.

Theoretical perspectives on diaspora and transnationalism

Diaspora and transnationalism offer theoretical frameworks and analytical lenses that transcend nation-states’ boundaries, and therefore are well equipped for exploring the experiences of migrants enmeshed in two or more social worlds. Transnationalism is not synonymous with diaspora, but diasporas are regarded as examples of transnational communities. More so, transnational communities can be seen as the building blocks of potential diasporas. Insofar as some diasporas maintain connections with their original or imagined homeland, they may be referred to as transnational communities. To use Faist’s (2010, p. 9) metaphor, diaspora and transnationalism are ‘two awkward dance partners, which talk about similar categories of persons involving forms of forced and voluntary migrations’. Hence, it is imperative to explore the origins of these terms and trace their different meanings in order to provide a conceptual basis for this book.

Diaspora

Diaspora is perhaps one of the most over-theorized, yet most elusive terms in both academic and social usages. Tölölyan (1996, p. 5) notes that the term diaspora, once a preserve for describing Jewish, Greek and Armenian dispersion, ‘now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes terms like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic communities’. Hence, diaspora has been described as a ‘travelling term’ (Clifford, 1994, p. 302), in that it

is a single signifier for a necessarily heterogeneous and disparate set of experiences. Indeed, the meaning of diaspora has been stretched to accommodate various intellectual, cultural and political agendas and ‘this has resulted in what one might call a “diaspora” diaspora – a dispersion of the meanings of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space’ (Brubaker, 2005, p. 1).

Etymologically, diaspora is derived from the Greek word diasperien, from dia-, ‘across’ and -sperien, ‘to sow or scatter seeds’. The term was first used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, referring to exiled Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria, and then came to be used to describe the plight of Jews outside Palestine. The Greeks understood the term as migration and colonization (Cohen, 2008). Hence, most preliminary discussions of diaspora refer to the Jewish diaspora as the concept’s defining paradigm (Braziel and Mannur, 2003; Cohen, 2008; Safran, 1991). Most preliminary discussions of diaspora were firmly rooted in a conceptual ‘homeland’; they were concerned with a paradigmatic case, or a small number of core cases, the Jewish diaspora, the Armenian diaspora, Greek diaspora, the African diaspora, among others (Anthias, 1998; Brubaker, 2005). Consequently, diaspora came to be understood as referring to groups who were forcibly expelled from their homelands and who remained socially marginal in hostlands as they waited to return.

Safran (1991) argues that the degree of force initiating a population’s dispersal tends to legislate what counts as a diaspora, semi-diaspora or non-diaspora. Only if a population faces a destroyed homeland and/or its own expulsion, and collectively experienced trauma as a result, can we talk of a diaspora. The diasporic community should share several of the following characteristics, viz.:

1) They, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’ or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about the original homeland […]; 3) they believe they are not – and perhaps cannot be – fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return – when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another… (Safran, 1991, pp. 83–4)

Safran’s quotation offers a number of definitive features as to what constitute a diaspora, and indeed this explication has been criticized for providing a rigid categorization of diaspora that focuses on the idea of a homeland. Likewise, Sheffer (1986; 2003, p. 9) defines an ethno-national diaspora as

a socio-political formation, created as a result of either voluntary or forced migration, whose members regard themselves as of the same ethno-national origin and who permanently reside as minorities in one or several host countries.

Unlike Safran (1991), Sheffer’s definition encompasses both voluntary migration and forced migration as features of a diaspora. Elaborating and expanding on key characteristics developed by other theorists, Cohen (2008) identifies five types of diasporas, namely: victim, labour, trade, imperial and cultural. The value of Cohen’s work is that it makes us aware of the many ethnonational communities whose members live outside their homelands, a recurring phenomenon in this age of globalization.

A review of the term diaspora, as formulated and popularized by classical diaspora theorists (Cohen, 2008; Safran, 1991; Sheffer, 2003), reveals three major building blocks or core features of the term that differentiate it from similar phenomena: history of dispersal; connections with the homeland (in term of myths, memories, desire for eventual return); and a collective identity or boundary-maintenance (Brubaker, 2005). The postmodern notion of diaspora, a response both to the rigid notion of diaspora posed by classical theorists and to the perceived failures of ethnicity and ‘race’ paradigms (Anthias, 1998), makes no reference to ethnicity, a ‘homeland’ or to a particular place of settlement, but emphasizes hybridity and deterritorialized identities, and plural attachments. Clifford (1994) claims that the notion of homeland need not be essential to the articulation of transnational communities. He insists that a shared and continuing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation and resistance are other key features. Nonetheless, the characteristics of diaspora as espoused by Safran (1991), and particularly those developed by Cohen (2008), ‘oscillate around the idea of homeland’ (Kalra et al., 2005, p. 12), leaving little room for groups that establish no relationship with their place of origin.

In his later work, Safran (2005, p. 52) points to two extreme positions in the debate about the relationship between diaspora and homeland, that is, ‘imagining a homeland where none can be clearly pinpointed (as in the case of the Romany and Sinti) and rejecting any connection with a homeland that exists’. Clifford (1994) and Gilroy (1993), for whom the homeland is less relevant to the reality of the diaspora than orientations and activities within the hostland, occupy the middle ground. Gilroy’s (1993) concept of Black Atlantic sees the African diaspora as a transnational and nonterritorial collective identity that challenges the fixed geographies of Africa, America, Europe and the Caribbean. Thus, Gilroy and Clifford comment on the categorization of diaspora as too essentialist and see diaspora as a process.

Reviewing the significance of the idea of homeland in defining diasporas, Cohen (2007, p. 1) argues that social constructionists have deconstructed the ideas of homeland and community, giving rise to an elastic notion, which can be characterized ‘as “solid”, “ductile” and “liquid”, on a diminishing scale from historical reality to postmodern virtuality’. The ‘solid’ idea of homeland has been reasserted by the emerging field of applied diaspora studies, which seeks to explain the role of diasporas as agents of economic, social, cultural and political development of their countries of origin. The weakening of the solid idea of homeland gives rise to what Cohen calls ‘ductile homeland’. For instance, European and American Jews’ productive years in the diaspora have reduced their connection with Israel by creating ‘virtual homes’ in the diaspora, thereby experiencing a process of ‘dezionization’ (Cohen, 2007; Safran, 2005). The ‘liquid’ idea of homeland happens when migrants construct new deterritorialized identities and subjectivities, ‘having lost their conventional territorial reference points, to have become in effect mobile and multi-located cultures with virtual or uncertain homes’ (Cohen, 2007, p. 10). Examples of these ‘deterritorialized diasporas’ are Roma (Gypsies), Caribbean peoples and religious diasporas. Cohen (2007, p. 14) rejects ‘unsupported postmodernist critiques’ that conceive the idea of homeland as a ‘one-way movement from solid notions of the homeland to liquid notions of home’, and argues for ‘empirical and historical support for any notion of home/homeland’. However, the classification of the idea of homeland as ‘solid’, ‘ductile’ and ‘liquid’ implicitly assumes the homeland is a sine qua non in defining diaspora and thus differentiates ‘real’ diasporas from semi-diasporas or informal diasporas. Social constructionists maintain that the homeland is not a necessary condition in defining diaspora.

Sheffer (2003) argues that the appropriation of the term diaspora to non-ethnic transnational entities such as ‘global religions’, ‘political ideological dispersal’, ‘transnational linguistic communities’ and ‘the global youth culture’ is a misnomer. Baumann (cited by Brubaker, 2005, p. 3) points to transethnic and transborder linguistic categories, such as Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone ‘communities’, which have been described as diasporas. In addition, references to religious diasporas include Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Huguenot, Muslim and Catholic diasporas. The designation ‘religious diaspora’ is contentious because ‘whereas members of ethnic diasporas regard certain territories as their actual homelands, most members of the global religions, with the notable exception of Judaism, are attached to a spiritual center that is not the actual historical birthplace of forebears of the group’ (Sheffer, 2003, p. 66). Moreover, religious diaspora derive their source of value and religious identities from the ‘transcendental realm’; ethnic diasporic identities are based on primordial cultural sentiments, subjective leanings and instrumental consideration (Sheffer, 2003). The key distinction is that whereas ethnic diasporas are trans-state, other groups are transnational entities. Thus, Sheffer (2003, p. 11) introduces the hyphenated term ‘ethno-national diasporas’ as an attempt to distinguish the term from transnational formations in explaining what has been termed ‘deterritorialized identities’. The discussion is between a rigid categorization of diaspora as developed by classical diaspora theorists, that accommodates no other, and a loose classification advanced by social constructionists that admits everything of a similar nature. Furthermore, it is possible to discern a tension in the diaspora literature between ‘boundary-maintenance and boundary-erosion’ (Brubaker, 2005, p. 6). Whereas classical diaspora theorists emphasize the group’s collective identity, shared history, memory and myths of return, by contrast, scholars influenced by postmodernism focus attention on hybridity, fluidity, creolization and syncretism. Where to draw the line remains a subject for intense debate.

Apart from analysing the salient features of the term diaspora, scholars have also examined the concept in terms of historical periods. Sheffer (2003, p. 21) categorizes diasporas into three phases, that is, classical diasporas (those whose origins were in antiquity or the Middle Ages), modern diasporas (those that have become established since the seventeenth century) and incipient diasporas (those in the making). Similarly, Reis (2004) departs from the literature that characterizes the Jewish diaspora as the prototype, and discusses diaspora in the three principal historical epochs, as classified by Sheffer (2003), namely the classical period, the modern period and the contemporary period. The classical diaspora is primarily associated with the ancient period and Greece. The central theme around the modern period involves the days of slavery and colonization. The contemporary period starts after World War II, and this period ‘illustrates the progressive effect of globalization on the phenomenon of diasporization’ (Reis, 2004, p. 42). Diasporic groups in the contemporary period, unlike the classical period, have numerous reasons fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 African Transnational Diasporas: Theoretical Perspectives
• 2 Vintages and Patterns of Migration
• 3 The Construction and Negotiation of Diasporic Identities
• 4 ‘Do You Have a Visa?’ Negotiating Respectable Masculinity in the Diaspora
• 5 The Diaspora and the Politics of Development
• 6 Religion in the Diaspora
• 7 Transnational Religious Ties and Integration: An Unhappy Couple?
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index