Recognizing migration as a human constant (Clifford 1997; Manning and Trimmer 2013) places certain realities of contemporary life into perspective. Earth’s regions would not have been peopled if our species was exclusively bound to its habitat. Whether to escape starvation, deadly conflicts or natural disasters, travelling to other places has been a means of survival for humankind. Contemporary diasporas are the outcomes of behaviour that has been integral to our species for many millennia. The global movement of people has continued in our time with the retracing of old routes and the charting of new ones. Current modes of transportation have increased travel and have accelerated the growth of diasporic communities. Contemporary technologies have also made possible regular contact between the vastly separated settlements of a group. Worldwide communication networks enable the maintenance of personal and communal linkages as well as engagement with the affairs of home countries in ways that were previously unthinkable. This chapter places the book’s close examination of migration, diasporas and communication into a larger context.
‘Diaspora’ (the scattering of people) existed as a social phenomenon long before the coining of the ancient Greek verb diaspeiro, from which the contemporary term is derived (Dufoix 2008). Nevertheless, diasporas are often seen as being anomalous in the modern world of nations because of an erroneous tendency to think of countries as normatively containing only sedentary, indigenous populations. Migration has been occurring since the earliest times and is a recurring feature of history to this day. The population of the world and that of individual territories was formed over many millennia through the proliferation of the earliest known homo sapiens from eastern Africa to other continents. In this global migration we have the primary formation of diaspora—the human diaspora.
The diasporic migrations of the last few centuries were largely influenced by colonization and trading links. It is the former colonies that are now producing the bulk of migrants; they are moving northwards—in the direction opposite to that which was charted by the colonizers. However, these postcolonials are travelling not only to their respective former metropoles but to other western countries as well. There are several reasons for this movement of people. The economic linkages of contemporary globalization are building on colonial infrastructures. There is a connection between the commercial involvement of Europe and North America in southern countries and the current human flows from the latter to the former. Saskia Sassen indicates that activities such as the off-shoring of production, foreign investment into export-oriented agriculture, and the power of multinationals in the consumer markets of less developed countries, as well as organized recruitment of foreign workers by western governments and employers, stimulate emigration (Sassen 1996).
Conflict is another major cause for the mass movement of people. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that ‘By end-2014, 59.5 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations’ (UNHCR 2015). There appears to be a relation between the increasing military involvement of western states in the Middle East and Africa , directly through interventions and indirectly through the arms trade, and the growing migration of people from these places to western countries.
Even as people move to secure a better life, they seek to remain in touch with those left behind. Migrants negotiate the contingencies of settling into new societies with the desire to remain in touch with family and friends. These are very human tendencies that are determined by close relationships and the need to be comforted by the culture in which one grew up. However, it is difficult to maintain the connections that one had at home and relational networks usually weaken as new ones develop in the receiving country. Nevertheless, the ties to the homeland do not disappear. Often, a complex cosmopolitan web of links is developed with the use of available communication technologies. The chapters in this book examine in depth the modalities and uses of diasporic media among several migrant groups that have settled in Europe.
Nomads and Borders
Migration is an expression of nomadism. A notable article by Symanski et al. (1975) in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers examined the continuum between nomadism and sedentarism, which are two primary modes of life that determine how humans make home. Archaeological and historical evidence tells us of early continental migrations, including those from the Caucasus north-westwards towards Europe and eastwards towards central and southern Asia and from Asia across the Bering Strait into the Americas (Manning and Trimmer 2013). The nomadic way of life was much more common than it is now, since a greater proportion of people in earlier eras tended to be hunters, gatherers and herders. The long-term trend has been of mobile peoples settling into sedentary lifestyles. One of the strongest pressures inducing sedentarism has been the policing of borders by governments. Boundaries between various jurisdictions have become much less porous than they used to be in previous times.
As human civilization has become increasingly sedentary over time, clashes between those who have chosen to settle down and those who continue to be nomads have grown. The former build villages, towns and cities, cultivate crops and take over territory for other social and economic activities. This is a culture of boundaries and of appropriating land and bodies of water as property. However, nomadic peoples need large spaces to traverse—many travel with their herds between winter and summer pastures, often cutting across property lines marked by settled peoples and occasionally trampling their crop fields. The archetype for this fundamental human contest can be found in the conflict between the Biblical /Quranic figures of Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam and Eve: ‘Abel became a herder of flocks and Cain a tiller of the soil’ (Genesis 4:2). Cain is supposed to have killed his brother, committing the first murder.
There have been innumerable conflicts between sedentary and nomadic peoples in human history : for example, the Indo-European migration into ancient India pushed southwards the Dravidians who had built an advanced civilization in the Indus River valley 4500 years ago; the Huns overran a nascent Eu...
