After a timid debut in the 1980s, over the past three decades, the term “diaspora” has featured prominently in numerous studies and in the broader theoretical debates within different, mainly interdisciplinary, fields such as cultural and media, postcolonial, and area studies. During the same period, similar attempts to introduce the term in the discourses of social science and humanities have been making inroads into older and more established fields such as politics, sociology, international relations, literary criticism, and social anthropology.
It is clear that the popularity of the term has not just been a terminological fad. It was partly the product of a desire, and need, among scholars to explore new dimensions of human mobility and, eventually, as this handbook aims to illustrate, connectivity, that were not adequately addressed through the use of existing conceptual frameworks that had particular histories and connotations. Moreover, it was intended to link phenomena associated to human dispersion with broader theoretical advances associated with the study of globalization, postmodernity and postcolonialism, to name but a few.
“Where once were dispersions,” Khachig Tölölyan observed at the time, reflecting on this trend (1996, p. 3), “there now is diaspora.” Indeed, as James Clifford (1994, p. 306) suggested,
Returning for a moment to Tölölyan's remarks, it should be pointed out that the shift from dispersion to diaspora indicates much more than the theoretical convergence we identified. The difference between dispersion and diaspora also lies in the ways in which diasporic phenomena and cultures are seen in the context of an increasingly transnational terrain and, we would argue, brings to the fore the notion of agency. Whereas dispersion refers to the process of populations spreading beyond the bounds to their place of “origin,” diaspora connotes processes of making sense of this dispersion, of creating infrastructures for narration and action in transnational and translocal contexts, or to the meeting of roots and routes as Gilroy (1993) aptly suggests. Diasporic studies have thus tended to look at the processes of the making of a diaspora, the conscious and subconscious ways in which particular transnational communities, networks, and identities are formed and transformed. In other words, social action and cultural change, the way in which migrants construct meaning, develop subjectivities and identities, and embark on action, are central in our understanding of the notion of diasporas.
However, the ascendancy of the term in social science discourse was not welcomed by all concerned as many remained skeptical, finding “diasporas” an unnecessary distraction most likely to bring confusion and undermine existing theoretical advances by its sheer presence in the debate. Characteristically, reflecting this skepticism and, even, hostility, at the opening plenary of the 1999 American Historical Association meeting, Colin A. Palmer claimed that “diaspora is a problem that invites a great deal of methodological fuzziness, ahistorical claims, and even romantic condescension” (in Winkler, 1999). Even more sympathetic commentators such as Alain Medam (1993) and James Clifford (1994), expressed skepticism and dismay at the gratuitous usage of the term often in order to merely, and descriptively, refer to the dispersion of a population from one nation‐state to several “host countries,” stressing the need to attempt a more robust theorization.
This rapid expansion of the usage of the term has had significant implications as far as the concept, its meanings, and its theoretical usefulness are concerned. Quite often the term has been used loosely and descriptively, referring uncritically to diverse phenomena associated to human mobility. Equally often, it has been used interchangeably with other categories that have had a presence in social science discourse for much longer such as those of “ethnicity” or “race,” “minority,” or even “migration.” Often criticisms focused on the undiscerning conflation between diasporic phenomena and other forms of mobility such as tourism, retirement migration, and a host of other similar practices. Indeed, “diaspora” would often be used to refer to phenomena as diverse as medium‐term “professional” mobility or to the dispersion of “expatriates” from Western postindustrial societies to other parts of the world—while concerns have also been expressed as to the capacity of the concept to refer to phenomena as diverse as exile and forced displacement on the one hand and the transnational mobility patterns of entrepreneurs in the Asia‐Pacific region on the other.
In addition to this terminological laxity, conceptualizations of “diaspora” have been “partial” and, not uncommonly, not integrated within relevant theoretical frameworks that would give the concept depth, theoretical usefulness and enhance its critical utility. It is quite clear that, as “diaspora” has become “one of the buzzwords of the postmodern age” (Cohen, 1999, p.3), in some cases, the usage of the term adds no value to attempts to better understand the complex phenomena it is purported to describe and probe; indeed, on some occasions its uncritical and unreflexive application, may be counterproductive. In such instances, “diaspora” becomes more of a catch‐all term, referring uncritically to a variety of dissonant contexts of displacement and human mobility, lacking some common denominator and disregarding crucial factors such as the particular social relations and imaginations that underpin such phenomena.
The agenda of any attempt to theorize “diaspora” and, by extension to talk about diasporic cultures, therefore is a complex and extensive one. In order to avoid the pitfalls identified above, one needs to pose questions as to the particular meanings, if any, that “diaspora” assumes in the particular political and theoretical constellations it has been part of during its rapid ascendance to the universe of social science and humanities discourse. One needs to explore the multiple ways in which the debate on diasporas and the very concept of “diaspora” converge with the broader contemporary to it debates of globalization and late modernity. Such an examination involves a search for the intersections between a “theory of globalization” or of “transnationalism” and the study of diasporic cultures. It requires thinking in terms of transnational and global flows and situating “diasporic cultures” in their midst, understanding them in terms of their relation to the complex ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes that make up the global terrain and the networks that populate these. The intersection of the complex connectivity that underpins the transnational field and of the processes of cultural reinvention and reconstruction that the diasporic condition sets in motion effectively renders media technologies and diasporic media crucial factors in the reproduction and transformation of diasporic identities, and of diasporas in general. In other words, the global flows making up the complex array of institutions and practices that, following Appadurai (1996) we can call diasporic ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, and technoscapes, are translated into diasporic imaginaries, partly through their representation and narrativization that is achieved within the context of the relevant mediascapes. Focusing on the cultural implications of the global flows of information and capital, Appadurai suggests that it is through the complex landscapes these constitute, that community may be imagined and realized (Anderson, 1983). In an increasingly globalized world, the mediascapes that enable interaction across distance are crucial in shaping transnational, national and local politics, cultures, and identities. Contemporary ethnoscapes reconfigure beyond recognition traditional ethnic and local notions of community as the notions of culture and community have shifted from the more static geography of the locality to the fluid topography of the transnational landscapes Appadurai identifies. He points to the struggle by Sikh immigrants in the West to further the cause of an independent homeland (Khalistan) within India, although the population involved in this struggle and the underlying imagination of Khalistan is only connected via the mediascape of a set of internet technologies: these landscapes thus, are the building blocks of what, extending Benedict Anderson, could be seen as imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe (Appadurai, 1996). Community is therefore “imagined,” mediated through the imageries of the mediascape, ideologies of the ideoscape, and ever‐shifting demographics of ethnicity (ethnoscape) and information.
Such rethinking poses questions, not only of the impact of mobility, but more crucially, of connectivity, of the ways in which dispersed populations, develop networks and the crucial connections that turn them from merely that—dispersed populations—into transnational actors in an increasingly globalized world.
In this respect, developments in the fields of media and cultural studies have played a significant role in understanding diasporas both conceptually and empirically. Research has brought to the foreground the interconnections between locations (past and present), and between spaces—physical and virtual (cf. Aksoy & Robin, 2000; Brinkerhoff, 2009; Diminescu, 2008; Georgiou, 2006; Gillespie, 1995; Nedelcu, 2012; Retis, 2006; Siapera, 2010). Within such a conceptual and methodological context, diasporic media and cultural studies have largely challenged the occasionally excessive emphasis on the notion of a homeland left behind, lost and/or lamented and they have focused on mediated interactions, on flows of ideas, information, resources. They have more broadly questioned the conventional state‐centered logic that stresses the importance of not only homelands but also countries of settlement. As Beck argues, mediated mobility has transformed “the experiential spaces of the nation‐state from within” (Beck, 2006, p. 101) and has therefore prompted the study of alternative experiential spaces that surpass the geopolitical restrictions associated with the nation‐state. They have set the concept against, and within, the imagination and practices that, over the past couple of centuries, have given rise and sustained the resilient geopolitical entity of the nation‐sta...
