American Diaspora
The American Diaspora refers to the dispersion of American people and culture beyond the borders of the United States. This concept is often explored in literature through narratives of migration, displacement, and the search for identity in new and diverse environments. It encompasses the experiences of various ethnic and cultural groups, reflecting the complexities of American society and its global impact.
7 Key excerpts on "American Diaspora"
eBook - ePubWriting Intersectional Identities
Keywords for Creative Writers
- Janelle Adsit, Renée M. Byrd(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Diaspora The word “diaspora,” a Greek term meaning “to disperse,” was originally taken up to describe the experience of Jewish people after the Babylonian captivity of 586 bc (OED). A diaspora is a dispersal of people, sometimes violent and forced, but possibly voluntary, from their homeland into new regions. The field of diaspora theory and explorations of diaspora in creative writing have now expanded to encompass many different groups, including the Irish diaspora, Palestinian diaspora, African diaspora, and more. Diaspora theory engages themes of memory, home, trauma, identity, violence, and the “forced scattering” of populations (Sudbury 2004). Theorizing diaspora is central to understanding colonialism. Robin Cohen (2008) argues that diaspora studies has gone through four phases: (1) the classic use of the term to explain the Jewish experience, (2) beginning in the 1980s, the expansion of the use of the concept to describe the experiences of a variety of groups, (3) a wave of social constructionist and postmodernist critique of the concept of diaspora, as articulated previously. These theorists destabilized the notions of homeland and ethnic/religious community, focusing on the complexity of identity, and finally (4) a reconsolidation of the concept of diaspora, incorporating phrase three critiques, characterized by “a requestioning and more sophisticated understanding of shifts in the homeland—diaspora relationship, the ways in which a diaspora is mobilized and how diaspora studies connect to post-colonial studies” (12). As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2013) write, “Colonialism itself was a radically diasporic movement, involving the temporary or permanent dispersion and settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire world” (61). As these settlers established plantations and agricultural colonies, labor was needed to grow food for the metropole. The result of this was systems of enslavement across the Americas...
eBook - ePubBeginning postcolonialism
Second edition
- John McLeod(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Indeed, the slippings between the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘migrant’ and ‘postcolonial’ have been frequent and are not free from problems, as we shall consider. The literature produced by ‘diaspora writers’ – as have been called Monica Ali, Buchi Emecheta, Fred D’Aguiar, Romesh Gunesekera, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Caryl Phillips, Zadie Smith and Benjamin Zephaniah – has proved immensely popular in Western literary criticism. Similarly, in the work of academics such as Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Rey Chow, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall and Sudesh Mishra, the new possibilities and problems engendered by the experience of migrancy and diaspora life have been readily explored. These possibilities include creating new and progressive ways of thinking about individual and communal identities and critiquing established schools of critical thought. Such work has often been resourced by critics who turn to issues of migration and diaspora to discover new ways to understand contemporary human existence beyond older, potentially outdated models that stressed the centrality of static ideas of land, belonging, home, nation and the like. But diaspora communities and diasporic thinking are not free from problems, and these days many people who study diasporic thought and culture are wary of its pitfalls, especially in the wake of the popularity of postcolonial accounts of migration and diaspora in the 1990s which often enthusiastically presented diasporic modes of thinking and multicultural communities as making possible the end of imaginative as well as concrete acts of prejudice and division...
eBook - ePubCartographies of Diaspora
Contesting Identities
- Avtar Brah(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It addresses the global condition of culture, economics and politics as a site of ‘migrancy’ and ‘travel’ which seriously problematises the subject position of the ‘native’. My central argument is that diaspora space as a conceptual category is ‘inhabited’ not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. Throughout the chapter I have emphasised power relations embedded within discourses, institutions, and practices. In so doing I have mobilised a multi-axial performative conception of power. The chapter concludes with the idea of ‘creolised theory’ which is central to the kind of analysis I have been developing in this book. THINKING THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF DIASPORA First, a note about the term ‘diaspora’. The word derives from the Greek — dia, ‘through’, and speirein, ‘to scatter’. According to Webster’s Dictionary in the United States, diaspora refers to a ‘dispersion from’. Hence the word embodies a notion of a centre, a locus, a ‘home’ from where the dispersion occurs. It invokes images of multiple journeys. The dictionary also highlights the word’s association with the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile. Here, then, is an evocation of a diaspora with a particular resonance within European cartographies of displacement; one that occupies a particular space in the European psyche, and is emblematically situated within Western iconography as the diaspora par excellence. Yet, to speak of late twentieth-century diasporas is to take such ancient diasporas as a point of departure rather than necessarily as ‘models’, or as what Safran (1991) describes as the ‘ideal type’...
eBook - ePubHinduism in America
An Introduction
- Michael J. Altman(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...For these Jews and Christians, diaspora marked a boundary. But in the 1990s, diaspora slipped from a theological term of identity to a category used by social scientists and scholars of culture. Writing in the inaugural issue of a new journal named Diaspora in 1991, political scientist William Safran described how “diaspora” and, more specifically, “diaspora community” seem increasingly to be used as metaphoric designations for several categories of people—expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court. 12 Safran then gave his own six-point definition for the new social scientific term “diaspora”: The concept of diaspora [should] be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteristics: 1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original “center” to two or more “peripheral,” or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collection memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland—its physical location, history, and achievements; 3) they believe that 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 that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance and 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, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship. 13 Safran’s definition describes a community living in one place but with its identity,. energy, and resources dedicated to the homeland. They are always here but looking over there...
eBook - ePub- Rogers Brubaker(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER FIVE The “Diaspora” Diaspora A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO, writing in the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora, William Safran observed that most scholarly discussions of ethnicity and immigration paid “little if any attention … to diasporas” (1991: 83). This claim was beginning to be out of date—as Safran recognized—even by the time it appeared in print. And obviously no one would think of making such a claim today. There has been a veritable explosion of interest in diasporas since the late 1980s. The words diaspora and diasporic appear in titles or abstracts of only twelve dissertations during the entire 1970s, in about ten per year in the late 1980s, in about sixty per year in the late 1990s, and in more than two hundred per year since 2008. 1 Diaspora yields half a million Google Scholar results and 15 million general Google hits, a large majority of them nonacademic. As the term has proliferated, its meaning has been stretched to accommodate a broadening variety of intellectual, cultural, and political agendas. 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. 2 Most early 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 paradigmatic case was of course the Jewish diaspora; until recently, some dictionary definitions of diaspora did not simply illustrate but defined the word with reference to that case (Sheffer 2003: 9). The modern use of the word diaspora, as Stéphane Dufoix has shown, derives from the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. 3 The word is used there to describe not the fact of dispersion but the threat of dispersion that will befall the Jews, as divine punishment, if they do not respect God’s commandments...
eBook - ePubGlobal Diasporas
An Introduction
- Robin Cohen(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 The study of diasporas A guide DOI: 10.4324/9781003256526-1 In studying diasporas I need to make clear that we are not studying migration in general. Many people migrate and for a large variety of reasons. Millions move each year from rural to urban areas to escape poverty or famine and to seek enhanced opportunities for income, education and a fulfilling social life. Students and professionals are increasingly international in their study or work horizons, while junior employees are often posted a long way from home. Truckers cart their wares to many places, temporary migrant workers pick crops in foreign fields, while sex workers are often smuggled across borders. None of these, and many other kinds of migrants, necessarily form part of a diaspora. Simple definitions of diaspora We can understand the difference between migration in general and diasporas in particular by focusing on four basic features of a diaspora – members of a defined group have been dispersed to many destinations; they construct a shared identity; they still somewhat orient themselves to an original ‘home’; and they demonstrate an affinity with other members of the group dispersed to other places. There are many examples of definitions of a diaspora based on one, two, three or all four of these basic features. For example: The definition in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica (2021) is ‘populations, such as members of an ethnic or religious group, that originated from the same place but dispersed to different locations’. This is echoed in one of the descriptions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2021), namely ‘the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland’. Although acknowledging that each element needs explication, Brubaker (2005 : 5) declares that one can identify three core elements that remain widely understood to be constitutive of diaspora...
eBook - ePubNarrating African FutureS
In(ter)ventions and Agencies in African and African diasporic fiction
- Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Susan Arndt, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Diaspora dynamics: shaping the future of literature * Noah Sow Diaspora sounds like “a thing, far away from an actual thing.” Yet it is present everywhere and in the future of all things. Diaspora means to have arrived, against all lack of embeddedness, at a mutual, sometimes virtual, place. We have arrived in both belonging and un-belonging. We are family, dancing together over the phone, into our futures. Our European Diasporas are satellite and pseudo-autonomous. In our own unique ways, we are connected to our neighbour continent. We are born, shaped, and surrounded by African influences. Yet, I do not have the authority to define Africa, its past, its present, or its future. I live in one of Germany’s futures, in full approval of the hopeful concept of an inclusionary Diaspora, where we shell out trust and confidence in mutual understanding, learning, and teaching, for a commonly shared future, in our futures yet to come. Only by educating each other do we know about the history of the Black presence in Europe. Our historicity and historiography have always been threatened and sabotaged. To become complete, European historiography is dependent on African memory and framing. Narrating Europe from its future will include perspectives beyond a self-referential European canon and beyond reactivity. It will happen on our account. Juggling multiple consciousness like spheres of code, we do not have to hide any longer. There is a future for everyone, and anyone has their own futures. I see one of our futures in today’s work. Eurocentric narratives did their best to keep us from asking ourselves: What is my own interest? What are my own concerns? What is my own agenda? Still we are compelled to regard all aspects of philosophy, society, even aesthetics from distorted viewing angles. Story after story, text after text has ignored the possibility of us being recipients. It is in the attitude. It is in the language. It is in the authors’ phantasies spattered over the pages...
