What is Transnationalism?

What is Structural Functionalism?

What is Postcolonialism?

What is Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

What is Neocolonialism?

What is Time-Space Compression?

What is the Harlem Renaissance?

Diaspora Theory | Definition, Examples & Analysis

The concept of a diaspora is crucial to the field of migration studies and to the wider social sciences. How we define a diaspora is, itself, a site of contestation, but in starting with a broad definition we can begin to understand what diaspora theory encapsulates. In his chapter “An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, Nigerian academic Michael J. C. Echeruo defines a diaspora as “a ‘nation in exile,’ a ‘race in exile,’ and a ‘people in exile,’ however vaguely we define ‘exile’ and irrespective of how long it lasts or can last” (2001). This definition invites us to consider how many different diasporas have existed and under what circumstances. Oftentimes, the term “diaspora” is used to refer to the Jewish diaspora, which resulted as a consequence of socioeconomic discrimination which forced Jews out of Palestine in the eighth century. However, a great number of diasporas have occurred and existed throughout history in a litany of different sociocultural contexts. In Global Diasporas: An Introduction, diaspora studies scholar Robin Cohen provides six main types of diasporas:

Victim diasporas — the most common use of the term “diaspora” — are cultures forcibly exiled from homelands (e.g. Jewish, African, Armenian diasporas).

Labor diasporas arise from movement in search of employment or work opportunities (e.g. indentured plantation workers from India, China, and Japan).

Imperial diasporas result from colonial projects or migration for the sake of maintaining empires (e.g. British and Russian diasporas).

Trade diasporas develop from migration motivated by creating trade links (e.g. Lebanese, Chinese diasporas).

Deterritorialized diasporas do not share one specific homeland but rather share a cultural space (e.g. Caribbean peoples).

Incipient diasporas are groups that seem likely to become diasporas (e.g. seemingly temporary workers engaged by the Gulf States and Germany after the Second World War).

For more on these categories, additional subcategories, and case studies, we recommend Global Diasporas: An Introduction and Migration and its Enemies, both by Cohen. 

In these six types of diaspora, different themes emerge. In victim diasporas, one key theme is often racism or white supremacy. In imperial diasporas, colonialism presents an enduring challenge for those impacted by said diaspora, especially for those who hosted migrants from the colonial state. However, across all of these categories  we see three key actors that make up the framework of diaspora theory, as Judith T. Shuval writes in “Diaspora Migration”:

Diaspora theory is structured around three principal actors — homeland, diaspora group, host — who interact in a multi-faceted, changing set of relationships which may be viewed on a bifocal or trifocal level. (2000)

Diaspora theory, as a research methodology, invites us to consider how these three principal actors interact. By analyzing  the components that make up the homeland and host  — such as their socioeconomic, cultural, and political climates — we can begin to understand how community develops when dispersed away from its point of origin.  

It is important at this stage that we differentiate diaspora theory from transnationalism. As discussed in our “What is Transnationalism?” study guide, the concept of transnationalism is often used alongside diaspora theory. However, diaspora theory specifically emphasizes the experiences of people “exiled” from their homelands as opposed to the broader experience of migration. As stated by sociologist Thomas Faist: 

Although both terms refer to cross-border processes, diaspora has been often used to denote religious or national groups living outside an (imagined) homeland, whereas transnationalism is often used both more narrowly — to refer to migrants’ durable ties across countries — and, more widely, to capture not only communities, but all sorts of social formations, such as transnationally active networks, groups and organisations. (“Diaspora and Transnationalism: What Kind of Dance Partners,” in Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods, 2010)

Diaspora theory has also been argued to be more political in nature: it contends with matters of inequality more directly than transnationalism, which focuses more on the phenomena of migration and less on the sociopolitical mechanisms behind it. Gender scholar and diaspora theorist Asale Angel-Ajani states that "there is the possibility within diaspora studies to move away from the politically sanitized discourse that surrounds transnational studies" (2006). Diaspora theory and transnationalism are interlinked and focus on similar mechanisms, but the exploration of how banishment or removal from one’s homeland impacts a community is not the same as investigating how identities are impacted by the crossing of geographical and cultural borders in any act of relocation. 

How does diaspora theory relate to different fields of study? 

As the diasporic experience can impact a host of factors in one’s lived experience, diaspora theory’s relevance encompasses multiple academic fields, not just migration studies. Notably, much writing on diaspora theory has been written by anthropologists and sociologists, but exile and displacement are issues which can also impact a country’s economic systems, international relations, and internal politics. Diasporas are not only a matter of cultural disruption but also a subject to be addressed from a socioeconomic standpoint.

Perhaps most crucially, diaspora theory is a subject of interest for scholars within colonial and postcolonial studies. Colonialism is the practice of one group of people occupying and controlling the country and land of another group of people, the impact of which is vast and multi-faceted. Colonialism is an exploitative and harmful practice which often leads to socioeconomic inequality for and discrimination against native communities, thus exiling native groups from their lands and forcing them to search for survival and safety elsewhere. We can see an example of how colonial and postcolonial studies are connected to diaspora theory in the following section. 

Applying diaspora theory to real-world scenarios

In applying diaspora theory to history we can better understand the mechanisms underpinning acts of migration. A useful example emerges in Cartographies of Diaspora by sociologist Avtar Brah. Brah details the migration of South Asians to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s and what circumstances led to this occurrence:

Cartographies of Diaspora

Britain experienced severe labour shortages during the post-World War II period of economic expansion. At the same time, having been systematically exploited during the colonial period, Britain’s ex-colonies faced a future of poverty. They had a large labour force, but insufficient means to make this labour productive. Migration of labour from the ex-colonies to the metropolis during the 1950s was thus largely a direct result of the history of colonialism and imperialism of the previous centuries. If once the colonies had been a source of cheap raw materials, now they became a source of cheap labour. (2005)

Let’s break down this passage in terms of the three primary “actors” in diaspora theory: the homeland, the diaspora group, and the host. 

With the homeland, we have established that colonialism impacted South Asian colonies severely, putting the residents of these countries in a position of significant socioeconomic disadvantage. With the diaspora group, we can see that their migration from homeland to host country is motivated by this socioeconomic disadvantage, forcing them to relocate in order to avoid poverty. With the host country, it is evident that the diaspora group was relocating to a country which already had ties of its own to the homeland — and would be more socioeconomically stable as a consequence of their exploitative colonizing practices. 

While this act of migration may at first appear to have been voluntary, the depletion of resources in these South Asian countries by the United Kingdom left many South Asians with little choice but to leave behind their homelands to survive. Given the interplay of these factors, it seems reasonable to argue that colonization led to an exile of South Asians aiming to escape poverty. Here, diaspora theory is perhaps more suited than a transnationalist lens: diaspora theory assists us in differentiating between cross-border migration that was voluntary or optional and cross-border migration that was necessary or compelled. 

A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism

For academics new to the subject matter of migration studies, A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, is a highly valuable interdisciplinary exploration of diaspora theory and the concept of transnationalism. Quayson and Daswani bridge the divide between theory and practice with this collection of insightful case studies and multidisciplinary analyses. This text effectively introduces and explains key terminology in the migration studies field and utilizes it in examples both historical and contemporary. 

Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities

Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, edited by Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin, is the next port of call for any scholar looking to establish strong foundations in the field of migration studies or postcolonial research. Knott and McLoughlin’s book is split into three sections. The first provides comprehensive definitions for the terminology used throughout migration studies. The second then investigates the intersections of diaspora experience(s) with various protected characteristics and forms of media. The third is a collection of case studies and essays on a host of diasporas around the world. This publication is absolutely essential for academics outside of the field looking to build their knowledge of diaspora theory from the ground up.

Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

For those looking to expand their understanding of diaspora theory beyond a nation-centric lens, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora by feminist scholar Gayatri Gopinath is a great place to start. Gopinath’s writing, which powerfully explores queerness from a postcolonial standpoint, challenges the misconception that diasporas occur solely when one ethnic group is exiled from one geographical location. Confronting the experience of queer exile and the patterns of dispersion that follow, Gopinath’s interdisciplinary and intersectional publication is an insightful and thought-provoking expansion on the original conception of the diaspora. 

Diaspora theory is a gateway. Through it we are invited to consider how transnationalism, colonialism, displacement, persecution, and inequality shape the movement and safety of peoples all around the planet. By understanding the actors at play — the homeland, the diaspora group, the host — we can begin to interrogate the misconceptions normalized in the mainstream about identity, belonging, nations, states, and what it means to be a “native.” When we strive to better understand the impact of exile, displacement, and relocation on societies, our awareness of what constitutes a given culture or community becomes a richer and more informative tapestry. Diaspora theory is a theory that belongs to no academic discipline and stands to benefit scholars of the social sciences, literature, media, and beyond. 

Diaspora and Hybridity (2005) by Virinder Kalra, Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk

Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (2006) by Tony Ballantyne

Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora (2014) edited by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook

The African Diaspora Population in Britain: Migrant Identities and Experiences (2016) by Peter J. Aspinall and Martha J. Chinouya

British and Irish Diasporas: Societies, Cultures and Ideologies (2019) edited by Donald MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann, and Jonathan Clark

Diasporas and Homeland Conflicts: A Comparative Perspective (2016) by Bahar Baser

Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation-State (2016) by Robin Cohen

Angel-Ajani, A. (2006). “Displacing Diaspora: Trafficking, African Women, and Transnational Practices,” in Gomez, M. A. (ed.), Diasporic Africa. NYU Press, pp. 290-308.

Brah, A. (2005). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1604191/cartographies-of-diaspora-contesting-identities-pdf. 

Cohen, R. (2022). Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3518673/global-diasporas-an-introduction-pdf. 

Echeruo, M. J. C. (2001). “An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project,” in Okpewho, I., Davies, C. B., and Mazrui, A. A. (eds.), The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, pp. 3-18.

Faist, T. (2010). “Diaspora and Transnationalism: What Kind of Dance Partners,” in Bauböck, R. and Faist, T. (eds.), Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods, Amsterdam University Press. pp. 9-34.

Gopinath, G. (2018). Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1466221/unruly-visions-the-aesthetic-practices-of-queer-diaspora-pdf. 

Knott, K., and McLoughlin, S. (eds.)  (2013). Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities. Zed Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2003102/diasporas-concepts-intersections-identities-pdf. 

Quayson, A., and Daswani, G. (eds.). (2013). A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/999934/a-companion-to-diaspora-and-transnationalism-pdf. 

Shuval, J. T. (2000). “Diaspora Migration: Definitional Ambiguities and a Theoretical Paradigm. International Migration, 38(5), pp. 41-56.

What is Diaspora Theory?

What is Poststructuralism?

What is Deconstruction?

What is Lacan’s Mirror Stage?

What is Critical Theory?

What is Narratology?

What is Structural Inequality?

What is Foucault's Theory of Power & Knowledge?

What is Existentialism?

What is World-Systems Theory?

What is Materialism?

What is New Materialism?

What is Russian Formalism?

Structuralism | Definition, History, Examples & Analysis

Structuralism is a twentieth-century intellectual movement aiming to identify and describe underlying systems of language, culture, literature, and more. Structuralism seeks to demonstrate that, beneath disparate practices and expressions, there lie universal laws and common principles.

The structuralist approach is organic and relational. For structuralists, the constituent units of reality and knowledge can only be understood in relation to a larger system. In fact, nothing exists outside of the system; everything is defined by the structures in which it is situated. There are no “things,” only relationships. 

Structuralism differs from existentialism, a significant earlier intellectual movement. While existentialists emphasize individualism and the absence of universal laws, structuralists see individuals as not only entangled in systems but, in structuralism’s most extreme forms, unable to resist or change them. 

Indeed, structuralism is not particularly interested in changes over time. While structuralists understand that systems can evolve, they study them as though they are static, frozen in time. Structuralism thus adopts a synchronic, or ahistorical, approach.

John Sturrock likens structuralism to orthodox scientific approaches. Like the task of an anatomist or ecologist, who always considers how their objects of study fit into larger systems (e.g., the circulatory system in the body, a particular habitat’s ecosystem),

Structuralism

The task of the Structuralist is thus, first to determine the elements out of which the structure in question is formed - easy enough in the case of an anatomy, not easy at all as we know to our cost in the case of an economy or a weather-system; and then to try to understand the often very complex modes of their interaction. (2008)

This approach may be familiar in the sciences, but it was novel for humanists and social scientists. For example, rather than treating a story as a work of self-expression and artistic ingenuity, strict structuralists approach the text as part of a larger system of linguistic, literary, and cultural signs, the product and reflection of these systems as much as — if not rather than — its creator’s mind. One major offshoot of this approach to literature is narratology, the study of the form and function of narrative, which has been influenced by prominent structuralists and poststructuralists. (See our guide “What is Narratology?” for more.)

While this approach certainly attracts criticism — particularly from those who feel structuralism undermines art’s aesthetic and individualized merits — many structuralist ideas have permeated academic thought and critical theory. This guide will acquaint you with some key structuralist figures and their theories.

Saussure and Peirce: structural linguistics and semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is considered a founder of structuralism, although this attribution and his influence came long after his death. His most significant text, Course in General Linguistics (2011), was derived from lectures collected by his students and first published three years after his death; no published translation appeared until 1959. 

Nonetheless, Saussure’s theories of linguistics and creation of semiotics (or semiology, as he called it, meaning the study of signs) became the foundation for other branches of structuralism including anthropology and literary theory.

Saussure’s core contribution to structuralism is his theory of the sign, signifier, and signified. For Saussure, words do not put a name to a thing; instead, they combine a concept with a sound-image. The sounds, syllables, and letters that make up a certain word (its sound-image) designate not a specific thing, but an abstraction of that thing. For example, when you read or hear the sound-image “tree,” you imagine a concept of a tree; you do not see a literal, specific one. Saussure writes,

Course in General Linguistics

I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for example (arbor, etc.). One tends to forget that arbor is called a sign only because it carries the concept “tree,” with the result that the idea of the sensory part implies the idea of the whole. (2011)

To emphasize this relationship, Saussure calls the sound-image (the word) the “signifier” and the concept (its referent) the “signified.” The letters T-R-E-E signify the concept of a tree. This combination is a sign.  

Saussure notes that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. That is, nothing about a tree indicates that it should be represented by particular sounds, syllables, or letters. “Arbitrary” does not mean that the choice is left to the speaker: “the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community” (Saussure, 2011). Instead, Saussure means the relationship is “unmotivated,” there is no “natural connection” between the signifier and signified (2011). The arbitrary nature of signs is why different languages have different words for essentially the same concept (tree, arbre, árbol, baum).

Saussure further proves that not only does the signifier change across language systems but the signified itself can also change. When hearing the word tree, a person who grew up near the redwoods of the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. likely pictures something different than someone who grew up in the Sahara Desert or in Japan.

Some words are partially motivated. For example, onomatopoeia are in part derived from the sound they aim to describe. However, different languages have different words for the same sound — English dogs say “bow-wow” while French dogs say “ouaoua” — so onomatopoeia are still shaped by the language system in which they arise.

Working on the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was another important figure in early semiotics. Peirce named three kinds of signs based on the relationship between the signifier and signified: symbol, index, icon. In the case of the symbol, there is no connection between the expression and its content; it is “unmotivated,” in Saussure's terms. Its meaning is learned but not derived from the object itself. 

An index, Peirce explains, “necessarily has some quality in common with the Object, and it is in respect to these that it refers to the Object” (The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2., 1998).  To use Sturrock’s example, a “ring round the sun” is a sign of rain. This sign is “naturally” derived from what it represents, but it is still open to interpretation based on cultural norms, individual knowledge, and the reason for which an individual may interpret the sign — “for practical reasons, if he is a farmer, or for more loosely communicative ones, to display perhaps an acquaintance with weather-lore” (Sturrock, 2008). 

An icon, also called a likeness, directly imitates what it represents. A painting or photograph of a tree is not a tree, but it signifies a tree through imitation. This example helps us recognize that signs need not be linguistic; semiotics addresses signs that are verbal, pictorial, gestural, and more.

To better describe language as a system, Saussure draws a distinction between la langue (language) and la parole (word). Parole is the individual action of speech (whether in written or verbal form), whereas langue describes the full catalog of options and rules, the language system at large. As Sturrock writes,	

If langue is a structure then parole is an event. The first is an abstraction, the second is real. Without the events there would be no way in which we could know of or investigate the structure, and without the structure the event would be formless and without meaning: the two are wholly interdependent. (2008)

Parole is necessarily individual, the personal action of speech, whereas langue is collective. Of language, Saussure writes,

It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity. (2011)

Saussure’s lexicon is the foundation upon which structuralism rests, and the concepts of sign-systems and semiotics continue to shape studies of language, literature, and culture today.

Perhaps the most well-known structuralist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) helped the movement gain prominence in France and created structural anthropology.

Before Lévi-Strauss, anthropology was dominated by empiricism. Empirical anthropologists drew conclusions strictly from observed or documented evidence, avoiding large generalizations or cross-cultural analysis. Conversely, structural anthropologists believe that, because all cultures are constructed by humans, they must have underlying similarities. As Sturrock explains,

Where the empiricist tradition accumulates data which seem to confirm the endless diversity of social practices, between one society and another, Lévi-Strauss claims that the same data can be used, in ever more abstract ways, to reveal the fundamental unity of all cultures. He represents Structuralism in its most extreme will to universalism. (2008)

Structural anthropology is influenced by functionalism, an earlier anthropological movement which aimed to explain behaviors through the social function they served. Structural anthropology also examines practices synchronically and connects them to shared community norms. However, Lévi-Strauss disagrees that all social phenomena must serve a purpose. Some behaviors have no utility, but their significance is revealed in the context of a cultural system of meaning. Lévi-Strauss thus uses Saussure’s theory of language — the parole only makes sense within the langue — as a model for his anthropology: just as language follows governing rules of signs, grammar, and syntax, society and culture function in a similarly systematic way.

To see this theory at work, consider one of Lévi-Strauss’s best-known arguments: the reason for the incest taboo, or the prohibition of sexual intercourse with near kin. Lévi-Strauss draws upon Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925, [2020]), which argues that all societies are organized around the act of gift exchange, producing systems of mutual obligation. As Donald D. Palmer explains, Lévi-Strauss applies this theory 

Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners

to the exchange of words, but also to the exchange of women (fathers and brothers “marrying off” their daughters and sisters). The near universality of the incest taboo is explained in terms of this exchange, which generates certain necessary kinship systems. Incest must be excluded from all such systems because it negates the establishment of social alliances. (2007)

The incest taboo, Lévi-Strauss argues, originates not from moral judgement but from avoiding exchanges that would go against one’s social and economic interests. 

Lévi-Strauss argues that kinship relations follow rules in a similar manner to linguistic systems. In Structural Anthropology (1958, [1974]), Lévi-Strauss writes,

the recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. 

Lévi-Strauss also applies structuralism to narrative. In “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), reprinted in Literary Theory (2017), he studies myths as a form of language. By analyzing variations of a myth, Lévi-Strauss claims to glimpse the “structural law of myth” and essential concerns regarding contradictions like culture/nature, good/evil, masculine/feminine, human/supernatural. Critics of Lévi-Strauss, such as Jacques Derrida, point out how these binaries are actually hierarchies, valuing one side while devaluing the other.

Lévi-Strauss transposes theories and methods from structural linguistics onto anthropology, serving the ideal goal of structuralism: to analyze different aspects of reality with the same methodology and discover underlying unity. 

For more of Lévi-Strauss’s writing, see Structural Anthropology Zero (2021), We Are All Cannibals (2016), and Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World (2013).

Barthes, Lacan, Foucault: from structuralism to poststructuralism

It is difficult to date when structuralism ends and poststructuralism begins. Roughly, structuralism rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, while poststructuralism emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the movements overlapped, and poststructuralism aimed not to wholly refute structuralism but to extend structuralism further. Sturrock writes,

Post-Structuralism is a critique of Structuralism conducted from within: that is, it turns certain of Structuralism’s arguments against itself and points to certain fundamental inconsistencies in their method which Structuralists have ignored. (2008)

Poststructuralism critiques structuralism’s trust in universal systems and stable binaries. While poststructuralists agree that signs are arbitrary and ubiquitous, they question the structuralist belief that signs have fixed meanings. Poststructuralism sees signs as constantly re-negotiated. Sturrock writes,

Post-Structuralism differs from Structuralism in being a philosophy of Becoming rather than of Being: it is endlessly dynamic, allowing us no escape or apparent respite from the shifting play of meanings. (2008)

The relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism is important to understand as we consider Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), and Michel Foucault (1926–1984). These thinkers can each be labeled structuralist and poststructuralist, and their relationships with these movements shifted throughout their careers. Here, we’ll highlight their key ideas, especially those building on core structuralist theories.

Barthes: semiotics, mythologies, narratives

Barthes was a prolific writer, theorist, and semiotician who sought to understand culture and language through Saussurean concepts. Barthes adds to Saussure’s model of signifier/signified/sign, proposing the semiological process of “myth.” Like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes connects linguistics and mythology, but Barthes treats myths as a specific kind of sign. Graham Allen explains that, for Barthes, a myth is “a thoroughly ideological process” which “works by presenting culturally specific objects and relations as if they were timeless, natural, and thus unquestionable”: 

Roland Barthes

Mythology transforms one culture’s values [...] into a universal and natural value [...] often while still recognizing its status as myth, as a cultural product. It is this duplicity of myth, a construct which represents itself as universal and natural, which characterizes its ideological function. (2004)

For example, Barthes discusses a magazine cover featuring a young Black man saluting in French military uniform. Following Saussure’s model of signs, the photograph signifies Frenchness, militarism, and fidelity, producing the sign of the “faithful Black French soldier.”

But, Barthes argues, the photograph works on a deeper level. Through the more complex semiological system of the myth, the “faithful Black French soldier” signifies

that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, [1972]) 

Barthes argues that myths serve ideologies but hide them through seemingly indisputable, natural signs, describing the “constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth”:

The form of myth is not a symbol: the Negro who salutes is not the symbol of the French Empire: he has too much presence, he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image. But at the same time this presence is tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent; it recedes a little, it becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed, French imperiality: once made use of, it becomes artificial. (1957, [1972])

By reading magazine covers and fashion trends, Barthes reveals how sign systems shape our world while concealing their motivating ideologies.

Barthes also applies structural linguistics to the study of narrative. In “The Death of Author” (1967, reprinted in Authorship [1995]), Barthes argues against reading texts through the lens of their author’s biography or intentions. Instead, he proposes we analyze the narrative on its own terms, as a product of a particular language system (langue) without definitive meaning. This belief in the infinite possibilities of interpretation aligns Barthes with poststructuralism.

Lacan combines structuralism and psychoanalysis, Saussure and Sigmund Freud, to explain human behavior and mental activity. Building on Saussure, Lacan proposes that signifiers change meaning in relation to other signifiers; a signifier actually signifies another signifier. Lacan believes that the unconscious is structured like a language and consists of chains of related signifiers.

By applying Saussure to Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan proposes a theory of three registers: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Broadly understood, the Real is reality unmediated by signs; there is no presence or absence; it is undifferentiated, unsymbolized, all-encompassing. The Real is impossible to fully understand or describe. Lionel Bailly writes,

Lacan

The Real is the featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being, by means of the Word. (2012)

For Lacan, we exist closest to the Real when we are first born, unaffected by language and culture, until we enter the mirror stage somewhere between six and eighteen months. During the mirror stage, the child sees its reflection in the mirror, and begins to understand its body as a whole and itself as an individual. The mirror stage marks the entry into the Imaginary, the realm of images, consciousness, and self-awareness. The child not only identifies with an image but also learns to imagine itself from the perspective of others — as a distinct individual. 

In other words, Lacan argues that the mirror stage is both about identification and individualization, a process that “decisively projects the formation of the individual into history”:

Écrits: A Selection

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (1966, [2020])

Through the mirror stage, we create the image of I and the symbolic I. Separating ourselves from the undifferentiated Real, we enter the Symbolic realm, the register of language, culture, norms, and signifiers.

Because we are governed by the Symbolic Order (the social world of linguistic and ideological conventions), Lacan translates Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (like the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety) from the physical to the symbolic. The Lacanian phallus is not a literal penis but a symbolic one, the sign of the distinction between sexes and the power of “wholeness.” The father, in Freud the subject of his son’s murderous intent, becomes for Lacan the Name-of-the-Father, the conceptual patriarch in the Symbolic Order, and the Law of the Father, the patriarchal nature of the Symbolic Order. By taking a linguistic rather than biological approach, Lacan opens new pathways for psychoanalysis and illustrates a broader point about the nature of signs: signs replace “things” themselves. We live and think in the Symbolic, glimpsing the Real through hallucinations and dreams.

For more on Lacan, see An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2006) and Jacques Lacan (2004).

Although Foucault eventually rejected structuralism, he built upon important structuralist ideas, such as the belief that there are no discrete “things,” only relationships. Examining both langue and parole, Foucault theorized systems of “discourse” through which knowledge and power work. Discourse dictates not only what can be said but who can say it. 

Foucault is interested in how knowledge functions as and through sign systems, with concepts like “reason” and “order” taking on different meanings at different points in history. For example, in History of Madness (1961, [2013]), Foucault tracks how the sign of the “mad person” changes in different eras, signifying folly, apocalypse, laziness, animality, or illness. These changes can be seen not only in depictions of mad people but in the actual treatment of individuals deemed mad.

In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and other works, Foucualt analyzes the creation and function of knowledge systems, especially through discourse. He views history not as a continuous line of development but as a series of ruptures, of different epoques with their own systems of knowledge that do not develop intuitively from what came before. Edith Kurzweil notes that this approach is structuralist: 

The Age of Structuralism

As [Foucault] refutes both the continuity of history as subject and the structural discontinuity of its ruptures, he is inventing a structuralist methodology without structures or history that is to uncover “pure” language and that resembles a Barthian textual reading. (2017)

Through his focus on language (discourse) and his novel approach to history, Foucault furthers structuralist impulses.

Structuralism dominated mid-century critical thought as scholars took a structural approach to language, anthropology, culture, history, literature, and more. But, when poststructuralism came into vogue, structuralism began to appear rigid and over-generalized in its approach. 

Yet, structuralist ideas remain strong. Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault remain intellectual giants, even if their structuralist origins are not always emphasized. Sign systems and Saussure’s concepts of the signifier and signified have been so embraced by the critical lexicon that they are not always recognized as structuralist. Even as the label of structuralist has gone out of fashion, structuralism continues to influence thinkers and theories across disciplines. 

Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (1975, [2023]) by Jonathan Culler

A Theory of Semiotics (1976) by Umberto Eco

Structuralism and Semiotics (2003) by Terence Hawkes

Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics and the Human Sciences (2014) edited by David Ingram

The Poverty of Structuralism: Literature and Structuralist Theory (2014) by Leonard Jackson

Saussure's Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: The Course in General Linguistics after a Century (2020) by Beata Stawarska

Allen, G. (2004) Roland Barthes. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1616138/roland-barthes-pdf 

Bailly, L. (2012) Lacan. Oneworld Publications. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/950010/lacan-a-beginners-guide-pdf 

Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Barthes, R. (1995) “The Death of the Author,” in Burke, S. (ed.) Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, Edinburgh University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1708663/authorship-from-plato-to-the-postmodern-a-reader-pdf 

Foucault, M. (2001) The Order of Things. Routledge. 

Foucault, M. (2012) The Birth of the Clinic. 3rd edn.  Translated by A. M. Sheridan. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1610931/the-birth-of-the-clinic-pdf 

Foucault, M. (2013) History of Madness. Translated by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1615338/history-of-madness-pdf 

Kurzweil, E. (2017) The Age of Structuralism: From Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1550574/the-age-of-structuralism-from-levistrauss-to-foucault-pdf 

Lacan, J. (2020) Écrits: A Selection. Routledge. Translated by A. Sheridan. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1974298/ecrits-a-selection-pdf 

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1974) Structural Anthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (2017) “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Rivkin, J. and Ryan, M. (ed.) Literary Theory: An Anthology. 3rd edn. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/992490/literary-theory-an-anthology-pdf

Mauss, M. (2020) The Gift. Translated by I. Cunnison. Barakaldo Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3018997/the-gift-forms-and-functions-of-exchange-in-archaic-societies-pdf 

Palmer, D. (2007) Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners. For Beginners. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/501171/structuralism-and-poststructuralism-for-beginners-pdf

Peirce, C. S. (1998) The Essential Peirce, Volume 2. Indiana University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/568728/the-essential-peirce-volume-2-selected-philosophical-writings-18931913-pdf 

Saussure, F. (2011) Course in General Linguistics. Translated by W. Baskin. Columbia University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/774968/course-in-general-linguistics-pdf 

Sturrock, J. (2008) Structuralism. 2nd edn. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2776253/structuralism-pdf 

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Harlem Renaissance | Definition, History, Examples & Analysis

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic, political and cultural clustering of activities and network of artists in the African American diasporic community. It was centered around the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem, bursting with catalytic experimentation and energy in the 1920s and 1930s. This experimentation saw poetry, fiction, drama, dance, music, fashion, sculpture, photography and visual art all collide and circulate in salons, house-rent parties, dinners, and nightclubs. 

These ideas were shared in books, such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928 [2012]) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928 [2022]); and in magazines like The Messenger, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life and Fire!!; as well as anthologies like James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922 [2021]) and Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925 [2014]). The optimism and energy of Harlem was captured by photographers, such as James Van Der Zee, who would hand-tint his prints and portraits; and in songs like Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Paintings like those by Aaron Douglas, sculptures by Augusta Savage, and the woodcut prints of James Lesesne Wells all contributed to the Harlem Renaissance. Its atmosphere was also documented in stories that proliferate from the time, such as when the pilot Hubert Fauntleroy Julian (nicknamed the “Black Eagle of Harlem” by the papers) parachuted into New York in 1923, playing “Runnin’ Wild” on a gold-plated saxophone as he flew over the streets of Harlem (Grandt, Gettin’ Around, 2018).

This period of intense artistic activism was borne out of the New Negro movement. Indeed, the term “Harlem Renaissance” has been retrospectively assigned to this era, while it was known at the time as the “New Negro movement” (Sherrard-Johnson, A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, 2015) or the “New Negro Renaissance” (Wall, The Harlem Renaissance, 2016). Henry Louis Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett explore how the New Negro movement “emerged to contest degrading black stereotypes” (The New Negro, 2021) and racist caricatures in order to redefine cultural identity. This was — as Stanley Crouch writes — an “Age of Redefinition” (Notes of a Hanging Judge, 1990), from old to new, as part of the struggle for civil rights. The Harlem Renaissance, Cary D. Wintz writes:

Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance

touched almost every aspect of African American culture and intellectual life in the period from World War I to the Great Depression. Its impact redefined black music, theatre, and the visual arts; it reflected a new more militant political/racial consciousness and racial pride that was associated with the term “New Negro” [...]. (2020) 

This was enlivened by the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909; the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamacia in 1914 by Marcus Garvey (who moved to Harlem in 1916); and the ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois that were set out in now seminal works like The Souls of Black Folk (1903 [2019]). In Harlem and other Black districts of northern cities in America, many turned to the arts as part of the fight for equality. David Levering Lewis writes of Charles S. Johnson, the sociologist and founder of the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity: 

If the road to the ballot box and jobs was blocked, Johnson saw that the door to Carnegie Hall and New York publishers was ajar. Each book, play, poem, or canvas by an Afro-American would become a weapon against the old racial stereotypes [...]. (When Harlem was in Vogue, 1981)

This was, then, a self-conscious movement where, as Langston Hughes would later reflect: “the Negro was in vogue” (The Big Sea, 1940 [2015]). Indeed, the “Jazz Age” came to broadly define this decade: a name that was borne out of the blues and jazz music of the Harlem Renaissance. As James Smethurst argues in The African American Roots of Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance is an integral part of the

The African American Roots of Modernism

cultural strands that produced literary modernism and the line of bohemias or artistic countercultures in the United States stretching back to the turn of the twentieth century. (2011)

The profound influence of the Harlem Renaissance can thus be seen in not only subsequent artistic movements, but in much of modernism’s formal play with rupture and radical experimentation. As Zoë Henry writes: “Put another way: Modernism still has the Blues” (“Syncopating Commemoration: On the Legacy of Langston Hughes”, 2022).

In his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Hughes writes that he had “an overwhelming desire to see Harlem. More than Paris, or the Shakespeare country, or Berlin, or the Alps, I wanted to see Harlem, the greatest Negro city in the world.” Emily Bernard notes that “Hughes was not alone” with this view, and that a popular saying from the time was: “I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than Governor of Georgia” (The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, 2007). So, why Harlem? 

Carla L. Peterson takes up this very question in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2015), tracking Harlem’s bohemian history and looking at the growth of New York’s Black population from the colonial period through to 1910, when over 91,000 Black people lived in the metropolitan area. “In Harlem,” Linda Wagner-Martin writes, “the Negro was no longer the minority” (The Routledge Introduction to American Modernism, 2016). As Peterson, Wagner-Martin, and many others have explored, one of the central causes for this was the Great Migration. Peterson highlights that of the 60,500-strong Black population of Manhattan in 1910, only 14,300 were born in New York State (2015). The Great Migration saw the mass movement of more than six million Black people from the rural South to urban areas in the North, like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Many Black Americans moved to escape the racism, mob violence, and Jim Crow segregation of the South, as well as terrible working and living conditions, devastating floods in Alabama and Mississippi in 1915, and a boll weevil infestation which wrecked the cotton crop (Wall, 2016). Although all of these factors were important, Locke argues in The New Negro: 

The New Negro

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern. (1925 [2014])

Thus, with the offer of better wages, housing, public school education and demand for workers, many traveled North. Hughes’s poem “The South” encapsulates this turn from the “lazy, laughing South / With blood on its mouth” to: 

The Weary Blues

Harlem became home not only to African Americans who had moved from the South, but also to those who hailed from the West Indies and Africa — such as Claude McKay who arrived from Jamaica, and Eric Walrond from Guyana. Bernard emphasizes the mingling that took place “across culture and class lines, both outdoors – along the elegant avenues and broad sidewalks that characterized Harlem – and indoors – inside cabarets, buffet flats, speakeasies and ballrooms that dominated nightlife in the city” (2007). Henry highlights how the proliferation of “conceptions of Blackness far beyond national boundaries” spurred the artistic experiments of the Harlem Renaissance (2022). 

As a number of critics have noted, many who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance were not actually based in Harlem. For example, Carla Kaplan writes that despite Nora Neale Hurston’s significant association with the Renaissance, she “hardly lived, rarely wrote about, and eventually turned away from” Harlem (A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, 2015). Recent scholarship has embraced what Sherrard-Johnson describes as the “suppleness” (2015) of the field-defining term, and examined the Renaissance in the context of a more diffuse, interconnected and extended network of creativity. Indeed, contributions from the Black Chicago Renaissance are also being explored by, for example, Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr. in The Black Chicago Renaissance (2012), and Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed in Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2020).

The Harlem Renaissance has been seen as a response to modernity, and it has its roots in a number of historical events: the Great Migration (starting around 1910); the end of the First World War in 1918; and the Red Summer of 1919. However, the chronological limits of the Harlem Renaissance are blurry. Although there is a critical consensus that it took place in the 1920s and 1930s, different accounts propose varying start and end points. 

Should its origins start in 1925, as Wagner-Martin suggests (2016)? This is the year of Locke’s landmark anthology The New Negro, which presented essays, poetry and prose by such figures as Hughes, Hurston, Countee Cullen and Du Bois. Or should it be earlier, with James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922? As well as being published earlier, Jonathan W. Gray argues that Johnson’s collection has “a more varied collection of black voices” (“Harlem Modernisms,” 2012). Or perhaps as Wall (2016) puts forward: if we are looking to early seminal texts, can the Harlem Renaissance’s origins be found in McKay’s anthemic sonnet “If We Must Die” (Complete Poems, 2004), which was written in response to the white supremecist violence that raged in what James Weldon Johnson termed the “Red Summer'' of 1919? Or how about Jean Toomer’s Cane, which was published in 1923? Looking back earlier still, Abraham Chapman argues that Du Bois’s 1899 poem “The Song of the Smoke” was a “poetic anticipation” of the Harlem Renaissance (“The Harlem Renaissance in Literary History,” 1967). 

Hughes’s account locates the Renaissance’s origins at the start of the 1920s, and to two Broadway shows and the Charleston dance: “It began,” Hughes recounts, “with Shuffle Along, Running Wild, and the Charleston. [...] [C]ertainly it was the musical revue, Shuffle Along, that gave a scintillating send-off to the Negro vogue in Manhattan” (The Big Sea, 1940). Shuffle Along opened in 1921, and Runnin’ Wild in 1923. 

Some see the Harlem Renaissance’s “official launch” (Wall, 2016) with the famous dinner that took place at the Civic Club on March 21, 1924. This event would come to be known as a “coming out party” for the young Black writers, artists, and intellectuals who shaped the Harlem Renaissance (McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 2002). The dinner was hosted by Charles S. Johnson, ostensibly to celebrate the publication of Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924 [2021]), and attendees included Gwendolyn Bennett, Cullen, Hughes, Walrond, Walter White, Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Locke, and others. Major publishers and journal editors were also present, and Locke was accordingly invited to edit a special issue of Survey Graphic some time later. It became, Wall writes, “the kernel of The New Negro (1925), the signal anthology of the Renaissance” (2016).

The ending of the Harlem Renaissance is similarly elusive. Nathan Irvin Huggins suggests the Harlem Riots of 1935 as an endpoint (Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, 1995). Hughes (1940) and many critics have identified the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression as a time when the optimism that had characterized the Harlem Renaissance was doused. However, as Wall argues, “if the onset of the Depression ended the vogue for Harlem, it did not signal the end of the Renaissance” (2016). Indeed, more books by Black writers were produced in the 1930s than in the roaring twenties. Sherrard-Johnson notes that the “Long Harlem Renaissance” (2015) is now increasingly recognized by critics. This temporal expansion has been informed by the diasporic and transnational turns in African American studies, which attends to the contexts and artistic production occurring in the 1890s all the way way through to 1940 — or even, as John Hope Franklin suggests, into the 1960s and beyond (From Slavery to Freedom, 1980). 

Just as the Renaissance’s temporal markers are evasive, so is its ideological and aesthetic core. Instead of a cohesive or structured movement, Wintz presents it as a self-conscious and varied “community of writers, poets, critics, patrons, sponsors, and publishers” where it “may be best conceptualized as an attitude or a state of mind—a feeling shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals” (2020). Following Wintz’s assertion, here is a small, very limited snapshot of the Harlem Renaissance’s “state of mind” (2020).

As jazz poetry came into being, through poems like Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” (1926) with its frustrated structure and meter, modernist poetic experimentation abounded. Incorporating jive language and syncopated rhythms into free verse, “The Weary Blues” “sounds out” jazz music through its syntax and style: 

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

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