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The term diaspora comes from the ancient Greek διασπορά (“scattering of seeds”), and in its common usage it refers to the process of dispersion of a religious or ethnic community from the original homeland.

Examples

Classical examples are the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian communities, often referred to as ideal types of diasporic communities. More recently other groups, ethnic (Irish, Italians, Koreans, Chinese) and nonethnic (African Americans), have been referred to as diasporas. In addition, because the term now tends to share meaning with cognate groups ranging from immigrants to refugees and from guest workers to ethnic communities, the world has truly witnessed a proliferation of diasporas. A key problem arising from the increasingly loose use of the term is, according to Rogers Brubaker in his 2005 article “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” its “dispersion . . . in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space.” The conceptual overstretching implies that if everything—all sorts of communities more or less dispersed—become diasporas, then nothing is distinctively so. The term therefore loses its discriminating power, making it impossible to distinguish diaspor ic from nondiasporic communities, (im)migrants in primis.

Conceptualizations

Conceptualizations of diasporas can be divided into two broad approaches. On the one hand are those, such as political scientists William Safran (1991) and Gabriel Sheffer (2003), who think of diasporas in a more classical sense, as communities or “bounded entities.” Here diasporas can be seen as groups, and therefore identified, even counted with some degree of precision. A diaspora can be defined, according to Yossi Shain and Aharon Barth in Diasporas and International Relations Theory (2003, 452) as “a people with a common origin who reside, more or less on a permanent basis, outside the borders of their ethnic or religious homeland, whether that homeland is real or symbolic, independent or under foreign control.”

On the other hand are those that take an antiessentialist approach to the concept. Diaspora becomes an idiom, a stance, a category of practice more than a category of analysis. This does not render the term irrelevant but focuses on the importance and the political consequences of the articulation of an identity as diasporic. In other terms, diasporas matter because of what they do or what is done in their name, rather than because of what they (allegedly) are.

What emerges from the juxtaposition of the two definitions above is a diversity in the approaches to the study of diasporas. The heterogeneity of approaches should not surprise, given the multidisciplinarity of diaspora studies where the fields of enquiry—political science, sociology, and anthropology—are attentive to the evolution of the concept and the study of its empirical manifestations.

The divide in the scholarship between an essentialist and antiessentialist field is also reflected in the way in which the definition of the term is approached. The classical definition of diaspora comes from Safran; a community can be referred to as a diaspora if it presents the following six features: history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland; and a collective identity defined by this relationship (1991, 83–84). A more recent attempt to redefine the concept in searching for its distinctive features comes from Brubaker, who indicates three core elements as constitutive of diasporas (2005, 5): the experience of dispersion, forced and nonforced; orientation toward a real or imagined homeland, which remains the source of loyalty and values; and boundary maintenance, that is, the preservation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the host society.

Even the three criteria above have been subject to heated scholarly debate. The importance of dispersion as a defining dimension of the diasporic experience has been questioned. Originally, diasporas were communities that emerged out of a forced dispersion. While dispersion and the memory thereof still remain central to diasporic identities, two new aspects have enriched the debate. First, dispersion may not necessarily have a traumatic or even forced origin, and second, as a result of the reconfiguration of political spaces in postcommunist Eurasia, dispersion may not only be the result of the movement of peoples across borders, but also the consequence of the movement of borders across settlements—the Russian speaking communities in the former Soviet space being a clear illustration of this new type of dispersion.

In addition, the very relationship with the homeland has started to be called into question. Homeland orientation (in terms of the memory of the dispersion or the commitment to return) dominated classical definitions of diasporas. Homeland remained the ultimate source of identity. Diasporas were homeland-centered communities. Especially on the wave of contributions coming from postmodernism, the salience of homeland orientation has been overcome by an approach that critiques the “teleology of return,” thus decentering diasporas.

Finally, a strong current in cultural studies has shifted the emphasis from boundary maintenance to boundary erosion. Drawing from the literature on transnationalism, concepts such as fluidity, creolity, hybridity, and hyphenated identities have gained ground in diaspora studies, pointing to the creation by and within diasporic communities of nonexclusive forms of communities, identities, and politics. This clearly stands in stark contrast to those arguing that boundaries between the community and the host society are essential for ensuring the preservation of the identity of a collectivity.

Conclusion

In terms of the substantive focus of diaspora studies, attention has been paid to various aspects of collective identity transformation; the maintenance of ties with the homeland and the adaptation to the host society; the economic significance of transnational networks (including remittances); and the impact of diasporas on both home and host countries’ politics, especially with regard to their influence on foreign policy conduct.

Bibliography:

Brubaker, Rogers. “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 1–19.
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.
Safran,William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 83–99.
Shain,Yossi, and Aharon Barth. “Diasporas and International Relations Theory.” International Organization 57 (Summer 2003): 449–479.
Sheffer, Gabriel. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Tölölyan, K. “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 3–7.