Diaspora

“Diaspora” is now a word in the popular domain, but its popularization presents challenges to the field of diaspora studies, namely how to regain some control over its meaning and parameters before it is totally reduced to a simple and simplistic essentialism denoting any kind of human mobility and scattering, or any kind of sentimental yearning by upper-class exiles. World history has been replete with diasporas, starting with the ancient Greeks who gave us the word “diaspora” (to sow or scatter) with their practice of intentionally planting colonies in other lands for cultural propagation and to advance trade. New ones continuously arise from different corners of the world, or emerge reshaped from the bowels of existing diasporas. From the ancient to the modern world, diaspora has been most frequently associated with the traumatic forced expulsion of Jews from their ancestral homeland of Israel and subsequent worldwide dissemination over the course of centuries (Safran 1991). In the modern world, accompanying the rise of capitalism and its corollary, the colonial reach of Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America for markets and raw materials, is the great and terrible African diaspora, created by the traumatic forced removal of tens of millions of men and women of many ethnic groups out of Africa over four centuries, to be dispersed throughout the Americas as chattel slaves. Unified initially by the dehumanizing regime of slavery and later reinforced by the demeaning regime of racism, descendants of slaves identify with each other through race, as “black people,” and have created multiple, dynamic expressions and meanings of blackness through culture—music, dance, art, literature—throughout the diaspora.