The tension between surface textures and deep structures often results in curious and complex cultural tropes in which the old and the new contend or compromise in unusual ways. It is obvious that diasporas and homelands have a complex, ambivalent and often dialectical relationship with another.
The enduring value of the diasporic experience is a spring of agonized inspiration, multiple identities, new subjectivities, creative memories and fresh perspectives on language and life, a stage seems to have come when one problematize the concept of the diaspora. The word diaspora may be used as an umbrella term for immigrant writers; it conceals the differences in their backgrounds as well as contexts.
The first general assumption is that the diaspora refers to those who write. The second general assumption is that the diasporic writer occupies a kind of second space, of exile and cultural solitude. Homi Bhabha calls it a third space, a hybrid location of antagonism, perpetual tension and pregnant chaos in his “The location of Culture”. The reality of the body, a material production of one local culture and the abstraction of the mind, a culture sub-text of a global experience, provide the interwining threads of the diasporic existence of a writer: this is a neither/nor condition that Sura P.Rath calls “Trishanku”in his article “Home(s) Abroad: Diasporic identities in “Third Space” . The products of this hybrid location are results of a long history of confrontations between unequal cultures and forces, in which the stronger culture struggles to control, remake or eliminate the subordinate partner” (Smader Lavie et.al). There are different forms of “Othering” experienced within the diaspora, and also different levels of identity. Imagining the other is not necessarily a crippling experience; it also defines one’s self and reassures one about one’s own distinct identity. The narrative production of home assures many strategies according to one’s relation to the place one came from, the place one came to and the place one belongs to. The idea of home is also related to time that transforms it into history or myth. Post – Colonialism seems to come full circle in those writers who inhabit the third space, live the third culture and shape the third history.
According to Homi Bhabha, the discourse of the wandering peoples of the diaspora marks a “Shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation”. Thus it interrupts the monologic discourse of modern metropolises with their imperial memories. It is a moment of disinherited unsetting imperial inheritance and thus challenging the monolith of the modern western nation; but it can also foster cultural nationalism.
Diasporic idealogies reinforce and reproduce patriarchy, class structure and ethnic conflict. Distinctions of class, sect and patriarchal norms within the family are also often reproduced by the diaspora as part of the reproduction of structure at home, often viewed as the structures of the lost Golden past and hence also of the promised future. Fortunately more and more diasporic writers are becoming aware of the relativity of the concept of the diaspora, its inherent contradictions with its multiple possibilities of alienation and assimilation, retreat into remembered patterns and revolt against them of being the colonizer and the colonized, marginal and central.
The enduring value of the diasporic experience is a spring of agonized inspiration, multiple identities, new subjectivities, creative memories and fresh perspectives on language and life, a stage seems to have come when one problematize the concept of the diaspora. The word diaspora may be used as an umbrella term for immigrant writers; it conceals the differences in their backgrounds as well as contexts.
The first general assumption is that the diaspora refers to those who write. The second general assumption is that the diasporic writer occupies a kind of second space, of exile and cultural solitude. Homi Bhabha calls it a third space, a hybrid location of antagonism, perpetual tension and pregnant chaos in his “The location of Culture”. The reality of the body, a material production of one local culture and the abstraction of the mind, a culture sub-text of a global experience, provide the interwining threads of the diasporic existence of a writer: this is a neither/nor condition that Sura P.Rath calls “Trishanku”in his article “Home(s) Abroad: Diasporic identities in “Third Space” . The products of this hybrid location are results of a long history of confrontations between unequal cultures and forces, in which the stronger culture struggles to control, remake or eliminate the subordinate partner” (Smader Lavie et.al). There are different forms of “Othering” experienced within the diaspora, and also different levels of identity. Imagining the other is not necessarily a crippling experience; it also defines one’s self and reassures one about one’s own distinct identity. The narrative production of home assures many strategies according to one’s relation to the place one came from, the place one came to and the place one belongs to. The idea of home is also related to time that transforms it into history or myth. Post – Colonialism seems to come full circle in those writers who inhabit the third space, live the third culture and shape the third history.
According to Homi Bhabha, the discourse of the wandering peoples of the diaspora marks a “Shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation”. Thus it interrupts the monologic discourse of modern metropolises with their imperial memories. It is a moment of disinherited unsetting imperial inheritance and thus challenging the monolith of the modern western nation; but it can also foster cultural nationalism.
Diasporic idealogies reinforce and reproduce patriarchy, class structure and ethnic conflict. Distinctions of class, sect and patriarchal norms within the family are also often reproduced by the diaspora as part of the reproduction of structure at home, often viewed as the structures of the lost Golden past and hence also of the promised future. Fortunately more and more diasporic writers are becoming aware of the relativity of the concept of the diaspora, its inherent contradictions with its multiple possibilities of alienation and assimilation, retreat into remembered patterns and revolt against them of being the colonizer and the colonized, marginal and central.
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