Diaspora

According to Oxford English Dictionary, Diaspora, refers to any body of people living outside their traditional homeland. Diasporas are sandwiched in their memory as almost simultaneous and cumulative. Diaspora is the “Voluntary or forcible movement of people from their homelands into new regions. (68)” Under colonialism, diaspora is a multifarious movement, involving temporary or permanent movement.

The “temporary or permanent” movement of Europeans all over the world, leading to colonoial settlements. Consequently, the ensuing economic exploitation of the settled areas necessitated large amounts of labour that could not be fulfilled by the local populace. The diaspora resulting from the enslavement of Africans and relocation to places like the British colonies. After slavery was outlawed, the continued demand for workers created indentured labour which produced large bodies of people from poor areas of India, China (and others) to the West Indies, Malaya, Fiji, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, etc. The diasporas are of importance to post colonial studies because the descendents of these people have come to produce highly unique cultures that both maintains and builds on the perceptions of their original cultures.

Diasporas are people who live outside their “natal (or imagined natal) territories” and recognize their traditional homelands are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, religions they adopt, and cultures they produce. Diaspora can be broken down into various forms: victim diaspora, labour diaspora, imperial diasporas, trade diasporas, homeland diasporas cultural diasporas. Each of the above categories underline a particular cause of migration usually associated with particular groups of people.

Diasporic subjectivity is necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier “elsewhere” in an active and critical relationships with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. “Home” then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location.

One cannot live earn, pay taxes, raise a family, produce scholarship, teach and take passionate and vigorous political stances in the one’s present location, and still continue to call it “not – home”. The demands of the “politics of location” are complex: “home” and “not-home” and “coming” and going” are neither literal nor figurative but rather, issues within the politics of “imaginary geographies”. Due to diasporic displacement, there is a “now” and a “then” in one’s life, underwritten by a “here” and a “there”.

With a change of location, there is both change and no-change. When people move, the very continuity of their identity is expressed as a function of historical change. It is as through the phenomenon of moving away from one’s given home into an acquired home vividly thematizes some of the constituent problems of historiography: how to represent the past in and through its very displacement, and how to speak for the present critically and genealogically. According to Safram’s the features of diaspora are: “Dispersal, collective memory, alienation, respect & longing for the homeland, a belief in its restoration & self – definition in terms of this homeland”(83).

The whole importance of the diaspora and its potential for creating a new kind of culture arise out of such a crossing of boundaries. The diaspora then involve a cross-cultural or cross-civilizational passage. It is only such a crossing that results in the unique consciousness of the diasporic. In other words, there has to be a source country and a target country, source culture and target culture, a source language and a target language, a source religion and a target religion and so on. The crossing may be both forced or voluntary, the passage involves some significant tension between the source and the target culture. It is through this displacement and ambivalence the diasporic is endangered. One of the most important themes in this type of literature is the concern with place and displacement: the special post colonial crisis of identity comes into being with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. These diasporas, displaced, alienated, excluded & oppressed, create their own kind of epistemic disjunction at the heart of the metropolis.

The diasporas constructed their homelands, accordance to their own need and compulsions. In the case of forced diaspora, where the distance between physical, but more so psychological, was so vast, that the motherland remained frozen in the diasporic imagination as a sort of sacred site or symbol, almost like an idol of memory and imagination. The poverty of the homeland, which caused the diaspora in the first place, was forgetten, or over written with the feeling that it was home, a place where the present alienation of the diasporic person did not exit.

While the old diaspora are cut off from the motherland, the new diaspora has unprecedented access to it by virtue of its privileged Non – Resident. Not forced to leave the birthland, these writers have chosen to relocate themselves in the metropolitan centers chiefly for economic gains.