Safe Spaces and Diverse Faces!

I think Diaspora is becoming a buzz term. I hate to use even that phrase "buzz term" because even that is itself beginning to buzz. I guess the real problem is that it is losing meaning. When I think of the term "diaspora" I think about the African one and the Jewish one, it seems to always involved an oppressed people. In those two cases it seems to describe a forced migration. The strict definition of the word describes a people living as religious minorities, a people moving from their "traditional" homeland and so on. Perhaps the term "African Diaspora" arose in the mid 20th century as part of the endeavor to connect Black people with Africa. If we have suffered a Diaspora then we must have a traditional home elsewhere. But what happens when everyone has a suffered a Diaspora? When there is a Jamaican diaspora, a puerto rican diaspora, an Indian diaspora, a Dominican diaspora, an Asian diaspora, a South Asian diaspora, an Irish diaspora, and a Ukranian diaspora does this not call into question the very idea of a people having an intrinsic connection to a certain place? Does this not complicate the imagination of a traditional identity, of a national identity? When people who have undergone a diaspora, undergo a second diaspora, i.e. all of those documented in the Caribbean, what is this really describing? I imagine, like all things social, power dynamics come into play here. But it seems that what is at stake here is the notion that geographic locations have a given meaning, a meaning that we have not invented. I would venture to say that people have moved around, do move around, and will continue to move around. Let us begin to question our imagined communities and open up to the possibilities of a non-static national, ethnic, and religious identity. There are of course plenty of injustices that have caused the large-scale movement of populations but what if this is a natural part of history? And moreover, what if coinage of the term "diaspora" is an attempt to imbue meaning into cultural-geographic continuity that hinders the possibility to see nuance? We do a violence to the experience of migration and movement when it all falls under one larger umbrella term "diaspora." Let us start being honest.



FT