Gendering Diasporas

1. Gendering Diasporas Gendering Migration & Diasporas RubaSalih

2. Overview • Development of Diasporas • Defining Diaspora • Diaspora & Postcolonialism • Diasporic Practices • Diaspora Space • Diaspora & Transnationalism • Readings: Gendering Diaspora • Proposed Questions

3. Development of ‘Diaspora’ • Greek origin: “dispersion”; to “sow or scatter” • Jewish experience • Forced Migration/Refugee Studies (material conditions) • Link with notion of border • Cultural Studies: celebration of hybridity; resisting reifications of ethnicity and culture (discourse) • ‘Diaspora’ as metaphor for globalized world, resistance, hybridity & transgression

4. Defining Diaspora • ‘The collective forced dispersion of a religious and/or ethnic group precipitated by a disaster, often of a political nature’ (Cohen, 1995)’ • Populations that satisfy 3 criteria: 1. dispersed from a homeland to one or more other territories. 2. Presence abroad is enduring, although exile not necessarily permanent; 3. some kind of exchange (social, economic, political or cultural) between the spatially separated communities

5. William Safran: Diaspora (1991) • 1) They or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign, regions; • 2) They retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland - its physical location, history, and achievements; • 3) They believe they are not - and perhaps cannot be - fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; • 4) They regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return - when conditions are appropriate; • 5) They believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and its safety and prosperity; and they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such relationship. (Safran, 1991)

6. Diaspora & Postcolonialism • Mode of theorization which allows thinking through displacements engendered by colonialism • Diasporic consciousness • Condition of subjectivity marked by long histories of displacement and dispossession • Emergence and development in relations with power

7. Diasporic Practices • Production of culture through active circulation of knowledge, objects and traceable aesthetic or expressive forms • ‘Practices that reproduce the feeling of a shared past and a constrained present’ • Expressive practices as ‘way out’ (music, dance, art, literature, religious & secular celebrations, poetry, theatre, food etc.) • Cultural inventiveness • Socio-economic constraints, legal restrictions, harsh living conditions might not allow for expressive traceable practices

8. ‘Diaspora Space’ (Avtar Brah) ‘Intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes’. • ‘Diaspora space is inhabited not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. • ‘Entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those who stay put.’

9. Diaspora & Transnationalism • Debate about relationship • “All diasporas are transnational but not all transnational are diasporas” • Diaspora ‘condition of leaving’ while transnationalism ‘condition of living’? • Diasporic subjectivity not necessarily related to crossing of boundaries and transnational movements, but depends more on the experience and memory of becoming ’unhomely’ • Characteristics: forced migration, collective memory, alienation & insulation; de-territorialization; projects of investments, diasporic consciousness; desire to return