Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity; Editorial

Special Issue Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1853

‘Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity’: Editorial, Ayman Abu-Shomar JPCS Vol. 4, No. 3, 2013 1

Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity

Ayman Abu-Shomar

Assistant Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies

King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

Introduction

The Special Issue Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity provides a thinking-

space of us invariably interested in the evolving spaces of Post-colonial and Cultural Studies.

The theme signposts several avenues around diasporic literature aiming to address the

contemporary stance of knowledge production within a broader sense of critical thought and

epistemology. It also aims to address several sub themes regarding the current postmodernist

stance and condition through branching out the theoretical scope of diaspora and literary

studies. The papers included in this issue offer a capacious range for empirical and theoretical

engagements with notions pertaining to what have become among the most contestable

concepts of our times: post-modernity, post-coloniality, and liquidity (after Bauman, (2000)).

Additionally, the literature of Diasporas, which has been an offshoot of diasporic experience,

mounts up as the major source of empirical knowledge in this collection alongside with these

theories and concepts. The assumption is that, for long, literature has been an integral part of

post-colonial and diasporic experience which appears to be instrumental to our study of

societies, cultures, historical momentum, and above all the critical discourses we sanctify to

understand the human conditions.

Since the human condition in this particular juncture of our history has become mystified by

the momentum of dramatic changes in the social, cultural, political, and economical spheres,

our ethical responsibility is to keep our search for new avenues of critical language at work to

address the infinite assurgency of the moment. As Gur-Ze’ev, (2005) believes: there always

exist other possibilities for new critical language and further potentials for approaching truth

and richness of life, which are always matters for human concern. The theme, therefore,

responds to such growing demands of ever-changing needs and to the insurgency and

disintegration of obligations as well as to the emergence of new human conditions. Currently

such conditions render normative and stable meanings and the ways to approach them

problematic. It could be said that the current theme carries reflective bearings towards

paradigmatic and essentialised epistemologies that are informed by cultural, political, and to a

far extent, ideological outlooks. In other words, the way the authors in this collection engage

with the diasporic text might be broadly understood as an attempt to take in hand a

revisionary approach to the stance of knowledge production and meaning-making on

contemporary times.



In the last few decades, the concepts of third spaces, ‘in-between’, cross-culturalism, cultural

diversity, pluralism and hybridity among many others have inspired scholars and

academicians to discern the meaning of such an inevitable discourse of our

contemporaneity. More to our understanding, the turn of the 21st century has revealed a

resurgence of interest in questioning the orthodox consensus regarding what has been so far

believed to be a grounded critical paradigm. Since, meanings nowadays are rhythmic in shape

and dynamic in structure without rigid, closed, or static boundaries, critical thought has

turned into regulated disorder and planned chaos keeping the stance of knowledge itself in

flux, in motion, and repeating forward. Recurrently, the proliferation of epistemologies has

been espoused into understanding the surge of the emergent postmodern condition, which is

not simply academic in fashion but rather a response to substantive changes in the way we

perceive our condition form the most private and intimate to the most exoteric and global. In

his essay Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope Ashcroft (2009) talks about the ‘perpetual

scene of translation that is the example of the moment of ‘betweenness’ through which the

current subjects of the ‘transaction’ are constituted: “it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of

translation and renegotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of

culture” (p. 14).

Since their conditions, knowledge and perceptions of identity flow in the spaces across

national and transnational boundaries, it is believed that the people of diaspora have

developed a sort of diasporic ontological and epistemological existence that enables them to

surpass ‘all-home-returning projects’ and pleas for pure identity. They negotiate the

complexities of difference in the new cultural spaces which open up between familiar and

foreign meanings, relations, and identities. The status of writers of diaspora, I would argue,

enjoys a double amenity from the ontological constraint of ‘culture’ as they behold two

worlds in front of them: that of diaspora and that of imagination. Ashcroft (2009), after Said,

discusses the utopian tendency in post-colonial criticism referring to this condition as

‘freedom from identity itself’ in addition to the constriction of national borders. As Maniam

(qtd in Dalai, 2008) declares: “to understand the symbiosis between diasporic experience and

the literature that grows in it, literature becomes a ‘device to decode the epistemology of

diaspora” (p. 8). Diasporic literary experience appropriates ‘reality’ not as an authoritative

end, but rather as an ongoing and becoming, and as a continuous process with heteroglossic

and polyphonic implications and intentions (Dalai, 2008).

In a sense, the authors in this collection responded respond to the theme Critical Spaces of

Diaspora with a broad backdrop of a deconstructive thought. Drawing on literary textual

knowledge and ‘realties’, the authors explore the potential and power of Diasporic meanings

beyond the idea of diaspora as a ‘traumatic experience of scattered people over the globe’,

but as a positively constructed experience to advance the stance of knowledge and meaning-

making beyond the closed boundaries of cultures. Raj, for example, argues that diasporic

literary experience transcends its diasporic context by instigating cultural sensibilities at

home. She perceives the single experience of Rushdie has inspired a critical framework



through which Indian postmodernity is established. I introduce the papers in the second part

of this editorial, but as for now, I wish to address the theme of this issue in more details.

Critical Spaces of Diaspora

Three major segments could be inferred from the banner Critical Spaces of Diaspora:

Diasporic Epistemology, the Diasporic literary text and the current condition of post-

coloniality. Dalai (2008) elucidates: “One among several enigmatic epistemologies of our

times is diaspora. It is a complex, constant and constitutive aspect of human life (more so in

our time) since the inception of modernity, through colonisation till the recent phenomenon

of globalisation” (p. 8). I wish to highlight three words here: complex, constant and

constitutive as backdrop thrusts into my discussion of the Epistemology of Diaspora that

informs the theme of Critical Spaces of Diaspora. Diaspora(s) are labyrinthine in nature

including discursively constructed and mobilised identities. Their multifaceted

manifestations, narrative and dialogic engagements that are located in-between spaces qualify

as corrective locale to ethnocentric cultural discourses. They also mount as antidote against

the ‘violence’ and monolith of modernist certainties and essentialised construction of

knowledge. In this manner, they diffuse our critical demeanours through their hybrid and

fragmented identities, which renders the multiplicity, mobility and dynamicity of

epistemologies not only conceivable but also inevitable. The creation of diasporic spaces

allows creative improvisation as non-finite and dynamic locales for negotiating with

difference, the ‘self’ and ‘otherness’. The notion of diaspora needs to be complicated as it

entails an amalgamation of dispersion, memories, myths, alienation, nomadism, ongoing and

hybrid identities, complex histories of dwelling, and travelling, or in Clifford’s words

(1997), ‘dwelling-in-travel’ – all of which force us to rethink the rubric of our old concepts,

monolithic discourse and epistemologies. The complexity and dynamicity of the concept as

Brubaker’s (2005) argues is that the notion of diaspora has been stretched out in various

directions including its semantic, conceptual and disciplinary spaces. As such, the notion has

mounted to entail confluence and convergence of multiple ideas, meanings, cultures,

experiences which offers myriad, dislocated sites of contensiation to the hegemonic and

homogenising forces (Brazial and Mannur, 2003).

Scholars have thoroughly examined the concept of diaspora in relation to cultural, political,

social, educational and literary representations, among others. Although adopting different

historical and theoretical modalities, they have a common denominator: the opening of the

term that once had been thought of as embodying a specific referent. This primary concern of

these revisionist projects has been paralleled with the conjunction of the emergent schools of

thought including post-structuralism, deconstructionism and post-colonialism, among others.

They experimented with the creation of theoretical possibilities towards a proliferation of

meanings and usages of the term in many aspects of human life. Such attraction also reflects

the enigmatic power of the term as a constitutive aspect of human life. Fernandez (2009), for

example, perceives diaspora as a notion that stimulates research in all directions as well as

having a power to discover gaps and interrogates the nexus necessary between theory and



practice. She believes that the “diaspora can be managed meaningfully if we understand that

it is in itself an open-source and that any attempt to limit its scope or its definition transgress

the boundaries of both its conceptual and epistemological framing. Diaspora is derived from

the idea of scattering of seeds. As such the concept must be allowed to take root, transplant,

cross-fertilise, rather than fossilise” (p. 7).

In this manner, the trajectory of theorising the term grows up towards an expansion of the

theoretical and interdisciplinary grounds upon which the term is used. It has also witnessed a

point of departure from the closed sense of dispersion and trauma to include myriad

structures of people either within or outside the notion of the border state. Currently, the

concept is used across a broad range of disciplines including: Sociology, Anthropology,

Geography, Cultural and Literary Studies, Migration Studies, Politics, and International

Relations (Adamson, 2008). Brubaker (2005) argues that the concept has become a key

vehicle of the proliferation of academic diaspora discussions including: “diasporic

citizenship, diasporic consciousness, diasporic identity, diasporic imagination, diasporic

nationalism, diasporic networks, diasporic culture, diasporic religion, or even diasporic self”

(p. 4). The travelling junction between these projects and conceptualisations of the concept of

diaspora has been revolving around the notions of place, space, mobility, locatedness and

transnationality (Mcllwaine, 2011a).

For the particular interest of the current them, a new ground of research is set out to explore

what is referred to as Diasporic Epistemology. The traditional reception of the concept

revolves around the idea of split, dual or hyphenated identities between two or more cultural

references. Tawnee (2012), for example, perceives ‘Diasporic Epistemology’ as a “dual

reference which affords immigrant subjects some individuality [the unique experience of

immigration to individuals], created by the intersection of both structural and cultural

conditions specific to a particular diaspora” (p. 11). Diasporic epistemology in this sense

refers to dual frames of reference between the ‘homeland’ and host destination, and is thus

understood as ‘split-epistemology’ where epistemology is defined as a construction of

knowledge through external authorities since the time of birth. On the other hand, Mishra

(1996) foregrounds ‘diasporic epistemology’ in the realm of Hybridity as a space that is

constantly confronting ‘cultural regimes’. In the domain of multiculturalism, she refers to

diasporic epistemology as a constantly contesting antidote to cultural knowledge and other

forms of hegemonic regimes informed by ethnocentric modalities. Close to this line of

thought are the notions of diaspora as transitional cultures or what Clifford (1997) refers to as

the “contact zones of nations, cultures and regions” (p. 283). Similarly, Bonnerjee et al.

(2012) perceive diasporic knowledge as a result of transitional links as well as a multiplicity

of belongings and identities where fixity and fetishism invoked by ethnicity can be

challenged. In sum, the idea of the difference between the ‘homeland’ and ‘host’ or the

connections between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997) and the ‘historical rift between

locations of residence and locations of belonging’ (Gilory, 2000, p. 124) still largely

dominate the attempts of theorising an epistemology of diasporas.



I however wish to engage with the concept of diaspora from another perspective by recalling

the case of The Frankfort School thinkers as well as their treatise regarding Critical Theory.

Since this institute-in-exile includes intellectuals who affiliated to Marxism, and had no

chance to survive in Nazi Germany, it could be safely claimed that the domineering force that

these intellectuals had gathered around is the sense of their diasporic existence. Although

they fulfilled their research activities with enthusiasm, they lived in isolation from their host

American environment or what Wiggershaus (1994) calls ‘splendid isolation’. Diaspora for

them was an impetus that informs their resistance to traditional Western epistemologies and

an endeavour towards their critical thought or what was later known as ‘Critical Theory’. In

particular, they resisted all regimes of truth, collectively referred to as positivism, and, to

meet this aspiration, they insisted on denying ‘all-home-returning projects’ (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005)

and any ideology thinking. Marcus and Tar (1988) describe the intellectuals of The Frankfort

School as “their writings were part of a tale, whose end is not yet written, of the repudiation

by radical academics, especially in the social sciences, of the ancient Western ideal of

dispassionate reason, of objective inquiry, in the study of man and society. They were also

parts of a tale of men of good will” (p. 29) [emphasis added].

In their later works, Adorno and Horkheimer developed the beginning of a critical theory or

what scholars nowadays refer to as ‘Diasporic Philosophy’. Gur-Ze'ev (2005) argues that

having no starting point nor a ‘telos or territory’ and 'not being at 'home' at all costs',

Diasporic Philosophy refuses becoming victimised by the 'self-evidence', ‘self-content', and

the 'negation of the ‘other’’. It refuses 'any identity thinking' in ontological, epistemological,

ethical, existential, and political terms (p. 21-3). He contends that Diasporic Philosophy

challenges nihilism in all its forms, yet insists on love and intimacy where human rationality

cannot establish an authentic ‘I’. He further claims that: “Diaspora as an ontological,

epistemological, existential attunement to the call to self-creation, as against self-

forgetfulness; as an alternative to being swallowed by all 'home-returning' appeals and all

salvation/emancipation agendas and educational projects that offer to constitute the "I" via

the "we" and the self-evident, true, or relevant values, truths ideals, and strivings” (p. 18).

Several observations can be drawn from this understanding of Diasporic Philosophy: First,

Diasporic Philosophy has no starting point, territory, and not being at home at all costs. To

my understanding, such diasporic existence enables profound epistemic realisations and

endless possibilities for meaning production beyond the geographical or national boundaries

that used to enslave epistemology for a long time. This analysis, I argue, contests with the

‘cultural’ knowledge that homes all prejudices and biased knowledge. In other words, I

realise that in-between spaces could mount as an impetus to guide our perceptions of the

world, and allow us to understand the ‘other’ not as a mere object of difference, but as a valid

source of meaning. Adorno and Horkheimer (qtd in Gur-Ze’ev, 2005) insisted that ‘there is

no cultural document that was not a manifestation of barbarism’ (p. 24). Since culturally

informed knowledge acts as colouring lenses, one cannot by any means arrive at a just

knowledge about other groups of human beings. For long, Europe has fallen in this trap, as

Said (1978, 1994 and 1995) has argued at length. When cultural knowledge is constructed as



a mainstream knowledge, it unquestionably leads to a closure and limitation to our

perceptions of the universe that of ourselves and that of the others. As Crotty (2007)

contends; if cultural knowledge is the basis of meaning-making, then these assumptions or

master myths can limit ways of thinking, since culture can best be seen as the source, rather

than the result, of human thought and behaviour. Furthermore, the act or crossing beyond the

boundaries of ‘culture’ or territories, uncovers the dearth of hidden political agendas while

claiming for realities, and enables further epistemic enunciations.

In his Location of Culture, Bhabha (1994) insists on the implication of this ‘Third Space’ as

an enunciative spilt for cultural analysis since, according to him, its temporal dimension

destroys the logic of synchronicity and evaluation that traditionally give authority to the

subject of cultural knowledge. The intervention of the ‘Third Space’, therefore, destroys the

mirror of representation of cultural knowledge as a fixed, integrated, open and expanding

code. It also deconstructs and challenges the historical identity of culture as a homogenising

and unifying force. In this sense, the domineering proposition of Critical Spaces of Diaspora

could be realised as an antidote to master myths of culturally informed knowledge since

culture can best be seen as the source, rather than the result, of human thought and behaviour

(Crotty, 2003). After Bhabah (1994), I perceive the intervention of such critical spaces as

corrective locales to challenge the historical identity of culture as a homogenising and

unifying force. It also allows an understanding of cultural statements and systems as

constructed in a contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, which refutes the

hierarchical claims of the inherent ‘purity’ of cultures. The search for the 'crossing points' of

cultures could be interpreted as a radical move towards critical cultural understanding, which

permits an antithetical approach of similar matters, hence denies hegemonic and stereotypical

discourses of cultural representations.

Second, Diasporic Philosophy deconstructs the formula of authentic ‘I’ while drawing

knowledge about this ‘other’. Trusting the ‘self’ as a source of knowledge is placed in

dialectic assessment with the ‘other’; when cultures are compared dialectically, it seems

normal for a person to depict his or her culture as the best. The ‘self’ mounts as a source of a

‘self’s knowledge’ about the ‘other’ and the ‘self’ simultaneously, yet, this knowledge is not

merely a representation of one’s free will, but a result of a socially or culturally constructed

knowledge. As such, epistemology shall be understood as “knowledge construction obtained

from external authorities since the time of birth” (Pizzolato et al., 2008). Spivak (1991)

contends that our subjectivity is constituted by the shifting discourses of power which

endlessly ‘speak for’ us, situating us here and there in particular positions and relations. In

these terms we are not the authors of ourselves; the subject cannot be ‘sovereign’ over the

construction of selfhood. Instead, the subject is ‘de-centred’ in that its consciousness is

always being constructed from positions outside of itself. It follows, then, that the individual

is not the point of origin for consciousness, and human consciousness is not a transparent

representation of the self but an effect of discourse.



Drawing on these arguments, the construction of diasporic critical spaces challenges and

disrupts the dividing lines of binary thinking, and promotes the construction of the ‘I’ via the

‘we’ which enables dynamic and discursively constructed discourses. The act of employing

multi-voice discourse, according to hook (1984) allows ‘other’s’ voices to have authority on

meaning; while in ‘single-voiced’ discourse individuals adhere to their own view point

paying no attention to possibly conflicting voices. ‘Multi-voice’ discourse calls the social

construction of ‘the self in relation’ and individuals see the ‘self’ not as a signifier of one ‘I’

but the coming together of many ‘I’s’ and the intra- and inter-subjective voices are made

possible.

Gur-Ze’ev, (2005) insists on the capacity of diasporic responsibility to addresses the infinity

of the moment in its endless creative possibilities, dangers, and abysses as it calls for a

fundamental communication with the otherness of the ‘other’, which precedes cultural

borders, political interests, race, national, gender, and other differences. It precedes yet

enables truly rational moral elaborations and critiques. It relates to the most intimate

manifestations of becoming-towards-the world, the ‘other’, and the one’s self as a challenge

and as an object of shared responsibility, love, creation, and happiness. Furthermore,

diasporic spaces enable ‘diasporic response ability’, not only as a potential for the ethical I,; it

is a gate to being true to oneself. Diasporic response ability is an ontological sign that while

accepting the whole, is committed to overcoming the division between immanence and

transcendence in an ethical diasporic moment. In short, the reception of critical spaces of

diaspora as a counter-step ethical moment antagonises sophisticated cultural systems that

rework, rob and productivise our ontological diasporic existence in the globe.

Post-coloniality, Literatures and Diasporas

Having this synopsis review of diaspora as informant of diasporic epistemology, I turn to

briefly demonstrate the interconnected and triangulated relationship between post-coloniality,

diaspora and the literary text. Post-colonialism is inextricably interconnected with the notion

of diaspora and literary studies. The theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi

Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent

years vitalised postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we

understand ‘culture’ and developing new ways of thinking beyond the confines of the

nation state. The notion of diaspora has been productive in its attention to the production of

new forms of knowledge and discourse, whether these discourse are produced in ‘the host-

land’, in the transitional spaces of cultures or absorbed by people at ‘home’. But, perhaps of

greater significance, postcolonial theory gains its strength from the consideration of the

epistemological implications of the term – diaspora as theory. It takes up diaspora in terms of

adaptation and construction – adaptation to changes, dislocations and transformations, and

the construction of new forms of knowledge and ways of seeing the world.

In literary and cultural studies, diasporic studies have been a well established paradigm as

appears the extensive writing of famous cultural and literary theorists such as Bhabha:

‘Hybridity’ and ‘Thirds Space’ (1994, 1996); Hall (1996a) and Gilory (1997) Hybrid



identities, among others. As a common theme for those critics, they share is the exploration

of the complex fabric of diaspora within the notions of Hybridity, culture-in-between, cultural

difference and multiculturalism. Reflecting on the role of those border-crossing theorists and

artists who write outside the ‘nation-state’ borders, I second Azadi’s observation that “every

theory of postcolonial, transitional, or diasporic literature and art is most convincingly

articulate and performed by works of literature and art themselves” (p 36). With the

emergence of ‘literature as social practice’ the role of readers who engage with literary

meanings and interpretation has become very much like agents who turn to literature to help

them in larger purposes in life, such as reflecting on their identities and possibilities for moral

and emotional engagements.

Additionally, diasporic writers such as V. S. Naipual, K. S. Maniam, S. Nadan and S.

Rushdie among many others have touched the complexity of meanings in their diasporic

texts. For example, in his ‘Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism’, Rushdie (1991)

perceives meaning as “a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries,

newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved;

perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate

materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death” (p. 73). Maniam (1987) perceives the

intersection of diaspora and literature a powerful apparatus to discover the power of the text

to decode the epistemology of diaspora. For him, fiction has been the exploration of the past,

present, psychology, conflicts and ambitions of Indian diaspora in Malaysia (p. 218).

Similarly, Nadan (2000) perceives diaspora-writing as a venture not only to understand but

also to survive: “it has become […] not only the enigma of survival, but a way into the world,

a solid mandala. Writing, though fragile and vulnerable, is the only home possible” (p. 101).

Currently, Khorana (2009) contends that diasporic texts remain a coherent representation of

the lives of disporians, as well as of the global-local nuances of the transitional era.

The articles in this issue look at recent developments in diasporic literature and

theory, alluding to the work of seminal post-colonial theoreticians like Fanon, Bhabha,

Gilroy, Clifford, and also building on the works of postmodern and post-structural thinkers

including Deleuz, Guattari and Appadurai. They address several themes drawn from

diasporic writers and texts in the light of the emergent post-colonial and post-modernist

critical approaches and arguments. The travelling theme of diaspora as informative thrust to

approach realities and discussions regarding the critical stance of postmodern era has been

the domineering endeavour for these authors. Although by no means I claim that the papers in

this issue have culminated into tied in theme, it could be safely claimed that, whether in their

theoretical or empirical approaches, they have affiliated to the theme with the backdrop of

diaspora as informative to their proliferated, multiple and dispersed ‘paradigm’. In other

words, the dispersal aspect of diaspora is itself reflected in the various ways the authors have

responded to the theme.

The first paper engages with the formation of postmodern and postcolonial identity in the

context of Indian fiction. Drawing on the critical reception of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,



Raj provides a corrective critique to the limitations of post-modernity and diasporic identity

in South Asian literature. She demonstrates how the ‘positioning of Rushdie as a unified

framework of the Indian postmodern stance has helped the imagining of nation and literature

written in English (IE) in the post-1980s’. Responding to the question of who is Rushdie?, the

author observes that the figure of Rushdie has changed much in the Indian postmodern era,

and his figure had been elevated to a status of a nation builder by means of challenging

literary conventions of earlier writers. Rushdie’s metaphors, for example, have not only

informed the way contemporary IE writers perceive themselves, but also how the genre and

the nation at large would perceive themselves: Rushdie “is appropriated by authors and critics

for legitimising a certain kind of identity which contemporary IF fiction provides” (p. 25).

Having these observations regarding how the metanarratives of the nation have established a

unified paradigm or a canon, Raj moves into a more reflective and critical position through

which she perceives “the privileging of nation-narratives [as leading] to a certain kind of

institutionalisation and canon formation which consequently produced a literary history that

ignored the themes, characteristics and voices that did not fit into the story of the nation” (p.

27). She contends that such ‘institutionalisation goes against the idea of postmodernity’ as ‘it

continues to promote unity and coherence in many ways’. The treatment of Indian women

writers, for example, is deemed to unfit in Rushdie’s canon: “the works on women-writing in

India find it impossible to begin the story with Rushdie and do not find it relevant to celebrate

the liberation that her art offers from the colonial straitjacket. Caught in the web of nation-

narratives produced predominantly by male diaspora writers, the critical establishment had

neglected not only the women writers but also the themes which challenged the patriarchal

notions of the nation” (p. 27). This sceptical position regarding a unifying national paradigm

is intensified by acknowledging the fact that this critical reception of Rushdie has gone off a

‘tradition’, vis-à-vis ‘a conscious attempt to read every novel in the framework of the nation’

has been established. This canonisation tradition has two damaging aspects to the idea of

postmodern diaspora: first, it excludes any work that does not comply with the monumental

fame achieved by Rushdie, and, second, it has no space to engage with “postcolonial issues

from the perspective of women, dalits, tribal and other marginalised communities” (p, 27).

In a similar vein, Abuhilal provides an innovative, reflective and critical reading to Edward

Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir to explore the Palestinian Diaspora as perceived in Said’s

discourse. She examines Said’s personal narratives and discourse in Out of Place in contrast

with his intellectual production particularly his foregrounding text Orientalism to theorise an

original stance of diaspora beyond the politically informed Jewish discourses. While Said

introduces a unified discourse of reading the Orient/Occident relationship, his personal life as

presented in his Memoir tells a different story. It incorporates difference, indeterminacy,

liminality, hybridism, fragmentation and disintegration as some of the basic aspects of the

diasporic identity that Said depicts in Out of Place. With the premise of Palestinian Diaspora

as an identity in the diasporic mind of Edward Said, the author realises the complexity and

‘ambivalence’ of Palestinian diaspora as consisting of multi-layers and several processes of

rewriting of identities or what she prefers to call ‘process of return and transformation’.



“Palestinian diaspora and its relation to colonial discourses exhibits a hierarchy of discourses

in which coloniser/colonised relations appear in different modes and levels” (p. 48).

Drawing on Said’s diasporic self, she contends that “Said’s inability to locate himself in a

place (metaphorically or geographically) comes as a result of the endless displacements, lack

of connection, alteration, disintegration and ‘dissonances' which characterize the diasporic

settings of Out of Place” (p. 30). This unique impetus by means of which disparity is

maintained in perception and reality that is created by Said’s diasporic self, which is ‘off’ and

‘out of place, ‘in motion , in time, in place’, and ‘without central theme’. It is a locale of

various and multitude of diasporic settings, which lead to a dominating "unsettled sense of

many identities – mostly in conflict with each other” (Said, 1999, p. 5). She concludes that

such ‘shift’ in Said’s discourse is informed by the continuous spatial displacements, which

call him to adopt an alternative discourse of power relations that is not categorical and cannot

be incorporated in his colonial discourse analysis theory. “In opposition to Said’s model in

Orientalism, Out of Place can point out to a significant function in the Post-orientalist

discourse analysis theory: the incorporation of concepts like negation, transformation,

assimilation in the colonial discourses of Out of Place can work in opposition to the stabile

and coherence of colonial relations in Orientalism” (p. 48).

Pattchett’s paper ‘Corpus cartography’: diasporic identity as flesh and blood offers an

original contribution to studies of diaspora beyond the dualist conception of diasporic identity

as based on the dichotomy of homeland/hostland, and by recognising that the dislocation of

identity could be a site of fragmented multiplicities. Patchett introduces the concept of

‘Corpus Cartography’ as a discursive construction of the body’s situated-ness as both body

and organ(s), and as rhizomatic challenge to post-modernity through defining and giving

agency to its excess. Building on the works of Deleuze and Guattari regarding their

conceptualisation of rhizomatic anti-genealogies, she demonstrates the ways in which

diasporic identity is re/imagined as post-modernity’s uncomfortable excess made flesh, and

‘thus contemplating the potential of a new way of thinking about diasporic identity’ (p. 51).

Within the repertories of post-modernism, the author uses the concept of rhizomatic

cartography to explore the diasporic conditionality through which the body as a corpus can be

mapped and shaped. Negotiations of diasporic identity, are therefore, determined by

principles of connection that consist of lines, but not points or positions: “I am taking corpus

to mean both the performative body acting out the discursive conditions of diaspora, as well

as the body as circuitry within which subjects in a diasporic group must perform and embody

multiple and connective lines of flight” (p. 51). Furthermore, the author moves into a more

challenging task by exploring the constructions ‘anti- genealogical body-centric map’, and

challenge the critical principles that perceive diaspora as a term of ‘nomadic postmodern

uprootedness. Drawing on Clifford’s ‘antiteleological temporality’, chaos/complexity theory

and hermeneutic narrative research by means of which she reads The American Gypsy, the

author contends that the pervasive fluidity of diasporic identity (re)formation moves in a

continuous metaphoric re-invention, which is interwoven rather than based on a linear

trajectory. She concludes that beyond dualistic binaries of home/host, diasporic identity could



be realised as deterritorialized: “it is neither locatable nor nomadic, neither exilic nor exotic,

neither essentialist nor entirely fragmented as an arbitrary state of ontological deception: it is

the embodiment of an orobouric metamorphosis” (p. 65).

In a similar line of thought, Chakraborty addresses to the theme of Critical Spaces of

Diaspora beyond the typical home/host traumatic dichotomy. Drawing on Bhabha’s notion of

the ‘in-between hybridised third space’, the author engages with a critical reading of the

poetry of Imtiaz Dharkar, as multifaceted and ‘complex’ negotiations through which the poet

(as an example of diaspora) challenges the otherisation process. Chakraborty observes that

the poet creates such spaces as “persistent endeavours to move beyond such marginalisation

by finding a voice that consistently challenges essentialistic and monochromatic constructs

and the violence necessitated by them” (p. 73). As such, after Ashcroft, the author contends

that the poetic voice helps open up spaces of a nomadic space within and between the

institutional and political specificities of nation state or ‘the liberating region of

representational undecideability’. In so doing the author reconfigures and deconstructs the

traditional idea of ‘home’ as a linguistic comfort, a mere cultural familiarity or geographical

space, and introduces ‘home’ as an all-encompassing paradigm shaped by the individual’s

sense of the self. Unhomeliness therefore becomes a sort of cultural alienation that includes

spatial dislocation, linguistic difference among many others. Recalling the colonial discourse

that perceives or stereotypes home as an instrument through which the agency of modernity

was to be attained, the author contends that such negotiations could be made possible when

‘home’ turns out to be a sphere beyond these contaminating influences. While perceiving

such influences (including essentialist impositions of race, religion and gender) as forces of

alienation and marginalisation, the poetic spatial devices of Dharkar would articulate the

defining personal strategies of selfhood that confound the logic of such essentialism. The

author concludes that within a postmodernist thought such consciousness could be seen as

those dissident micronarratives in opposition to grand narratives of nation-state, religious or

ethnic communities. Such dissident voices would mount and open up new sites of

enunciation, ‘Third Spaces’ or spaces of ‘transnation’ through which cultural, identity and

national affiliations are superseded and dissolved.

Nonetheless not all spaces or ‘contact zones’ are harmonious conditions, but are potentially

burdened with the ‘rift of separation’, ‘loss of identity’ as well as being both physically and

psychologically devastating. Labidi’s paper The New-Middle Passage: Negotiating with the

Traumatic Experience of Clandestine Migration in Caryl Phillips’s ‘A Distant Shore’ (2003)

explores how the current traumatic experience of clandestine migration could reflect both: the

former slave trade and a discourse of neo-colonisation. The author reminds us that such

spaces or ‘passages’ between ‘worlds’ (from ‘Third World’ to ‘First World’) are not always

without their desolations and sufferings, but are mainly an experience of ‘incomprehensible

agony’. Motivated by escaping the miserable conditions in their home countries, including

the shackles of social divisions, dictatorship, poverty, diseases among many others, -

clandestine migrants or ‘illegal’ secret travellers embark on dangerous voyages to the

promises of the welfare of ‘First World’s’ countries. The case, as the authors author shows



us, is one of the most harrowing: “slavery and current illegal migration to Europe are the

outcome (direct or indirect) of a ruthless imperial project (carried out through the dual

atrocities of slavery and colonialism) which irredeemably exiled the Black man from his

African homeland and deepened the gap between the ‘West and the ‘Rest’” (p. 88). Drawing

on Caryl Phillips’s A Distance Shore, the author explores how the literary text goes beyond

the mere documentation of the realities of secret migration (statistics, dates, numbers, etc.) to

articulate the clandestine migrant’s subterranean psychic, existential, and identity plights

once dreams of warm welcome in the metropolis fail to materialize. He concludes that

Solomon’s ‘middle-passage’ is both soul-destroying and life threatening; ‘it is wrapped up in

intense discomfort and utter physical and mental arduousness’. The trauma begins as soon as

Solomon and his fellow clandestine travellers ‘climb in the truck’; and the ‘Middle Passage,

is therefore, a devastating experience: “Solomon’s problematic and destructive border-

crossing to the mother-country is but a reminder of the lingering memory of slavery and its

trans-generic poignant haunting” (p. 102). Or in Glissant’s words (qtd in Abidi) the journey

of cross worlds to the unwelcoming host land is a ‘torture’ and ‘death lingering in the

distance’.

In her exploration of the notions of diversity, diaspora and multiculturalism in the Malaysian

context, Othman addresses issues around the diasporic identity of Chinese and Indians in

relation to that of the Malay, and to the host community at large. Within the repertories of

qualitative research, the researcher addresses to the following questions: a) how diverse

ethnic groups of diaspora in addition to the host group could project a model case of

multicultural society? b) How multi-ethnic and cultural groups could coexist and collectively

work to the welfare of the country? More specifically, she investigates the influence of

cultural peculiarities (religion, language, politics and social practices) of the main ethnic

groups that constitute Malaysian society on the collective identity of multi-cultural society.

Drawing on her findings, she contends that what might be labelled as ‘Malaysian’ identity is

a collective and dynamic notion has been revolving evolving over the years. Within the

broader theoretical tenets of diaspora and multiculturalism studies, she maintains that while

these ethnic groups still adhere to their linguistic, religious and cultural particularities, they

constantly and vigorously commemorate a unique model of multicultural policy. Both

diaspora and the host society therefore coalesce and depict a positive intent that leads to a

particular genre of harmony, pluralism and coexistence: “Diaspora is a machinery for the

creation of new ethnicities in the host country, and while the term ‘ethnicity’ appears divisive

to the society at large, it provides an anchor for diasporas to settle down, establish new roots

and contribute to the society’s cultural heterogeneity” (p. 127).



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Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity; Editorial