Definition of Diaspora Safran’s (1991) basic characteristics: 1-Dispersal from an original “centre” to two or more foreign regions 2-Retention of a collective

Definition of Diaspora

Safran’s (1991) basic characteristics:1-Dispersal from an original “centre” to two or

more foreign regions 2-Retention of a collective memory, vision, or

myth about their original homeland including its location, history, and achievements;

3-The belief that they are not – and perhaps never can be – fully accepted in their host societies and so remain partly separate


4-The idealization of the putative ancestral home and the thought of returning when conditions are more favorable

5-The belief that all members should be committed to the maintenance or restoration of the original homeland and to its safety and prosperity

6-A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history, and the belief in a common fate.


• Diaspora as a term historically and typically denotes the scattering of people from their homelands into new communities across the globe

• Robin Cohen adopts Safran’s definition BUT four additional features

-diasporas may include, indeed, often I include, “groups that scatter for aggressive or voluntary purposes,


• second, diasporas and “diasporic consciousness” are predicated on a “strong tie to the past or a block to assimilate on in the present and future”

• third, diasporas are defined positively, not just negatively

• members of a diaspora characteristically do not have a sense of only a collective identity in a place of settlement, nor again only a relationship with an imagined, putative or real homeland, BUTalso a common identity with co-ethnic members in other countries

Other Types of Human Movement

• Displacement, deterritorialization • Often indistinct and overlapping boundaries

– Colonial settlers – Transnational corporate expatriates– Student visas – Postcolonial émigrés – Refugees – Political asylums (or asylum seekers) – Detainees – Internally displaced persons (IDPs) – Economic migrants – Undocumented workers (“illegal aliens”)

Diaspora-Homeland-Host State

• A triangular relationship• Diaspora is of great importance to both host

and home countries• Homeland: remittances, investment, foreign

policy• Host state: Conditions in the host state are

important in determining diaspora organization and actions

Nation-State and Diaspora

• The incorporation of diaspora as a unit of analysis in the field of international relations has been largely neglected by both recent and critical scholarship.

• The emphasis or adherence to the state-centric model in the realm of international relations has contributed to the sidelining of entities known as diaspora as a valuable unit of analysis.


• In this sense, the nation state cannot account for : certain features in the emerging global political economy, which can perhaps be better explained by using diaspora.

• Diasporas were inconveniences to the key unit of modernity, the nation-state, whose leaders sought to make ethnicity (they often called it ‘race’) congruous with territory.

• While marginalizing imported diasporas, the powerful nation-state states, especially in Europe established their own diasporas abroad to further their imperial plans.


• Divided loyalties between the host state and homeland/ethnic group?

• Host states • Homelands

Classification of Diaspora

Three critical historical phases of diaspora formation

• Classical Period• Contemporary/Late Modern Period

Ancient Greek Diaspora

• Ancient Greek Diaspora• The term “diaspora” has its origins in Greek history

and civilization• For the Greeks, the expression was used to describe

the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean in the Archaic period (800·600 BC)

• The word diaspora is a derivation of the Greek verb diasperein, which means to sow or scatter about and the Greek preposition dia meaning through or over


• According to Chalianu and Rageau “under Rome and during the Hellenistic period the Greeks experienced both an intellectual and a and a trading dispersion”.

• diasporas are “ancient features of human history”, a concept which has virtually become synonymous with Jewish experience; that of the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile.


• Although there was some displacement of the ancient ‘diaspora’, the term essentially had a beneficial connotation. Expansion through trade, military conquest, free migration and settlement were the predominant features of the Greek diaspora.

• In the pre-modern period, it is clear the common Jewish use of the term ‘diaspora’ overlaid a much more benign meaning in the original Greek.

Jewish Diaspora

• Jewish Diaspora• In the absence of a suitable theoretical

framework for analyzing contemporary diaspora, a sizeable body of literature exclusively makes reference to the Jewish case, thereby establishing it as the archetypal diaspora.

• Victim diaspora, exile, forced migration• The loneliness and sadness of the diasporic

experience

Jewish Diaspora

• Most characterizations of diasporas emphasize their catastrophic origins, their mass nature

• Isolation and insecurity of living in a foreign place, set adrift, cut off from their roots and their sense of identity, oppressed by an alien ruling class and their disturbing effects

• The groups were seen as victims, destined never to realize themselves or to attain completeness, tranquility or happiness.

Jewish Diaspora

• The Jewish diaspora dates historically to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the subsequent dispersal of Jews from their Holy Land (and homeland) in Judea, beginning a period of Babylonian exile.

• Following the 1095 CE call for Crusaders to reclaim the “Holy Land” by Pope Urbanus, anti-Jewish sentiments and practices among Christians erupted in Europe. Brutal anti-Jewish violence spread throughout Germany and other part

Jewish Diaspora

• Jewish European and Russian communities, however, suffered racism and Political discrimination throughout the nineteenth century; and in the late nineteenth century, modern anti-Jewish political persecution emerged as European nationalisms with their focus on racial purity and folk-citizen.

• A reaction to late nineteenth and early ,twentieth-century anti-Semitism, Zionism (a desire to found or reclaim a Jewish homeland) thrived in the 1890s initiated by its visionary-leader Theodor Herlz A Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist.

Jewish Diaspora

• On November 2, 1917, Lord Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people.

• Balfour Declaration was tantamount in the eyes of many Arabs and Palestinians as a promise by a European imperial power to create a Jewish state in Jerusalem and the surrounding area, Palestine, without consideration of how this act might displace Palestinians already living there.

Jewish Diaspora

• Following the rise of Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party, or the ,Nazi Party, in Germany in the 1930s, Jewish immigrants sought refuge in Palestine.

• 1948, Establishment of the Israeli State. Law of Return (1950)

Jewish Diaspora• From the beginning, the Jewish diaspora was (and has

remained) fragmented ; by language, culture, customs, diets, ritual practices, and geographical locations.

• Sephardic Jews settling first in Spain and Portugal, or the Iberian peninsula, later in the Maghreb, Egypt, and elsewhere in North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the Mediterrenian

• Ashkenazi Jews settling in Northern and Eastern European countries, particularly in Germany, Prussia, the Baltic and Balkan regions, and eventually moving eastward into Russia;

• Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and parts of the so-called Arab world.

Jewish Diaspora

• Today, Jewish populations reside in many countries from Azerbaijan to Uruguay, Argentina to Belarus, Russia to South Africa, France to Romania, Kazakhstan to Iran – with the largest population) in the United States (5.75 million), more than the number residing in Israel (4.14 million). Other large diasporic populations exist in Argentina (213,000), France (530,000), Russia (430,000), the Ukraine (325,000), Brazil (100,000), Great Britain (300,000), and South Africa 1(114,000).

Armenian Diaspora

• The Armenian diaspora forms part of a typology Victim Diasporas which Cohen classifies in addition to the Jews and the Africans.

• Armenians were largely dispersed because of the numerous conflicts between the Byzantine Empire and Armenia itself.

• The exodus of Armenians therefore began as early as the end of the eleventh century (1080) and resulted in the settlement of Armenians in Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Moldavia, and even western Anatolia.

Armenian Diaspora• 1915, the forcible deportation of two-thirds of the

1.75 million Armenians in Turkey to Syria and Palestine and that something like 600,000 people died on the journey.

• For the Armenians, the Turkish deportations marked the shocking start of their diasporic experience, with substantial groups settling in the Middle East, France.

• The United States and Soviet Armenia. The collective anguish of the deportations meant that the Armenians had joined Jews and Africans to create a trinity of ‘victim diasporas.”

Modern Diaspora:African Diaspora• The transatlantic slave trade began when seafaring

traders started buying African slaves from the coast of West Africa in the late 1400s; and enslaved Africans transported in small numbers to Portugal, were imported into the Americas in larger numbers beginning in the early 1500s.

• According to historian Thomas C. Holt (in “Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World”), the Americas are unthinkable apart from its Africanist presences, and particularly the contributions to labor, production, and the capitalist accumulations of wealth in the European colonies of the Americas.

African Diaspora• The point here is that the most developed and

commercial sectors – the French, the British, and the Dutch –led the way in the exploitation of slave labor.

• From sugar to tobacco to cotton and coffee, enslaved Africans were absolutely crucial to the agricultural production, surplus profit for planters, financial success of the American plantation economies, and the massive accumulation of wealth in the colonies.

• To give only one example, though undeniably, historically Slavery was, “instrumental in fashioning the global architecture of the modern World.”

Modern Diaspora• Historically, some of the earliest and most persistent

patterns 0f modern international migration, particularly since the mid- to late-nineteenth century, have been economic.

• In the wakes of the abolition of the international transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1863 and in Brazil in 1888, both countries actively sought economic migrants to sustain expansive capitalist development in their post-abolition economies that had been built quite literally – on the backs of blacks, or from the compulsory labor of enslaved Africans.

Modern Diaspora

• Both the United States and Brazil had influxes of economic migrants into their countries and economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and consequently, both are what may be cLassified as “immigrant countries,” having been profoundly impacted by the diverse ethnities, , religions, cultures, languages, and of course, labor of those incoming migrants .

Modern Diaspora

• Other “settler colonies” established at the height of European colonial expansion and founded on the suppression and displacement of indigenous peoples (Native Americans, Amerindians, Aborigines, Maori, Zulus) also emerged in the early twentieth century as “immigrant countries” that sought economic migrants (particularly from Europe) to bolster their capitalist economies and to “whiten” their populace or citizenry.

Modern Diaspora

• Another important post-abolition diaspora involved the migration of Indian and Chinese individuals, frequently as “indentured laborers” to the Caribbean (Trinidad, Cuba), parts of South America (particularly Guyana, Peru, and Brazil), South Africa (especially in Durban and Natal), the East African coast (Kenya, _ Uganda, Tanzania, and Zanzibar), and islands in the Indian ocean, such as : Mauritius and Reunion, and in the Pacific Ocean, such as Fiji and Hawaii.

CONTEMPORARY-Late Modern Diasporas

• In contrast to the Classical Period, the Contemporary Period covers a much wider range of diasporic communities and their reasons for dispersal are far more numerous than the Classical Period, particularly in relation to globalization.

• This period covers the end of World War 11 (1945) to present day.

• Deals with contemporary diaspora issues with issues of transnationalism and globalization.


• Diaspora is largely a phenomenon created either when ethnic groups “migrate of their own free will, leaving to study, work or join their family abroad” as such, need not arise only as a result of a crisis or traumatic vent.

• Pursuit of work and the seizing of opportunities to study and travel abroad, facilitated by the globalizing process, are sufftcient reasons to stimulate the diasporic process in the contemporary context , therefore, that the distinction be made that these late modern-day diasporas not resulting only through intense political conflict, but as a result of opportunity.


• In the aftermath of the war in Europe, great chaos reigned both in terms of political disorganization and economic collapse problems which were “greatly exacerbated by large-scale population movements”

• War and afterwards resettled in their own country from states overrun by the Third Reich during the war and from territory taken from Germany in 1948, and Russians and Poles settled in territories annexed or occupied at the end of the war, from which the original inhabitants either fled or were expelled

• During the post-World War 2 period until 1959, numerous former Asian and Middle Eastern colonies acquired independence.

• From 1960 to 1989 many of the developing countries- 41 in Africa, 11 in the Caribbean, and 4 Asian countries – gained independence. These movements provided the impetus for immigration from former colonial territories to move to the metropolis of the colonizer.


• Diasporas are also global capitalist economic formations created by push/pull factors within national economies, regional trading blocs, and even within the production and labor shifts of the global economy, such as the “importation” of multi-national corporations (MNCs), or “offshoring” and the outsourcing” of labor.


• Diaspora is, though imprecisely and at times inaccurately, often used synonymously with other critical terms such as transnationalism and global capitalism that have had similar moments ofhistorical emergence within post-Cold War discourses that attempt to understand geopolitical and cultural realignments following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.


• While the nationalism as a term aptly describes the movement of capital, finance and trade that serve to erode the nation-state as the foundational ground for capitalist economies, diaspora remains a primarily human form of movement across geographical, historical, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.


• To better understand diaspora as a theoretical, sociological, and historical, cultural, and geopolitical term, one must first understand the the ways in which migratory patterns and the, migrations of various groups of individuals inform what we mean by diaspora

• Migration defines the movement of individuals from a native country across national or state boundaries into a new receiving (or “host”) country: migrants, however, move for many varied and disparate reasons – some voluntary (such as economic profit, employment, education) and : others involuntary (compulsory migration as a consequence of civil warfare, racial or ethnic oppression, religious persecution, dictatorship and state violence.


• Factors Contributing to Diaspora Formation in the Late Modern Era:– The most obvious example of the diasporic process

becoming globalized is through “the profound technological revolution that has occurred in telecommunications, and Iparticularly information technology” which has “created the conditions for increased cross-border communication and exchange, and, therefore, laid the I basis for an expansion of economic transactions among states on a global scale.

– These advanced technology make “family- and kin-based economic transactions” easier and safer.


• Apart from the media, improvements in transportation and telecommunications have facilitated the diasporic process by permitting migrants to maintain closer and cheaper contact with their homeland in a manner that was not possible in the past.

• As a result, the remittances that diasporic communities send to the homeland impacts favourably their home economies.

• cosmopolitan and hybridized culture created and sustained by satellite , transmissions, videos, tourism, advertisements and the global media and entertainment industries.

Documents

Definition of Diaspora Safran’s (1991) basic characteristics: 1-Dispersal from an original “centre” to two or more foreign regions 2-Retention of a collective