In search of the ‘authentic’ diasporic subject

(This essay from our web-exclusive package was first published in Himal Southasian, September 2003.)

In the last twenty years, as patterns of migration continue to disperse growing numbers of people across the world, the idea of the disapora has become increasingly common in the social sciences. Utilised initially as a predominantly 'neutral' term to describe the dispersal of people from a 'homeland', it was largely drawn from the historical precedent of Jewish communities, a varied and complex phenomenon, which changed in character through time and space. Although they were not always explicit, certain assumptions were embedded in the idea of diaspora, which related back to 'the Jewish experience'. These assumptions were that a diaspora was born of suffering and loss, contained a desire to return to a 'homeland', and that this dispersed population was, potentially, radical in character, a subaltern in the midst of dominant political structures. These assumptions were powerfully reiterated when the notion was applied to the forced migration of enslaved Africans, who, in the process of enslavement, were not only denied their history but also faced alienation, brutalisation and racism in their new 'home'. African American scholars helped write Africans back into history, and in the process, inscribed a sense of belonging to an African diaspora, through the shared experience of enslavement and dislocation from a place of origin with common cultural codes, helping create an ethos of an authentic, pan-African identity. W E B Dubois and Booker T Washington are amongst those associated with the creation of Black Studies in the United States, and, via the Harlem Negro Renaissance Movement, helped spawn the idea of 'negritude' amongst writers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sengor in the Francophone world, where all those of "negro descent" shared certain distinct characteristics.

These assumptions were also emphasised in a different way when 'diaspora' came to be conceived in a sense that disrupted ideas of essentialised, national identity. In Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall recontextualised the notion of diaspora, locating it in the experience of colonialism and contributed to an alternative reading of the constitution of collective identity. This innovative analysis tried to incorporate complex colonial histories and subvert dominant narratives of the nation state, where many of those who had migrated to Britain in the recent past found themselves 'erased' from British history. In this instance, rather than pointing to an essential 'pan-Africanness', the focus shifted instead to hybrid narratives constructed from the fabric of slavery, displacement and racism, as a necessary counterweight to marginalisation in British society. Diaspora thus marked a different sense of belonging, extending beyond, but also within, the borders of the nation state. (Gilroy has come to find the term diaspora problematic, and suggests the idea of 'outernationalism' as a better way of understanding identifications beyond the borders of the nation state.) The idea of diaspora was interpreted as a subversive mode of identification, which challenged notions of absolute states of being. In this form, it was also a part of the shift to anti-essentialist analysis in the wake of postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment thought and the modernist project, after the 'critical events' of 1968. This conceptualisation of diaspora also intersected with, but was not identical to, the wider project of postcolonialism and ideas of hybridity. For anthropologists stuck in a moment of theoretical paralysis, where 'the gaze' had turned back on themselves, diaspora studies seemed to offer a way out of the 'crisis of representation' suffered in the wake of critiques that increasingly drew a caricature of a discipline determined by its colonial past, shaped by Eurocentric presuppositions, and theorised through such treacherous notions as 'truth' and 'objectivity'.