Global Diasporas

An Introduction

Robin Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134077946
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In a perceptive and arresting analysis, Robin Cohen introduces his distinctive approach to the study of the world's diasporas. This book investigates the changing meanings of the concept and the contemporary diasporic condition, including case studies of Jewish, Armenian, African, Chinese, British, Indian, Lebanese and Caribbean people.

The first edition of this book had a major impact on diaspora studies and was the foundational text in an emerging research and teaching field. This second edition extends and clarifies Robin Cohen's argument, addresses some critiques and outlines new perspectives for the study of diasporas.It has also been made more student-friendly with illustrations, guided readings and suggested essay questions.

1
FOUR PHASES OF DIASPORA STUDIES

Arguably, diaspora studies have gone through four phases, which I specify below, then explore in greater detail:

• First, the classical use of the term, usually capitalized as Diaspora and used only in the singular, was mainly confined to the study of the Jewish experience. The Greek diaspora made an off-stage appearance. Excluding some earlier casual references, from the 1960s and 1970s the classical meaning was systematically extended, becoming more common as a description of the dispersion of Africans, Armenians and the Irish. With the Jews, these peoples conceived their scattering as arising from a cataclysmic event that had traumatized the group as a whole, thereby creating the central historical experience of victimhood at the hands of a cruel oppressor. Retrospectively and without complete consensus, the Palestinians were later added to this group.
• In the second phase, in the 1980s and onwards, as Safran notably argued, diaspora was deployed as ‘a metaphoric designation’ to describe different categories of people—‘expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities tout court’.¹ Moreover, a point again made by Safran, the term now designated a vast array of different peoples who either applied the term to themselves or had the label conferred upon them. Given their number (certainly now over one hundred), their historical experiences, collective narratives and differing relationships to homelands and hostlands, they were bound to be a more varied cluster of diasporas than the groups designated in phase one.²
• The third phase, from the mid-1990s, was marked by social constructionist critiques of ‘second phase’ theorists who, despite their recognition of the proliferation of groups newly designated as diasporas and the evolution of new ways of studying them, were still seen as holding back the full force of the concept.³ Influenced by postmodernist readings, social constructionists sought to decompose two of the major building blocks previously delimiting and demarcating the diasporic idea, namely ‘homeland’ and ‘ethnic/religious community’. In the postmodern world, it was further argued, identities have become deterritorialized and constructed and deconstructed in a flexible and situational way; accordingly, concepts of diaspora had to be radically reordered in response to this complexity.
• By the turn of the century, the current phase of consolidation set in. The social constructionist critiques were partially accommodated, but were seen as in danger of emptying the notion of diaspora of much of its analytical and descriptive power. While the increased complexity and deterritorialization of identities are valid phenomena and constitutive of a small minority of diasporas (generally those that had been doubly or multiply displaced over time), ideas of home and often the stronger inflection of homeland remain powerful discourses and ones which, if anything, have been more strongly asserted in key examples (see Chapter 7). The phase of consolidation is marked by a modified reaffirmation of the diasporic idea, including its core elements, common features and ideal types.

THE PROTOTYPICAL DIASPORA

Let me elaborate on each of these four phases, starting with one of the key features of the classical, victim diaspora—the idea of dispersal following a traumatic event in the homeland, to two or more foreign destinations. Migration scholars often find it remarkably difficult to separate the compelling from the voluntary elements in the motivation to move. However, when we talk of a trauma afflicting a group collectively, it is perhaps possible to isolate a class of events characterized by their brutality, scale and intensity so as unambiguously to compel emigration or flight. Being shackled in manacles, being expelled by a tyrannical leader, or being coerced to leave by force of arms, mass riots or the threat of ‘ethnic cleansing’ appear qualitatively different phenomena from the general pressures of over-population, land hunger, poverty or a generally unsympathetic political environment.

Although Jews often allude to their earlier period as slaves in ancient Egypt, particularly in the Passover rituals that recount the story of the Exodus, it was the destruction of Solomon’s laboriously-constructed temple in 586 BC by the Mesopotamian Empire that is evoked as the central folk memory of trauma. The Jewish leader of the time, Zedekiah, vacillated for a decade, and then impulsively sanctioned a rebellion against the powerful Mesopotamian Empire. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, brutally suppressed the revolt and dragged Zedekiah and the key military, civic and religious personnel in chains to Babylon.⁴ Jews had been compelled to desert the land ‘promised’ to them by God to Moses and thereafter, the tradition suggests, forever became dispersed.

As I shall argue in Chapter 2, the catastrophic origins of the Jewish diaspora have been unduly emphasized in their collective consciousness—though I by no means wish to minimize some of the calamities that afflicted diasporic Jews over the centuries. The remaining four prototypical diasporas have also had unambiguously shocking episodes in their history that led to their original or further dispersion. Let me turn, for example, to the ‘first’ African diaspora set into motion by the African slave trade. (Twentieth-century, post-colonial African emigration prompted by civil war, famine, economic failure and political instability can be thought of as generating a ‘second’, incipient, set of ‘new’ African diasporas.⁵) The horror of the slave trade has been exposed so many times that justifiably hyperbolic language begins to lose its force. The under-researched Indian Ocean African slave trade to Asia and the Middle East was enormous—perhaps as many as four million were involved—but it was the forcible transhipment of ten million people across the Atlantic for mass slavery and coerced plantation labour in the Americas that provided the defining misfortune that constituted the African diaspora.

There were early expulsions of Armenians by a Byzantine emperor in the sixth century AD and many Armenians were involved in long-distance commerce and trade. However, the crucial historical events that led Armenians to be characterized as a victim diaspora followed the massacres of the late nineteenth century and their forced displacement during 1915–16, when the Turks deported two-thirds of their number (1.75 million people) to Syria and Palestine. Many Armenians subsequently landed up in France and the USA. It is now widely accepted (though still implausibly disputed by Turkish sources) that a million Armenians were either killed or died of starvation during this mass displacement, the twentieth century’s first major example of what has come to be known as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The migration of the Irish over the period 1845 to 1852, following the famine, can be regarded as a comparable tragedy. To be sure, there have been ups and downs by Irish historians of migration in seeking to assess just how salient the famine was in propelling the vast and continuous transatlantic migrations of the nineteenth century. However, in her powerfully argued and scholarly account, Kinealy suggests that there was much more deliberation in the British response to the potato blight than had previously been adduced. She argues that, far from laissez-faire attitudes governing policy, the British government had a hidden agenda of population control, the modernization of agriculture and land reform.⁶ This gives the Irish events a greater similarity to those that propelled the Jewish, African and Armenian diasporas.

When Britain withdrew from Palestine on 14 May 1948, the Israeli army occupied the vacuum and the ethnically-based state of Israel was proclaimed. Initially out of prudence, then out of panic, two-thirds of the Arab population of Palestine left their homes and became refugees, at first in neighbouring countries, then all over the Middle East and beyond. As Schultz recounts, ‘To the Palestinians, the birth of Israel is thus remembered as the catastrophe, al-nakba, [serving] to imprint the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation and denial.’⁷ The 3.9 million-strong Palestinian diaspora had been born. \ Ironically and tragically, its midwife was the homecoming of the Jewish diaspora.

These scarring historical calamities—Babylon for the Jews, slavery for the Africans, massacres and forced displacement for the Armenians, famine for the Irish and the formation of the state of Israel for the Palestinians—lend a particular colouring to these five diasporas. They are, above all, victim diasporas in their vital historical experiences. This does not mean that they do not also exhibit features characteristic of other diasporas, including voluntary migration for the purposes of trade or work or for other reasons. Rather, their victim origin is either self-affirmed or accepted by outside observers as determining their predominant character. Again, there are many contemporary examples of forced displacement that have created incipient victim diasporas, which over time may create sufficient social cohesion to separate particular groups from their surrounding context in their countries of settlement. In both established and embryonic victim diasporas the wrench from home must survive so powerfully in the folk memories of these groups that restoring the homeland or even returning there becomes an important focus for social mobilization, and the mould in which their popular cultures and political attitudes are formed. At the end of this chapter I shall build up a consolidated list of the common features of a diaspora, but for the meantime let me draw two elements from the prototypical cases discussed above: the traumatic dispersal from an original homeland and the salience of the homeland in the collective memory of a forcibly dispersed group.

THE EXPANDED CONCEPT OF DIASPORA

One of the most influential statements marking the beginning of contemporary diaspora studies was Safran’s article in the opening issue of the then new journal, Diaspora.⁸ Safran was strongly influenced by the underlying paradigmatic case of the Jewish diaspora, but correctly perceived that many other ethnic groups were experiencing analogous circumstances due perhaps to the difficult circumstances surrounding their departure from their places of origin and/or as a result of their limited acceptance in their places of settlement. Safran was, of course, not alone in recognizing the expanded use of the concept of diaspora, but he was crucial in seeking to give some social scientific contour to the new claims rather than allow a journalistic free-for-all to develop. The Jewish experience continued to influence Safran’s view of the vital importance of homeland in defining one of the essential characteristics of diaspora. For him, members of a diaspora retained a collective memory of ‘their original homeland’; they idealized their ‘ancestral home’, were committed to the restoration of ‘the original homeland’ and continued in various ways to ‘relate to that homeland’.⁹

The violent wrench from home determined these attitudes. By contrast, while there may have been compelling elements in the history of other diasporas, these either may have involved less cruelty or may have had less impact on the natal society. Let me take, for example, the nineteenth-century system of indentured labour abroad, which affected many Indians, Japanese and Chinese. It does not minimize the oppressive aspects involved in this system of labour recruitment and control to say that in some crucial respects they differed from those of the victim diasporas. In all three Asian cases, the numbers involved in indenture were a very small fraction of the total population, the migrants had the legal right to return and the recruitment process and work conditions were legally regulated, however badly. Again the indentured labourers were augmented by subsequent much larger migration from India, China and Japan for the purpose of work, trade or business.

In allowing such cases (and many others) to shelter under the increasingly broader circumference of the diasporic umbrella, we need both to draw generalized inferences from the Jewish tradition and to be sensitive to the inevitable dilutions, changes and expansions of the meaning of the term diaspora as it comes to be more widely applied. In addition to the groups already mentioned, Safran lists Cubans and Mexicans in the USA, Pakistanis in Britain, Maghrebis in France, Turks in Germany, Poles, blacks in the North America and Corsicans in Marseilles. We can immediately think of others. Ukrainians, Italians, Afghans, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Iranians, Tibetans, Russians, Germans, Tamils, Sikhs, Hindus, Somalis or Kurds all have at least as strong a claim to inclusion as diasporas and have been so described. There are also many more ambiguous cases—the Japanese, the Roma, the Hungarians, the Croatians, the Serbs, the British, and Caribbean peoples¹⁰ either call themselves, or could be called ‘diasporas’ (to name but some possibilities).

In short, it is difficult to decide where to draw the line. However, social scientists do have at least four important tools to help in this task:

1. We can distinguish between emic and etic claims (the participants’ view versus the observers’ view) and discuss how these claims map onto the history and social structure of the group concerned.
2. We can add a time dimension looking at how a putative social formation, in the case of a diaspora, comes into being, how it develops in various countries of settlement and how it changes in response to subsequent events in hostlands and homelands.
3. We can list the most important features that seem to apply (or partly apply) to some, most or all of the cases we consider are part of the phenomenon we are investigating.
4. Finally, we can create a typology, classifying phenomena and their subtypes using the measures of consistency, objectivity, pattern recognition and dimensionality with a view to evolving an agreed and controlled vocabulary. In social science, Weber’s ‘ideal types’ (explained briefly below and then in Chapter 9) is a widely used method, which I also adopt.

Though I will explain my reservations shortly, Safran made a huge step in the right direction in his first list of the main characteristics of diasporas. He is properly relaxed in allowing that no contemporary diaspora will meet all the desiderata. However, he maintained that the concept of a diaspora can be applied when members of an ‘expatriate minority community’ share several of the following features:

• They, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from an original ‘centre’ to two or more foreign regions;
• they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland including its location, history and achievements;
• they believe they are not—and perhaps can never be—fully accepted in their host societies and so remain partly separate;
• their ancestral home is idealized and it is thought that, when conditions are favourable, either they, or their descendants should return;
• they believe all members of the diaspora should be committed to the maintenance or restoration of the original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and
• they continue in various ways to relat...