Thanks Daniel!
For your cases could you also speak of "imagine communities" who are spread abroad? Or it is more than that?
Best regards
c
This is how I approach the issue beginning from page 7 of my book, Africans in China:
Vertovec (1999) defined and outlined three major senses in which the term features in modern Diasporan studies as follows:
“DIASPORA” is the term often used today to describe practically any population which is considered “deterritorialised” or “transnational”—that is, which has originated in a land other than the one in which it currently resides, and whose social, economic and political networks cross the borders of nation-states or, indeed, span the globe. (p. 1)
The three meanings that Vertovec mentioned include seeing Diaspora as a social form, as consciousness, and as a cultural production:
Within a variety of academic disciplines, recent writing on the subject conveys at least three discernible meanings of the concept “Diaspora”. These meanings refer to what we might call “Diaspora” as social form, “Diaspora” as type of consciousness, and “Diaspora” as mode of cultural production. (p. 2)
The first sense is closely related to and exemplified by the experiences of Jews, who often invoke their traumatic experience of exile from a historical homeland and who are now dispersed around the world. The second may refer to many minority populations—for example, in America, there are African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians, to name a few, who identify with a certain historical heritage. The third meaning of Diaspora,a means of cultural production, is closely related to the discussion of current notions of globalization, which is often seen by anthropologists and field linguists, among others, as a worldwide flow of cultural objects such as language, images, and meanings resulting in creolizations and hybridizations as well as cultural and linguistic transformations.
My use of the term in this book conforms closely with the third meaning. For me, Diaspora, as in the phrase African Diaspora in China, involves the constant back-and-forth movement of Africans into China, resulting in migration (temporary or otherwise) and the formation of networks and communities in China. These Diasporan networks and communities may end up with the features of global Diasporan communities, exhibiting a certain kind of hybridity involving the cultural and linguistic features of Africa and China.
Now I am in the Academia and I do use it but when I was a practioner of foreign politics in this field we never used it to refer to Basques in the World... In our experience they didn´t like to be called that way and in our model they are who decide the rules....
Dear Joseba
Very interesting point indeed: Diaspora as a scientific concept (more or less as fact without ideological value) opposite to diaspora as a connoted word.
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