GENDERING MIGRATION & DIASPORAS RUBA SALIH Gendering Diasporas
Jan 21, 2016
GENDERING MIGRATION & DIASPORASRUBA SALIH
Gendering Diasporas
Overview
Development of DiasporasDefining DiasporaDiaspora & PostcolonialismDiasporic PracticesDiaspora SpaceDiaspora & TransnationalismReadings: Gendering DiasporaProposed Questions
Development of ‘Diaspora’
Greek origin: “dispersion”; to “sow or scatter”
Jewish experienceForced Migration/Refugee Studies (material
conditions)Link with notion of borderCultural Studies: celebration of hybridity;
resisting reifications of ethnicity and culture (discourse)
‘Diaspora’ as metaphor for globalized world, resistance, hybridity & transgression
Defining Diaspora
‘The collective forced dispersion of a religious and/or ethnic group precipitated by a disaster, often of a political nature’ (Cohen, 1995)’
Populations that satisfy 3 criteria: 1. dispersed from a homeland to one or more other territories. 2. Presence abroad is enduring, although exile not necessarily permanent; 3. some kind of exchange (social, economic, political or cultural) between the spatially separated communities
William Safran: Diaspora (1991) 1) They or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific
original ‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign, regions; 2) They retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original
homeland - its physical location, history, and achievements; 3) They believe they are not - and perhaps cannot be - fully accepted
by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it;
4) They regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return - when conditions are appropriate;
5) They believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and its safety and prosperity; and they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such relationship. (Safran, 1991)
Diaspora & Postcolonialism
Mode of theorization which allows thinking through displacements engendered by colonialism
Diasporic consciousnessCondition of subjectivity marked by long
histories of displacement and dispossessionEmergence and development in relations
with power
Diasporic PracticesProduction of culture through active circulation of
knowledge, objects and traceable aesthetic or expressive forms
‘Practices that reproduce the feeling of a shared past and a constrained present’
Expressive practices as ‘way out’ (music, dance, art, literature, religious & secular celebrations, poetry, theatre, food etc.)
Cultural inventivenessSocio-economic constraints, legal restrictions, harsh
living conditions might not allow for expressive traceable practices
‘Diaspora Space’ (Avtar Brah)
‘Intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes’.
‘Diaspora space is inhabited not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous.
‘Entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those who stay put.’
Diaspora & TransnationalismDebate about relationship“All diasporas are transnational but not all
transnational are diasporas”Diaspora ‘condition of leaving’ while transnationalism
‘condition of living’?Diasporic subjectivity not necessarily related to
crossing of boundaries and transnational movements, but depends more on the experience and memory of becoming ’unhomely’
Characteristics: forced migration, collective memory, alienation & insulation; de-territorialization; projects of investments, diasporic consciousness; desire to return