The Concept Of Diaspora According To Different Scholars

Diaspora, for long, was only tied to the migration of the Jews from Israel to all corners of the world; now it has increasingly become a more open-ended field of enquiry and no longer principally based on the Jewish paradigm. In his seminal book Diasporas, Stéphane Dufoix points out that “Diaspora has become a term that refers to any phenomenon of dispersion from a place; a population spread over more than one territory; the places of dispersion; any non territorial space where exchanges take place, and so on” . The term diaspora has become in vogue, moving from being a ‘historically and politically loaded concept’ to a neutral and ‘catchall’ one , to use Safran’s terms.

The notion of diaspora is utilized to mean a dispersion of people of a common national descent. Thus, could we say that there is an Indian or a Syrian diaspora just because there are many Indian or Syrian people living outside the Indian or the Syrian peninsula? It could be said that the concept of diaspora has metamorphosed and spotted over the years and is still being studied by many scholars and writers. Jhumpa Lahiri and Mohja Kahf resort to find a suitable context within which to write and/or stand; they strive to find a dovetailed angle at which to align themselves to the world, discovering that the problem is reinforced and compounded when they are relegated to a peripheral position on the edge of an alien society. Their works convey their ambivalent and mongrelized position in the world and their oscillating condition between the homeland and the settled land. Salman Rushdie argues in Imaginary Homelands that the memory of the displaced individual works like a “broken mirror” that reflects in the present a partial and distorted image of the past, creating “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands”.

The theoretical framework of this study consists of two areas, namely cultural studies and postcolonial theory. I endeavored to contour identity paradigm with a diasporic theorization of cultural identity by scrutinizing it through paradigms of hybridity, polyphonic multiculturalism, syncretism and cultural exogamy. Questions of identity and representation have always been crucial to this discourse as the diasporic consciousness necessitates predominance of traits like alienation, peripheralization, nostalgic longing for homeland and experiencing a sense of limbo.

East-West encounter, living in-between spaces and cultures, homelessness, rootlessness are the reverberated themes of postcolonial literature through which the diasporic sensibility of a person/writer set and the diasporic sensibility constitutes the core concerned of for most of the Indian/Syrian diasporic writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Mohja Kahf. They have successfully presented the diasporic consciousness of migrants who have been physically as well as culturally alienated from their roots. The trauma of being uprooted, loss of home and the malleability of hybrid identity have preoccupied many postcolonial scholars. The list of chief theorists of diaspora would include names like Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, William Safran, James Clifford, Arjun Appadurai and others who are cogently projecting diaspora as a volatile and inconsistent force.