ABSTRACT
Diasporas could be compared to stranded “migratory birds”—they are strangers from elsewhere who, without a sense of belonging, never feel at home
in a new country yet unable to return to their homeland. “To come from elsewhere, from ‘there’ not ‘here,’ and hence to be simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the situation at hand,” observes Iain Chambers, “is to live at the intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more extensive arrangements along emerging routes”; for Chambers, diaspora is a “drama of the stranger”: “Cut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to make herself at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present” (1994, 6). In this drama, as we can see, the “historical inheritance” and the “heterogeneous present” are often transrelated and translocated into a diasporic discourse of global and local negotiation, which means both border-crossing and border-redefining in spatial and temporal domains, and which involves not only the crossing of geopolitical borders, but also the traversing of multiple boundaries and barriers in space, time, race, culture, language and history. Diaspora, which opens up new spaces for cross-cultural negotiation, creates radical effects of dislocation upon identity articulation. The complexities and ambivalence associated with diaspora have created a tension between two localities and a kind of spatiotemporal duality. It seems that diasporas have constantly to situate themselves in an awkward mediation between home-ness and homeless-ness; and they have to learn how to reposition themselves in a new relationship between their permanent residences and their “homes.” This repositioning, as Julia Kristeva observes, serves as a necessary strategy for diasporas to “live with the others, to live as others,” to be “reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize themselves as foreigners” within new social perimeters (1991, 195). Moreover, since diasporas develop multiple relationships that cross and span cultural and national borders, the trajectories of their identities, as a result, would occupy no singular cultural/national space but are situated in a web of social, economic and cultural links encompassing both global and local discourses.
