ABSTRACT
How very apt, one might say, that the ominous word diaspora, which somehow includes the ideas of random movement, displacement and uprootedness, should itself have become a living proof of the standard Saussurean model of arbitrary signifiers and the fact that meaning tends to slip, to evolve or be irrevocably lost in the outer reaches of historical or geographic ‘space’. Some sociologists/ ethnologists indeed went so far as to suggest that the dreaded word should be dropped altogether, and ‘diaspora’ be replaced by the term ‘transnational communities’ (Rex 2002: 53-4). Others, instead, speak of ‘third-time spaces’, thus opting for an attractive aura of semantic sci-fi but perhaps ignoring the arduousness and the processes of disillusionment involved in the formation of diasporas, not to speak of the poverty, pain or persecution that prompted such displacement in the first place. In the context of the present chapter, ‘diaspora’ has been retained as a working term, since reference to it is still frequent and extensive in criticism and theoretical works, and since it has most of its roots in the history of the Jewish people, which makes it some sort of yardstick against which to measure the texts produced by young Jewish authors in Britain.
