ABSTRACT
How are we to understand the concept of diaspora, its relation to ethnicity, and its value for understanding problems of identity? One approach, suggested in Stuart Hall’s (1992: 257-8) idea of ‘new ethnicities’, emphasizes the ways in which diasporic populations can forge a hybrid, emergent or mixed identity. Following a line of reinscribing patterns of inequality based on class and race within a cultural framework, Hall’s approach seeks to escape what is seen as an essentialized (and biologically rooted) concept of ethnicity, positing instead the importance of discourse and a variable narrative frame. The move is described as transgressive and potentially libratory, a challenge to ethnic absolutism and, in its progressive appropriation of what W. E. B. DuBois identified for African-Americans as a troubled and troubling ‘double consciousness’ – facing outward and inward at the same time (Reed 1997) – a way to break free of the polarities imposed by coercive binaries. The aim, conceptually, is to reject absolute racial markers. But we should recognize immediately that what Hall proposes is primarily a movement in thought, a discursive step. Typically, the construction of identities involves both the passive experience of ‘being made’ by external forces and the active process by which a group ‘makes itself’. This involves not only material circumstances but also the intervention of claims imposed by other persons or groups, and typically entails a complex interaction involving cultural assertion and challenge, the reproduction or transformation of cherished ideas of self, and even the repudiation of identities over time (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 80; quoted in Kibria 1998: 941). Often, the migratory experience initiates this cycle. Groups in diaspora are confronted with new realities and new opportunities – and new challenges. But whether a displaced or dislocated group can seize the possibility of remaking itself is, in the first instance, a question that begs for an appreciation of the materiality of power. As Anthias (2001a: 624; 2001b) suggests in her discussion of hybridity, identities under challenge are not simply merged, but merged under the sway of specific social relations – arrangements for imposing or eliciting difference that are characteristically asymmetric. The exercise of power is fundamental to the equation.
