ABSTRACT
Migration scholars – normally a rather conservative breed of sociologists, historians, demographers and geographers – have recently been bemused to find their subject matter assailed by a bevy of postmodernists, novelists and scholars of cultural studies. A reconstitution of the notion of diaspora has been a central concern of these space invaders. For example, the editor of the US journal Diaspora, Khacha Tölölyan, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, announced its birth (1991: 3) with the following statement:
The conviction underpinning this manifesto disguised as a “Preface” is that Diaspora must pursue, in texts literary and visual, canonical and vernacular, indeed in all cultural productions and throughout history, the traces of struggles over and contradictions within ideas and practices of collective identity, of homeland and nation. Diaspora is concerned with the way in which nations, real yet imagined communities, are fabulated, brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on the land people call their own and in exile.
