ABSTRACT
[ Diaspora —accent on the second syllable—was originally the name given to the dispersion of the Jews throughout the Old World, first after the conquest of their homeland by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. and, in greater numbers, after the Romans laid waste to the country following the Jewish Revolt against them around 70 A.D. In recent years this useful term has been adopted for the less-than-willing migration of other peoples faced with grim financial need (and even for the totally unwilling dispersion of the Africans through slavery). This important migration phenomenon has spawned its own journal, Diaspora. The goals of Diaspora, according to editor Khachig Tölölyan, are to examine the evolution of the “term” and its “semantic domain.” Acknowledging that 30 years ago “diaspora” was a term of “self-description” used only by Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, today the term is being “repeatedly appropriated by various disciplinary (and polemical) endeavors, and redefined along the way” (Diaspora 3:3 1994).
