ABSTRACT
The classical concept of Diaspora is associated with the Jewish exile experience, with pain, with suffering. It is also applied to the great involuntary exodus of Black Africans brought to the New World via slavery creating one dimension of the Black Diaspora. This perception of Diaspora as a traumatic experience implies a feeling of loss resulting from the inability to return to the land of origin, engendering a tension between two places: the place of origin and the new, exiled home place. This tension shapes what is commonly referred to as the diasporic subject: one who by consequence becomes a hybrid subject. Hybridity in this context does not refer to any racial composition of the population, but to a process of cultural translation, which is never completed but in constant negotiation, disrupting any “fi xed” model of cultural identity. First, we must consider how these negotiation processes take place and second, the consequences of the Diaspora experience to fi xed models of cultural identity. It is in this sense that we relate Diaspora to nation deformation. That is, the diasporic condition disrupts the idea of nation-state because it disrupts the classical idea of the “nation” as a homogenous society and questions all forms of nationalism related to homogeneity. Diaspora, then, for our purposes must be considered as “a process which has an impact on the way people live and upon the society in which they are living” (Kalra et al. 2005: 29). In so doing, the consciousness of the diasporic condition questions every single form of belonging because it is “entirely a product of cultures and histories in collision and dialogue” (Kalra et al. 2005: 30). In constant collision and in constant dialogue, one could add.
