ABSTRACT
The renewed currency, in recent years, of ‘diaspora’ as a theoretical tool has surfaced in the context of contemporary migrations of peoples, capital and cultures.2 An important contribution of this body of work is to mediate the relationship between the constraining local and the inflated global by conceiving new forms of belonging that are tied in with both local conditions of existence and multilocal ties and connections.3 Another important contribution of this body of work is to mediate the relationship between the constraining local and the inflated global by conceiving of ‘new geographies of identity’ (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996) that Avtar Brah has called the ‘diaspora space’ (Brah 1996: 209). Composed of genealogies of displacement and genealogies of ‘staying put’, diaspora space inserts itself between localism and transnationalism and proposes a conception of identity as a positionality that ‘is not a process of absolute othering, but rather of entangled tensions’ (Clifford 1994: 307).
