ABSTRACT
Recent literature about transnational migration in cultural anthropology implies two distinct models of diasporic subjectivity. According to the first model, the tension of “living here and remembering/desiring another place” (Clifford 1997, 255) determines how people construct their collectiveidentity: how they map its boundaries, invest in it materially and emotionally and figure its difference from other groups. Collective identity is a matter of the politics of location, but the location of diasporas is (by definition) plural, fragmented, dynamic and open. In this model, therefore, notions of group identity are calibrated to people’s fragmented, dislocated social experience. For example, people cultivate a myth about their losthomeland, and, on that basis, generate the criteria for ethnic inclusion and exclusion (Safran 1991). Or they travel back and forth in a transnational family network, pursue parallel life strategies in several places at once and on that basis generate sentiments of connection or a singular trope of collective self-definition (a process explored in the Haitian diaspora by Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001 and Laguerre 1998). They may find themselves thrown on the defensive by shifting politics in their homeland and forced to craft entirely novel and hybrid tropes of self-definition (Gross et al. 1996). In all these cases, collective subjectivity arises from, and mirrors, people’s supralocal lives, including the ideas, images and political engagements that move in transnational space (see Axel 2004).
