ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to find a theoretical and conceptual framework within which to locate issues of multilocality, displacement, complex social loyalties, and the overlapping identities so characteristic of what is sometimes characterised as the period of "late modernity", "postmodernity", or, more simply, "globalisation". Despite a more positive possible interpretation of the diasporic experience, the negative version of diaspora remained the predominant common and scholarly connotation, a use that was initially reinforced by Arnold Toynbee's powerful early work on the treatment of the Armenians by the Ottomans. The experience of dispersal and collective suffering constitute the key starting points in the definition of the classic diasporas. The emergence of the three great regional economic blocs—the European Community, the North American Free Trade Area, and the Asia-Pacific region—will increasingly involve a network of political, cultural, and social organisations designed to build affiliations of a more social kind to the compelling economic logics of these blocs.
