ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the connections between diaspora and the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another, and its representations in visual culture. Diaspora derives from the Greek diaspeirein, to spread about, but to most of us, the term is less benign; it implies a disabling fragmentation and scattering of a once-unified people. A distinguished group of contributors, who include Alan Sinfield, Irit Rogoff, and Eunice Lipton, address the rich complexity of diasporic cultures and art, but with a focus on the visual culture of the Jewish and African Diasporas. The chapter concerns the images of eastern European Jews produced in the 1920s and 1930s by two Jewish photographers, Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic. The work is similar in subject, but different in photographic style: pictorialist documentary in the case of Kacyzne's images, modernist photo-montage in Vorobeichic's work.
