ABSTRACT
Claire Alexander lucidly summarizes the article; suggestively explores key issues of place, difference, and history in diaspora scholarship; and concludes by pointing to some new directions in the study of diaspora. In this chapter, the author highlights the central constitutive tensions and ambivalences involved in efforts to define the field and aims to see all three tensions as similar in form. The first constitutive tension concerns the notion of dispersion itself. The second constitutive tension is between an emphasis on the orientation to an existing, projected, or imagined “homeland” or centre as an authoritative focus of value, identity, and loyalty, a position for which Safran remains a key statement, and an emphasis on lateral rather than “vertical” connections, on routes rather than roots. The final constitutive tension is between an emphasis on boundary-maintenance, identity-preservation, or community-formation vis-a-vis the environing host society and a counter-emphasis–characteristic of the 1990s “transnational moment” and its critique of “ethnic absolutism”–on hybridity, fluidity, creolization, and syncretism.
