ABSTRACT
Diaspora has the ring of antiquity, yet the term is a favored keyword of contemporary social theory and public discourse. The word conjures up images of the exodus of the ancient Jews and the scattering of Africans with the Middle Passage, but modern diasporas are transnational communities of the most unprecedented kind. The age-old idea holds a place of privilege in the fashionable vocabulary of globalization, border theory, and post-colonialism. While attempts to define and delimit diaspora abound, consensus has been elusive at best. Until the present generation, the “ideal types” and virtually exclusive referents were the Jewish and the African diasporas, and even the latter usage, as pertinent as it is to reflections on modernity, is of surprisingly recent vintage.1 But nowadays, as of around 1990, anything can be a diaspora, from a food club to a graduating class to a far-flung viewing audience, such that only the minimal sense of dislocation or displacement, as suggested in the etymological metaphor of scattering or sowing seeds (-sperien) across space (dia-), seems to circumscribe in any way this sprawling and variegated semantic field. Appropriately, there has also been contestation over the very relativism and indeterminacy of such displaced, scattered usages.
