ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that sociological treatments of diasporic ethnicities have for too long focused on ethnic hybridities at the expense of other ways diasporic individuals produce ethnicity, and that this focus has also been overly optimistic and celebratory. The rational, strategic portrayal of the sociological subject also contained dangerous assumptions about race and ethnicity. Solomos and Back note that much discussion on the issue of racial-ethnic identities ‘assumes that individuals should utilise their ethnic identity in a unitary, constant and strategic manner’. Personal social trajectories capture the directed and steered social movements of individuals without privileging notions of static social hierarchies. Transdiasporic ethnicity is a journey of personal social trajectories that is made in the social intimacies and distances between individuals, and the ethnic lifestyles they espouse captures the paths and trails they make in their everyday lives. It improves upon current conceptions of ethnicity by accounting for the directions that individuals take within transdiasporic space.
