ABSTRACT
The noun “diaspora” dates to the late seventeenth century where it is believed to derive from Hellenistic Greek, from dia + spora. People being “diasporic” or “in the diaspora” comes to name those not just away from home but those working to recreate identities alien to their current setting but familiar to memories of a distant or lost homeland. Diaspora studies present a useful example of how nostalgia can be understood as a product of the stressed present, pitched outward and backward in time, though bearing all the marks of the contemporary. The literature of diaspora studies is in how representations of near and far, here and there, present and past, can be seen to be mutually informing rather than a simple binary pair in which each is the straightforward opposite of the other.
