ABSTRACT
The concept of diaspora has been conceptualized and appropriated from a wide range of perspectives. In the context of globalization, it has been described as a transnational social organization (Wahlbeck 1999) and transnational community (Sökefeld 2006) characterized by a triadic relationship involving the country of ‘origin’, the country of settlement, and an ethnic group dispersed across different states (Cohen 2008). Because the concept is used indiscriminatingly to label a wide range of migratory experiences and identities as diasporic, it has been contested for lacking boundaries and so losing its semantic, conceptual and analytic power (Brubaker 2005). In a critical response to Werbner (2015: 51), Brubaker argues that diasporas have boundaries but that these are ‘defined and highlighted situationally, dialectically and over time, in action, through performance and periodic mobilization’. Others have criticized the concept for essentialization and reifying group identities and failing to provide an alternative to the already knotty concepts within migration studies of race and ethnicity (Anthias 1998; Soysal 2002). Radhakrishnan (2003) maintains that identities are constructions of historical and political contexts and that all essentialist notions of them are deployed strategically to attain specific political goals. It is worth mentioning that the very formation of a diaspora was originally situated within a negative discursive field characterized by destruction of the homeland and dispersion of the Jewish community (Cohen 2008; Kenny 2013). However, this is not to say that we should reduce diaspora to an entity or single experience, but should rather see it as a category of practice in motion.
