ABSTRACT
May we say that the new post-war diasporas are cosmopolitan social formations? The powerful attraction of diaspora for early postcolonial theorists was that, as transnational social formations, diasporas challenged the hegemony and boundedness of the nation-state and, indeed, of any pure imaginaries of nationhood (Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1991). The creative work of diasporic intellectuals on the margins was celebrated for transgressing hegemonic constructions of national homogeneity (Bhabha 1994). One recent scholarly riposte to this view has highlighted the continued imbrication of diasporas in nationalist rhetoric. Again, while postcolonial theorists challenged simplistic paradigms of diasporas as scattered communities yearning for a lost national homeland, whether real or imaginary (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; Ghosh 1989; Hall 1991), the growing consensus has been, by contrast, that such imagined attachments to a place of origin and/or collective historical trauma are still powerfully implicated in the late modern organization of diasporas. Diasporas, it seems, are both ethnic-parochial and cosmopolitan. The task remains, however, to disclose how the tension between these two tendencies is played out in actual situations.
