ABSTRACT
The UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker (2005) pointedly titled his critique of the rapid growth of diaspora studies ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’. He noted that during the 1970s the word ‘diaspora’ and its cognates appeared as keywords only once or twice a year in dissertation abstracts; in the late 1980s, they appeared on average 13 times a year; and by the year 2001 alone, nearly 130 times. Brubaker warned that this rapid dispersion of the term into many disciplinary discourses was stretching and diluting its meaning. He identified the journal Diaspora as ‘a key vehicle for the proliferation of academic diaspora talk’, but added that even its editor (that would be me) worried that diaspora ‘is in danger of becoming a promiscuously capacious category’.
