ABSTRACT
In ‘super-diverse’ cities such as London across the Western hemisphere, an intensification and diversification of migrant groups is having a profound effect upon how diaspora-making is taking place and how diasporic identities are being formed. A wider range of cultural resources and an increasingly complex ethnic landscape is precipitating the dismantling of conventional categories of difference and identity. In Britain, for example, this diversification consists of a transition from a more conventional immigrant and ethnic minority population (large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities and citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or former colonial territories), to a ‘new migration’ from a diverse range of origins mostly relating to places that have no specific historical and colonial links with Britain (Vertovec 2007). Alongside the increasingly diverse make-up of the population, we are also seeing a proliferation in the ways in which people (particularly young people) are expressing their identities (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010; Vertovec 2012). This emphasis on the ‘super-diversity of identities’ suggests the enabling of a more open, public and visible expression of social identities (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah 2010; Valentine 2013). These developments also present new challenges to the way we may categorize and encounter other people (Valentine 2013), as well as potentially presenting new possibilities for identity formation (Barber 2015). A multiplication of diverse identities can contribute to a more complex, fluid and nuanced understanding of ‘race’ and ethnicity, and therefore diasporic identities. Conceptions of ‘super-diversity’ are arguably useful in two ways: firstly, they can offer the potential for avoiding essentialisms by focusing on ‘processes of identification’ rather than points of origin (Wessendorf 2013); and secondly, they hold the potential to open a space to develop more sophisticated notions of ethnicity in urban contexts by extending dominant or traditional conceptions of multi-racial and multi-ethnic contexts beyond ‘hypervisible’ groups, like South Asian and African-Caribbean migrant-settler populations in the British context (Knowles 2013).
