ABSTRACT
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, postcolonial writers, and theorists as well as scholars of the African diaspora, working primarily in the humanities, established broad connections between migration and diaspora, on the one hand, and the hybridization of languages, identities, aesthetic forms, and cultural practices, on the other. In the opening decade of the new millennium, commentators on cosmopolitanism and globalization extended these arguments to project a more general equivalence between diaspora and cosmopolitanism. Over the same 30 years or so, however, scholars in the emerging field of diaspora studies, working chiefly in the social sciences and on a range of diasporas, suggested that certain core features render diasporic formations anticosmopolitan. This contradiction between diaspora as inherently cosmopolitan-a proposition based primarily on theoretical speculation-and diaspora as intrinsically anticosmopolitan-a proposition grounded mainly in empirical studies-has become the central paradox that we need to resolve at the intersection of the phenomena called “diaspora” and “cosmopolitanism.”
