ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding the importance of diaspora for the contemporary period demands a practice of reading across the diverse methodological approaches made across different descriptive genres, and requires a recognition of the limits of theory in depicting this phenomenon which tends, by its very nature, to defy strictly classificatory or historical approaches. The articulation of diaspora in the contemporary time, this chapter will suggest, is most helpful and significant when it is able to acknowledge a particular uncertainty in the practice of history-making, as well as in the practice of categorising migratory movements into ‘types’. This uncertainty, while not unique to the contemporary time, is nevertheless accelerated in this period, and demands a set of articulatory tools which are more adaptable than ever, more open to the conditional, provisional nature of disciplinary or classificatory endeavours in the contemporary historical exercise. At the heart of this examination of diaspora is an intention to retain the difficulty which is inherent, I suggest, to identifying either place, people, or historical moment according to distinctive criteria; this practice of naming diaspora seeks instead after stories which emphasise inconclusive and often simultaneous timelines, and narratives of place which defy any sense of it as stable, unitary, or known. By putting into practice a willingness to read the ways that diaspora experience is articulated in fictional settings, as having uniquely important work to do alongside readings of lived situations, this chapter offers an approach which seeks to define diaspora in the contemporary with an eye to the more nuanced affective realms. In this way, the intangible qualities of diaspora experience begin to be articulated, in ways which can fruitfully combine with more conventional understandings of migratory movements, to gesture toward some of the most fragile and unnameable qualities of diaspora in current and recent experience.
