Diasporas 9780520941298

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface to the American Edition
Introduction
Chapter 1. What Is a Diaspora?
Chapter 2. The Spaces of Dispersion
Chapter 3. Maintaining Connections: Holding On and Letting Go
Chapter 4. Managing Distance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Citation preview

Diasporas

Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture, Centre national du livre. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture’s National Center for the Book.

Diasporas Stéphane Dufoix Translated by William Rodarmor With a foreword by Roger Waldinger

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Originally published in French as Les diasporas © 2003 Presses Universitaires de France University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dufoix, Stéphane. [Diasporas. English] Diasporas / Stéphane Dufoix ; with a foreword by Roger Waldinger ; translated by William Rodarmor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-520-25359-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-25360-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Emigration and immigration—History. I. Title. jv6021.d84 2008 304.8—dc22 2007024150 Manufactured in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To Valérie and Clara They gathered the diaspora parts of me

I have been away from Nigeria for 30 years. . . . In all these thirty years I have been convinced that I was living abroad and, at a push, overseas. It now turns out, however, that I have actually been living in the diaspora. This sounds like a very lovely place, with fauna and flora, nubile virgins, blue skies and a certain je ne sais quoi. The sort of place where you can tiptoe through the tulips stopping every so often to smell rose, her friends chantel, angel, tiffany and any other delicacies that take your fancy. So why the hell have I not been invited? All this time I have been “abroad” studying and working my ass off, sitting in dull offices, with dull people, doing dull things to pay off dull bills when I could have been in the diaspora with nubile virgins with understanding ways. I am so mad. Diaspora. What a lovely word. I can just picture myself in Paris whispering it into the ear of an innocent victim: “Would mademoiselle like to come back with me to the diaspora?” Bet she wouldn’t say no. Toks-Boy, “Look ma. I’m in the Diaspora now!” Blog posting, 5 January 2007 http://toksie.blogspot.com/2007/01/ look-ma-im-in-diaspora-now.html

CONTENTS

Foreword by Roger Waldinger xi

Preface to the American Edition xix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. What Is a Diaspora? 4

Chapter 2. The Spaces of Dispersion 35

Chapter 3. Maintaining Connections: Holding On and Letting Go 59

Chapter 4. Managing Distance 80

Conclusion 106

Notes 109

Bibliography 125

FOREWORD

Diaspora—as both concept and social practice—is in vogue. One doesn’t have to look far for evidence of interest in this idea. We can begin in the academic world, starting with the interdisciplinary journal called Diaspora (in publication since 1991) and continuing on to the librarian’s favorite tool, the World Catalog, where a search for books with “diaspora” in the title, published since 2005, yields more than 450 hits. The kaleidoscope of groups mentioned—Indian, Armenian, African, Scottish, Dutch, Muslim, Catalan, Cuban, Greek, Mexican, Central American, and southern—exemplifies the phenomenon that Rogers Brubaker has labeled the “diaspora diaspora”—the wide, indeed unending, dispersion of this concept beyond the classic case of the Jews. For academic purposes, therefore, to say “migration” is now to say “diaspora,” a trend that makes it necessary for any student to understand how the concept is used and why, even though its ubiquity may deprive it of analytic utility. But even more surprising than the shift from an occult to an everyday term is the concept’s xi

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practical importance. Today, diaspora is not just a category of analysis; it is also a category of practice. That is to say, it is a strategy or a project undertaken by a broad range of actors interested in what the people ready to think of themselves as members of a diaspora might be willing do. Diasporas are of interest to states seeking to organize emigrants (and their descendants) into a collectivity that can be controlled and from which resources can be extracted, and to emigrants (and their descendants) eager to use the advantages acquired from residence outside the home state in order gain leverage within the home state. Diasporas also are of interest to international organizations, such as the World Bank, that want to manage the resources generated by dispersed populations, thereby reducing their predilection for fomenting long-distance violence at home while increasing their capacity to generate feedback that might help the stay-at-home populations improve their lives. Whether India, Italy, Israel, Ireland, or what have you, there is no “emigration state” without a so-called diaspora that it is trying to mobilize; likewise, there are few emigrations in which self-conscious diaspora talk or social action is not to be found. But with so much activity within and beyond the academic world, the problem for the student (beginning, advanced, and professional) is how to understand diaspora—as both an intellectual phenomenon and a social process. For that task, there is no better book than this short volume, a translation of a book originally written for the venerable French series Que sais-je? (What Do I Know?) and a model of intellectual economy. In a sense, the book reflects diaspora’s travels, as it is a view from the other side of the Atlantic, reporting on intellectual developments unlikely to be known to the great majority of Anglophone

Foreword / xiii

readers and doing so in a distinctive French idiom. It succeeds in giving the reader the best of both worlds, which is why it is so valuable a contribution. Dufoix’s is a cosmopolitan rendering: he is fully up to date with trends, not only on both sides of the English channel, but also on both sides of the Atlantic. His discussion is consistently right on target, fully relevant to the concerns of U.S. scholars and framed in a way that the latter will find novel. Small in size, but large in scope, Diasporas tells a coherent story, capturing the key elements needed for any effort to understand the phenomenon. The book extends well beyond the continental, or at best, hemispheric, concerns that preoccupy students and scholars in the United States: its global range befits the concept and phenomenon to which it is addressed. Likewise, Dufoix steers clear of the presentism that afflicts the social scholars of today’s world of mass migration: an advocate of a dynamic analysis, Dufoix moves effortlessly across time, demonstrating both the continuities in diasporic experiences and the features that distinguish today’s world. Grounded in deep knowledge and extending across languages, disciplines, and times, this volume will be equally appreciated by scholars and students. Dufoix’s interest in the career of the concept of diaspora bespeaks a sensibility more common in the French, than in the American, academic world. The American reader would do well to attend to his uncommon perspective: Dufoix extends the concept from a limited number of cases to an almost unlimited set, and from academic discourse to real-world politics, which makes the question of its meaning all the more important. As it turns out, the concept occupies an honorable place in the history of American sociological thought, notwithstanding contemporary scholars who insist that a

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so-called transnational perspective is new and illuminates phenomena that their predecessors could not see. Indeed, Dufoix’s discussion shows that the “diaspora diaspora” began early, as thinkers concerned with the experience of the peoples dispersed from Africa were quick to take up the analogy with the history of the Jews. As usual, scholarship on “the African diaspora” yielded not one but many conflicting interpretations, but the concept put the question of a connection to a distant place of origin at the center of debate. However fascinating the intellectual history found in these pages may be, the volume does far more than merely captivate. Dufoix develops a conceptual framework for thinking about the relationship between dispersed populations and their homelands, all the while presenting a wealth of fascinating, empirically grounded case studies to illustrate key experiences and substantive conceptual points. Dufoix masterfully guides the reader through the various scholarly attempts to define diasporas. As he points out in chapter 2, this effort assumes that one can find real, existing diasporas and then distinguish them from other seemingly similar, but essentially different, phenomena. The problem, however, is that the quest is fundamentally fruitless. Not only do scholars fail to agree, but also the attempt to define diasporas leads to static, historical approaches that assume the existence of communities, rather than explaining why “diasporic” communities might arise or decline. Moreover, the many definitional attempts cannot take into account the selfconscious diasporic discourses and projects of states and émigrés, who are busily developing collectivities they call diasporas, regardless of whether those collectivities meet the scholars’ criteria. Recognizing the definitional quest as bootless, Dufoix has something better to offer: namely, a framework for comparing the relationships between homelands (which he describes using the term

Foreword / xv

“referent-origin”) and their dispersed populations, which he develops in chapter 3. Dufoix proposes an ideal type with four stylized components:

. .

.

.

Centroperipheral mode, in which the home state is the controlling force, with links extending between home states and emigrant collectivities, but with little or no connection across collectivities. Enclaved mode, in which the emigrant collectivities draw on a belief in a common origin, but without any corresponding effort directed (positively or negatively) toward the home state or state intervention oriented toward control. These collectivities are localistic, with few, if any, flows or exchanges across populations or nodes. Atopic mode, in which the emigrant collectivities draw on a belief in a common origin, but without any corresponding effort directed (positively or negatively) toward the home state or state intervention oriented toward control; flows (of ideas, people, and resources) extend across the emigrant collectivities. Antagonistic mode, in which the emigrant collectivities draw on a belief in a common origin in order to organize against the home state; thus, flows (of ideas, people, and resources) extend across the emigrant collectivities in order to apply pressure against the home state.

While this ideal type can be used for typological purposes, Dufoix has something else in mind: namely, to identify a range of possible configurations that are likely to vary across time and space. Drawing on a wealth of examples, he shows how populations can move from one configuration to another, with the Jews, for example, exemplifying the atopic mode for most of their postbiblical history and shift-

xvi / Foreword

ing toward the centroperipheral mode following the creation of the state of Israel. He shows exiled east Europeans, in another example, moving from the antagonistic mode of the cold war era to something approximating the centroperipheral mode in the years since the Berlin wall fell. The mode itself can be the object of conflict: thus, a home state eager to subordinate and control “its” emigrants abroad by fashioning a relationship that resembles the centroperipheral mode will be at odds with the exiles eager to take advantage of their location in a new state in order to overturn the old order left behind. And one mode need not exclude the other: in any one population, the enclaved mode may best describe the reality of working-class immigrants interested in sociability and social support; the atopic mode may correspond to the network-building and -maintaining activities of entrepreneurs; and the antagonistic or the centroperipheral mode may exemplify the activities of a politically oriented elite. Put somewhat differently, there are no diasporas, only different ways of constructing, managing, and imagining the relationships between homelands and their dispersed peoples. In chapter 4, Dufoix discusses three possible approaches: state efforts to control and manage “their” diasporas; the long-distance nationalism of émigrés (possibly directed against existing homeland states or regimes or oriented toward host states in support of homeland causes); and the Internet as a mechanism for building the “imaginary community” and doing so in relatively costless ways. In each case, the distinctiveness of the contemporary situation comes into view: dispersion, once a liability, is now a value to be put into play. In the end, we are left with a paradox: the world’s peoples are mainly sedentary, but a growing proportion is on the march. While

Foreword / xvii

dispersions take any number of forms, the question of connectedness—to a homeland, to a state, to fellow migrants located in the same or a different “new” land—emerges wherever the movers go. Hence, diaspora—as concept, as program, as phenomenon—is here to stay. This book is the indispensable guide for the perplexed. Roger Waldinger

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

The French edition of this book was published in 2003 as part of the well-known encyclopedic collection Que sais-je? Launched by Paul Angoulvent in 1941, the collection publishes general, popular works on specific subjects, and Les Diasporas bears its hallmarks. When the book came out in 2003, it had very few footnotes, and its main purpose was to present the state of the art on the notion of diaspora and some related elements. Its objective therefore seemed fairly simple. However, starting with my first conversations with the collection editors (in particular Julie Gazier, whom I thank), I insisted on a point I felt was important. I was happy to write the book, because I had already been working on an aspect of the subject for two years. But I felt a certain awkwardness at the idea of writing about “diasporas” (plural)—a title assigned to me by Presses universitaires de France—when I didn’t believe in the validity of “diaspora” as a concept. The editors agreed to let me give the text a somewhat schizophrenic character: it would present the state of research being done xix

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under the “diaspora” heading, while suggesting at another level that the concept may be hiding more phenomena than it reveals. Three years later, there was no question of returning to these aspects of the text. The book you have in your hands is deliberately and almost proudly schizophrenic. It still attempts to describe the evolution and current content of diaspora studies while, at the same time, taking a sidelong glance at an alternate conceptual framework, especially in chapter 3. Nevertheless, I made a few changes to the original text. Beyond simple corrections of typos and factual errors, the book has undergone two important changes. First, it now has the backnotes that were absent from the French text because of the Que sais-je? format. The existence of this critical mechanism is a significant evolution, but the book still falls within its intended status and length. Ideally, nearly every line could be developed and made the object of a note, but that is not my goal. The bibliography has been updated, but to keep it from unbalancing the book, I could not cite all the many books and articles that helped me in my writing. I apologize in advance to all those authors who could legitimately demand to be listed. Where possible, statistics have also been updated. Second, I have been able to include in the American edition some new facts arising from my most recent research. I am currently finishing a habilitation thesis on the usages of the word “diaspora” from the third century b.c. to the present. The book belongs in the lineage of the very few studies dedicated to some or all of the history of the emergence of the notion of diaspora.1 When considering an American edition, it seemed important to introduce some new facts about the word’s history: the early use of “diaspora” by Robert E. Park in his reading of Simon Dubnov’s entry in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in the early 1930s; and the discovery of written

Preface to the American Edition / xxi

occurrences in French and English of such expressions as “Black diaspora,” “African Diaspora,” and “Negro diaspora,” as early as the 1950s and early 1960s, whereas specialists in the subject—including me—thought these terms had not appeared in print until 1965. In any case, it was impossible to add more facts on the history of the usage of the word as such without completely rewriting the book. Let us hope that the work I am now finishing will one day be available to the public. A comparative study requires coverage of themes and topics on which one is not an expert, and makes relying on specialists all the more necessary. On many points, I owe a great deal to my exchanges with Francis Abiola Irele, Valérie Amiraux, Jean-Loup Amselle, Martin Baumann, William Berthomière, Michel Bruneau, Christine Chivallon, James Clifford, Robin Cohen, Dana Diminescu, Paul Gilroy, Nancy L. Green, Stuart Hall, Sari Hanafi, Robert Hettlage, Martine Hovanessian, Theodor Ikonomu, Christophe Jaffrelot, Riva Kastoryano, Martin Kilson, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, Eva ØstergaardNielsen, Orlando Patterson, Sergio Della Pergola, Carine PinaGuerassimoff, Roland Robertson, Chantal Saint-Blancat, Saskia Sassen, Gabriel Sheffer, Anne de Tinguy, Khachig Tölölyan, Shmuel Trigano, Johannes Tromp, William Turner, Lina Venturas, Roger Waldinger, Patrick Weil, and Andreas Wimmer. I also thank my third- and fourth-year students at the University of Paris X–Nanterre, as well as those who took my “Diasporas” and Trans-state Identities class at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales between 2005 and 2007. I often “tested” new leads and new hypotheses on them. Their questions, criticisms, and occasional confusion helped me reformulate, refine, or jettison my ideas. The publication of this book abroad would not have been possible without the confidence of Roger Waldinger, the sharp but

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always kind eyes of James Clifford and Andreas Wimmer, and the availability and human qualities of Naomi Schneider of the University of California Press. Its passage into English would have been impossible without the competence, accuracy, and patience of William Rodarmor. They all have my gratitude. Finally, while writing is often solitary, it becomes meaningful only when done in company. This book owes everything to the presence, love, and patience of my wife, Valérie, and my daughter, Clara, and I dedicate it to them. Je vous aime. Saint Leu la Forêt, January 2007

Introduction

A simple word . . . “diaspora.” For a long time, it referred only to physically scattered religious groups (peoples, churches, or congregations) living as minorities among other people and other faiths. Then, starting in the 1970s, this ancient word underwent an amazing inflation that peaked in the 1990s, by which time it was being applied to most of the world’s peoples. There were British, Chechen, Somali, Tibetan, Caribbean, Algerian, Iranian, Latin American, Romanian, Russian, and Afghan diasporas. Some involved components of a national population. France had Corsican, Breton, Auvergnat, and Alsatian diasporas. The word was applied to professional groups, including scientists, intellectuals, and engineers, and even to French and Nigerian soccer players!1 An all-purpose word, “diaspora” is now a term current among print, radio, and television journalists; it is in the vocabulary of representatives of national and religious communities, as well as state authorities careful not to lose touch with the descendants of former emigrants; and it is part of the conceptual arsenal of scholars in migration topics. 1

2 / Introduction

In this way, “diaspora” has become a term that refers to any phenomenon of dispersion from a place; the organization of an ethnic, national, or religious community in one or more countries; a population spread over more than one territory; the places of dispersion; any nonterritorial space where exchanges take place, and so on. For some people, this flexibility is a sign of migration’s diversity. For others, it is a betrayal of the word’s meaning. In the first case, “diaspora” means nothing more than the idea of displacement and the maintenance of a connection with a real or imagined homeland. In the second, the only real question is, Does this population deserve the name “diaspora”? I have chosen not to choose between these two options—catchall or private club. Instead, I consider both extremes by showing that they belong to the history of the word. Because “diaspora” is just a word. Like all words, it serves only to denote part of reality, one that isn’t always the same each time it is used. It is never that which it denotes, to the point where the word alone is enough to describe what it expresses. There is no phenomenon called “diaspora” that is independent of each individual case and independent of the use of the word “diaspora” and its corresponding terms in different languages. The current use of this word, contradictory though it may be, raises issues about the voluntary or involuntary migration of people; the maintenance or the re-creation of identification with a country or a land of origin; and the existence of communities that claim their attachment to a place or, to the contrary, to their spatially freefloating existence. It is true that the history of certain peoples seems to argue in favor of their singularity compared to others. But a more careful analysis shows that, unless one is satisfied with a simple statistical, atemporal, and unifying reality, “diaspora” often fails to

Introduction / 3

present the workings of the thing it ought to best describe: the relationship to what I call a “referent-origin.” This is why I argue for the establishment of a broader, more complex analytical framework that takes into account the structuring of the collective experience abroad based on the link maintained with the referent-origin and the community stance this creates. Dispersion implies distance, so maintaining or creating connections becomes a major goal in reducing or at least dealing with that distance. Language causes the impossible to exist, and makes it believable. Words outline things, give them one or more definitions, and— depending on the authority of those who speak them—have the power to create meaningful objects. Today, “diaspora” builds and gives meaning to links between people by weaving guiding threads that stretch across tens of thousands of miles and shine like a familiar light in the labyrinth of others.

chapter 1

What Is a Diaspora?

“Diaspora” is a Greek word, derived from the verb diaspeiro, which was used as early as the fifth century b.c. by Sophocles, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The modern usage of “diaspora” stems from its appearance as a neologism in the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek by the legendary seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria in the third century b.c. In the so-called Septuagint Bible, “diaspora” is used twelve times. But it doesn’t refer to the historic dispersion of the Jews who were taken as captives to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 b.c., or to any other human historical event. Contrary to what has often been claimed, “diaspora” was not used to translate the Hebrew terms galut, galah, and golah. These were rendered in the Septuagint by several Greek words: apoikia (emigration), paroikia (settlement abroad), metoikia (emigration) or metoikesia (transportation), aikhmalosia (wartime captivity), or apokalupsis (revelation). Instead, “diaspora” always meant the threat of dispersion facing the Hebrews if they failed to obey God’s will, and it applied almost exclusively to divine acts. God is the one who scatters the sin4

What Is a Diaspora? / 5

ners or will gather them together in the future. Relying on works by other historians of religion such as Willem Cornelius van Unnik and Johannes Tromp, Martin Baumann shows that it was only in later Jewish tradition that the meaning of “diaspora” changed to designate both the scattered people and the locale of their dispersion.1 In the Christian tradition, the New Testament (where “diaspora” appears three times) presents the church as a dispersed community of pilgrims waiting to return to the City of God. The eschatological waiting connected with “diaspora” tends to disappear in the fourth century, only to resurface during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, when it describes Protestant minorities in Catholic countries, or the reverse. To understand the growing popularity of the term during the second half of the twentieth century, it is essential to examine two examples that are strongly both linked and opposed: the “Jewish diaspora” and the “black diaspora.” THE JEWISH AND BLACK/AFRICAN DIASPORAS

The Jewish Diaspora

Considering the Jewish experience of dispersion means taking into account all of Jewish history, which is marked by constant swings between the centrality of the land of Israel—where no sovereign Jewish power existed between 586 b.c. and 1948—and the growth of one or more centers outside it. The French sociologist Shmuel Trigano counts no fewer than nine “geopolitical structures,” or “geons,” of world Judaism.2 What he calls “the unfinished space” corresponds to the period of geographical instability (1250–586 b.c.) when the territory was initially divided among tribes until the founding of the Davidic king-

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dom, then split into northern and southern kingdoms, and finally saw the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar. “The bipolar world” (586–332 b.c.) marked a break in the unity of the people between the Israeli and Babylonian hubs. Most of the Jews had been deported (galut) to Babylon, and some chose not to leave when it became possible to return home. This bipolarity survived the conquest of Israel by Alexander, but the Babylonian center lost some of its influence in the “Judeo-Western system” (332 b.c.–a.d. 224). Though not politically independent, Jews were present in the land of Israel even after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in a.d. 70, which is usually given as the start of the Jewish “diaspora.” The Jews left Israel only after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century, because of persecution suffered under Byzantine rule. A new geon, “the shattered world” (a.d. 224–630), saw the Babylonian hub develop as the first Jewish center outside of Israel. Arab expansion starting in the seventh century gave the Jewish world a common geopolitical framework. In this “sea of oneness” (a.d. 630– 1250), Babylon was joined by a new hub on the Iberian Peninsula, the site of a Jewish golden age in artistic, scientific, intellectual, and political domains. During this period, the distinction was first drawn between the Iberian Jewish communities, the Sephardim— from S’farad, meaning “Spain” in medieval Hebrew—and those who traveled from Israel through Italy to settle in Italy, France, and the Rhineland and were known as the Ashkenazim, from Ashk’naz, the Hebrew term for the Germanic countries. Fleeing anti-Semitic persecutions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Ashkenazim would turn tolerant Poland into “the star of the North” (1250–1492). Meanwhile, the Catholic Reconquest and the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century ended the Arab presence in

What Is a Diaspora? / 7

Europe and in the Baghdad Caliphate, bringing the Jewish Iberian and Babylonian hubs to an end. The expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492 and their dispersal to the Ottoman Empire, the cities of northern Europe, Galilee, and the Americas transformed the Jewish world into a “compass card” (1492–1700) marked by the establishment of many small centers focused on commerce and banking. The crisis then faced by the Marranos, the crypto-Jews expelled from Spain, signaled the decline of the earlier centers and the emergence of Prussia and France as countries where citizenship for Jews became possible. France declared the emancipation of the Jews—that is, the end of special laws and the proclamation of equal rights—on 27 September 1791. Some Germanic states adopted similar principles in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they did not apply to the whole of German territory until after the empire was unified in 1871. As the Russian hub grew in size, the influence of the Ottoman and Middle Eastern ones diminished. This “tripolar world” (1700– 1948) went into decline at the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of anti-Semitism in France (the Dreyfus Affair) and Germany, as well as in Russia, where the tsars encouraged pogroms against Jewish shtetls. The migrations to the West began then: 2.7 million people between 1881 and 1914, and 860,000 from 1915 to 1939. The consequences of the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933— persecutions, World War II, and the launching of the “final solution” with the Axis powers’ support—led to the destruction of the Jews of Europe, 6 million of whom would die in the Holocaust. Europe’s Jews represented 72 percent of the world Jewish community in 1850 and 57 percent in 1939; after the war, that figure fell to 32 percent. The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 inaugurated the current “duopoly” (1948 to the present). It is characterized by the

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coexistence of a state for the Jews and the maintenance of a nonIsraeli Jewish identity now mainly centered in the United States. For the American political scientist Daniel Elazar, the Jewish people represent “the classic diaspora phenomenon” by reason of their capacity to preserve their “integrity as an ethnoreligious community” despite more than two thousand years of existence without political power over their own country of origin.3 Moreover, the continual Jewish migrations during those two millennia favored religious identification based on a shared temporal and religious rhythm rather than on shared land. The existence of the Jews as a political entity (eda, in Hebrew) rests on the idea of a covenant between God and the twelve tribes of Israel. Its principles are found in the Torah, which is both the name of the first five books of the Bible and the collection of the rules of Jewish life (Talmud and commentaries). The eda is unusual in being at once dissociated from a territory yet needing one in order to be fully realized. From the very beginning, the organization of the Jewish people in spatial circles (local, regional, and global associations) rather than geographical ones allowed an extended family or tribe to move through wider and wider levels when dispersion imposed a redefinition of the spatial frameworks. The local circle often matched a city’s limits, and a regional one those of a state or a continent. But from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, the eda rested on the institution of the Resh Galuta, the head of the exile community in Babylon. When this position disappeared with the end of the Muslim empire, respect for the Torah was Judaism’s sole remaining inclusive force. The emergence of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century marked a passage to new forms of representation. The persecutions suffered by the Jews in central and eastern Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century led to the formation of small

What Is a Diaspora? / 9

organizations aimed at founding agricultural colonies in Palestine. A return to Zion, the mountain that rises above Jerusalem, became a goal. Zionism developed in the Russian empire as early as 1882, but it was the publication of The Jewish State, by Theodore Herzl, in 1896 that marked the birth of Zionism as a political movement advocating the founding of a Jewish national homeland. The First Zionist Congress, which met in Basel in 1897, chose the two goals of establishing a national assembly of the Jewish people through the election of delegates from all the communities, and creating a national homeland by encouraging emigration to Palestine. The first point saw the establishment of what would become the World Zionist Organization, which attracted tens of thousands of individual members in 1897 and had a million by 1939. The World Jewish Congress, created in 1936, allowed for national groupings. But the Zionist movement was divided over two issues involving a homeland: the respective roles of religion and politics, and the approach to founding a state. Between the two world wars, after the defeat of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and as more and more Jews immigrated to Palestine, the Zionists split again, this time over the question of violence. The Socialists advocated a nonviolent approach and the encouragement of immigration; Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “revisionists” and their military wing, the Irgun, decided in 1936 to respond with violence to Arab terrorism and, later, to British domination. Giving an overall estimate of the world’s Jewish population and its geographical distribution presupposes knowing who is Jewish. Current statistics generally follow a definition that is broader than that prescribed by halakha (tradition), which dictates every aspect of Jewish life and says that one must be born of a Jewish mother or ritually convert to Judaism. The figures usually put forth take into account what the demographer Sergio DellaPergola calls “the core

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Jewish population,” which includes all those who consider themselves to be Jews.4 It should be noted that this definition, though founded on a subjective conception of Jewishness, is more restricted than that which operates in the framework of Israel’s Law of Return. The most recent version of this law includes spouses, nonJewish children and grandchildren, and their spouses. At the beginning of 2006, according to DellaPergola, the world Jewish population numbered about 13.1 million, of whom nearly 81 percent lived in two countries: the United States (about 5.3 million) and Israel (5.3 million out of a total population of about 7 million). Ninety-five percent of Jews are concentrated in ten countries: the United States and Israel, France (491,500), Canada (373,000), the United Kingdom (297,000), Russia (228,000), Argentina (184,500), Germany (118,000), Australia (103,000), and Brazil (96,500).5 The Black/African Diaspora

It is no accident that “diaspora” has been applied to the situation of the descendants of Africans living on other continents. Indeed, even before the word was used, the parallel was being drawn in the nineteenth century between the Jewish and black dispersions in the writings of the first thinkers of the “pan-Africanist” cause, W. E. B. DuBois and Edward Blyden. For blacks, the biblical episode of the Exodus—escaping from slavery and reaching the Promised Land—had special resonance. Jews and blacks are linked by the role of Africa in Jewish history. Blyden considered the Jewish question to be the “question of questions,” and he admired Zionism for undertaking and organizing a return to the land of origin. He himself “returned” to Africa in 1850 in the context of a program launched in the 1820s to settle former slaves that led to the creation

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of Liberia. Aspirations for a return to Africa from the United States and England took shape as early as 1787, when the British government supported settlement in Sierra Leone, and continued into the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, the head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), advocated the founding of a black nation in Africa. The 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World proclaimed the black race’s right to self-determination and chose red, green, and black as the colors of the “African nation.” But the project of return depended on a shipping company, the Black Star Line, and its financial difficulties led to Garvey’s downfall. He was imprisoned and then expelled from the United States and the UNIA. With that, the “back-to-Africa” plans came to an end. In spite of the link between the Jewish and black peoples established by the idea of a return to the land of origin, none of those militant theoreticians used the word “diaspora.” Until now, scholars all agreed that the first written occurrences of the expressions “African diaspora” and “black diaspora,” and the use of “diaspora” to describe the situation of blacks living outside of Africa, dated from 1965. And that is what I wrote in the French edition of this book, citing articles by George Shepperson and Abiola Irele.6 I did note that the expressions and issues were not new inventions but had already been circulating in intellectual circles since the mid-1950s. My research since 2003 reveals that not only did the idea occur earlier but the terms themselves did, too. They were often used to explicitly draw an analogy between Jewish history and black history, or to note the existence of discrimination that both groups faced in the countries where they lived. In his 1916 book American Civilization and the Negro, the African American thinker and doctor Charles Victor Roman raised the

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question of the future of blacks in Africa and the American South: “The Negro is not going to leave here for two reasons: In the first place this is his home, and in the second place there is nowhere to go. He is not going back to Africa any more than the white man is going back to Europe or the Jew is going back to Palestine. Palestine may be rehabilitated and Europe be Americanized, but the Jew will not lose his worldwide citizenship, nor America fail of her geographical destination as the garden-spot of the world. The Negro will do his part to carry the light of civilization to the dark corners of the world, especially to Africa; dark, mysterious, inscrutable Africa; the puzzle of the past and the riddle of the future; the imperturbable mother of civilizations and peoples. The slave-trade was the diaspora of the African, and the children of this alienation have become a permanent part of the citizenry of the American republic.”7 Soon afterward, in 1917, the analogy was drawn on the Jewish side. A Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward, made the connection between the race riots that erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, on 2 July, and the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, during which more than fifty Jews were killed: “Kishinev and St. Louis—the same soil, the same people. It is a distance of four and a half thousand miles between these two cities and yet they are so close and so similar to each other. . . . Actually twin sisters, which could easily be mistaken for each other. Four and a half thousand miles apart, but the same events in both. . . . The same brutality, the same wildness, the same human beasts.” The editorial went on: “The situation of the Negroes in America is very comparable to the situation of the Jews . . . in Russia. The Negro diaspora, the special laws, the decrees, the pogroms and also the Negro complaints, the Negro hopes, are very similar to those which we Jews . . . lived through.”8 The Jewish editorial writer is proclaiming the “Negro diaspora.” But those two

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occurrences hardly spelled the formula’s success. Not until the 1950s and 1960s would its usage become common among English-speaking historians of Africa, like Basil Davidson,9 and, especially, among French scholars and intellectuals. In 1951, the French ethnologist and great Haiti specialist Alfred Métraux set out the idea that Africa is not merely surviving in Haiti but is actually alive and well there, and that its vitality stems from the “physical energy” and the “strength of soul” shown by the slaves and their children in resisting cruel treatment: “The black ‘diaspora’ has been a benefit for the New World, a benefit that we are just now becoming aware of as we see the lengthening roll of blacks distinguished by their talents in the most varied domains.”10 In his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes of “the Negro diaspora, that is, the tens of millions of blacks spread over the American continents.”11 From the mid-1970s, publications started to multiply that used “diaspora” to refer to an ever vaster population that included, in addition to the transatlantic trade, the Muslim slave trade in the Middle East and Asia, as well as voluntary migrations. The broadest definition is the one given by the historian Joseph Harris in 1982: “The African diaspora concept subsumes the following: the global dispersion (voluntary and involuntary) of Africans throughout history; the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition; and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa.”12 A major phenomenon lies at the root of this dispersion: the slave trade. Slavery existed in the societies of antiquity, but it reached unprecedented and systematic proportions in the Muslim world and in European societies and their colonies. Blacks were captured, bought, sold, transported, and put to work. In the framework of its

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westward expansion starting in the seventh century, Muslim civilization operated a trans-Saharan slave trade involving 7.5 million people between 650 and 1900. To that figure must be added the approximately 3.5 million slaves bought or seized in raids in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the east coast of Africa and sent north, for a total of approximately 11 million. Eleven million is also the generally accepted estimate of the total number of slaves shipped to the Americas during the transatlantic commerce between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries: 4 million to Brazil; 2.5 million to the Spanish colonies; 2 million to the British West Indies; 1.6 million to the French West Indies and Guyana; 500,000 to North America (the British colonies, then the United States); and 500,000 to the Dutch West Indies and Suriname.13 These men and women were uprooted from the African soil and separated from their families and communities for centuries, deprived of institutions, and condemned to an existence that the sociologist Orlando Patterson qualifies as “social death.”14 Do they and their descendants still share—or have they ever shared—a common identity? If so, what is it? Their origin in Africa? Their skin color? The transmission of practices and beliefs across the ocean and through the generations? The experience of slavery itself? These are the questions around which the debate about the black/African community—or communities—has focused. Its main thrust is an examination of the connection with Africa: continuity with or rupture from the origin; or to the contrary, the absence of an origin and the development of a common culture precisely founded on hybridity. The word “diaspora” gives meaning to both. The reference to Africa functions on several levels: heritage, the claim of skin color, Afrocentrism . . . The link to an African origin is always viewed in its cultural, racial, or historic dimensions when

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answering the question What is African in the “African diaspora”? The French anthropologist Christine Chivallon shows that the debates by both academics and activists about the Africanness of certain community, family, or religious practices in the Caribbean or the Americas range along three axes: perfect and pure continuity; creolization as a meeting of two worlds and the formation of a new, culturally complex one; and alienation.15 The third situation, which is especially present in works on the French West Indies, stresses the interiorization of colonial structures and the impossibility for Caribbean peoples to appropriate their history in a republican framework that prevents the claiming of origins. Isolated and discriminated against because of their skin color, blacks have reversed the stigma, turning it into a banner of unity. But being a “black nationalist” means different things to different people. In the Négritude movement, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor advocated the symbolic return to an ancestral Africa; Pan-Africanism demanded political self-determination for the Africans of Africa; and Afrocentrism inverted Western ethnocentrism, making Egypt and/or Ethiopia the first civilization. The ambiguity of a real or symbolic return to Africa is clear in the Jamaican Rastafarian movement. Born in the 1930s, it views the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as the black god incarnate and considers whites inferior to blacks. But in fact, the return is only a fiction, a way of keeping alive and reinventing an Africa whose territory is the memory of dispersion itself, more vibrantly alive in the scattering than it would be in a reunion. THE RECENT HISTORY OF AN ANCIENT WORD

“Diaspora” may be an old Greek word, but it was rarely used in other languages before the nineteenth century. In the first diction-

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ary of modern Greek (1659), it describes both dispersion in the wider sense and the Greek presence throughout the world. Its use in Moral Philosophy by Iosipos Moisiodax (1761) is plural: Greece is “all the diasporas of the Greeks.”16 It is still used in that sense today, mostly in the singular. Aside from that special case, “diaspora” in European languages related only to theology or the study of religions until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1754 it appeared in the title of a book by Edward Weston on the condition of Jews in England.17 The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française noted the appearance of the term in French in 1908,18 but it had already been used by Ernest Renan in his Histoire du peuple d’Israël in the early 1890s.19 “Diaspora” was often used in Germany, England, and the United States during the nineteenth century. It referred either to the Bible—the Old Testament texts on the dispersion of the Jews, and the New Testament texts on the situation of the Christian church scattered among heathens—or to nonbiblical cases of a people or a group dispersed but unified by their religion, such as the Armenians and the Moravian brethren. The Moravian case is especially interesting. The church was born of the Hussite reform movement that developed in the Czech countries in the fifteenth century. Forced into exile after the Battle of White Mountain against the Catholics in 1620, the Moravians founded their church in Saxony in 1722. In 1742 a system of missions was established to evangelize and maintain connections among the faithful in Europe. In 1750 it took the name of Diaspora of the Church of the Brethren, in a reference to the Gospel of Peter. According to Edmund de Schweinitz, the author of the 1859 Moravian Manual, this diaspora then numbered nearly eighty thousand people.20 In American encyclopedias at the

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end of the nineteenth century, the word “diaspora” is connected to the Moravian Church, not to the Jewish people. Instances of the phrase in dictionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century sometimes acknowledge its plural usage. Thus, its first appearance in the British Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language in 1913 reads: “Applied collectively: a) to those Jews who, after the Exile, were scattered through the Old World, and afterwards to Jewish Christians living among heathen. Cf. James i.1. b) by extension to Christians isolated from their own communion, as among the Moravians, to those living, usually as missionaries, outside of the parent congregation.”21 By contrast, in the 1929 Larousse du XXe siècle, the meaning of the word is limited to the Jewish example: “Relig. hist. The dispersion of the Jews driven from their country by the vicissitudes of their history through the ancient world.”22 Until the 1950s, “diaspora” had no possible meaning except religious. Yet in the 1931 edition of the American Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, historian Simon Dubnov, the author of the entry “Diaspora,” felt that the term should not be limited to Jewish or religious history: “Diaspora is a Greek term for a nation or part of a nation separated from its own state or territory and dispersed among other nations but preserving its national culture. In a sense Magna Graecia constituted a Greek diaspora in the ancient Roman Empire, and a typical case of diaspora is presented by the Armenians, many of whom have voluntarily lived outside their small national territory for centuries. Generally, however, the term is used with reference to those parts of the Jewish people residing outside Palestine.”23 Dubnov’s text played a major role in the diffusion of the term

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“diaspora” itself, and in both its progressive secularization in general and its gradual separation from the historic experience of the Jewish people in particular. While some scholars read his entry as a call to restrict the term to the case of the Jews, others saw it as an opening. In 1949, the American sociologist Rose Hum Lee relied on Dubnov— whom she quotes at length in an early footnote while carefully omitting the phrase about the Greeks and the Armenians—to show that “Chinatowns are a type of segregated communities of people separated from their homeland but whose dispersion differs from the historical ‘diaspora’ of the Jewish people scattered throughout the Greco-Roman world.”24 Ten years earlier, the sociologist Robert Park, whose previous work focused on the “marginal man”—the question of the stranger so dear to Georg Simmel—took a completely different tack.25 Having found in the “emancipated Jew” a kind of model of a person caught between two cultures, Park in 1939 reframed Dubnov to enlarge the use of “diaspora” and apply it to Asians: “There are, at the present time, between 16,000,000 and 17,000,000 people of Asiatic origin living in the diaspora, if I may use that term to designate not merely the condition but the place of dispersion of peoples.”26 Park’s usage seems to have gradually displaced Dubnov’s, to the point that Park himself is sometimes quoted as the source of this definition.27 In fact, Dubnov is absent from the 1968 edition of the Encyclopedia, and the “Diaspora” entry reappears only in 2001, written by the British sociologist Robin Cohen.28 This expanded usage began to appear in newspapers and dictionaries in the 1960s. Le Monde wrote of a “Czech diaspora” in 1968.29 In 1980 the Dictionnaire des mots contemporains adopted the extension of the definition to “other populations besides the Jewish people.”30 In 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

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added this new dimension: “dispersion (as of a people of common national origin or of common beliefs” and “the people of one country dispersed into other countries.”31 This progressive shift of a word designating the historic situation of a people or religious groups to a generic term has been especially apparent in the social sciences. DIASPORA AS A CONCEPT

Except for the article by Simon Dubnov cited above, “diaspora” as a concept is almost absent from the social sciences lexicon before the 1960s. 1. The Emergence of a General Concept

Until the mid-1980s, “diaspora” was used in two separate and independent ways, without any real effort to define it: as a name for certain populations living outside a reference territory, and as a specialized concept describing African trading networks. During this period, scholars commonly used the term to refer to four groups of people: Jews, people of African origin, Palestinians, and Chinese. As we have seen, the expressions “black diaspora” and “African diaspora” took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s and have continued to spread.32 Qualifying the “overseas Chinese” as a “diaspora” dates back at least to the end of the 1940s, but its growth in popularity stems from anthropologist Maurice Freedman’s work on Chinese family structures in the 1950s and 1960s.33 The Palestinian case is even more interesting. The first mention of “diaspora” in connection with Palestinians apparently appears in a 1965 United Nations report, but the term became much more widely used after

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the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Its use is especially potent, since the Palestinian dispersion was born of a conflict with the State of Israel. In 1985, the scholar Walid Khalidi wrote, “Just as all Jews in their Diaspora would not or could not live in Israel, not all Palestinians in their Diaspora could or would live in the Palestinian state. But just as Israel works its magic on the Jews of the Diaspora, the sovereign state of Palestine . . . will work its magic on the Palestinian Diaspora.”34 In this period, the word was gradually being applied to other groups too, such as the Armenians, Dominicans, and Irish. At the end of the 1960s the concept of “trading” or “commercial” diasporas emerged among historians of Africa, beginning with Ivor Wilks’s and Abner Cohen’s works on West African peoples, notably the Hausa and the Mandé. Popularized by Paul Lovejoy and Philip Curtin, the concept referred to merchants’ long-distance networks along commercial routes. Cohen describes a trading diaspora as “a nation of socially interdependent but spatially dispersed communities.” This is a broad category, and it includes commercial networks in Asia and South America in which both business and religion— especially Islam in the case of North and West Africa—play a primary role in forging cohesion.35 In 1976 the American political scientist John Armstrong proposed an initial typology of “diasporas” as “mobilized” or “proletarian.”36 But it was with the 1986 publication of Modern Diasporas in International Politics, edited by the Israeli political scientist Gabriel Sheffer, that the field shifted to a general theoretical approach based on a comparative perspective, comparing Jews, Armenians, Turks, Palestinians, Chinese, Indians, and so on. The fundamental issue was less developing a theory of diasporas—as the German sociologist Robert Hettlage suggested in 199137 —than defining the term in

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the social sciences. Three kinds of definitions can be distinguished: open, categorical, and oxymoronic.

open definitions These offer a loose and nondiscriminating view of the object of study and leave the door open to an undetermined number of a priori cases. The earliest definition is Armstrong’s: “Any ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity, i.e., is a relatively small community throughout all portions of the polity.”38 This includes groups of nomadic hunters or herdsmen, as well as what he calls “Gypsies.” Sheffer’s position too is an open definition, but it is much more elaborate. In the introduction to his 1986 book, he subtracts the possibility of nomadism from Armstrong’s position and adds a fundamental element: the maintenance of a link with the place of origin. “Modern diasporas are ethnic minority groups of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin—their homelands.”39 A “diaspora” must therefore have a number of factors involving the origin of the (voluntary or forced) migration; settlement in one or several countries; maintenance of identity and community solidarity, which allows people to make contacts between groups and to organize activities aimed at preserving that identity; and finally, relations between the leaving state, the host state, and the diaspora itself, the last of which may become a link between the first two. In 2003, Sheffer revisited at length the definition of what he now calls “ethno-national diasporas.”40 categorical definitions These place the object of study within a matrix of strict criteria that must be fulfilled for it to war-

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rant the scientific designation as a “diaspora.” Both categoric and categorical, the criteria are designed to differentiate between “true” and “false” diasporas. At times, asking whether a given population is or is not a diaspora has become some studies’ primary focus. There are two kinds of categorical definitions, depending on whether the diaspora must satisfy one or more than one criterion. An example of the first kind appears in an editorial by the French geographer Yves Lacoste in the special 1989 issue of the journal Hérodote devoted to the “geopolitics of diasporas.” Lacoste says that “true” diasporas can be recognized by “the dispersion of the major part of a people.”41 His main criterion isn’t the absolute number of people who have left, but their number relative to the country’s total population. So while there may be some 20 million Chinese in Southeast Asia, they can’t claim to be a “diaspora,” because, though their number is considerable, it is insignificant compared to the billion Chinese in China. By this definition, there are only five diasporas: the Jewish (Ashkenazim and Sephardim), Lebanese, Palestinian, Armenian, and Irish. In 1991 the American political scientist William Safran made the first attempt to construct a closed conceptual model with multiple criteria. He suggests, “lest the term lose all meaning”42 limiting the term “diaspora” to minority expatriate communities whose members shared several of the six following characteristics: their or their ancestors’ dispersion from a “center” to at least two peripheral foreign regions; persistence of a collective memory concerning the homeland; certainty that their acceptance by the host society is impossible; maintenance of an often idealized homeland as a goal of return; belief in a collective duty to engage in the perpetuation, restoration, or security of the country of origin; and maintenance of individual or collective relations with the country of origin. Unlike Sheffer’s definition, Safran’s seems historically embodied by the Jewish dias-

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pora, in its structure if not directly in its formulation. As an archetype, the Jewish diaspora is therefore anterior, original, and superior to all others. If a comparison can or must be made, it will be not so much among diasporas as between each of them and the Jewish diaspora, which provides the criteria. It is also present in the “iconoclastic” concepts presented by Robin Cohen in his 1997 Global Diasporas, the first major general study of diasporas written by a single scholar.43 Cohen uses Safran’s criteria but modifies them slightly. He merges idealization of the country of origin with the commitment to its maintenance and security and adds the eventual creation of a state. To those criteria he then appends four more: voluntary migration (for business, work, or colonization); an enduring ethnic awareness; the emergence of new creativity; and a feeling of empathy and solidarity with “fellow ethnics” in other countries. As a result, Cohen produces a list of nine “common characteristics of a diaspora” coupled with a typology that distinguishes diasporas according to their primary identity: victim (Jews, Africans, Armenians, and Palestinians), labor (Indians), trade (Chinese), cultural (the Caribbean), and imperial (British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese).

oxymoronic definitions These are rooted in the appearance of postmodern thought in the 1980s and are the heirs of various currents critical of modernity, notably the works of Michel Foucault. In France they crystallized around the philosophers Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Modern societies, which are characterized by a belief in reason, progress, universality, and stability, are confronted by emerging postmodern societies dominated by doubt, fragmentation, the end of great narratives of truth and science, racial mixing, and fluid identities. Postmodernism spread through most of the social sci-

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ences, in particular sociology and anthropology. In the 1980s it encountered the English “cultural studies” movement, which studied subaltern or postcolonial subcultures (workers, minorities, immigrants, and so on). In that setting, a vision of “diaspora” developed that was radically different from both the open and the categorical definitions. Where those definitions stress reference to a point of departure and maintenance of an identity in spite of dispersion, postmodern thought instead gives pride of place to paradoxical identity, the noncenter, and hybridity. Three authors writing in English played an important role in establishing this vision: Stuart Hall, James Clifford, and Paul Gilroy. Of “diaspora,” Hall wrote in 1990: “I use this term metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, imperialising, hegemonizing form of ‘ethnicity.’ . . . The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”44 The postmodern vision introduced a break between modern forms of diaspora, whose archetype is the Jewish model, and its new forms, whose archetype is the “black diaspora.” The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s 1993 book on the “black diaspora,” has become a cultural studies classic.45 In a 1994 article, he insists on the “plural status” that can be seen in the word’s history, where “diaspora-dispersion” and “diaspora-identification” have coexisted in opposition, with the first tending to the end of dispersion, unlike the second, which is written in living memory. Taken in this second sense, the “diasporic idea” allows one to go beyond the simplistic

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view of certain oppositions (continuity/rupture, center/periphery) to grasp the complex, that is, the joint presence of the Same and the Other, the local and the global—everything that Gilroy calls “the changing same.”46 In a 1994 essay, the American anthropologist James Clifford, known for his studies of “traveling cultures,” also opposes two visions of “diaspora” while rejecting the “postmodern” label: an “ideal-type” vision founded on the accumulation of criteria and the built-in relationship to a center, and a decentralized vision more focused on the frontiers of the diaspora than its core, in order to understand what diaspora is opposed to. According to Clifford, this is the static nature of the nation-state: “Diasporas have rarely founded nation-states: Israel is the prime example. And such ‘homecomings’ are, by definition, the negation of diaspora.”47 2. French Thinking about Diasporas

In 2005–6 two collective works on the question of “diasporas” were published in France.48 But France began theorizing about the term “diaspora”—considering it in an abstract form and openly—only in the 1980s. Earlier French or French-language publications with “diaspora” in their titles mainly concerned the Jewish people. In addition to the “Diaspora” collection launched by the publisher Calmann-Lévy in 1971, a few books or brochures appeared about the Jewish people or the relationship between the State of Israel and Jews living in other countries. The periodical Les Cahiers de diaspora was launched in 1979, and the term “diaspora” was also applied to other populations, in particular Armenians, Africans, and more rarely, Chinese.49 But these usages avoided the issue of definition. As both the geographer Michel Bruneau and the anthropologist Denys Cuche note, geographers and historians were the first to raise

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the possibility of making “diaspora” a category and trying to define it.50 The French geographer Maximilien Sorre used the word as early as 1957 to designate the space that national minorities occupy in foreign countries.51 The French geographer Pierre George, however, proposed an initial definition in 1984. Diaspora was characterized by dispersion and fed by successive exoduses, forced or voluntary, and by ethno-cultural segregation and conservation of cultural practices despite contacts with the surrounding population. “The reference is valid if the signs symbolizing membership in a collectivity and shared relations between the cores of the diaspora and between those cores and the leaving homeland endure.”52 The distinctive criteria of diasporas are a community of history, belief, reference territory, and language between the dispersed cores. But again, the category is based on the archetype of the Jewish diaspora. In his 1975 book, Être un peuple en diaspora, Richard Marienstras suggests that the unique Jewish situation of a nonterritorial mode of living “in diaspora” should not be considered abnormal in the system of nations.53 In 1985 he laid out the conditions that make other diasporas possible. Against the current temptation to use the word “to designate any emigrant community whose numbers give it visibility in the host community,” he stressed the central role of time in determining “true diasporas.” “We can be fairly sure that the Chinese, Roma, Armenians, and Jews ‘live in diaspora’ and will continue to do so for some time to come. For other emigrant communities, this is less certain.”54 The age of monographs began in the late 1980s. The decade after the special 1989 Hérodote issue saw a proliferation of symposia, collective works, and journal theme issues, crowded with singular studies of this or that “emigrant community” by academics specializing in the study of certain “diasporas” or “diasporic” phe-

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nomena within a population. Among French specialists, one can cite the geographers Georges Prévélakis and Michel Bruneau for the Greeks; the historian Pierre Trolliet, geographer Emmanuel Ma Mung, and sociologist Live Yu Sion for the Chinese; the anthropologist Martine Hovanessian and historian Anahide Ter-Minassian for the Armenians; and the anthropologist Christine Chivallon for West Indians and the “black diaspora.” At the same time, more general thinking was developing, although timidly, about the concept and its usage, along with the consideration of approaches to the meaning(s) of “diaspora,” the conditions of its use, and its ambiguities. Four scholars of this aspect of the discussion are worth mentioning. In 1993 the French sociologist Alain Médam noted the transformations of the term. As “a proper name that has tended over time to become a common name,” the word has lost its distinctive character, as well as its negative connotation: at a time of globalization of the economy and culture, “‘diasporians’ [diasporéens in the original French] are no longer traitors, but go-betweens.”55 Ignoring the battle over definitions, Médam suggests ways to grasp the current diversity of “diaspora” situations by way of typological oppositions, depending on their age, recognition, organization, or lifespan. Those situations can be rigid or fluid, official or clandestine, dynamic or amorphous, reversible or irreversible. While focusing on each case’s uniqueness, Médam paradoxically mentions the need to return to the archetype of the Jewish diaspora “as a way of getting a little closer to essential characteristics.” Permanence, which is the essential criterion of any diaspora, is possible only when it involves a territory that has no borders and is not limited to a specific piece of ground. For Jews, that abstract territory has been the Torah. The anthropologist Christine Chivallon has a completely differ-

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ent point of view. In 1997 she set out to study the implications of the use of the word “diaspora” for West Indians.56 Though widely used by the British, the word was practically absent from French research until recently. In French studies, “diaspora” is synonymous with the persistence of awareness and the community link in spite of dispersion—a concept that contradicts the notion of the fragmentation, not to say absence, of a West Indian identity shaped by the slave trade, slavery, and assimilation. By contrast, British postmodern theorizing about diaspora (Hall and Gilroy) puts the nomad and the hybrid first, as we have seen. The West Indian world (Hall) or the black Atlantic (Gilroy) became the prototypes of the diaspora seen as “fluid and mobile.” In France, this concept was represented only by the literary créolité (creoleness) movement, notably by Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant. Chivallon goes farther. Theories that condemn rational thought’s capacity for exclusion and inferiorization are merely obeying the same logic while reversing its values: “The unstable identity is now estimable,” whereas the fixed and centered identity is stigmatized. Though presented as neutral, these concepts are freighted with intentions and carry implicit classifications through the dualities they express, in the English-speaking world and elsewhere. In 2004, Chivallon wrote a pioneering book examining the question of the black diaspora from the perspective of the Caribbean.57 The anthropologist Martine Hovanessian, who studies the Armenians, has also considered situations of extreme exile, characterized by massive exodus and the loss of homeland. In 1998 she undertook to sum up six years of research on the notion of diaspora. Having stated that it involves a construct, she insists on the necessity of considering the issues involved in its use, whether by the groups themselves (self-designation) or by scholars given to distinguishing

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between “true” from “false” diasporas. What matters, Hovanessian writes, is “untangling the links between the social reality and the notion.”58 The term is a perfect echo of the transformations of the contemporary world (fragmentation of, and challenge to, the nation-state) because of the network structure of diasporas. In fact, the globalization of the migratory space favors their emergence, which allows one to go beyond the single relation between the sending country and the host country, suggesting the possibility of spaces for economic and cultural relations between the nation-states. Diasporas are closely linked to considerations of problems of minorities and the “ethnic factor,” she writes, and are often thought of as “transmission belts between the minority culture and the national host culture.”59 For Hovanessian, however, the question of connection and social sense is even more important. Diasporas primarily born of the loss of a national territory create a sense of identity in their exile situation, a national imagination that supports the maintenance of solidarity in dispersion. So the maintenance of myths— of origin or of return—is therefore the foundation of a modus vivendi among states. In 1999 the sociologist Dominique Schnapper weighed the value of the word with respect to the sociopolitical environment and made the connection between the shift in the meaning of “diaspora” from pejorative to positive, and the development of transnational phenomena that relativize the significance of a national model.60 The confluence of the political, the cultural, and the economic within the framework of the nation-state has become less pertinent, favoring a disassociation between the territories of residence, belonging, and subsistence. This context favors diasporic thought, but it is necessary to specify the limits of a term whose contemporary use is so sloppy that it is becoming simply a synonym for “ethnic group.” “Diaspora”

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will remain scientifically useful only on two conditions, writes Schnapper: first, its use must be neutral, neither pejorative nor eulogistic; second, it must concern, independently of the circumstances of the dispersion, “all dispersed populations, whatever their prestige, that maintain ties among themselves, and not only to the Jews, Armenians, Greeks, or Chinese.” These ties must be “institutionalized . . . whether objective or symbolic.” Schnapper is here touching on the differences between a word in its ordinary meaning and a category of scientific thinking.61 THE AMBIGUITIES OF A CLICHÉ

In the space of about fifteen years, “diaspora” has evolved into an allpurpose word used to describe a growing number of populations. Both in the media (television, print, and radio) and in scholarly publications, it has replaced such terms as “exile” and “foreign community.” It is increasingly being used without any definition in a scope that is both wide and loose. “Diaspora” now means “ethnic community separated by state borders” or “transnational community.” Schnapper was right to underscore the importance of transnational phenomena in the word’s changing meaning, but the role played by social scientists in the extension of its possible limits must also be taken into account. This extension is due to two phenomena: the influence of theories of globalization and postmodernism since the 1980s, and the creation of publication sites specifically dedicated to socalled transnational phenomena that use “diaspora” in their titles. From the early 1980s, three new expressions have appeared in the social sciences that favor broadening the dimensions of the notion of diaspora: “postmodernism,” “globalization,” and “transnationalism.” We have already noted the importance of the first of these.

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The second, “globalization,” appeared in the mid-1980s, in particular in the writings of sociologist Roland Robertson, to designate the intensification of relations at a global scale and the growing consciousness of the wholeness of the world.62 After that, many sociologists and anthropologists (Anthony Giddens, Ulf Hannerz, Ulrich Beck, and Zygmunt Bauman, among others) considered the study of society at the planetary level, taking into account the growing importance of flows—human, economic, and financial, but especially informational and cultural ones—which have made possible an unparalleled degree of interaction between the local and the global. As the American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai says, cultural deterritorialization opens the path to imagining multiple possible existences. He uses the term “ethnoscape” to describe “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons [who] constitute an essential feature of the world.”63 It is between nation-states that certain activities and connections acquire their full meaning. Specialists in international relations have underscored this “transnational” dimension. As early as 1972, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye stressed the growing importance of networks and nonstate actors (nongovernmental organizations and multinational businesses).64 In his 1990 book Turbulence in World Politics, American international relations theorist James Rosenau opposed the “state-centered” world to the “multicentered” world of individual and collective nonstate actors.65 In the early 1990s, anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton argued for a new concept to describe the life of migrants who no longer feel forced to break with their culture and country of origin. In their 1994 book, Nations Unbound, they write: “We define ‘transnationalism’ as the processes by which

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immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders.”66 These “transmigrants” develop and maintain all sorts of relations—familial, religious, economic, and political—with the place they come from, thereby laying the foundations of nonterritorial nations. While the authors insist that this kind of nation is not diasporic, it is undeniable that the spread of new concepts like transnationalism has influenced the use of “diaspora,” which has come to stand, for many people, as a synthesis of everything that operates through states. Moreover, “diaspora” has become an intellectual rallying cry. The 1991 launching in the United States of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies has clearly played a role in this development. In its maiden issue, editor in chief Khachig Tölölyan writes that, while the nation-state remains the principal form of political organization, the world has entered a “transnational moment” where nonstate forces threaten the stability of borders. “We use ‘diaspora’ provisionally to indicate our belief that the term that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrants, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community.”67 Since 2002, the Diasporas Study Center at the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail has published a journal called Diasporas, histoires et sociétés. Its goal isn’t so much the study of diasporas as that of “diaspora problems” (countries dreamed of and promised, returns, conversion, and loyalties), with the understanding that “studying diasporas comes down to examining the vast lexical and semantic fields which tirelessly describe the migratory challenge.”68

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The growth in the number of phenomena and populations covered by “diaspora” has understandably attracted critics who focus either on the word’s lack of theoretical power or its inability to describe certain phenomena. The sociologist Floya Anthias has shown that, when the notion of “diaspora” is used as a “typological tool” (Cohen) or as a description of a “social condition” that challenges nation-states (Clifford), it fails to articulate the differences within diasporas, in particular the role played by differences of sex and class in the perception or the construction of ethnicity.69 For his part, Östen Wahlbeck, a specialist in Kurdish studies, correctly insists on the need to move beyond real-world definitions based on limiting criteria, toward an ideal-type definition of diaspora.70 To the German sociologist Max Weber, the ideal type was not a description of reality but a conceptual tool used to better understand it. Such a usage of “diaspora,” which is more conceptual than descriptive, makes it possible to stress a population’s common characteristics without giving it a global definition as a “true diaspora.” Another aspect of criticism focuses more on the word’s inflation, in an attempt either to “save” the concept from complete dilution71 or to understand the challenge of such a “diaspora industry.”72 The unbelievable proliferation of studies focused on the theme of connections—of all sorts—that are established, preserved, or undone beyond borders has produced a raft of scientific terms constructed with the prefixes “trans-” (transnationalism, translocality, transculture, and transmigration) or “cyber-” (cyberculture, cybernauts, and cyber communities). Adjectives like “transnational,” “diasporic,” and “global” are being appended to classical concepts: transnational social space, transnational network, global or diasporic public sphere or public space, transnational social movements—the list is a long one. The lexicons of many disciplines,

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such as anthropology, political science, and sociology, have been considerably reworked in the last fifteen years, to the point where some subject specialists have started rearticulating these concepts to integrate them into an expanding analysis of the transnational and the global. New, ever more encompassing terms have also seen the light of day, such as “globalized communities” and “global networks.” The first is the result of work by the sociologists Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof,73 who have attempted to draw up a general chart of transnational phenomena, in which the globalized communities are distributed among five types: national or transnational communities where membership arises from ethnic or national origins; those once founded on a country of origin but whose connection with a homeland is now only symbolic; lifestyle and activity communities built around sports or culture; activist communities pursuing global solutions to political or ethical problems; and finally, groups based on a shared profession or activity. The second concept, that of “global network,” was the principle behind the 2001 founding of a new journal Global Networks by the leaders of the British Transnational Communities Programme. Its mission is the study of all those “social, economic, political, and cultural networks” created by the “dynamic and often flexible connections among individuals, members of a family, businesses, social groups, and organizations.” These are the “emerging transnational actors” who “represent the human face of globalization” at the planetary level.74 Taken in all its usages, “diaspora” is like the god Janus: It looks both to the past and to the future. It allows dispersion to be thought of either as a state of incompleteness or a state of completeness. The issue of origin arises in both cases.

chapter 2

The Spaces of Dispersion

A consideration of dispersion involves being able to name a common point of departure for it. People can’t be dispersed without first having been together. But who is dispersed? What dispersed population(s) are we talking about? Writes historian William McNeill, “It is safe to assume that when our ancestors first became fully human they were already migratory, moving about in pursuit of big game.”1 Paleoanthropologists place the first migrations of the genus Homo from Africa at between 2 and 1.5 million years ago. According to the “out of Africa” hypothesis put forth in the 1980s, modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) had a single origin in Africa from which they progressively “colonized” the rest of the world: the Near East (100,000 years ago), Southeast Asia and Australia (60,000 years ago), and America (between 35,000 and 15,000 years ago). If this monogenetic (singleorigin) theory is correct, dispersion is written into humanity’s very soul. 35

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THE HISTORIC DIRECTION OF MIGRATIONS

The fact that individuals or groups move is not meaningful in itself. Likewise, the reasons for these movements can rarely if ever be reduced to simple oppositions: political/economic, forced/voluntary, or temporary/permanent. They must be understood with reference to the frameworks of meaning in which they occur. Being sedentary is a recent development in human history. For thousands of years, hunting, agriculture, and pastoralism were nomadic activities; the development of boats gradually made access to offshore lands possible. A time finally came when, as Emmanuel Kant writes, people covered the entire Earth’s surface: “Because it is a globe, they cannot scatter to an infinite distance.”2 According to McNeill, there are four kinds of migrations: the forced movement of one population by another; the conquest of a people by another, followed by a merger of the two; the welcomed arrival of strangers; and the importation of individuals or an entire people uprooted from their land. The first kind corresponds to nomadism; the second, to enterprises of conquest; the third, to the establishment of commercial activities; and the fourth, to slavery. Any attempt to set out broad patterns must note an important structural change between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that did more than modify the space of human migrations in a quantitative way: the formation of a system of states in Europe. During the last five centuries—which a number of authors, including Roland Robertson and Immanuel Wallerstein, consider to be the period when the process of globalization took shape—some European states launched transportation, communication, commerce, and population management networks that connected different parts of the world.3 As we have seen, slavery reached systematic and

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unequaled dimensions at that time. Two new phenomena then emerged through the transformation of more ancient phenomena via the prism of the state: colonization and immigration. In the first case, a state extends its domination over territory that it considers to be without a ruler. In the second, individuals leave the territory where they live for political or economic reasons, more or less under duress. In both cases, human beings move. It is significant that colonial expansion led to the establishment of two different flows toward the colonies: those of the colonizers and those of the workforce (slaves, then contract workers). In the nineteenth century, the conjunction of several factors—namely, the liberal-democratic, demographic, and industrial revolutions—prompted both the freedom to emigrate to “new lands” (United States, Australia, and Canada) and the European countries’ need for cheap labor. Progress in transportation allowed tens of millions of individuals to move: 52 million Europeans left the Continent between 1820 and 1945. In the twentieth century, this phenomenon continued to expand: people migrated for work, and there were also flows of refugees, populations displaced by war and changed borders, migrations by skilled workers, and family reunifications in every direction—south to north for migrations of legal or illegal workers, north to north for skilled workers and more rarely for refugees, north to south for colonization or the migration of technicians or engineers, and especially, south to south for refugees. It is estimated that some 155 million people now live far from the place where they were born. An individual or collective movement across the surface of the globe is a geography in itself, a writing on the earth. The nomad inscribes a continual space that, like a Möbius strip, has neither beginning nor end, whereas the expansionist writes links between discontinuous locales, connecting them to a center. Another kind of

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writing occurs between the two that combines the original place and the space of dispersion in an original geography. FOUR MIGRATORY PEOPLES

In its classic usage—before its quantitative and semantic explosion—the word “diaspora” applied particularly to those people with or without a state whose centenary, not to say millennial, migration traditions had not affected the persistence of a permanent collective conscience rooted in an enduring reference to a history, a land, or a religion. In an effort not to disassociate a people’s historic existence from the dispersion of some or all of its members, the French geographer Michel Bruneau has come up with the expression “world people” ( peuple-monde de la longue durée), which is based on Fernand Braudel’s notions of world economy and Joel Kotkin’s concept of the “global tribe.”4 Bruneau uses the phrase to designate “people who have occupied and politically or culturally dominated vast spaces, of continental or subcontinental dimensions for a great part of their history, with a historic depth of more than two millennia.” Their space is a tripartite one: one or more states created in the last two centuries; a broader cultural realm; and finally a “world diaspora.” Among these “world peoples” we can count the Greeks, Indians, Chinese, and Armenians. The Greeks

In antiquity, the power of Greek cities was manifested by their ability to found far-off, independent colonies, where the cities and colonies were connected more by language, culture, and history than by law or a hierarchical relationship. This is what the French geog-

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rapher Georges Prévélakis calls a “galactic” organization, as opposed to a “dendritic” organization based on the relation between a center and its periphery.5 The spread of Roman power—first by the republic, then the empire—over the entire Mediterranean did not cause Hellenism to disappear as a cultural unity. After the empire split in two in 395, Hellenism actually blossomed in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, where it became the principal cultural component, especially in the religious domain: The Great Schism of 1054 divided Roman Catholics from the Greek Orthodox. Even political power became Hellenized. The seizure of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire, but Hellenism survived in the Ottoman Empire. Along with the Jews and the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church was allowed to establish an autonomous religious community, called millet, that was responsible for the allocation and collection of taxes and for such matters as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. With the development of the Mediterranean trading system in the sixteenth century, Greek communities appeared outside the empire, including western Europe (Livorno and Venice) and Russia. Contact with Enlightenment philosophy and the ideas of 1789 fed the aspiration for a Greek state. This was created in 1830, founded on the ambition of restoring Greater Greece by recovering the Ottoman territories of Asia Minor. That hope collapsed in 1922–23 with the end of the Greco-Turkish war and the territorial agreement between the two countries. Massive emigration from Greece to the United States began at the end of the nineteenth century. It involved 450,000 Greeks between 1890 and 1920, most of them affected by the economic crisis that hit southern Europe. Waves of departures were primarily driven by economic considerations. Between the 1946 civil war,

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which was followed by a severe depression, and 1977, about 1 million Greeks left for countries that favored immigration: Australia, which took in 160,000, the United States (135,000), and Canada (100,000). The others went to western Europe, especially Germany. Moreover, the “dictatorship of the colonels” from 1967 to 1974 led to the departure of thousands of political opponents and the politicization of communities abroad for or against the regime.6 In 1996, the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs counted more than 5.5 million Greeks living abroad, distributed as follows: nearly 3.5 million in the Americas, including 3 million in the United States and 350,000 in Canada; 1.3 million in Europe, including 350,000 in Germany, 250,000 in Ukraine, 210,000 in Great Britain, and 35,000 in France; 700,000 in Australia; 140,000 in Africa, including 120,000 in South Africa; and close to 70,000 in Asia, including 50,000 in Kazakhstan. (There are no updated and reliable figures for the early twenty-first century, even from the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad, because the data often do not make clear whether a figure refers to Greek citizens or persons of Greek origin.) The structure of Greek life abroad rests on the existence of communities (koinotites) and a network of some three thousand associations. The result is an intermingling at the territorial (municipal, national, and regional) and transstate levels. The first is based on residence and aimed at promoting Greek culture through schools, libraries, and religious and linguistic practices. But some overseas Greek communities define themselves in terms of a specific identity or territory, such as Cyprus or the Pont. For example, there are 2 million Pontic Greeks worldwide, mostly in Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Germany, and Sweden. Their “country” is a one-hundredkilometer strip of the southeast Black Sea coast that has been inhabited by Greeks since the seventh century b.c. Many migrated to the

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Caucasus and Russia in the nineteenth century during the RussoOttoman wars. Others were exterminated by the Turks between 1919 and 1923 or sent to Greece during the population exchanges with Turkey after 1923. These people feel Greek, but they insist on the specificity of their origin. The transstate level is that of nonterritorial movements, whether they involve the church or worldwide organizations established in the countries where expatriates live. Their purpose is to ensure unity in dispersion: religious unity of the Orthodox Church around the patriarch of Constantinople, for example, or “ethnic” unity embodied in pan-Macedonian or pan-Pontic confederations. These have been joined by a third, territorial unity: that of the national state. Various attempts at representing Greeks abroad have been made since the end of World War II. In 1975, Article 108 of the Greek Constitution enjoins the state to “take care of emigrant Greeks abroad and of the maintenance of their ties with the Fatherland.” Since then, two organizations have been created: an administrative body, the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad (1983), and a representative one, the World Council of Hellenes Abroad (1995), composed of representatives named by the national federations and global confederations. Their rivalry clearly shows the existence of both a galactic system (the Orthodox Church) and a dendritic system (the Greek state). These correspond to two different views of Hellenism that differ in their relationship to Greece.7 The Indians

Indian migrations on a world scale really began only in the nineteenth century, because sacred Hindu texts such as the Dharma Shastras forbade crossing the seas. Nevertheless, “Indians” could be

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found beyond their borders, especially in Southeast Asia, before the Christian era, be they Tamil fishermen from what is now Sri Lanka, merchants in trading posts, or monks spreading Buddhism. During the last two centuries, people have left India in four phases: migrations within the colonial framework; migration to Western countries after independence in 1947; migration to the Persian Gulf countries since the 1980s; and the brain drain to the United States in the 1990s.8 India was long fought over—by the Dutch and the French in the seventeenth century, then by the French and the British in the eighteenth—before falling to the British after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. It is estimated that close to 28 million Indians emigrated between 1846 and 1932 to work as free or contract laborers.9 After slavery was outlawed in the British, French, and Dutch colonies (in 1833, 1848, and 1863, respectively), the shortage of manpower led those countries to seek other solutions. Under pressure from planters, the indenture system was established. Volunteers, nearly all of them Indian and Chinese, contracted to work in the plantations of the empire for a period of five years. The French and Dutch struck deals with the British to take advantage of the Indian labor force, and some 1.5 million Indians left for Guyana, New Zealand, Japan, Martinique, Canada, and Jamaica. Indenture was outlawed in 1917, but under the successor kangani system, which was similar to indenture but had no contract or term of service, some 6 million Indians went to work in the tea and rubber plantations of Ceylon, Malaysia, and Burma. Finally, a free emigration of “passenger Indians” took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This involved merchants, bankers, and clerks, who served as “imperial auxiliaries” in the countries of East Africa (Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa) and Asia (Burma, Malaysia, and Fiji).

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Unlike workers in the indenture or kangani systems, these free migrants often belonged to the higher castes. After the World War II and Indian independence in 1947, the migratory pattern changed. Two-thirds of the Indians living in Europe went to the United Kingdom, where 146,300 “IndoPakistanis” immigrated between 1955 and the restriction of immigration in 1962. Many Indians—200,000 by the end of the 1970s— came to Britain from East Africa, having been expelled from Uganda and Kenya in 1971. There were almost no Indians in Australia from 1901 and 1972, because of the White Australia Policy, but they numbered 95,000 in the 2001 census, and the Indian government estimates that close to 200,000 persons of Indian origin (PIOs) now live there. Finally, the strong growth of the petroleum industry in the Persian Gulf countries from the 1970s led to an initial demand for workers—first unskilled, then skilled—and Indians responded. Their numbers in the gulf region jumped from 40,000 in 1971 to 600,000 in 1981. According to Indian statistics, there were more than 3 million there in 2001: 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia, 900,000 in the United Arab Emirates, 311,000 in Oman, 294,000 in Kuwait, and 130,000 in Bahrain and Qatar. Indians cannot become citizens of those countries, so these contract migrants play an important role in the economic development of India through the money they send home to their families. Except for a few thousand individuals in the nineteenth century, Indian migration to the United States began only after the lifting of the ban on immigrants from Asia in 1946. But the numbers really became significant after passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which eliminated the quota system and favored qualified immigrants: 115,000 Indians came in 1976, 500,000 in 1987, 815,000 in

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1990, and 1.7 million in 2000. This growth is explained primarily by the development of the information technology industry in India and the export of its talents through “body shopping.” That migration was even encouraged by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s industrial policy for India. With these post-1947 migrations, the Indian government took stock of the role that migrants were playing in the country’s industrialization though remittances to their families. Among these migrants were the most skilled workers as well as, and especially, unskilled workers. In the 1970s, the category of non-resident Indian (NRI) was created to designate Indian citizens living abroad, who were offered investment and business creation programs in India. The relative failure of the initiative, coupled with expatriate organizations’ demands for the establishment of a stronger link with India, led the authorities to adopt a more general policy toward Indians abroad. In 1999, the government created the PIO category to designate any citizen of another country who was an Indian citizen or a descendant of someone who had been born in and lived in India. Upon request, and with a payment of one thousand dollars, the PIO would be given economic advantages in India as well as the possibility of traveling there without a visa. But in 2001, only twelve hundred requests for PIO cards were made. In 2000, the government created a committee to propose a framework for a global policy toward the “Indian diaspora.” Delivered in 2001, its 570-page report represented a major shift in Indian policy, proposing an ethnicization of Indian-ness that went beyond the actual nationality of the emigrants and their descendants. This policy may favor the growth of global institutions and organizations for a very divided population. This is because the efforts to organize migrants and their descendants at a national or global

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level have been much less successful than groupings based on four essential dimensions: religion (Hindu, Sikh, and Parsi), language (Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu), region of origin (Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat), and caste. To take just one example, the British anthropologist Steven Vertovec notes in The Hindu Diaspora that 90 of the 737 Hindu organizations in Great Britain have a caste name.10 Broad trends are hard to prove, but one factor seems to be of capital importance: the colonial or postcolonial migratory framework. In the earlier period, Indians were often too numerous to be a simple minority. In some countries, Indians (NRIs and PIOs combined) are the majority. This is the case for the island of Mauritius, whose 715,000 Indians represent 70 percent of the population. One can also cite Guyana, with 400,000 Indians (51 percent), or Fiji, with 340,000 (46 percent). In these cases, the religious element tends to dominate at the expense of an Indian identity. By contrast, postcolonial emigrants often found themselves with a minority status, which led to their collective presentation of themselves as “Indian.” According to the Hyderabad sociologist Chandrashekhar Bhat, their higher socioprofessional status allowed those migrants to stay in contact with their society of origin, whose stratification of caste and identity by language, region, and religion they attempted to reproduce.11 In 2001, the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora estimated that NRIs and PIOs together numbered more than 20 million.12 They are particularly numerous in Southeast Asia, including nearly 3 million in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and 1.7 million in Malaysia; in the Persian Gulf, with 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia; in North America, with 1.7 million in the United States and 850,000 in Canada; and in some African countries, including 1 million in South Africa.

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Europe is relatively underrepresented—65,000 in France and 71,000 in Italy—except for the United Kingdom, with 1,200,000. The Chinese

As an ancient Chinese poem has it, “Wherever ocean waves break on the shore, there are Chinese.” Since the end of the nineteenth century, there has been a term to designate those Chinese: huaqiao (temporary emigrant). The word was officially adopted by the Chinese authorities in 1911, but its meaning was restricted in 1957. Since then, a distinction has been made between Chinese who are living abroad (huaqiao) or who have returned from abroad (huiqiao) and noncitizen Chinese (haiwai huaren)—which refers to Chinese who have taken another nationality (waiji huaren)—and the descendants of Chinese emigrants (huayi).13 In his 1991 book, China and the Chinese Overseas, Wang Gungwu writes that the pattern of Chinese migration has historically involved four types, which roughly correspond to periods and kinds of migrants: huashang (businessman), huagong (coolie), huaqiao (temporary resident), and huayi (descendant of Chinese).14 The huashang type corresponds to the merchants and artisans and their families who departed for business purposes. It covers most of the Chinese migrations from the third century to the middle of the nineteenth to the South Seas (Nanyang): Philippines, Siam, Malaysia, and Sumatra. These groups of businessmen and planters benefited from the presence of Westerners—except when they were the victims of massacres by the Spanish or the Dutch. The huagong type of migrant was a part of the globalization of Chinese migration. As in the Indian case, the abolition of slavery by the colonial powers produced a system of contract labor—the coolie trade—

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between 1845 and 1874, as the European countries moved to exploit their new colonies. Though primarily directed to Southeast Asia and its rubber and sugarcane plantations, the coolie trade also funneled thousands of Chinese to the gold and copper mines of South Africa and Peru, to the “sugar islands” of the Caribbean, and to North America during the American and Canadian gold rushes in 1848 and 1858. Voluntary emigration by Chinese became established in the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of treaties between China and various countries. The flows then poured into the “new lands” to build the transcontinental railroad (Canada and the United States) or join the search for gold (Australia in 1870), until discriminatory measures against Chinese immigrants in these countries in the 1880s slowed the flows. The migrants then changed direction, heading toward Europe: Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. As the huaqiao type of emigrant, migrants for the first time were able to play a role in relation to their country of origin. Chinese from abroad became important vectors of nationalism and were influential in the overthrow of the empire and the declaration of the People’s Republic in 1911. The emergence of businessmen and intellectuals in their midst, as well as the migration of many teachers charged with the instruction of the émigrés’ children in Asian countries, reinforced the idea that emigrants and their offspring had an obligation to strengthen and maintain their national identity. The huayi type of migrant is the most recent. It includes the descendants of Chinese emigrants who left for another country, like the estimated fifty thousand who left Hong Kong and Malaysia for Great Britain between 1960 in 1971, and the hundreds of thousands who left Hong Kong and Taiwan for the United States after the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act abolished restrictions on Asians.

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These four types do not account for the recent flows of “new Chinese abroad” (xin huaqiao or xin yimin), however. These involve both legal flows (students, technicians, information technology specialists, businesspeople, and liberal professionals) and illegal flows. In the 1990s, organized networks developed to help people leave China without permission and clandestinely enter countries that strictly limited immigration. There are said to be several hundred thousand illegal Chinese in the United States and in Europe, notably in France. Around 1990, the population of overseas Chinese was estimated at 30 or 37 million, depending on whether you counted the Chinese of Hong Kong and Macao, which joined the People’s Republic in 1997 and 1999. Excluding the Chinese in Hong Kong and Macao, this population is today estimated at 34 million. By comparison, this figure was about 6 million in 1910, including Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong and Macao. The emigrants’ destinations, on the other hand, have hardly changed. At the beginning of this century, 90 percent of overseas Chinese were living in just five places: Hong Kong, Macao, the Dutch West Indies, Thailand, and the Malay Peninsula, including Singapore. Today, four countries account for nearly 70 percent of the total: Indonesia, 7.3 million; Thailand, 6.1 million; Malaysia, 5.3 million; and Singapore, 2.7 million. Five other countries account for another 20 percent: the Philippines, 2.2 million; Myanmar, 2 million; the United States, 2 million; Vietnam, 1.9 million; and Canada, 910,000. The rest are scattered among 126 other countries. Besides Hong Kong and Macao, Chinese make up the majority of the resident population of one country: Singapore (75 percent).15 Those populations harbor great ethnolinguistic and geographical diversity, however. Some 90 percent of overseas Chinese come

The Spaces of Dispersion / 49

from the four provinces of China’s southeast coast: Guangdong, Fujian, Hainan, and Zhejiang. Squeezed between the sea and the mountains, with crowded cities and little arable land, these became China’s portals to the world (Fujian tea supplied Europe at the start of the twentieth century) and the world’s gateways into China (until 1842, Canton, in Guangdong Province, was the country’s only port of entry). Specifically, just a few cities of these provinces are emigration sites. The Chinese call each of them qiaoxiang, “émigré village.” They are points of departure but also places of reception for the money sent by the emigrants, on which these cities often depend for at least half their revenue. They are also places to which huiqiao return when they come home to live and build their houses. Though the great majority of Chinese abroad come from only four provinces, they represent enormous ethnolinguistic variety because of southern China’s complex dialect structure. The existence of many dialects, often mutually incomprehensible, favored the emergence of a corresponding number of migratory networks and patterns. Almost all the Hakka, Minbei, Minnan, and Hailam live in Southeast Asia; the Cantonese in the United States; the Teochiu in France; and the Wu in western Europe, as original immigrants or migrants from somewhere else. In France, for example, the Teochiu are refugees, having fled Cambodia and Vietnam, where they settled in the late 1970s. By contrast, the Qingtian from Zhejiang Province first came to France during World War I as contract workers in the weapons factories. In the eyes of the Chinese authorities, emigrants have represented variously a danger or a benefit. They were vectors of nationalism before 1949, but after the founding of the People’s Republic they and the families they left behind in China were suspected of having ties to foreign imperialism. Their image became even worse

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during the 1960–70 Cultural Revolution. In 1978, however, Teng Hsiao-p’ing’s new policy instead stressed the role they could play through their financial investment in the country’s economic modernization. There are no statistics on investors’ ethnic origins, but it is estimated that overseas Chinese account for about 70 percent of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. The total influx is considerable: $26.8 billion between 1979 and 1991, and more than $10 billion per year after 1992. The figure stabilized at around $40–45 billion per year between 1997 and 2001, making China the world’s second country in FDI received, after the United States. China became first as FDI inflows rose in recent years, reaching $72 billion in 2005.16 In 2003, Hong Kong represented 40.4 percent of the inflow. Still, according to the Chinese Bureau of Statistics, between 1983 and 2000 Hong Kong represented 49.6 percent of that investment, Taiwan 7.5 percent, and Singapore 4.8 percent, as against 8.6 percent for the United States, 8.1 percent for Japan, and 7.7 percent for the European Union.17 The Armenians

To describe their presence abroad, Indians use the metaphor of the banyan, a fig tree whose spreading trunks send roots into the ground, contributing to the vitality of the entire tree. Armenians, by contrast, use that of the walnut tree, with roots extending to the four corners of the world.18 With a historic homeland located between the Black and Caspian seas, Armenians were longtime traders between Asia and Europe since at least the fifth century b.c. The politically and economically powerful Armenian empire dominated the entire Middle East in the first century a.d., before being defeated by the Roman armies.

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Though they converted to Christianity in the fourth century, Armenians maintained a unique brand distinct from that of the Roman and Orthodox churches, within the Roman Empire and in more or less sovereign kingdoms. After the conquest of Armenia by Byzantium in 1045, a large number of Armenians left the country, heading west to the Black Sea and Bulgaria or northwest to Poland and Ukraine. Many nobles and priests fled to Cilicia on modern Turkey’s southeast coast, where they founded an independent state. It survived until 1375—the last Armenian state until the proclamation of the Republic of Armenia in 1991. Even in the absence of a state, Armenians maintained a sense of community, however. Starting in the fourteenth century, business ventures led to the establishment of Armenian commercial colonies in the Levant, eastern Europe, along the Volga, and, later, as far away as Persia, India, the Far East, and western Europe. This sparked a search for trustworthy fellow countrymen for information and contact mechanisms, such as the drafting in Armenian of texts on prices, measures, and weights. The Ottoman sultans encouraged Armenian settlement in the empire after 1453, and Armenians gained the right to community and religious autonomy in the millet system. The Armenian Apostolic Church was the cement that held the dispersed population together until the idea of Armenian nationalism very gradually began to spread in the eighteenth century. This was further stimulated by the founding abroad of newspapers, schools, associations, and political parties such as the Hentchak (social democratic) and Dashnak (revolutionary) parties. Fueled by the suspicion that Armenian nationalism was being supported by the Russians, the Ottoman repressions of 1894–96 and 1909 killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians and drove others to emigrate, notably to the United States. In 1915–16 the

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Ottoman authorities deported Armenians to Syria and eliminated the Armenian elites in a genocide that killed three-quarters of the region’s 2 million Armenians. Half of the survivors headed for Russian Armenia; the rest left for Egypt, Iran, Argentina, France, or the United States, where large Armenian communities already existed. Deprived of their citizenship, they were granted refugee status in 1924. Their significant presence in the Near East and eastern Europe before 1939 gradually diminished with the international crises affecting those regions. The French historian Anahide Ter-Minassian calls the 1915 genocide a “foundational event” (événement-matrice) that created a “memory of catastrophe” and marked the start of what some have called “the Great Diaspora”: the Armenians’ separation from their historic homeland.19 The independent Republic of Armenia (1918– 20) led by the Dashnak party collapsed and became a Soviet republic in 1921. Repatriation (nerkaght) to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia (SSRA) attracted only 42,000 people between the two world wars and about 102,000 between 1946 and 1948.20 Armenians living elsewhere did not consider it their country. The political structures reflected the radical opposition between those who supported the SSRA (the Hantchak and Ramgavar parties) and those who refused to recognize it (the Dashnak party). The Apostolic Church and the Armenian language played a crucial role in maintaining national unity, as did the growth of local Armenian neighborhoods (as in Issy-les-Moulineaux, southwest of Paris), which maintained the “community connection.” Starting in 1965 the call for recognition of the genocide—which France answered in 1998— constituted another avenue of union. New groups emerged that affirmed their commitment to an Armenia not limited to the SSRA’s

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borders, and that engaged in terrorist violence between 1975 and 1985. The creation of the independent Republic of Armenia in 1991 opened a period of dialog between the authorities and the representatives of Armenians abroad. Current statistics suggest a population of about 7 million Armenians worldwide, 3 million of whom are in Armenia. Los Angeles, with some 250,000, is the second-largest Armenian city in the world after the country’s capital, Yerevan. According to government figures, available on the official Web site www.armeniadiaspora .com in January 2007, those living outside the nation’s borders are distributed as follows: more than 2 million in Russia, about 1.5 million in the United States, 460,000 in Georgia, 450,000 in France, 250,000 in Lebanon, 150,000 in Ukraine, and 130,000 in Argentina. Scholars have put forth different estimates—800,000 for the United States and 350,000 for France—but the statistic for Turkey poses a problem. One estimate suggests that more than 2 million Armenians live in Turkey, while most other statistics hover between 40,000 and 80,000. This touches on a crucial point: Who counts? And who counts what? STATIC THINKING ABOUT DISPERSION

In the last thirty years, each of the four populations presented above has been commonly referred to as a “diaspora,” to the point where this naming can be assimilated to a status they are granted. Why not? But we should ask ourselves, what does this usage imply? It allows us to assign a geohistorical experience to other people, in the framework of comparisons related to the continuous and persistent relationship between a people and a country in spite of distance. It

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also allows us to postulate the existence of a community whose name is “diaspora,” and which simultaneously represents the shared awareness of the nation’s physical absence and its symbolic presence. Finally, it allows us to encompass the dispersed peoples within one and the same meaningful framework, independently of their social, economic, political, cultural, and other differences. The diaspora exists, all other things being equal. In a completely paradoxical fashion, “diaspora” has rarely been a term as dynamic as its etymology suggests. Today, its meaning is approximately the following: “A national, ethnic, or religious community living far from its native land—or its place of origin or reference—in several foreign territories,” or even “An ‘alien’ cultural group living in a single country.” This static word, “diaspora,” used to describe the result of population movements, presents the further singularity of carrying a meaning that is itself more and more dispersed. “Diaspora” is currently so labile that it is not unusual to notice a number of semantic shifts within a single text, sometimes within the same paragraph. Without going into details, it is possible to distinguish at least seven main usages:

. . . .

The statistical ensemble of dispersed people and their descendants, that is, a population: the Chinese diaspora includes 20 million people. An ethnocultural community existing in several countries: for example, the representatives of the Indian diaspora. An “ethnic” population within a country, or even a city: for example, the Chinese diaspora in France or the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles. A particular migratory pattern: traumatic, labor, or business diasporas.

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. . .

A condition that is both historical and psychological, and individual or collective, which can be interpreted as either positive or negative: to be a diaspora people, to live in diaspora. A geographical area of dispersion characterized by its remoteness from a country of origin: the Armenians of the diaspora. A subset of a larger “diaspora”: Sephardim or Ashkenazim diasporas for the Jews; Gujarati or Telugu diasporas for the Indians; Teochiu or Cantonese diasporas for the Chinese.

Behind, or rather beneath, this slippery word, hide a variety of things we are reluctant to fully think through. In a completely unexpected way, the use of the notion of diaspora is actually a vehicle for static thinking. In general, using the word “diaspora” hides several illusions that are rarely, if ever, made explicit.

the illusion of essence According to this illusion, everything happens as if the name implied the real existence of a substance, a position the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein summarized this way: “A substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.”21 The diaspora exists; one can encounter it in the form of archetypes, the best known of which is the Jewish diaspora. The task then consists of—starting from an analysis of the archetype under consideration—working out a definition that would postulate the adequacy of the word “diaspora” so that it applies to any migratory phenomenon matching the predefined criteria. The concept corresponds to the thing’s reality. Only phenomena that are identical in reality can deserve the title of “diaspora.” the illusion of community Here, “diaspora” is not a social construct, but a sum: the fact of the dispersed members of the

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population under consideration. This means that—depending on the case and according to modalities that are only rarely specified— not only are living migrants (nationals or not) tallied but so are their descendants. Writing down the number of those who compose the “diaspora” is a way of making it real. This addition is the equivalent of building community according to the logic of aggregation, as if a common situation is enough to create a common conscience, as if the ontological (ethnic, national, religious) relations between the dispersed people establish an effective link, as if sharing the en-soi, (i.e., objective common characteristics) necessarily implies the pour-soi (i.e., the formation of a group self-consciousness), thus making the “diaspora” an actor capable of thought and action.

the illusion of continuity The “diaspora” is never challenged in connection with the preceding principles. Since it exists, as attested by the counting of thousands or millions of individuals, it can’t disappear. The essentialism that characterizes it exempts it from any examination of its modalities of establishment, decline, transformation, or disappearance. This static thinking has two principal effects: politically, it allows the named “diaspora” to come into existence; scientifically, it makes it impossible to reason in terms of process. To understand what is happening, it seems more appropriate to take the illusions of essence, community, and continuity in the static analytical framework described above and transform them into dynamic dimensions of active processes. the identification dimension This includes the analysis of everything related to the use of a term like “diaspora,” including other words that are usually translated as “diaspora” ( galut,

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tefoutsot, spyurk, huaqiao, and so on). When the same word is used, does it cover the same phenomenon, the same population, the same issues? Who does the naming? Names come from four sources: the authorities in the country of origin, those of the host country, the official representatives of a transstate community, and social scientists obliged to give the “diaspora” a name. How are these four connected?

the differentiation dimension This dimension includes the question of unity and the limits of those transstate communities. It invites an investigation of their foundations (ethnic, religious, spatial, political, and so on) to understand if that which brings them together is more important than that which divides them, and at what level. In other words, what are the pertinent levels of belonging to a single community: The local? The regional (host country or continent)? The global? the historicity dimension This includes the preceding two. The issue of identification involves two kinds of history: historicity (the past) in order to guarantee continuity through space and persistence through time, and historiography (the writing of the past) as a performative mode of existence. Writing history makes something exist in history. In the same way, the differentiation must be understood both synchronically (What does it mean to belong to a given moment?) and diachronically: When does a transstate community begin? At dispersion? At the establishment of institutions that represent the group outside of space? When does it end? Escaping from the epistemological impasse that ordinary words—even when presented as concepts—put us in would no doubt involve reversing the order of priorities. Rather than assign-

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ing migrant populations a place in a palette of preexisting terms (exile, diaspora, or refugee community), why don’t we first try to identify the phenomena and processes linked to collective existence outside of a land—real or mythical—constructed as a place of origin, a point of departure or of reference? Only in a second stage would we need to give them a name within the framework of a sociological initiative that Emile Durkheim sums up this way: “What matters is not to distinguish words; it is to succeed in distinguishing the things that are covered by the words.”22 Later on, we can find “new words” to designate phenomena that resemble each other. The difficulties of inventing a conceptual language can be resolved partly by adopting another epistemological initiative in sociology, which is present in Emile Durkheim but is, above all, formalized by Max Weber: the establishment of ideal types—that is, instruments of thought that are not the final goal of research but are instead ways of apprehending the real.

chapter 3

Maintaining Connections Holding On and Letting Go

Any attempt to describe the collective relationship to space and time involves suggesting answers to several intertwined questions: What are the social frameworks through which relationships to a community’s underpinnings are changed and reshaped? What “makes” a community? Is distance the equivalent of detachment or attachment? What is the role of time in maintaining and transforming connections? In this chapter, I propose a schema I hope can serve as an analytical framework for answering these questions. It postulates the existence of different ways of being connected to the referentorigin. Building communities, whether local or transstate, can then occur without reference to a territory. STRUCTURING THE COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE ABROAD

Since the late nineteenth century, studies of migratory phenomena have generally distinguished them according to two main factors: how people left, and why. Migrations could then usually be classified 59

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as voluntary/involuntary and political/economic. The two are usually merged, with voluntary corresponding to economic, and involuntary to political. Linking these binary terms to “immigrant/ refugee” then makes it possible to consider the migrants’ evolution as “natural”: a voluntary economic immigrant is in the country to work, whereas a political refugee forced to flee opposes his or her country politically. Some recent studies have tried to move beyond this dichotomy, but it remains the keystone of most analyses, in keeping with the pattern of static thinking described earlier. Since the 1980s, “diaspora” has tended to replace “immigration” and “emigration” in their current usages of “population.” For example, the expression “Iraqi immigration (or emigration) in France,” as a reference to France’s Iraqi or Iraqi-born population, often becomes the “Iraqi diaspora in France.” Yet it is striking to see to what extent that designation generally “forgets” the existence of a political dimension or combines it with other factors when considering them as causes of migration, which amounts to much the same thing. To cite just one of the more flagrant cases, most studies of the “Chinese diaspora” consider geographic distribution, economic organization, and individual or collective relationships to the country of origin as reasons for leaving, but not the political aspect of certain activities, organizations, and publications. It is as if the political element is not part of the “diaspora,” but is the outgrowth of another notion, exile. As a result, if political militants are included in the “diaspora” numbers, their uniqueness disappears, even though they may differ radically from other migrants in their relationship to the country of origin. The usage of “diaspora” tends to downplay politics while promoting uniformity. For instance, the report by the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora does not once mention the reality of caste differences among PIOs.

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This static view of “diaspora” joins an equally static view of the political or economic “nature” of migrations and migrants. Aside from the fact that it is often very hard to separate economic and political causes for migration, this view prevents us from taking into account changes of nature that occur in the host country: “economic migrants” who become political; “political migrants” who do not get involved in political activities related to their country of origin; and previously uninvolved migrants who renew their connection with their home country. Or this possibility of a change in “nature”—from economic to political and vice versa—occurs in an attenuated view of continuity, where the diaspora is “dormant” and awakens without ever disappearing. One peculiarity of the current use of “diaspora” in social science is the coexistence of the loosest, most all-encompassing, and conceptually oddest usages. Since the 1980s, a thousand adjectives appended to “diaspora” have bloomed: classical, modern, new, emerging, of refugees, dormant, traumatic, imperial—to cite but a few from an ever lengthening list. Again, the issue of language is of crucial importance. The noun “transnationalism” and its adjective “transnational,” which have become so common, often serve only to distort different relationships to physical space. The reason for this lies in what Walker Connor calls “the muddy understanding of the national phenomenon,” which leads people to use the word “national” and its derived words as synonyms for “state” and prevents us from considering, for example, any nonstate national factors.1 “International relations” are actually “interstate relations.” “Transnational” presents the same problem. Composed of the prefix “trans-,” meaning “by way of ” or “through,” and the adjective “national,” it logically refers to phenomena that take place through or by way of nations. But this is not the meaning promoted by writers who use the word. Instead, they

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give it the sense of an ethnic, national, or religious unity, in spite of the presence of people living in different countries. The content of this “transnational” link, which should actually be called a transstate one, is never exactly specified. A link with what? A state? Sometimes. But it could also be with another referent-origin: a nation, people, land, or nonterritorial identity. The political scientists William Miles and Gabriel Sheffer have suggested differentiating between nonethnic “diasporas,” which are transnational because they are composed of members of different nationalities, and ethnonational “diasporas,” which are transstate.2 I propose the consideration of four ideal types that involve the structuring of the collective experience abroad. I call them “centroperipheral,” “enclaved,” “atopic,” and “antagonistic.”

centroperipheral mode In this mode, the existence and organization of a national community in a host country is closely linked with the individuals’ home country. Official institutions— embassy, consulate, cultural center, educational establishments, and so on—play a central role, as do the expatriates’ own associations, often within a body representing all the nationals living in a given country (Greeks in the United States, Hungarians in France, and so on). Moreover, the state may also create or support an organization designed to bring these associations together so as to ensure representation of its overseas nationals. This corresponds with what Khachig Tölöyan calls a “transnation”: all of a country’s nationals, whether inside or outside its borders.3 enclaved mode This involves the local organization of a community within a host country, usually in a city. When community neighborhoods are involved, this mode eventually becomes part

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of the urban fabric, but it also can exist as a network of associations that gather like with like. The enclave operates locally and helps its participants get to know and stay in touch with one another. Unlike the centroperipheral mode, the enclave is based not on a formal link of nationality but on a shared identity.

atopic mode This is a transstate mode, but it does not seek to acquire a physical territory. It refers to a way of being in the world between states that is built around a common origin, ethnicity, or religion that does not reduce one to being a subject of a host country. This identity is best expressed in dispersion itself. It presents two aspects that Emmanuel Ma Mung considers to be the main criteria of a “diaspora”: multipolarity—a presence in several countries—and interpolarity, the existence of links between the poles.4 This is a space of more than a place, a geography with no other territory than the space described by the networks. It is a territory without terrain. antagonistic mode Like the preceding one, this is a transstate mode. It corresponds to what in my 2002 book, Politiques d’exil, I call an “exile polity”: a political space that is both national and transstate, formed by groups who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the current regime in their country of origin, or who consider the country to be under foreign occupation.5 In both cases, these exile polities’ goal is to liberate their country, nation, people, or land. To achieve this end, they compete with each other to convince the major powers to recognize their legitimacy in waging this struggle. A state of war exists between the regime and the exile polity (considered both as a whole and as the collection of competing groups). This antagonism sometimes leads to actual war between the exiles

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The Interplay of Structural Axes Structuring Mode

1

2

3

Centroperipheral

+

-

-

Enclaved

-

+

-

Atopic Antagonistic

-

+

+

+/-

+

+

and the regime. This can take the form of guerrilla warfare—for example, as between the African National Congress and the South African apartheid regime, or between Afghan exiles in Pakistan and the communist, then Taliban, regimes in Kabul. It can also lead to warfare in which exiles fight against their own country’s national army, as often happened during World War II. These four structuring modes vary along three axes: (1) the relationship to the existing regime; (2) the relationship to a referentorigin that is separate from the state or from an identity; and (3) the interpolarity of individuals, groups, and communities. The possible permutations along these axes are summed up in the above table. With respect to the other poles and to the state, the four ideal types exhibit three different forms of organization: the island (enclaved); the peninsula (centroperipheral), and the archipelago (antagonistic and atopic). These provide ways of considering spatial autonomy, territorial links, and deterritorialized networking. The atopic and antagonistic modes differ in their relationship to the state. The first is indifferent to the state, whereas the second opposes it, as the accompanying diagram illustrates. I want to make one thing clear: this is not a typology. A typology generally involves an exclusive classification, where the presence of [table1]

Referentorigin

State

Antagonistic relationship

Reciprocal relationship

Referentorigin

Atopic Mode

Principal link structuring the community (state or referent-origin)

Locally based community in another country

State

Enclaved Mode

Four modes of structuring the collective experience abroad

Representative Institution

State

Centroperipheral Mode

State Referentorigin

Antagonistic Mode

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an “object” in one category prevents it from being present in another. A typology tends to freeze phenomena in an identity, defining them once and for all and making it very hard to move them from one category to another. Despite the efforts of some authors— notably Robin Cohen, William Safran, and Gabriel Sheffer—to limit “diaspora” to a specific and restricted sense, we have to recognize that the current tendency is toward the proliferation of “forms” of diaspora. As a result, the objects classified are being subdivided and assigned to a single class of phenomena whose coherence is guaranteed by strict criteria. That is not the purpose of the scheme I am proposing here. While the four modes may warrant more specificity, this formulation takes into account three points that are often neglected or impossible within a typology framework: (1) Populations living abroad, whether or not united by nationality, do not necessarily share the same referent-origin. (2) The structuring modes presented above do not exist in pure form: in practice, they are often combined for greater effectiveness. (3) It is possible to move from one structuring mode to another and back again. As I noted earlier, descriptions of “diasporas” overlook the political dimension of discourse and practices, or they combine within a single framework people who say they support the current regime in the country of origin, those who declare their opposition to it, and those who don’t take a position either way. In all three cases, the analysis fails to include the very strong relationship that—absent any (re)conciliation—unites those who view themselves as part of a loyal “colony” and those who claim to be part of the dissident exile polity. It would be wrong to think that their existence as enemies makes them unaware of each other, however. In fact, they watch each other and trade blow for blow at both the highest level (regime

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against government in exile or worldwide representative organization) and the most local (between associations or organizations operating in the same country or city). For example, the French anthropologist Gisèle Bousquet describes the often-violent struggle in Paris in the 1980s between supporters and enemies of the Hanoi regime, as an echo of other struggles unfolding in other places.6 Most regimes deal very differently with those nationals or former nationals overseas who challenge their legitimacy and those who support it. The intelligence services of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc made a distinction between “émigrés” and the “colony” while keeping an eye on both. Understanding the organization of the national population abroad involves grasping the eventual existence of these conflicts, as well as other ways of keeping the relationship to a common identity alive. The Chinese and Chinese-born population abroad displays the four structuring modes in institutional form: “colonies” built around loyalty to the Beijing regime; Chinatown “enclaves”; the exile polity of opponents to the regime; and certain very significant forms of transstateness, notably economic. The structuring modes described here bring spatial frameworks into play. The centroperipheral relationship corresponds to the national level, the enclave corresponds to practices at the local level, and the atopic implements the transstate stance itself, with neither center nor physical location. As a result, it is almost impossible for one of these structures to exist in its pure state. Within the enclave, a centroperipheral pattern can develop if the home country tries to exercise its influence on it, as can the network-creating atopic pattern, and both can compete with one another. In the same way, the operation of an exile polity can be accompanied by powerful enclave patterns when a city or a neighborhood becomes the symbol of the struggle. Miami’s Little Havana, where the Cuban community has

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waged its fight against the Castro regime for the last forty-five years, is probably the most visible example of a “locality” in a transstate space, that of the wider exile Cuban struggle. Finally, while “reality” can be a combination of several modes, the ongoing relationship with the referent-origin can also change— for example, passages from the centroperipheral to the antagonistic mode may occur, and vice versa. When individuals or groups refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a regime, this creates the necessary conditions for the formation of an exile polity. In general, the situation leads to either migrations that give rise to politicized organizations, or to the politicization of communities in each host country. The consequence of the split between those who are “pro” and “anti” régime is the coexistence of people living very close to each other, with some representing the “official country” and others claiming to represent the “real country,” the “other country,” or the “free country.” This politicization, which involves taking a stance on legitimacy, tends to invade all community space, forcing everyone in it to take sides. It turns individuals, associations, and newspapers into opponents that may once have merely been economic migrants and ways to keep connected with the country left behind. An example is the politicization of Italians after Mussolini came to power in Rome. The anti-Fascist struggle waged by those who felt they incarnated the “real Italy” opposed the consolidation of the “colonies” in Il Duce’s Fasci all’Estero framework. Another example is the situation of Poles who emigrated to North America or elsewhere in Europe. They closed ranks in the Allied armies to oppose Nazi aggression but, after 1944, split in their attitude toward the communist regime in Lublin, then Warsaw. Other kinds of changes in the relationship to the origin are possible—for example, moving from the atopic to the antagonistic mode. This is illustrated by the

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history of the Jewish people. Long deprived of a geographical center and a central land, the multipolar structure of Judaism in exile maintained Judaism’s identity thanks to its religious temporality, which allowed people to feel they were all celebrating religious events at the same time, despite being physically apart. The spread of Zionism marked the passage to another pattern, that of an ideological and physical return to the land and the struggle to create a state. Arrayed against this new stance were all the groups for whom the essence of Jewish identity lay in exile and dispersion. This belief has survived the creation of the State of Israel, notably within a current of thought called diasporist. While the founding of Israel did not unify Judaism’s mode of existence, the creation of a state for people deprived of one, or the establishment of a new, legitimate regime, is generally enough to terminate the exile polity. The members of the opposition in exile, whether they go home to live or not, give their allegiance to the new regime, and this often leads to a modified centroperipheral mode. For the leaders of political organizations in exile, the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe and the establishment of democratic regimes in 1989–90 marked the end of their struggle. Renewing contact with embassies and returning home—even briefly—also signal a rejoining of the “colony” and the unity of the community, both locally and at the transstate level. BUILDING COMMUNITY

What is a community? The term seems so clear and self-evident that the question may appear pointless. It isn’t. First of all, in sociology the notion of community is often opposed to that of society. In his 1887 book, Community and Civil Society, Ferdinand Tönnies

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defines community (Gemeinschaft) as natural, and civil society (Gesellschaft) as resting on artifice: “All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world. In Gemeinschaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. We go out into Gesellschaft as if into a foreign land.”7 Community and society can coexist, but the era of society—that is, modernity— replaces that of community when contractual relationships displace those of blood and place. Yet despite being based on such “natural” characteristics as blood, ethnicity, skin color, caste, or clan, which are so many given identities—losing or acquiring them is difficult, if not impossible—community does not exist in and of itself. As Durkheim and Weber explained early in the twentieth century regarding race, mere objective membership in a “natural” group does not become the cause of social phenomena or socially meaningful actions, because the social cannot be explained by the natural. For Weber, what creates community is a social relationship based on the subjective feeling of belonging to the same community. I add that this belief is sustained by the existence of an objective community that is socially constructed and symbolized by institutions, spokespeople, emblems, and myths. The nation-state emerged when the attributes of society and community were combined. The artificial form that protects the interests of those who belong to it corresponds to the state; the sense of unity created by giving shape to a shared past corresponds to the nation. Migrants, whose mental outlook has been shaped in settings other than the host society’s, try to re-create those settings when they can in order to feel less estranged from themselves. Whether

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they succeed depends on how massive the migration is, how much freedom to organize the host country grants the migrants, and whether they are dispersed or concentrated. But a feeling of belonging can still exist even when conditions do not come together to establish community structures. At the family level it is expressed in maintaining or discovering religious, culinary, clothing, musical, or literary traditions; in the daily practice of one’s language; in choosing children’s names, and so on. Whether maintained or discovered, the feeling does not signify belonging to a community in the objective sense, even though the development of new communication technologies would appear to allow objective connection at a distance, as we will see later. Obviously, the concentration of new arrivals within the same city favors the process of (re)constituting fellow feeling. The local then becomes the place where community identities are forged on the model of those that prevail in the home country. This occurs through the intermediary of institutions or practices that ensure the relevance today of yesterday’s settings in their shape here and now and, if possible, through the generations: Armenians in Issy-lesMoulineaux or Los Angeles; Italians in East Harlem or Bobigny; Jews in Alexandria, the Sentier in Paris, or New York; and Sikhs in Vancouver or London. Depending on the social organizations of the countries of origin, so-called modern structures emerge that gather people based on nationality (Italian, Armenian, Indian, and so on), or “premodern” ones emerge based on clan, caste, religion, language, or region of origin. Fellow feeling can also be promoted by physical concentration within the city. The insular model can take physical shape in the creation of an actual neighborhood, a “home away from home.” The physical actualization of the community

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presence—which was so well analyzed by the sociologists who studied Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s—is what gives rise to Chinatowns, Little Italys, and Little Indias.8 Chinese neighborhoods are the best known of these communities inscribed in the urban space. They date back to the nineteenth century in Asian cities such as Singapore, Bangkok, and Manila; in each, Chinese immigrants called the neighborhood where they lived Tangcheng (Tang City). There were several reasons for their concentration: deliberate racial distribution by the colonial power, as in most Southeast Asian cities; ethnic and racial segregation shaped by the inclinations of arriving migrants in the United States, Canada, and Australia; or the growth of the city around an earlier Chinese settlement, as in Kuala Lumpur. Though Chinatowns are not necessarily very big—for a long time, New York’s was only eight blocks square—they are visually striking, with their profusion of Chinese characters and distinctive, small-scale architecture built around stores—groceries, restaurants, medicinal herb shops, and gambling houses—or regional specialties, such as jewelry in Bangkok. They are cities within the city and mostly closed to the outside world. Because of this, they are able to maintain a traditional stratification based on clan and local origin. This is the role of the huiguan (native place) associations. Later, umbrella organizations develop, grouping the huiguan in order to speak in the name of the community as a whole. Leadership then falls to the most important associations or professions, often those of businesspeople. In New York’s Chinatown until the 1960s, this was the role of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also called the Six Companies, which guarded its traditions and kept Chinatown practically shut off from the world. To repeat, no community exists on its own. It is the organized,

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structured, objectively visible shape of the most intimate things shared by people with the same origin. To accomplish this, a community needs structures that define it. It is never merely the sum of all those who come from the same country: this would be a simplistic and false representation. Its unity rests on signs, values, and rules controlled by community authorities. Those who embody them have the right to speech and influence by their natural or acquired rank, but they are themselves as much created by the community that recognizes them as creators of the community they represent. During the twentieth century this dialectic changed in response to the foreign, localized communities’ growing need to work together to gain greater visibility in their host countries. Particularism was blurred, yielding to a common identity presented as a national one. Its representatives made this “national community” a reality by naming it and giving it a face. The community rooted in actual practices thus disappears in favor of an imagined community whose useful (statistical) scope is larger than that of individual or collective interactions. The more an ethnic population is numerous, concentrated, and organized, the more the community thus (re)formed can effectively support the maintenance of cultural markers that function as both internal landmarks and external signs. The public display of celebrations such as Chinese New Year, of specific businesses or eating places, or of habits of dress, such as the wearing of the turban by Sikhs, does not mean the same thing to those who live inside this world of signs and to those who see it from the outside. On one side, what is involved is the connection with the community through the presentation of that which unites it; on the other, the defining of cultural distinctiveness in the public space. The French anthropologist Anne Raulin showed how the double signage used by North

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African and Chinese businesses fulfills this function. Where one customer may see only the simple expression of an exotic Arab or Asian identity, an initiate will discern in the use of certain alphabets or the prominence of certain symbols an identity that could be Kabyle, Berber, Thai, or Cantonese.9 Similarly, where some spectators may just see Indian dances, the Punjabi will recognize the Bhangra, a popular Sikh dance, while the Gujarati may worship the goddess Durga by dancing the Dandiya. Must we see here proof of a possible cultural purity? No. Besides, “pure” compared to what? Some communities’ isolation would seem to have resulted in the survival of vanished rituals, language expressions, and traditions. But this does not mean these are pure vestiges, especially if one considers that all traditions are built, invented, and reinvented with new materials yet are always presented as pure. Promoting purity is an effective argument, since the community operates on an ideal of continuity with its origin. But traditions are never transplanted in exactly the same way. Sooner or later, the influence of changes in the mental attitudes of the migrants and their descendants begins to have an effect. So the traditions are the product of a syncretism, a novel fusion of different cultural elements, just as the transplanted language, ritual, or custom was already the product of earlier syncretisms. But no “transplanted” community can rest only on the belief in a transplantation. You can’t move roots to a new soil and expect the same tree to grow as in the mother forest. To further extend the organic metaphor so popular in studies of communities and the language of community spokespeople, the purity that must be maintained depends on the near-total absence of “crossbreeding.” Endogamy, meaning marriage within the national, ethnic, or religious group, is encouraged, if not mandatory. The existence of an “ethnic” neighborhood

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generally facilitates the multiple contacts that are necessary for endogamy, as well as the survival of traditional matrimonial practices. But when the restrictions to be obeyed are many, ethnic matrimonial strategies take place in an expanded space that includes the local, the regional, and the country of origin. Punjabi marriages must take place between people of the same region, religion, and caste. When this proves difficult or impossible within the local ethnic population, the search is broadened. Sometimes it is easier to return to Punjab to get married. The Internet revolution has transformed the matrimonial marketplace by globalizing it. A site such as www.punjabimarriage.com carries marriage offers for Punjabis and Sikhs of the entire world. Far from necessarily favoring universalization or homogenization, globalization also facilitates the means that are at the disposal of community specificities.

CONNECTIONS BASED ON RELIGION AND ECONOMICS

In creating a geography without physical territory, dispersion is never so unified as when the local is able to give meaning to the global, and vice versa. Two elements of collective life are fundamental in this process: religion and economics. These are such broad topics that I limit my discussion here to their main points. As we have seen, the word “diaspora” was long limited to the religious realm, particularly to Judaism and Christianity (Catholic and Protestant). Martin Baumann notes that the theoretical usage of “diaspora” in the history of religion began only in the mid-1990s, and that, symmetrically, diaspora studies have long neglected the religious factor in favor of ethnicity and nationalism.10 Yet in 1987 the British professor of religion Ninian Smart gave three reasons for

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linking “diaspora” (a term he did not define) and religion: the religious adaptations in a migration situation; the possible changes in practices and dogma in the country of origin; and the important role played by the “diaspora phenomenon” in facilitating the emergence of multiethnicity in the modern world.11 The placement of religion in the spiritual world actually tends to keep it separate from the division of territory into political units, namely, states. Thus deterritorialized, religion is not limited in space. To be sure, there are promised lands and “national” religions, whether nationalized (Anglican), active in the building of the nation-state (Greek Orthodox), or inherently embodied by a people (Jewish or Armenian). But religion always seems to join local elements (practices) with global ones (texts and beliefs). Moreover, the sanctification of certain places or cities helps to weave a transstate geography composed of local nodes. It is precisely on this theme of the link between a religion and a national territory that a number of authors differ about the appropriateness of qualifying religions as “diasporas.” If Catholicism is in Rome, Islam in Mecca, Sikhism in Amritsar, and Judaism in Jerusalem, then being far from the center is the equivalent of living in diaspora, if you follow John Hinnells’s definition of a “diaspora religion,” for example: “The religion of any people who have a sense of living away from the land of the religion, or away from the ‘old country.’”12 But this would limit the reality of religion to the existence of a center and the connection between all the believers and that one center. In fact, there are often numerous holy places, and the fact that some religions, like Islam or Catholicism, are in the majority in many countries can make those countries important religious centers. Besides, religions do not all adopt the same institutional frameworks that might serve as resources for an existence apart

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from states. The sociologist Peggy Levitt identifies three forms of “transnational religious organization”: “extended,” as in the case of the Catholic Church, which has built a tight hierarchical network centered on the figure of the pope but is locally fairly autonomous; “negotiated,” as exemplified by the Protestant churches, which are united in a flexible and leaderless network; and “re-created,” when believers migrate to a country where no structure exists and they must build one from scratch.13 Recent studies of migrants’ religious practices allow us to view the relationship to the origin in ways other than the options of integrating the host society or returning home. Some writers view the notion of diaspora in a much more dynamic way. Stephen Vertovec and the French sociologist Chantal de Saint-Blancat both stress the reworking and transformation of rituals and practices in the migratory context, and both use the term “diaspora” to describe Hindu or Moslem populations, but in radically different ways. Vertovec thinks one can speak of a “Hindu diaspora,” because, like Sikhism and Judaism, Hinduism is not a proselytizing religion and Hindus all look to Bharat Mata—Mother India.14 Saint-Blancat feels that one can hypothesize a “Muslim diaspora” in the process of structuration and stabilization in Europe, despite two particularities that would seem contrary to a definition of a diaspora: the obligation for the faithful to return to the land of Islam, and the absence of a single original country.15 Today, the first is tending to disappear, while the second is undergoing the effects of a distinction between religion and culture that allows one to reterritorialize Islam in local contexts. The fact that the Muslim reality is not transitory, and that the links between the countries of origin, the new countries of residents, and the extraterritorial community here represented by the umma—the community of believers—are being maintained and re-created,

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argues in favor of the crystallization of a “diaspora.” It would be based on the identification of European Muslims to an extraterritorial, symbolic “elsewhere”: the Koranic revelation, whose content would be reworked in local territorial settings. Just as religion can help mesh the referent-origin and the creation of a nonterritorial existence, economics produces similar phenomena. In Tönnies’s sociology, the contract and business are typical forms of society, because they are the only links that connect individual strangers in a shared goal. But when shared utility supplants the preexisting community, one must recognize the existence of community economic forums that Tönnies or Weber would certainly consider nonmodern, resting mainly on a restricted market—a kind of market among one’s own kind that is not a global, open one. What are the relationships between dispersion and economics? For the last two centuries, migration from the poorer to the richer countries has been part of the dynamic of capitalism, as labor flows responded to entrepreneurs’ needs. Yet the globalization of migratory flows in the service of economic globalization hides a less visible side, where migrants use “dispersion as resource” (in Emmanuel Ma Mung’s phrase) to establish long-distance community economic relations.16 The response to globalization from above is a globalization “from below” in a transstate framework. Witness the Chinese networks of distribution and exchange, or the “transnational communities” described by the Cuban-American sociologist Alejandro Portes: economic networks based on a solidarity born of a common origin and the crossing of national borders.17 The Dominican Republic has hundreds of businesses created by former émigrés to the United States that operate in largely informal fashion by maintaining ongoing links with the United States for their supplies and sales.

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These economic activities, based on community solidarity and operating as networks between countries, occur within the recent and global development of a phenomenon that has been extensively studied in France by Michel Péraldi and Alain Tarrius: transborder migrant networks.18 The Belsunce neighborhood in Marseille is emblematic of this new form of organization in dispersion. It is a business and shopping center for North African and African communities but also the heart of the movement of merchandise (cars, cigarettes, and counterfeits) across the entire Mediterranean. It is an informal “bazaar economy” based on the trust born of face-to-face relationships. In it, the linguistic, juridical, and relational skills acquired during migratory travel become priceless assets. These networks, which Tarrius calls “migrants’ societies,” have their specific modes of cooptation—the process by which members of a group decide who will join them—and their own territories. They are inventing a novel way of existing in space and place. They are not “diasporas,” which, “while they sustain connections with countries of origin, quickly become complementary to the economies of the countries they settled in,” he writes. “The new nomads, on the other hand, stay connected to their place of origin and remain economically dependent on it alone.”19 It is these new nomads’ ability to adapt to local norms that make them people both from “here” and from “there.” Whether one feels one is from here, from there, or both—or neither, as in the case of the “dual absence” described by the late French sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad—what is always involved, even implicitly, is dealing with distance.20

chapter 4

Managing Distance

Being far from one’s native land and feeling nostalgic for it are ancient themes. They are found among poets and writers and are widely shared by those who have left to go abroad. Being far from home is often a rupture, and for the last two centuries state authorities and those living far from the referent-origin—state, nation, or territory—have tried to fight it. This chapter outlines three different approaches to shrinking the distance between individuals or groups and their land, whether it is their own homeland or that of their ancestors. The approaches’ aim is to create proximity in spite of physical distance: objective and legal proximity when it occurs or can occur within the formal links of nationality and representation within the state; political proximity when actions are taken from afar in the name of the nation against an occupying state or a regime judged illegitimate; and temporal proximity when modern means of communication allow a connected intimacy with the homeland despite being far away. 80

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THE STATE AND ITS NATIONALS ABROAD

In French, there is a specific word to designate someone who lives far from his or her country but is still a citizen of it: ressortissant. In the fourteenth century, this described the condition of someone who was under the authority of a court. It was only at the very start of the twentieth century that the word acquired its contemporary usage. Though specifically French, it points to the historical invention in the late eighteenth century of a link—namely, that of nationality— that underpins a formal connection between the state and its people who live abroad. People who leave the country are still connected to it in spite of distance, and they remain under the authority of the state, which both controls and protects them. During the nineteenth century, nationality gradually grew to mean that a person belonged to a state, and that the state was responsible for its nationals, wherever they might be. Before that—as with the German states before 1870—nationality could be lost by lengthy emigration, even if the person did not acquire another nationality. The existence or nonexistence of a state, with its sovereign power to grant or withdraw nationality and therefore citizenship, shapes the modern forms of belonging. For a long time and for all countries, citizens’ distance from the home territory was the equivalent of distance from full exercise of citizenship. In other words, distance from the territory was tantamount to distance in the civic connection. Conceived as the collection of rights and duties, citizenship was therefore ideally inscribed in a double enclosure: one enclosure of civic space for nationals alone, and a second enclosure of national territorial space for political activity, which was reserved for nationals and which excluded any foreign political activity. Only recently have countries developed

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policies that take into account their nationals or their descendants abroad. It is worth remembering that France’s pioneering Conseil supérieur des Français à l’étranger dates only from 1948. (It became the Assemblée des Français de l’étranger in 2004.) We are currently witnessing two kinds of transformations in what we think of as a nation. First, a “spatialization” of the nation beyond the territorial framework, and the formation of what one could call extraterritorial nations, of which citizens living abroad are real citizens. Second, the increasingly frequent inclusion in the national space of individuals living abroad who are unusual in that their link with the state is not one of nationality but of origin. What are being formed are what I call ultrastate nations, not in the sense of “superstate” but actually “beyond state.” In the following paragraphs, I detail some of the dimensions of these transformations by stressing the connections that countries maintain with their nationals or people of national origin living abroad, who have not yet been the subject of many broad studies.1 Today, many countries face the issue of having a large population of former citizens or their descendants outside their borders, whether the dissemination was due to the disappearance of an earlier state or empire or to ancient migrations. Maintaining a clearly defined link with them, often mediated by nationality, becomes a national priority or gradually develops as an important asset, especially at the economic level. The formation of independent states, a large part of whose population considered as “natural” lives abroad—usually as nationals of another country—leads to a clarification of the relationships between the interior and the exterior. The consequences of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, which returned a geographical and political center to the Jewish

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people, well illustrates the tensions that can arise between a national definition of belonging, which presupposes a territory, and an ethnocultural definition, which can do without one. The 14 May 1948 Declaration of Independence states that “the State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration [aliyah] and for the in-gathering of the exiles.” The July 1950 Law of Return affirms the right of every Jew recognized as such to freely immigrate to Israel as an oleh. The word aliyah (plural aliyot) actually means “immigration to Israel by a Jew,” but its symbolic meaning is “ascension”: a Jew “going up” to Israel is in fact “returning home.” He is therefore called an oleh (plural olim). Finally, the 1952 nationality law automatically grants Israeli citizenship to the olim. For the first time, returning to the land means entering a territory for Jews. Aliyah, which was an ancient phenomenon but for a long time only an individual one, was first arranged in 1882 by Zionist organizations, then after 1929 by the Jewish Agency. Five successive aliyot took place between 1882 and 1948, involving more and more immigrants: 1882–1903 (35,000), 1904–14 (40,000), 1919–23 (40,000), 1924–29 (82,000), and 1929–40 (250,000). The years 1945–48 saw the entry of some 80,000 mainly illegal immigrants. Between 1948 and 1999 there were 2.7 million olim, including 680,000 in 1948–51 and 609,000 in 1990–94, the height of aliyah of Jews from the former Soviet Union.2 The founding of a new territorial center for the Jewish people raised the question of the future place of Jews who “did not return.” This directly involves the meaning of exile, in the sense of galut. Two opposing camps developed: those who considered the founding of Israel to be the end of galut, and those for whom galut is part of the Jewish condition. This controversy involves the representation of the entire Jewish people and also crops up in language. Is the con-

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dition of non-Israeli Jews living outside Israel still “exile” (galut), or is it mere “dispersion” (tefoutsot)? Without either of the two poles— the State of Israel and the diaspora—gaining the upper hand, they recognized their mutual roles through the organization and financing of aliyah. But the Six-Day War in June 1967 and the threats to Israel’s survival led to greater unity. The relationship between the two poles grew, and Israel became increasingly recognized as the national center of the Jewish people. But tensions flared again in 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, and have continued since, for political and religious reasons. Jews in and out of Israel are divided over the war in Lebanon, the two intifadas (1987–1993 and 2000– 2003), and the current peace process. Moreover, the definition of the formal requirements for conversion to Judaism has pitted Jewish Americans and the Labor Party against the religious parties and the Likud. In the same way, the independence of the Republic of Armenia in 1991 has resulted in the return home of certain political groups operating abroad, notably the Revolutionary Armenian Federation. In 1998, newly elected president Robert Kocharian promised to strengthen relations with individuals of Armenian origin living overseas. A department charged with relations with the “diaspora”—spyurk in Armenian—was created within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1999 the Armenia-Diaspora conference was held at Yerevan that attracted “representatives of all Armenians”— some 800 elected or nominated delegates from fifty-two countries— and 250 Armenian officials. This conference marked the de facto establishment of official relations between the authorities and various community organizations abroad. It was decided to next establish committees on culture, economy, humanitarian affairs, politics, communication, and the possibility of creating an Armenia-

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Diaspora coordination organization. The burning question of nationality was very much in the air, since Article 14 of the Armenian Constitution of 1992 does not allow dual nationality. Despite a mention in the final text, no decision was reached. The second conference, in May 2002, confirmed this commitment, stating that “Armenians cannot be viewed as ‘aliens’ in their motherland,” and that being able to acquire dual nationality would allow “every Armenian to establish a full-fledged presence in his or her motherland.”3 Constitutional reform, notably on the subject of dual nationality, was at the heart of the 2003 presidential campaign, but the victory of the “no” vote in the constitutional referendum of 25 May 2003 caused the question to be temporarily shelved. A new referendum on 27 November 2005 finally removed the constitutional ban on dual citizenship. (A third conference took place 18–20 September 2006.) An unusual contemporary situation can be seen in the situation of Russians after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The passage from a federal structure, in which Russians played a leading role, to a structure of national states has resulted in 25 million “ethnic” Russians living outside of Russia’s borders. Yet the 28 November 1991 law establishes a nonethnic Russian citizenship. It is open to all those living in the Russian Federation, as well as to all former Soviet citizens living outside Russia who have not taken another nationality. The disappearance of Soviet citizenship has given way to the new states’ reformulation of the nationalities that existed in the USSR. Except for Estonia and Lithuania, they all grant citizenship to the residents of their countries. In November 1991 the Estonian parliament reenacted the former 1938 law on nationality, under which any immigrant who settled between 1938 and 1991 was illegal because of the foreign occupation of the country and could not

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become a citizen. As a result, a great number of Russians cannot acquire citizenship there. The 1994 Lithuanian law is similar. The other new countries’ legislations are less strict. The situation presents Russian authorities with a double challenge: protecting populations that risk being considered former colonists in their new country; and maintaining a national identity based primarily on the Russian language. This broad approach gradually focused on the narrower situation of “ethnic Russians,” whom Russian politicians call “our compatriots in those countries.” The word “compatriots” (sootetchestvenniki) became a common one in Russian political discourse. In the mid-1990s the refusal by all the new states except Turkmenistan and Tajikistan to grant dual nationality to “ethnic Russians” thwarted Russia’s policy of maintaining links in the hope that these “Russians” would return, at a time when the country was losing population. In ten years, 8 million former Soviets, most of them Russian, immigrated to Russia. In October 2001 President Vladimir Putin declared to the Congress of Russian Nationals that Russia had to do more for its “diaspora.” For a November 2006 interview in the newspaper Russkaya Mysl, Putin wrote, “What is important to us is that our compatriots abroad have the possibility of preserving their ethnic and cultural identity, be able to protect their lawful rights and interests and, if they wish, return to their homeland.”4 Yet the new law on citizenship passed on 19 April 2002, and its later amendments, did not favor the acquisition of Russian nationality by these “ethnic Russians.” It is striking to see how the growing attention paid by certain countries that were historically countries of emigration to their nationals, or to populations of national origin living abroad, finds in the word “diaspora” an adequate, positive term to designate the maintenance of connection and the importance of origin. The word

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increasingly occurs in official terminology and crops up in speeches and reports, along with expressions like “abroad” or “in the world.” So “diaspora italiana” has the same general meaning as “Italiani nel mondo” or “Italiani all’Estero.” For the last few years in India, “diaspora” has been the official term for NRIs and PIOs, to the point where the 2001 report by the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora, which was charged with proposing ways to maintain the connection, devoted more than fifty pages to the study of other “diasporas” (Chinese, Greek, Italian, Japanese, South Korean, Jewish, Lebanese, Filipino, Polish, and Irish) and their relationships to their states. As a sign of the interpenetration of social science studies and political desires, the report draws on academic studies, notably Robin Cohen’s typology cited in chapter 1. These days, some countries seem to feel it is important to have “their” diaspora. Many motives, often impossible to sort out, can explain this attitude: economic (investments), political (support of and loyalty to the regime), demographic (reverse migration), or symbolic (national identity). In February 1995, President Mary Robinson delivered to the Irish parliament a speech titled “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora,” 150 years after the famine of 1845 that marked the beginning of the island’s huge migration. She noted that “this great narrative of dispossession and belonging, which so often had its origins in sorrow and leave-taking, has become—with a certain amount of historic irony—one of the treasures of our society.” Her speech called for the development of cooperative projects and mutual knowledge to “cherish the diaspora”: “They look to us anxiously to include them in our sense of ourselves.”5 The emergence of these policies of attention and recognition over the last three decades has been marked by the institution of public, if not state, organizations charged specifically with dealing

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with individuals living abroad. These are “nationals abroad,” and sometimes citizens of another country who can show proof of their ancestors’ nationality and thereby enter into a formal relationship of rights and eventually obligations. These policies correspond to the authorities’ (re)discovery of expatriate populations, and some are also in response to demands directly from community organizations abroad. The result is the establishment of representative consultative organizations, governmental services usually run by the ministry of foreign affairs, changes in laws on nationality or the right to vote abroad, or encounters like those that, in 2001, drew delegates to the Global Convention of People of Indian Origin in New Delhi or the Second Congress of Polish Emigrants and Poles Abroad in Warsaw and Krakow. The heightened interest of countries of origin in their émigrés, and vice versa, can be clearly seen in the growing acceptance of dual nationality. Here is just one example concerning Latin American countries. In 1991, only four of them had recognized dual nationality: Uruguay (in 1919), Panama (1972), Peru (1980), and El Salvador (1983).6 By 1997 there were seven more. In Brazil and Costa Rica, the decision was made by the authorities alone. In Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico, pressure was also brought by the émigrés themselves. This pressure often develops when relations between the countries and their expatriates change. As the latter form local or national cultural or political organizations, they demand official recognition of their existence and role. A demand for dual nationality increasingly parallels a demand for dual citizenship, which allows people to vote in the national elections of their country of origin. Voting from abroad is a fairly recent phenomenon, but it is spreading. It began in Australia in 1901 and France in 1950—in the latter case only through the election of rep-

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resentatives at the Conseil supérieur des Français de l’étranger—but has only more recently appeared in other “old democracies” like Great Britain (1985) and the United States (1975). In Mexico, passage of a law on dual nationality in December 1996 anticipated a right to vote, but the electoral code was changed only in 2005. The 2006 presidential elections were the first opportunity for Mexican citizens living abroad to participate through absentee voting. Due to lack of information and strict registration procedures, few voters managed to register, and their “votes from abroad” totaled only a little more than thirty-two thousand. Poland’s 1962 law does not recognize dual nationality, but neither does it impose the loss of Polish citizenship in case of naturalization. Poles abroad have been able to vote in national elections since the 1990s, but they got the right to vote in runoff presidential elections thanks to a 2000 law. At the end of the nineteenth century, the nationality rights of immigration countries, which were often based on the principles of jus soli (“law of soil,” allowing someone born in the territory to foreign parents to acquire nationality at birth or at majority), began to collide with the growing desire of authorities in the emigration countries to not lose contact with their émigrés. What often followed was the establishment of a right of nationality based on jus sanguinis (“law of blood,” or inheritance-based rules). Italy went even further. Facing contradictory pressures to favor the integration of its émigrés in their host countries and yet not break the connection, Italy passed a law in 1912 that eliminated the automatic loss of nationality in case of foreign naturalization and made its recovery easy in case of loss. This compromise has remained largely intact, with a 1992 law merely reinforcing those provisions. In Greece, the right to nationality was based on jus sanguinis in 1830 and has the same characteristic today, based on the 1975 Constitution and on the

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country’s 1955 code of nationality, as amended several times, notably in 1984, 1993, 1997, and 1998. These two countries have opposite legislation on the question of the right to vote by citizens residing abroad. It is absent from Greek law. In Italy, by contrast, the right was reinforced in a 27 December 2001 law that allows citizens to vote without returning home. Greece and Italy have only recently established organizations for exchange and cooperation, in which each works with its population abroad to maintain its language and culture. In Greece such organizations appeared after the civil war, first a creation of the Directorate of Greeks Abroad and Migration within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1947), and then a High Council of Greeks Abroad (1954). Article 108 of the Democratic Constitution of 1975 asserts that “the State shall be concerned with those Greeks who live abroad and the maintenance of their links with the Motherland.” But this nationality-based framework is changing to embrace a wider vision of Hellenism in which people of Greek origin can also find their place. Their life abroad falls under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad, created in 1983 under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The World Council of Hellenes Abroad, which was formed in 1995, is composed of 975 representatives of Greek organizations. These representatives are elected according to host country; the number of representatives for each country depends on the number of Greeks or citizens of Greek origin living in it. (A host country must have least ten thousand Greeks or citizens of Greek origin to participate.)7 In Italy—except for the Fascist period, when Mussolini made organizing Italians abroad a priority, and communities were torn between Fascists and anti-Fascists—state policy has focused more on the conditions and modes of emigration than on the life of the

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“Little Italys” or on strengthening their ties with the nation. In 1985 an organization of Italians overseas was established by encouraging areas with more than 3,000 Italians to form local committees. A 1989 law formalized the General Council of Italians Abroad. It is made up of 94 members, 65 of whom are elected through local electoral assemblies overseas. Another 29 are appointed by the prime minister to represent emigration associations, political parties, professional organizations, and the press. In June 2001, the Berlusconi government even included a ministry for Italians abroad. It was headed by Mirko Tremaglia, who had Parliament adopt the law allowing Italians to vote from abroad. In one of history’s frequent ironies, it was precisely the Italian vote from abroad that sealed Silvio Berlusconi and Tremaglia’s defeat in the April 2006 general elections, by electing four pro–Romano Prodi senators and thus giving the Unione Party a majority in the Senate!8 In their policies toward their émigrés, India and China have moved from abstention to attention. Until the 1970s, they encouraged their émigrés to integrate into their host countries. Primarily economic considerations explain the creation of specific frameworks favoring financial investment, but they also involve the establishment of broader measures. In China they paralleled the rehabilitation of émigré families and a change in the right to nationality. A 1980 law required Chinese immigrants naturalized abroad to give up their Chinese nationality, in order to reassure the host states. That law is still in force today.9 India, on the other hand, agreed to grant its PIOs an Overseas Citizenship of India. Passed by Parliament on 22 December 2003, the law has been in force since 2 December 2005. Besides this, on the basis of the 2001 Report on the Indian Diaspora, the government declared January 9 a holiday, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, to mark the new union between the coun-

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try and its “prodigal children.”10 Being a countryman no longer simply means living in the country. The European Union has taken note of this. In June 2003, on Greece’s initiative, sixty representatives of twenty-eight countries’ “diasporas” met at the European Diasporas Summit in Thessaloníki to see “how to strengthen ties between the EU and its diaspora.”11 Though much publicized at the time, this initiative seems to have been short-lived. LONG-DISTANCE NATIONALISM

In her analysis of transstate loyalties and policies, political scientist Eva Østergaard-Nielsen defines transnational political practices as the “various forms of direct cross-border participation in the politics of their country of origin by both migrants and refugees (such as voting and other support to political parties, participating in debates in the press), as well as their indirect participation via the political institutions of the host country (or international organizations).”12 She stresses the fact that the first dimension, that of the mobility of the actors, is not the most important one. What does it mean to get involved in a national cause from a distance? What forms can this take? A first, major distinction to be made is between those nationals abroad who support the state, and those who oppose it. Engagement against the state can be further subdivided between a struggle against the regime and a struggle for the recognition of a new political entity (either a state or not). These two forms are too often confused, including by the authors who were the first to suggest lines of research on this topic or who have undertaken its systematic study. In 1983, the historian and Indonesia scholar Benedict Anderson published a book on nationalism called Imagined Communities, in

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which he stressed the role of print media in bringing a nation into existence by taking members who do not know each other and putting them in touch and in synch.13 In 1998, Anderson revisited the matter of national consciousness, starting with the exile from which it springs. He writes that it is from confronting the other, the “nonself,” that nationalism is born as an assertion of national purity in contexts where the prospect of mixing threatens one’s uniqueness. It therefore takes root in a kind of exile. Transnationalization linked to the development of postindustrial capitalism favors migrations, as well as the maintenance of a connection that Anderson calls “longdistance nationalism.”14 Migrants or their descendants organize their presence in their adopted countries according to a relationship to the country of origin, and they try to influence the host country’s policies in favor of the state, nation, or people to which they feel “related.” Though the two political scientists reached opposite conclusions, the Israeli Yossi Shain and the American Tony Smith have described the increasing influence of this “ethnic lobbying” in the United States now that it has become legitimate for people to state their origins in public discourse.15 This involvement with a foreign country by citizens inevitably raises the question of these hyphenated Americans’ real allegiance to the United States. Are they defending America’s national interest, their own, or some other country’s? This factor is of capital importance. But two specific points must be made about the studies above. First, the American situation is not unique. Over the last two centuries in Great Britain and France in particular, many “ethnic” groups have tried to influence foreign policy: Jewish, Italian, and middle European nationalists; 1848 “Springtime of Peoples” revolutionaries; and anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi, and anticommunist émigrés. Second, it is impossible to study this

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phenomenon without taking account of the direction of the influence. These groups can support a country and its policies or express national sentiment from afar, in what the French political scientist Riva Kastoryano calls “transnational nationalism.”16 The situation is different when organizations struggling against a regime whose legitimacy they do not recognize put pressure on their host countries’ foreign policy. When an exile polity emerges, this radically changes the direction of long-distance nationalism, in which the diplomatic (nation-to-nation) and legitimacy approaches collide. Involvement at a distance with a country with which one feels individually or collectively close can take different forms. For example, it includes the humanitarian impulse felt by Poles abroad toward “their” country when martial law was declared in 1981, and by Armenians worldwide following the 1988 earthquake. Local and regional associations build bridges between compatriots who are not necessarily fellow citizens. Beyond ethnic lobbying and brotherly compassion, more direct political involvement also occurs. It is manifested through a longdistance commitment to support the country’s policies, particularly when it is in conflict with another country. The case of Croatia is interesting in this regard. The country’s 1991 secession was supported by German, American, and Canadian businesspeople of Croatian origin. They used their influence on their adopted countries’ diplomatic services to quickly recognize the Croatian state under Franjo Tudjman, whose HDZ (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, Croatian Democratic Union) party was founded in exile. These compatriots also financially supported Croatia’s ensuing war with Serbia under Slobodan Milosˇevi´c. Even in opposition, the HDZ received a great deal of its support from Croats abroad, notably those in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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Individual or collective refusal to recognize a ruling regime’s authority—whether in the country of origin or in the promised and desired land—leads to the formation of an alternative political space composed of groups that are all opposed to the same enemy but which might also be fighting among themselves. Exile polities have a delicate structural relationship with distance. They rely on a specific articulation of time and space. Political combat beyond the country’s borders often involves putting time and space on hold in order to promote the idea that the legitimate country is located abroad and that legitimate political time is stopped so long as the political situation does not change. The Iranian presence in Los Angeles—which is often called “Irangeles”—studied by the French political scientist Fariba Adelkhah offers a vision of Teheran before the Shah’s fall, but a Teheran more Iranian than it was then, “Iranified” by its distance from Iran.17 The success of an exopolitical group also depends on its capacity to not lose contact with the real country, because its goal is always to return. But as more years of exile go by without political changes in the home country, the divergence between the two grows and the likelihood of their being aligned shrinks. This was clearly seen in the figure of banker Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress in exile, who returned to Iraq in April 2003 thanks to the American military intervention. Chalabi, who left the country in 1956 at age eleven, found it enormously difficult to convert the legitimacy guaranteed by the American government into personal popular legitimacy. One can also distinguish between exile polities that exist away from the land and the groups (clandestine or not) on the referent territory that are fighting for the cause. For the latter, the passage of time does not put them any further from their goal. In its transstate dimension, the organization of stateless peoples

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involves the politics of exile; in its localized dimension, it involves the demand for recognition of a nonstate identity. Kurds are currently the world’s largest ethnic population without a country. They number between 20 and 25 million and are mainly distributed between Turkey (half of them), Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the European countries. There are about a million Kurds in Europe (the great majority of these are from Turkey), including 550,000 in Germany, 100,000 in France, and 65,000 in Holland.18 The armed struggle for the creation of an independent Kurdistan began in the early 1980s, between the Turkish coup d’état of 1980 and the outbreak of war in Kurdistan in 1984. The Kurds of Europe emphasized their difference from the Turks by stressing their Kurdish identity, which made them members of a nation of millions. The guerrilla war between the Turkish army and the Marxist-oriented Kurdish Workers Party (the PKK) gives meaning to this identification at a distance, reinforced by the exile in Europe of Kurdish militants during the last two decades. At the level of countries of residence, western Europe is thus the theater of Kurdish lobbying of institutions, and at the transstate level Kurds are organized into a flexible, networked structure that allows rapid mobilization in a number of countries thanks to new technologies (the Internet and mobile telephone). This was demonstrated after the kidnapping of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan by Turkish police in 1999. Around the world, but especially in Europe, thousands of supporters of the Kurdish cause poured into the street to protest in a mobilization that was clearly coordinated at the global level.19 Another revealing case is that of the Palestinians. As a result of the 1947–48 war between Israel and the Arab states, some 800,000 “Palestinian Arabs” left their land or were forced from it and moved

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to Arab countries. This was Al Nakba, “the Catastrophe.” According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians numbered some 11 million in 2005. About 49 percent live on the soil of the former Palestine: 3.8 million in the Palestinian territory, and 1.1 million in Israel. Of the rest, 90 percent live in Arab countries, including nearly 3 million in Jordan, 1.6 million in other Arab countries, and about 560,000 in other foreign countries.20 The 1993 Washington and 1995 Oslo agreements gave concrete form to hopes for a Palestinian state in spite of the current situation, because a quasi state already existed in nonterritorial form: the Palestine Liberation Organization. Created in 1964, the PLO came under the control of guerrilla organizations in 1969, notably Ya¯ sir ‘Arafa¯ t’s Fatah. It symbolically gathered dispersed Palestinians around the goal of Palestinian sovereignty and created a political space without a territory, operating through a network of organizations, militias, associations, and groups based in Algiers, Beirut, Tripoli, Damascus, Amman, Washington, New York, and elsewhere. As we have seen, the tension between community and society as different bases for life together raises the question of allegiance. The acquisition of a new nationality by a migrant seems to leave intact the pull of the country of origin in case of war or overpowering influence. The twentieth century’s wars illustrate how deeply nations fear the threat of “enemies within,” whether foreigners or former foreigners. The 11 September attack against the United States in 2001 demonstrated the risk that new information technology can represent when it is used to coordinate deadly attacks from a distance. Because of Al Qaeda, the image of an elusive, hydraheaded network consisting of small cells that are largely independent of each other has become threatening.

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THE DUAL PRESENCE

According to the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, the defining characteristic of modernity is the existence of “disembedding mechanisms.” One of the most important of these at play in modernity is “the separating of time and space,” which were undivided when communal life was local.21 The nineteenth-century revolution in transportation and communication made mastery of space a fundamental dimension by reducing the connection between time and distance covered. This has become especially important now that it can no longer be separated from time. The period that saw the development of electronics and information technology has been dubbed “second modernity” (Ulrich Beck), “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman), “supermodernity” (Georges Balandier and Marc Augé), “late modernity” (Anthony Giddens), and “hypermodernity” (Gilles Lipovetsky), because it managed to make space potentially independent of time.22 This state of affairs has obvious consequences for the maintenance of a connection in spite of distance: with the country— whether the political, economic, or cultural life of one’s country— with one’s employers, or with one’s family left behind; between the country and one’s self, when an Internet site, discussion forum, or cyber group becomes the place for contact; and between different actors on the same project, of whatever kind, who are separated geographically but brought together by their belief in a shared belonging. Something that was virtually impossible thirty years ago is a reality today: it is now faster and cheaper for a Japanese living in Paris to read the Tokyo Shimbun online than to go buy it at a newsstand. It is important to note that the means of communication that allow us to remain in contact or to be “in real time” are not limited

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to the Internet or to e-mail. They include television, radio, mobile telephone, and video. Satellites allow a better circulation of wavelengths, and the invention of new devices (the home and portable computer, videotape, CD and DVD players, cell phone, and fax machine) supports diversification of platforms. The new information technology, with its resulting “disappearance” of space, is not accessible to all, because of cost and the unequal distribution of technical competence. One can even suggest, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman does, that the technologies’ effect is to widen social gaps worldwide instead of homogenizing ways of experiencing space. Whereas globalized elites everywhere enjoy “disincarnation,” the rest of the population finds itself literally “stuck to the ground” in a “locality” that increasingly isolates them.23 The cyberspace of instant communication is democratic only if you have access to it. Yet this view does not take two key factors into account: the low cost of Internet communications, and above all, the symbolic importance of the link that can connect families of migrants to that which they experience as an origin. The past written in people’s bodies is now present only in another, distant part of space. Anything that can make this past real and shrink distance is welcome. It is no accident that, in 1978, Indians living in England were quicker than the English to buy videotape players. VCRs allowed them to watch Indian films at home that were not being shown in movie theaters. What was true of videotape then is true today of the dish antenna, the symbol of connection with cable and access to satellite TV. As the French sociologist Dana Diminescu wrote in the introduction to the special issue of the journal Hommes et migrations devoted to this topic, new information technology offers those who can access it the possibility of no longer experiencing migration as a “dual absence,” in Abdelmalek Sayad’s phrase: never really belong-

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ing to the old “there,” which has become “here,” but also not quite belonging to the new “there” that once was “here.” Today, the technological revolution is opening the way to a “copresence” here and there, because “here” and “there” have lost some of their meaning.24 In some way, ubiquity exists; “supermodern” migrants invented it. And it is only an apparent paradox that travel has not diminished as a function of the increased potential for communication, which reduces some of migration’s drawbacks without eliminating its advantages. Analyzing the use of mobile telephones among migrants in precarious situations (people without documents, illegals), Diminescu shows that it is both an instrument of social integration “from below” and “a way of being settled in mobility.”25 By functioning as a nonfixed address, she says, the mobile phone simultaneously favors maintenance of a clandestine existence, membership in French solidarity networks, and a strong and ongoing connection with family left behind. The global village that Marshall McLuhan announced in 1962 exists today.26 It is a network of information flows that are supposed to benefit “the commons.” But what kind of commons? The links created by the new information technologies perfectly fit the current outlines of the term “diaspora”: transstate nation, exile polity, nonterritorial community, economic networks, individual or collective maintenance of connections, and so on. The linkage of contemporary communication networks appears both as the completed model of the rootless, centerless rhizome discussed by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari27 and the vector of increased continuity between the dispersed and the center. This specificity of the acceleration of the globalization process, which necessarily joins the local and the global, explains how it can empower the most cosmopolitan people as well as those who are

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most deeply rooted. “Diaspora,” in its modern and postmodern versions, admirably sums up “globalization from below.” Michel Laguerre, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, defines “virtual diaspora” as “the use of cyberspace by immigrants or descendants of an immigrant group for the purpose of participating or engaging in online interactional transactions” while stressing that no virtual diaspora can sustain itself without real contact.28 The Internet, with its governmental sites and links to multiple topics, is a medium of choice for developing contact policies between states and the collection of groups that define themselves, and which they define, as their “diaspora.” Web sites give continuity and immediacy to the relationship these two poles maintain between those representing the state and the “diaspora.” The state plays a pivotal role in this. When Eritreans in America created the Dehai network in 1992—significantly, it was called Eritrea Online—this was crucial in making a transstate national space for Eritrea, which became independent in 1993.29 In 2002 the Eritrean government set up the Commission for Diaspora Relations and immediately planned a Web site and a database. It was explicitly stated that the commission’s activities were not identical with those of the country’s embassies and consulates. Institutional Web sites set up by many countries—including India, Armenia, Greece, and Italy—coexist with other sites designed to help communication between the different poles of the periphery: HR-NET for Greeks (www.hri.org), NRIonline for Indians (www.nriol.com), and Huaren.org for Chinese (www.huaren.org). The study of the Turkish situation by the French geographer Stéphane de Tapia for a special issue of the journal Cemoti shows that new information technology in general often allows for the

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creation of media that reflect the real social structures of the country of origin. In this way, what actually lies behind official discourse about Turkish society is a segmented rural society organized around family, regional, or confraternal connections.30 The Arab concept of açabiyya, which denotes belonging and solidarity, is therefore pertinent in understanding the significance of traditional networks within the most modern frameworks, as in the Indian case noted above. In a different way, James Tyner and Olaf Kuhlke’s study of fifty-four Filipino Web sites revealed that the notion of tanahang (home) plays an essential role among Filipinos. Some 4 to 5 million Filipinos live in more than 160 countries and territories. They are subject to discrimination in the host countries because of their origin, but since 1970 have been the object of the greatest solicitude on the part of their government. Through the Internet, they maintain the image of one people and one home under a single roof in spite of dispersion, which supports the idea of a Filipino identity that is pan-national and not transnational.31 The metaphor of the family is omnipresent, for that matter. Most “ethnic” portals and governmental sites have a link to a genealogy page. Researching the lost origins of one’s family name leads one into a structured and accessible community. Television does too, especially since the advent of the C and KU frequency bands and the development of satellite-based television. Many networks have been launched that are aimed at populations living abroad: WMNB (Russia), Doordarshan (India), ART (Arab countries), MED-TV (for Kurds), as well as RFI and TV5 (French-speaking peoples). Though such TV channels as Al-Jazeera (Qatar) and Al-Arabia (Dubai) attract tens of millions of viewers worldwide and provide information about the Arab world in particular, they are less rele-

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vant in maintaining connection, because connection requires greater localness.32 The existence of all these networks, and therefore the possibility of maintaining contact, means nothing in itself. It acquires meaning when it is applied in practice. It can also signal completely opposite phenomena, ranging from a complete refusal to assimilate into the host country’s culture to the creation of a “symbolic ethnicity” from afar by well-acculturated migrants or their descendants. This is what emerged in particular from Hamid Naficy’s 1993 study of the impact of television on the Iranian community in Los Angeles.33 Cyberspace can be described as a “heterotopia,” in the sense that Michel Foucault uses the term: an alternative space that challenges the dominance of the official one.34 This heterotopia allows one to escape from the center, either to challenge it or to validate the existence of all the poles of the periphery in addition to the center. Exile polities have found in the Internet an effective tool for lobbying, diffusion, and communication. In 1996 the campaign by a Burmese militant at the University of Wisconsin on his Free Burma Coalition Web site led to the raising of the issue of economic sanctions against the Rangoon regime in the American Congress. The main exile organizations of Sikhs, Tamils (through the well-known Tamilnet), Kurds, and others have turned their sites into veritable political platforms, as well as the very locale of their alternative policy, new state, or new regime. Thus, until recently, one could read on the Sikh site www.khalistan.com: “Welcome to Khalistan’s sovereign cyberspace!” Moreover, these deterritorialized spaces can provide interpolarity, as the link between poles that do not have a center. The possibility of these kinds of networks continues to change the relationship that so-called southern countries maintain with

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their highly educated émigrés and with their expatriates in general. Instead of enduring the migration of their students to Western universities, they are increasingly facilitating it. This “expatriation” is no longer experienced as a catastrophe or hemorrhage, because new technologies now allow the creation of scientific and technical networks through which some nations or professions organize the participation of these intellectual expatriate elites in the development of the country, without making them return home. The most emblematic of these are Colombia’s Red Caldas (Red Colombiana de Cientificos e Ingenieros en el Exterior, launched in 1991) and South Africa’s SANSA (South African Networks of Skills Abroad, launched in 1998). At their peaks, the Colombian network had more than eight hundred members from twenty-five countries, and SANSA had almost twenty-five hundred members from sixty-five countries. The number of what academics have dubbed “diaspora knowledge networks” continues to grow. There were about 173 of them in 2006, and probably 300 if Chinese networks (which are harder to identify because of the alphabet) were included.35 “Brain drain” is gradually being replaced by “brain gain,” which, tellingly enough, is being called “the diaspora option.”36 Thus, since 1997, the Palesta network (Palestinian Scientists and Technologists Abroad) has allowed engineers and technicians to pool their knowledge about issues related to the economic development of the Palestinian territories, but their involvement does not necessarily imply a return to the land. For the Palestinian sociologist Sari Hanafi, the networking allowed by the new communication technologies does not mean the end of geography but rather “reshaping geography.” It makes the construction of nonphysical territories possible.37 The most extreme example of heterotopia is probably that of the

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virtual state named Cyber Yugoslavia. Since 1999, www.juga.com has offered itself as the country for those who “lost” their country in 1991 with the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. It offers a nationality and a passport to all those who “feel Yugoslav.” In April 2003 it had more than 16,600 “citizens” and was receiving more than six hundred applications for citizenship a day. Cyber Yugoslavia had only 16,768 “citizens” in January 2007, and it even seems that the Web site is not available anymore, but it remains an interesting case of a “state” that, being located on the Internet, claims a territory of 0 km2. Its webmasters say that when it reaches 5 million citizens they will ask for recognition by the United Nations and the grant of 20 m2 of ground—anywhere in the world—to install their server. Space is needed only for the machines: The people will be united in their dispersion.

Conclusion

In its contemporary usage, “diaspora” is perfectly suited to the modern world. Relieved of its heavy burden of misery, persecution, and punishment, the word nicely fits the changes in the relationship to distance, in view of the quasi disappearance of time in its relationship to space. The technological possibility of proximity between people who resemble each other in some way—whether religious, national, ethnic, cultural, professional, or other—allows nonterritorialized links (networks) to emerge. Their spread favors a vision of the planetary reality, or part of that reality, in terms of a “global world.” Whether “diaspora” is a common word, a scientifically constructed concept, or a rallying cry that gives meaning to a collective reality, it is highly contemporary. Denying this would be pointless. It is more important to try to understand what this updating of an ancient term involves. I conclude by asking three questions about the word’s present and its future, and the things it tends to describe today. Is the word itself becoming dispersed? According to Emmanuel 106

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Ma Mung, the number of Web pages containing the word reached 136,000 in 2002.1 In 1998 the editor of Diaspora wrote that his journal had covered thirty-six “diasporas.” A glance at French books published since 1980 reveal at least fifty of them dealing with ethnic, national, or religious diasporas. A simple search in the WorldCat global catalogue reveals that more than seven hundred books with “diaspora” (singular) in their title have been published since 2003. The present volume may contribute to that expansion. Called Diasporas, it offers examples borrowed from the most diverse situations. Rather than give in to the fashion for questions like “What is a diaspora?” or “Is this really a diaspora?’ I prefer to avoid them and instead suggest a new framework for questioning. Is “diaspora” a useful word? Answering in the negative would be to deny the interest shown it by so many journalists and scholars, as well as by those many individuals who use it to describe the “community” they represent or feel they belong to. Words do not circulate without purpose, even if the meanings they carry are not the same for everyone. But how is “diaspora” useful? To impress people? To give coherence to a group? No doubt. To guarantee greater visibility for scholars by allowing them to coalesce around one word? Certainly. To better describe certain phenomena? I do not think so. The usefulness of the word mainly rests in its existence as a rallying cry. It may be scientifically and politically effective, but theoretically it is lifeless. In that case, is it a word destined to disappear? Given the incredible number of books, articles, colloquiums, seminars, and fundraising appeals related to the topic of “diasporas,” this is not about to happen any time soon. I would even go so far as to say that, despite academic voices raised to criticize the concept for its theoretical weakness or its inflation, “diaspora” has not yet peaked. It is

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necessary to go beyond “diaspora” in the same way that Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have shown it is useful to go beyond “identity.”2 But the term “diaspora” is still uniquely convenient, both politically and scientifically. Today, its semantic horizon encompasses the challenges of modernity and supermodernity: it can designate both the root and the rhizome; a persistence in time and space as well as the emergence of new forms of time and space; the structures of state and territory, and their disappearance; the static nature of identity or its constant transformation; all kinds of identities, from the most local to the broadest (human diaspora) while passing through every possible form of community (as shown by the appearance in English of such phrases as “queer diaspora,” “gay and lesbian diaspora,” “cyborg diaspora,” “postmodern diaspora,” and “electronic or e-diaspora,” for example); globalization from above and from below; and both the ancient world and the world to come. “Diaspora” has become a global word that fits the global world. It has been a proper noun, in the Septuagint Bible, and a quasiproper noun—that is, a closed category—for Armenians, Greeks, Africans, and others. Today it is a common noun. It “speaks” for itself.

NOTES

PREFACE

1. Martin Baumann, “What You Always Wanted to Know About the Origins and Usage of That Word ‘Diaspora,’” 1998. This online paper used to be available at Irish Diaspora Studies, www.irishdiaspora .net, but as of January 2007 this seems not to be the case anymore. See also Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 19, no. 66 (Spring 2001): 45–73; Edward A. Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora” (paper presented to the Center for Comparative Social Analysis Workshop, UCLA, 25 October 2001), 28 pages, available at Centro de Estudios Sociais, www.ces.uc.pt/formacao/materiais_racismo _pos_racismo/alpers.pdf; Matthias Krings, “Diaspora: Historische Erfahrung oder wissenschaftliches Konzept? Zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs in den Sozialwissenschaften,” Paideuma 49 (2003): 137–56; Jose C. Moya, “Diaspora Studies: New Concepts, Approaches, and Realities?” (paper presented to the Social Science History Association meeting, Chicago, 18–21 November 2004), 28 pages.

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110 / Notes to Pages 1 –11 INTRODUCTION

1. Jean-Christophe Servant, “Escales sur la planète foot: le Nigéria,” Libération, 11 June 2002; Grégory Schneider, “France-Danemark: un petit but pour la route,” Libération, 16 August 2001. 1. WHAT IS A DIASPORA?

1. Martin Baumann, “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison,” Numen 47 (2000): 313–37. See Willem Cornelis van Unnik, Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora in der hellenistisch-römischen Zeit (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1993); and Johannes Tromp, “The Ancient Jewish Diaspora: Some Linguistic and Sociological Observations,” in Religious Communities in the Diaspora: New Perspectives on Past and Present, ed. Gerrie Ter Haar (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1998), 13–35. 2. Shmuel Trigano, “Espaces, ruptures, unités: essai d’introduction à une morphologie générale de la société juive,” in La société juive à travers l’histoire, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 4:15–73. 3. Daniel Elazar, “The Jewish People as the Classic Diaspora: A Political Analysis,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 212. 4. Sergio DellaPergola, “La population juive dans le monde à l’aube du XXIe siècle: tendances, perspectives et conséquences,” in Les diasporas: 2000 ans d’histoire, ed. Lisa Anteby-Yemini, William Berthomière, and Gabriel Sheffer (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 163–64. 5. Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population 2006,” in American Jewish Year Book 2006 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006), 559–601. 6. George Shepperson, “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora,” African Forum 2 (1966): 76–93, originally a communication to the International Congress of African History held at Dar-es-Salaam in September 1965; Abiola Irele, “Négritude or Black Cultural Nationalism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (October 1965): 321–48.

Notes to Pages 12 –17 / 111

7. Charles Victor Roman, American Civilization and the Negro: The Afro-American in Relation to National Progress (1916; reprint, Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1921), 194–95. Italics in the original. 8. The Jewish Daily Forward, 28 July 1917, quoted in Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 75–76. 9. Basil Davidson, Which Way Africa? (London: Penguin Books, 1964). 10. Alfred Métraux, “L’Afrique vivante en Haïti,” in Haïti, poètes noirs (Paris: Seuil, 1951), 21. 11. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth] (1961; reprint, Paris: Maspéro, 1970), 148. 12. Joseph Harris, introduction to Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph Harris (1982; reprint, Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 3. 13. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997), 804–5. 14. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 15. Christine Chivallon, La diaspora noire des Amériques. Expériences et théories à partir de la Caraïbe (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2004). 16. Iosipos Moisiodax, Ithiki Philosophia (Venice: n.p., 1761), quoted in Michel Bruneau, Diasporas et espaces transnationaux (Paris: Anthropos, 2004), 8. 17. Edward Weston, Diaspora: Some Reflections upon the Question relating to the Naturalization of Jews, considered as a Point of Religion (London: J. Robinson, 1754). 18. Le Robert. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 1 (Paris: Le Robert, 1998): 1076–77. 19. Ernest Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. 4 (1893; reprint, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1953), 1135. 20. Edmund de Schweinitz, The Moravian Manual: Containing an Account of the Protestant Church of the Moravian United Brethren or Unitas Fratrum (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1859). 21. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield: Merriam, 1913), 1978. 22. Paul Augé, Larousse du XXe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris: Larousse, 1929).

112 / Notes to Pages 17 –20

23. Simon Dubnov, “Diaspora,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 126. 24. Rose Hum Lee, “The Decline of Chinatowns in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 5 (March 1949): 422. Also in Arnold Rose, ed., Race Prejudice and Discrimination (New York: Knopf, 1951), 147–60. 25. Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (May 1928): 881–93. 26. Robert Park, “The Nature of Race Relations,” in Race Relations and the Race Problem, ed. Lewis Copeland et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1939), 28. 27. See for example Marvin Harris and Charles Wagley, Minorities in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 250. 28. Robin Cohen, “Diaspora,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 3642–45. 29. Le Monde, 12 September 1968. 30. Pierre Gilbert, Dictionnaire des mots contemporains (Paris: Le Robert, 1980), 171. 31. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (London: Bell and Sons, 1961), 1:625. 32. For an analysis of the spread of the syntagmas “African diaspora” and “black diaspora” from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, see Stéphane Dufoix, “W. E. B Du Bois: Race et ‘diaspora noire/africaine,’” Raisons politiques 21 (2006): 97–116. 33. See for instance Maurice Freedman, “Immigrants and Associations: Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Singapore,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, no. 1 (October 1960): 25–48. 34. Walid Khalidi, “A Palestinian Perspective on the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 14, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 44. 35. Abner Cohen, “Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas,” in The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, ed. Claude Meillassoux (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 267; Paul Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria, Nigeria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980); Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Notes to Pages 20 –26 / 113

36. John Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 2 (June 1976): 393–408. 37. Robert Hettlage, “Diaspora: Umrisse einer soziologischen Theorie,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 16, no. 3 (1991): 4–24. 38. Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” 393. 39. Gabriel Sheffer, “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics, ed. Gabriel Sheffer (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 3. 40. Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 41. Yves Lacoste, “Editorial: Géopolitique des diasporas,” Hérodote 53 (April–June 1989): 3. 42. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83. 43. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997). 44. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 235, italics in the original. Hall revisited the meaning of the concept in “Thinking the Diaspora: HomeThoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe 6 (September 1999): 1–18. 45. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46. Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora,” Paragraph 17, no. 1 (March 1994): 211. 47. James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Current Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): 307. 48. Lisa Anteby-Yemini, William Berthomière, and Gabriel Sheffer, eds., Les diasporas: 2000 ans d’histoire (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005); William Berthomière and Christine Chivallon, eds., Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain (Paris: Karthala, 2006). 49. Jean Ziegler, Le pouvoir africain. Eléments d’une sociologie politique de l’Afrique noire et de sa diaspora aux Amériques (Paris: Seuil, 1971); François Debré, Les Chinois de la diaspora (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1976). 50. Denys Cuche, “Diaspora,” Pluriel Recherches: Vocabulaire his-

114 / Notes to Pages 26 –31

torique et critique des relations inter-ethniques 8 (2001): 14–23; Michel Bruneau, Diasporas et espaces transnationaux (Paris: Anthropos, 2004). 51. Maximilien Sorre, Rencontre de la géographie et de la sociologie (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1957), 95, quoted in Diasporas, ed. Michel Bruneau (Paris: Reclus, 1995), 15. 52. Pierre George, Géopolitique des minorités (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), 74. 53. Richard Marienstras, Être un peuple en diaspora (Paris: Maspéro, 1975). 54. Richard Marienstras, “On the Notion of Diaspora,” in Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation-States, ed. Gérard Chaliand (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 125. Originally published in French in 1985. 55. Alain Médam, “Diaspora/diasporas: Archétype et typologie,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 9, no. 1 (1993): 63. 56. Christine Chivallon, “De quelques préconstruits de la notion de diaspora à partir de l’exemple antillais,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 13, no. 1 (1997): 149–60. 57. Chivallon, La diaspora noire. 58. Martine Hovanessian, “La notion de diaspora: Usages et champ sémantique,” Journal des anthropologues 72–73 (1998): 12. 59. Ibid., 19. 60. Dominique Schnapper, “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept,” Diaspora 8, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 225–54. 61. Ibid., 249, 251. Schnapper expanded on the ideas in her 1991 article in a book written with sociologist Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, Diasporas et nations (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006). 62. Roland Robertson, with Frank Lechner, “Modernization, Globalization, and the Problem of Culture in World-Systems Theory,” Theory, Culture, and Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 103–18. Robertson’s most influential book is Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). 63. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33. 64. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

Notes to Pages 31 –36 / 115

65. James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 66. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 7. 67. Khachig Tölölyan, “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 4. 68. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Patrick Cabanel, “Projet éditorial,” Diasporas, histoire et sociétés 1, no. 1 (2002): 9. 69. Floya Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’: Beyond Ethnicity?” Sociology 32, no. 3 (August 1998): 557–80. 70. Östen Wahlbeck, “The Concept of Diaspora as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Refugee Communities,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28, no. 2 (April 2002): 221–38. 71. Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (January 2005): 1–19. 72. Phil Cohen, “Rethinking the Diasporama,” Patterns of Prejudice 33, no. 1 (1999): 3–22. 73. Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof, eds., Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002). 74. “About the Journal,” statement from the editors of Global Networks, at Global Networks, www.globalnetworksjournal.com/about .htm, accessed 23 May 2007. 2. THE SPACES OF DISPERSION

1. William McNeill, “Human Migration in Historical Perspective,” Population and Development Review 10, no. 1 (1984): 1. 2. Emmanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 103. Originally published in Germany in 1795. 3. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

116 / Notes to Pages 38 –46

4. Michel Bruneau, “Peuples-monde de la longue durée: Grecs, Indiens, Chinois,” L’Espace géographique 3 (2001): 193–212; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1981–1984), 3 vols.; Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1993). 5. Georges Prévélakis, “Les espaces de la diaspora hellénique et le territoire de l’Etat grec,” in Diasporas, ed. Michel Bruneau (Paris: Reclus, 1995), 99–112, especially 100–102. 6. Lina Venturas, “Greek Governments, Political Parties, and Emigrants in Western Europe: Struggles for Control, 1950–1974,” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17, no. 3 (2001): 45. 7. There are few relatively recent studies of Greek migrations and diaspora. See J. M. Fossey, ed., Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Hellenic Diaspora from Antiquity to Modern Times (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991); Richard Clogg, ed., The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); and Lina Venturas, “Greek Governments, Political Parties, and Emigrants in Western Europe: Struggles for Control (1950–1974),” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17, no. 3 (2001): 43–66. 8. For a relatively recent global study, see Brij V. Lal, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (Singapore: Didier Millet, 2006). 9. K. Laxmi Narayan, “Indian Diaspora: A Demographic Perspective,” Occasional Paper no. 3, Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora, n.d., p. 6, University of Hyderabad, available at the Web site for the Centre for Study of Indian Diaspora, www.uohyd.ernet.in/sss/cind diaspora/occ3.html, last accessed 9 June 07. 10. Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2000), 98. 11. Chandrashekhar Bhat, “Contexts of Intra- and Inter-Ethnic Conflict among the Indian Diaspora Communities,” available at the University of Hyderabad Web site, www.uohyd.ernet.in/sss/indian _diaspora/oc5.pdf, last accessed 29 May 2007. 12. Report of the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora, December 2001, available at Indian Diaspora, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in/, last accessed 29 May 2007. 13. See Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (1998;

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reprint, Singapore: Didier Millet, 2006). Also see Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha America, 1994); and Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999): 306–37. 14. Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991). This typology is strongly challenged today. 15. See the statistics displayed by the Dr. Shao You-Bao Overseas Chinese Documentation and Research Center at the Ohio University Libraries Web site, available at www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/shao/ databases_popdis.htm, last accessed 29 May 2007. On Singapore, see Population Trends 2006 Report (Singapore: Singapore Department of Statistics, 2006). 16. See Michael Thorpe, “Inward Foreign Investment and the Chinese Economy” (paper presented to the New Zealand Conference of Economists Annual Conference, Wellington, 26–28 June 2002, available at the Web site of the New Zealand Conference of Economists, www.nzae.org.nz/files/%2346-THORPE.pdf, last accessed 12 June 2007. More recent figures come from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2006 (New York: United Nations, 2006), 51. 17. Figures for 1983–2000 come from Thorpe, 10. For 2003, see Eswar Prasad and Shang-Jin Wei, “Understanding the Structure of Cross-border Capital Flows: The Case of China” (paper presented to the “China at Crossroads” conference, Columbia University, 15 December 2005), available at the National Bureau of Economic Research Web site, www.nber.org/~wei/data/prasad&wei2005/China %20capital%20inflow%2012–15–05.pdf, last accessed 12 June 2007. 18. For a relatively recent broad study on Armenians abroad and the formation of the Armenian nation, see Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); as well as Khachig Tölölyan, “The Armenian Diaspora as a Transnational Actor and as a Potential Contributor to Conflict Resolution,” 2006, available at the Web site of the International Center of the University for Peace, Canada, www .toronto.upeace.org/diaspora/documents/Armenian%20Background %20Paper%20for%20UPeacE.pdf, last accessed 29 May 2007. 19. Anahide Ter-Minassian, “La diaspora arménienne,” Hérodote

118 / Notes to Pages 52 –74

53 (April–June 1989): 129. Martine Hovanessian expands on “memory of the catastrophe” in Le lien communautaire: Trois générations d’Arméniens (Paris: Colin, 1992). 20. Anahide Ter-Minassian, “Erevan, ‘ville promise’: Les rapatriements des Arméniens de la diaspora, 1921–1948,” Diasporas, Histoire et Sociétés 1 (2002): 74. 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations” (1958; reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 3. These books are composed of notes dictated by Wittgenstein in 1933–34. 22. Emile Durkheim, “Débat sur le nationalisme et le patriotisme,” in Textes (Paris: Minuit, 1975) 3:179. Chapter originally published in 1905. 3. MAINTAINING CONNECTIONS

1. Walker Connor, “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a . . . ,” in Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 97. 2. William Miles and Gabriel Sheffer, “Francophonie and Zionism: A Comparative Study in Transnationalism and Trans-statism,” Diaspora 7, no. 2 (1998): 119–48. 3. Khachig Tölölyan, “Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transnation,” Diaspora 9, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 107–36. 4. Emmanuel Ma Mung, La diaspora chinoise: Géographie d’une migration (Paris: Ophrys, 2000). 5. Stéphane Dufoix, Politiques d’exil (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 23–30. 6. Gisèle Bousquet, Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). 7. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, trans. Margaret Hollis (1887; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. 8. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth were prominent members of the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago. 9. Anne Raulin, L’Ethnique est quotidien: Diasporas marchandes et pratiques commerciales (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).

Notes to Pages 75 –82 / 119

10. Martin Baumann, “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison,” Numen 47 (2000): 313–37. 11. Ninian Smart, “The Importance of Diasporas,” in Gilgul: Essays on Transformation, Revolution, and Permanence in the History of Religions, ed. Shauel Shaked et al. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1987), 288–97. 12. John Hinnells, “The Study of Diaspora Religion,” in A New Handbook of Living Religions, ed. John Hinnells (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 686. 13. Peggy Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life,” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–18. 14. Stephen Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–4. 15. Chantal de Saint-Blancat, “Islam in Diaspora: Between Reterritorialization and Extraterritoriality,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 1 (March 2002): 138–51. See also Chantal de Saint-Blancat, L’Islam de la diaspora (Paris: Bayard, 1997) 16. Emmanuel Ma Mung, “La dispersion comme ressource,” Cultures et conflits 33–34 (Spring–Summer 1999): 89–103. 17. Alejandro Portes, “Globalization from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities,” in Latin America in the World Economy, ed. W. P. Smith and R. P. Korczenwicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 151–68. 18. Michel Péraldi, ed., La fin des norias? Réseaux migrants dans les économies marchandes en Méditerranée (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002). 19. Alain Tarrius, La mondialisation par le bas: Les nouveaux nomades de l’économie souterraine (Paris: Balland, 2002), 18. 20. Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré (Paris: Seuil, 1999). 4. MANAGING DISTANCE

1. Among the rare exceptions are Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, ed., International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies, and

120 / Notes to Pages 83 –91

Transnational Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Laurie Brand, Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Nancy L. Green and François Weil, eds., Citoyenneté et émigration: Les politiques du départ (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2006). 2. See “Aliyah and Absorption,” 29 October 2002, available on the Website of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.mfa.gov.il/ MFA/History/Modern%20History/Centenary%20at%20Zionism/Aliy a%20and%20Absorption, last accessed 29 May 2007. 3. Declaration of the Second Armenia-Diaspora Conference (Yerevan, 27–28 May 2002), available at Armenia Diaspora, www.armenia diaspora.com/conference2002/htms/declar_eng.htm, last accessed 29 May 2007. 4. Russkaya Mysl, 23 November 2006, available at the Web site of the Kremlin, www.kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2006/11/23/0746_ type82916_114331.shtml, last accessed 29 May 2007. 5. Mary Robinson, Cherishing the Irish Diaspora, Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas, 2 February 1995, available at Irish Emigrant, www.emigrant.ie/emigrant/historic/diaspora.htm, last accessed 6 June 2007. 6. Michael Jones-Correa, “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its Consequences for the United States,” International Migration Review, 35 no. 4 (Winter 2001): 997–1029. 7. On Greek policy toward migrants, see Georges Prévélakis, “Finis Greciae or the Return of the Greeks? State and Diaspora in the Context of Globalisation,” working paper of the Transnational Communities Programme, 1998, available at the Transnational Communities Programme Web site, www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working_papers/ prevelakis.PDF, last accessed 1 June 2007; and Lina Ventura, Ellines metanastes sto Velgio (Athens: Nefeli, 1999). 8. On Italian policies, see Ferruccio Pastore, “A Community Out of Balance: Nationality Law and Migration Politics in the History of PostUnification Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 27– 48, and Guido Tintori, “Cittadinanza e politiche di emigrazione nell’Italia liberale e fascista: Un approfondimento storico,” in Familismo legale: Come (non) diventare cittadini italiani, ed. Giovanni Zincone (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006).

Notes to Pages 91– 97 / 121

9. See Carine Pina-Guerassimoff and Eric Guerassimoff, “Les ‘Chinois d’outre-mer’ des années 1890 aux années 1990,” in Citoyenneté et émigration: Les politiques du départ, ed. Nancy L. Green and François Weil (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2006), 137–56. 10. For a broad historical and sociological analysis of the Indian case, see Ingrid Therwath, “L’Etat face à la diaspora: Stratégies et trajectoires indiennes” (PhD diss., Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 2007). 11. Summit of European Diasporas, Summary Report and Recommendations, 30 June 2003, p. 2, available until 2006 on the Web site European Diasporas, www.europeandiasporas.org. 12. Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, “The Politics of Migrants’ Transnational Political Practices,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 762. See also Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany (London: Routledge, 2003). 13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 14. Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in The Spectre of Comparisons, ed. Benedict Anderson (London: Verso, 1998): 58–74. 15. Yossi Shain, Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homelands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 16. Riva Kastoryano, “Vers un nationalisme transnational: Redéfinir la nation, le nationalisme et le territoire,” Revue française de science politique 54, no. 4 (2006): 533–53. 17. Fariba Adelkhah, “Les Iraniens de Californie: Si la République islamique n’existait pas,” Les Études du CERI 75 (May 2001): 40. 18. The Cultural Situation of the Kurds, Report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 7 July 2006, available on the Web site of the Assembly of the Council of Europe, http://assembly.coe.int/Main .asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc06/EDOCM006.htm. 19. On the Kurdish case, see the works by Östen Wahlbeck and Eva Østergaard-Nielsen. 20. Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestine in Figures 2005 (Ramallah: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2006), 13.

122 / Notes to Pages 98 –103

21. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (1990; reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 20. 22. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (1986; reprint, London: Sage, 1992); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2000); Georges Balandier, Le désordre. Éloge du mouvement (Paris: Fayard, 1994); Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995); Gilles Lipovetsky and Sébastien Charles, Hypermodern Times (London: Polity Press, 2005). 23. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (London: Polity Press, 1998), 18–26. 24. Dana Diminescu, “Les migrations à l’âge des nouvelles technologies,” Hommes et migrations 1240 (November–December 2002): 6–9. Diminescu refined her analysis in “Le migrant connecté: Pour un manifeste épistémologique,” Migrations Société 17, no. 2 (November– December 2005): 275–92. 25. Dana Diminescu, “L’usage du téléphone portable par les migrants en situation précaire,” Hommes et migrations 1240 (November– December 2002): 69–70. 26. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1987). 28. Michel Laguerre, “Virtual Diasporas: A New Frontier of National Security,” 2002, available at the Nautilus Institute, www.nautilus .org/archives/virtual-diasporas/paper/Laguerre.html, last accessed 9 June 2007. 29. Victoria Bernal, “Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online,” Global Networks 6, no. 2 (2006): 161–79. 30. Stéphane de Tapia, “Le satellite et la diaspora: Champ migratoire turc et nouvelles technologies d’information et de communication,” Cemoti 30 (June–December 2000): 175–201. 31. James Tyner and Olaf Kuhlke, “Pannational Identities: Representations of the Philippine Diaspora on the World Wide Web,” AsiaPacific Viewpoint 41, no. 3 (December 2000): 231–52. 32. On these topics, see Karim H. Karim, ed., The Media of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003).

Notes to Pages 103 –108 / 123

33. Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 34. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27. That text was written in 1967 but published in French only in 1984. 35. Jean-Baptiste Meyer and Jean-Paul Wattiaux, “Diaspora Knowledge Networks: Vanishing Doubts and Increasing Evidence,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies 8, no. 1 (2006): 4–24. See also Yevgeny Kuznetsov, ed., Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006). 36. Jean-Baptiste Meyer et al., “Turning Brain Drain into Brain Gain: The Colombian Experience of the Diaspora Option,” Science, Technology, and Society 2 (1997): 285–315. 37. Sari Hanafi, “Reshaping Geography: Palestinian Community Networks in Europe and the New Media,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31, no. 3 (May 2005): 581–98. CONCLUSION

1. Emmanuel Ma Mung, “Naming Diasporas on the Internet,” in Les diasporas, 2000 ans d’histoire, ed. Lisa Anteby-Yemini, William Berthomière, and Gabriel Sheffer (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 149–56. 2. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–47.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Stéphane Dufoix is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Paris X–Nanterre. He is a member of the Sophiapol (Political sociology, philosophy, and anthropology, Paris-X) and of the Centre d’histoire sociale du XXe siècle, the author of Politiques d’exil (Presses universitaires de France, 2002), and the editor, with Patrick Weil, of L’Esclavage, la colonisation, et après . . . France, Etats-Unis, Grande-Bretagne (Presses universitaires de France, 2005). He is a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. William Rodarmor is a French translator, writer, and editor with many book translations to his credit. One of them, Tamata and the Alliance, by Bernard Moitessier, won the 1996 Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association. He lives in Berkeley, California.