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IT331 Transnational Stories in Italy – Diaspora and Hybridity
DIASPORA
origins of the term comes from Greek : Speirein (to sow) dia (over / through)
GENDERED CONNOTATIONS: ‘The original meaning of diaspora summons up the
image of scattered seeds, and we should remember that in Judeo-Christian (and Islamic)
cosmology, seeds are metaphorical for the male "substance" that is traced in genealogical
histories (see Delaney). The word "sperm" is etymologically connected to diaspora. It
comes from the same stem, [Greek - to sow or scatter], and is defined by the OED as "the
generative substance or seed of male animals." Diaspora, in its traditional sense, thus
refers us to a system of kinship reckoned through men and suggests the questions of
legitimacy in paternity that patriarchy generates. (Helmreich, 1992)
COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE: ‘Diaspora signified a collective trauma, a banishment,
where one dreamed of home but lived in exile’ (Cohen)
DEFINITIONS: ‘1) they or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original
“centre” to two or more “peripheral”, or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective
memory, vision or myth about their original homeland – its physical location, history,
achievements; 3) they believe that they are not – and perhaps cannot be – fully accepted
by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they
regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they
or their descendants would (or should) eventually return –when conditions are
appropriate; 5) they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the
maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity;
and 6) they continue to relate personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or
another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined
by the existence of such a relationship’ (Safran, pp. 83-4).
TYPES OF DIASPORA (Cohen):
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Victim diaspora- Jews, Armenians, Africans
Imperial diaspora – British
Labour diaspora – Indian
Trading diaspora – Chinese, Lebanese
Cultural diaspora – Caribbean
‘Diaspora are not synonymous with casual temporary travel. Nor is diaspora a
metaphor for individual exile but, rather, diasporas emerge out of migrations of
collectivities, whether or not members of the collectivity travel as individuals, as
households or in various other combination. Diasporas are places of long-term, if not
permanent, community formations, even if some households or members move on
elsewhere. The word diaspora often invokes the imagery of traumas of separation and
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dislocation, and this is certainly a very important aspect of the migratory experience. But
diasporas are also potentially the sites of hope and new beginnings. They are contested
cultural and political terrains where individual and collective memories collide,
reassemble and reconfigure’ (Brah, p. 193)
‘Diasporas, in the sense of distinctive historical experiences, are often composite
formations made up of many journeys to different parts of the globe, each with its own
history, its own particularities. Each such diaspora is an interweaving of multiple
travelling; a text of many distinctive and, perhaps even disparate narratives’ (Brah, p.
183).
DIASPORA SPACE: ‘is the intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as a
point of confluence of economic, political, cultural and psychic processes.’ It ‘includes
the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of
‘staying put’ (Brah).
It is inhabited not only by migrants but also by their descendants and those constructed
as indigenous. Diaspora space includes ‘us’ and ‘them’, it contests boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion. (Brah)
ITALY’S MANY DIASPORAS: Donna Gabaccia refers to Italy as having ‘many
diasporas’ as migrants attachments are to the home town (il paese) rather than Italy (il
Paese). ‘The modern diasporas of Italy were webs of social connections and channels of
communication between the wider world and a particular paese (village) or patria
(hometown)’ (Gabaccia, p. 3).
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HYBRIDITY
Origins of term: biological term used in 19th century racial theories.
Today the term is used in a more positive sense and has become ONE OF THE KEY
TERMS AND CONCEPTS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, used in the work of cultural
theorists such as Robert Young, Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall.
HYBRIDITY AS AN ANTI-ESSENTIALIST CONCEPT: ‘a key term in that wherever it
emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism’ (Young, p. 27).
MORE THAN THE SUM OF TWO PARTS or the fusion of two elements. It holds
together contradictions and difference. Bhabha describes it as a ‘“newness” that is not
part of the continuum of past and present’.
IT HAS SUBVERSIVE POTENTIAL (Bhabha). It undermines ideas of purity on which
colonial thought and power is predicated.
margins / interstices /liminal spaces / in-betweenness
cultural hybridity / linguistic hybridity / literary hybridity
QUOTATIONS
‘The positive feature of hybridity is that it invariably acknowledges that identity is
constructed through a negotiation of difference and that the presence of fissures, gaps
and contradictions is not necessarily a form of failure. In its most radical form, the
concept also stresses that identity is not the combination, accumulation, fusion or
synthesis of various components, but an energy field of different forces’ (Papastergiadis,
p. 238).
The hybrid, therefore, is formed not out of an excavation and transferral of foreignness
into the familiar, but out of this awareness of the untranslatable bits that linger on in
translation’ (Papastergiadis, p. 278-8).
Hybridity ‘foregrounds complicated entanglement rather than identity, togetherness-indifference rather than separateness and virtual apartheid’ (Ang, p. 141).
Hybridity ‘is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through
disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and
original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial
identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the
necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It
unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its
identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back
upon the eye of power. (Bhabha, p, 159-60).
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‘Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses
the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ”denied” knowledges enter upon
the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’
(Bhabha p. 162)
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Ien Ang, ‘Together-in-difference: beyond diaspora into hybridity’, Asian Studies Review
(2007), 27:2, 141-154.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Atvah Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York:
Routledge, 2008), See Chapter 8 ‘Diaspora, border and translational identities’.
James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’ in Cultural Anthropology 1994, 9 (3): 302–338.
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge,
2008). See esp. Chapter 8
Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: Routledge, 2000), see introduction.
Stefan Helmreich, 'Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora' in Diaspora:
A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1992, 243-249.
Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Tracing Hybridity in Theory’, in Debating Cultural Hybridity, ed.
by Werbner & Modood (London: Zed books, 1997), pp. 257-281.
Sandra Ponzanesi, 'Diasporic Subjects and Migration', in Thinking Differently, ed. by
Braidotti & Griffin (London: Zed, 2002).
William Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’ in
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1991, 1 (1): 83-99.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, Routledge,
1995).