Diaspora: Concept, Context, and Its Application in the Study of New Literatures Lourdes López Ropero Contents
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ISSN 0214-4808 ● CODEN RAEIEX Editor Emeritus Pedro Jesús Marcos Pérez Editors José Mateo Martínez Francisco Yus Editorial Board Asunción Alba (UNED) ● Román Álvarez (University of Salamanca) ● Norman F. Blake (University of Sheffi eld) ● Juan de la Cruz (University of Málaga) ● Bernd Dietz (University of La Laguna) ● Angela Downing (University of Madrid, Compluten se) ● Francisco Fernández (University of Valen cia) ● Fernando Galván (University of Alcalá) ● Francisco García Tortosa (University of Seville) ● Pedro Guardia (University of Barcelona) ● Ernst-August Gutt (SIL) ● Pilar Hidalgo (Univer sity of Málaga) ● Ramón López Ortega (University of Extremadura) ● Doireann MacDermott (Universi ty of Barcelona) ● Catalina Montes (Uni- versity of Salamanca) ● Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza) ● Esteban Pujals (Uni ver sity of Madrid, Complutense) ● Julio C. 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Murcia Estos créditos pertenecen a la edición impresa de la obra Edición electrónica: Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures Lourdes López Ropero Contents Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures . 6 Abstract . 6 1. Genesis and Evolution of the term . 7 2. The Anglophone Afro-Caribbean Diaspora: A Case Study . .18 3. The Literary Imagination in the Caribbean Diaspora . 22 Works cited . 27 Revista Estudios Ingleses 16 (2003) Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures LOURDES LÓPEZ ROPERO University of Alicante [email protected] Abstract Displacement and dispersion do not only feature prominently as topics in the New Literatures in English, but characterize the lives of many postcolonial authors who have chosen or been compelled to develop their writing careers in different parts of the Western world. This paper puts forward the term diaspora as an analytical fi eld with which to map and apprehend multi-centred New Literatures, taking Anglophone Afro-Caribbean literature -produced along a London-New York-Toron- to axis- as a case study. Background to the origin, development and widespread currency of the term across disciplines will be provided. CONTENTS 6 Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures Lourdes López Ropero 1. Genesis and Evolution of the term n recent decades, experts from different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities have incorporated the Iterm diaspora into their discourses in an attempt to rep- resent experiences of displacement. The creation in 1991 of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies attests to the prominence achieved by the term as an instrument of analy- sis. In the Preface to the Journal’s inaugural issue, the editor, Khachig Tölölyan, links the term to a large semantic domain including words like ‘immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, ethnic community... the vocabulary of transnationalim’ (Tölölyan 1991: 4-5). The editor’s use of the word transnationalim reinforces his desire to ‘erode’ the ‘sharply defi ned borders of the nation-state’ (5), and he thus draws an example from Joyce’s Ulysses. Asked by a Dublin citizen to defi ne what a nation is, Leopold Bloom answers “the same people living in the same place” (3). But this fails to satisfy the questioner, a nationalist at odds with the rule of the British Empire, whose defi nition of Ireland in turn includes the Irish diaspora: “We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black 1847...” (3). What is at stake here is the location of culture. Are culture and place isomorphic categories? CONTENTS 7 Revista Estudios Ingleses 16 (2003) Anthropologists, cultural critics and historians have called into question essentialist defi nitions of culture and nation. Current ethnography, for instance, has shifted away from reductive notions of culture as ‘dwelling’ towards a more capacious defi - nition of culture as ‘multi-locale’ (Clifford: 1992). Multi-locale ethnography has consequently replaced the village as a cul- tural whole by more complex fi elds to do justice to transna- tional political, economic, and cultural forces that traverse and constitute local or regional worlds Cultures such as ‘Haiti’ can now be ethnographically studied both in the Caribbean and in Brooklyn. Indeed, the idea of nation as an immutable homogeneous en- tity has come under attack from different quarters. As early as 1882, historian Ernest Renan concludes that a nation is ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’, based on ‘the possession in com- mon of a rich legacy of memories’ and a will to perpetuate it in the present (19); he reaches this conclusion after ruling out criteria such as race, language, religion or natural frontiers. Benedict Anderson defi nes nations as ‘imagined communi- ties’. Nations, Anderson explains, are imagined because their members will never really get to meet their fellow-members, but will still hold an illusion of communion. Besides, nations imagine themselves as ‘limited’, with fi nite boundaries; as CONTENTS 8 Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures Lourdes López Ropero ‘sovereign’, and not divinely-ordained; and as a ‘community’ because ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 1991: 6-7). Na- tions also imagine themselves to be ‘historical’, in spite of the fact that they ‘loom out of an immemorial past and glide