What is the difference between hybridity and diaspora

What do we mean by 'diaspora' and 'hybridity'? Why are they pivotal concepts in contemporary debates on race, culture and society? This book is an exhaustive, politically inflected, assessment of the key debates on diaspora and hybridity.

It relates the topics to contemporary social struggles and cultural contexts, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate and displace the key ideological arguments, theories and narratives deployed in culturalist academic circles today. The authors demonstrate how diaspora and hybridity serve as problematic tools, cutting across traditional boundaries of nations and groups, where trans-national spaces for a range of contested cultural, political and economic outcomes might arise.

Wide ranging, richly illustrated and challenging, it will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, ethnicity and nationalism. Home and Away Social Configurations of Diaspora.

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When I returned to the States, I began an amateur study of Egyptology. I could detect a ghostly image … a common trunk, off which different African cultures, north and south, east and west, had branched.

And yet traditional Egyptology, with few exceptions, such as the works of Henri Frankfort and E. There seemed, on the part of most, to be an almost magical insistence that the cataracts of the Nile were somehow a more impassable barrier than the Alps or the Pyrenees.

I should also say that there is no need, on the opposite side of the debate, for the unscholarly claim that Cleopatra was Black. Given the abysmal state of mainstream scholarship, the Africanist intuition was as good as any other. Stating that, though, seemed more a matter of intellectual necessity than simple nostalgia. I do think every good artwork is over-determined, with multiple composing elements.

For subjectivity is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the binarism of postmodern theory. In addition, contemporary theory stoutly denies its enduring binarism.

It makes the historic personal and the personal historic. In my performances and photo installations, I focus on the Black female, not as an object of history, but as a questioning subject.

In attempting to establish Black female agency, I try to focus on that complex point where the personal intersects with the historic and cultural. Because I am working at a nexus of things, my pieces necessarily contain hybrid effects.

Using images with so uncanny a resemblance to my late sister and her family helped objectify my relationship to her and to them and may have given viewers a traditional narrative catharsis.

On the other hand, because personal images were compared to images that were historic and politically contested, a space was created in which to make visible a previously invisible class. They were also able to open out to other cultural, i. The work I am doing now in my studio continues these preoccupations but locates them in the more recent 19th century.

For those of you who have just seen the Miscegenated Family Album installation here at the Davis Museum, or who may have seen images from it in your classes, I have tried to examine my practice in words that hopefully cut a crevice between the magic of the installation and my overdetermined creation of it. I wanted to set up a situation where the movement back and forth between the experience of the piece and the process of hearing me talk about it might be disorienting, might create the feeling of anxiously watching your feet as you do an unfamiliar dance.

The events in the Balkans in the s wit- nessed forced movement and resettlements of people to almost all parts of Europe and North America. The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia into Bosnia, Kosova, Serbia and Slovenia means that many peoples are living close to their former homes, yet are not able to return. The displacement of people as asylum-seekers and refugees also brings with it the difficulty of returning home.

South African political activists often found their way to Britain and were banned from returning to South Africa during the apartheid era.

Significantly, the status of refugee ties in with the notion of an exiled diasporic, as the only country a UN-recognized refugee passport does not allow the bearer to travel to is the homeland. It is useful to abstract the idea of force as a motivation for migration and thus the potential creation of a diaspora in the contemporary world. There are numerous examples in the late twentieth century of ethnic and nation- alist politics creating groups of displaced peoples.

In , the internal strife in the African state of Rwanda led to the creation of over a million refugees. However, it can be argued that, other than in some trading communities, migration of all sorts carries with it varying degrees of com- pulsion. These may not be directly traced to the actions of a nation-state, but do relate to the inequalities created by capitalism, such as the demand for labour, the rise of poverty or famine and the basic demand for better social and economic conditions.

Unlike exile, migration, as such, does not necessarily mean that returning home is barred, even though not being able to return may act as a powerful source of nostalgia for home. Robin Cohen builds upon the framework developed by William Safran to provide a list of conditions which, when satisfied, allow for the application of the diaspora label.

In viewing diaspora as a mode of categorization, we find a number of problems. As the following criteria illustrate, there is an inherent bias towards certain types of experience: 1 dispersal and scattering from a homeland ; 2 collective trauma while in the homeland ; 3 cultural flowering while away ; 4 a troubled relationship with the majority while away ; 5 a sense of community transcending national frontiers home and away ; and 6 promoting a return movement away to home.

Our reason for doing this is to illustrate one of the fundamen- tal flaws in the exercise he attempts. Crucially, the dynamic presented by Cohen oscillates around the idea of a homeland. In addition to the above criteria, he further classifies diasporas in terms of a set of core features. There are, accordingly, five different forms of diasporic community: 1 victim African and Armenian ; 2 labour Indian ; 3 trade Chinese and Lebanese ; 4 imperial British ; and 5 cultural Caribbean.

Even though Cohen is not simplistic in the application of these divisions, acknowledging as he does that there are overlaps and that things can change with time, the nature of this project is to develop a metanarrative which accounts for a world of movement and settlement in an orderly way.

For example, to reduce an Indian diaspora to labour migration immediately anticipates that this is the key factor in shaping the contours, cultures and settlement of the entirety of that diaspora.

This is, of course, not true, as there are a myriad of other factors that go into such processes of creation. If there is a useful aspect to this kind of grand narrative, it is to provide detailed historical material and to point out issues that are worth exploring and that can be taken up in other contexts. For example, the historical longevity of the diasporic construct is one that predates the modern for- mation of the nation.

Diaspora is not limited to any particular historical period in that we have examples of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial diasporas even while privileging this as a historicizing frame- work.

This approach is also strongly people-centred in that links created by capital and commodities and, more recently, through media channels such as television and newspapers are not made a priority, though obviously this has both advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, however, such a definitive schema is unable to even partially answer the question of whether diaspora as a term helps us in thinking about movement and change with any clarity, let alone providing the intellectual tools needed to transform society along lines that enable the pursuit of social justice.

Another framework is offered by Steven Vertovec , who approaches the subject of diaspora not so much through the categorization of peoples, but with attention to the ways that multiple meanings of diaspora are gener- ated through ethnographic work. From his work in Trinidad and Britain, Vertovec offers three definitions as types: 1 diaspora as social form; 2 diaspora as a type of consciousness; and 3 diaspora as a mode of cultural production.

Our focus in this chapter will be on diaspora as social form; the next chapter will concentrate on cultural issues. A concern with diaspora as con- sciousness will straddle both chapters. For Vertovec, diaspora as a social form has three aspects. First, it consists of specific social relationships related to common origins and migration routes. Secondly, there is a tension of political orientation between loyalty to homeland and to that of the host country.

Thirdly, there are particular economic strategies that mark certain diasporic groups in terms of mobilizing collective resources. The context in which these aspects are played out are also threefold: i the global stage upon which transnational ethnic ties are maintained; ii the local state in which settlement has taken place; and iii the homeland states, or where forebears come from. It may be that the distinction between social and cultural forms offered by Vertovec provides a useful set of categories for organizing the literature.

This matrix is privileged for its classificatory elegance rather than for offer- ing a way of comprehending social groups or conceptualizing diaspora in analytical terms. It is quite apparent that diaspora as a concept has gained productive purchase in a range of fields that traverse the social sciences and humanities.

However, although the models of diaspora presented by Vertovec may serve well to categorize the literature, they do less to address the limitations that might be placed around the con- cept and they do not point us in the direction of its possible progressive uses. Indeed, this final point can also be made about the work of Cohen.

To move beyond these frameworks requires a sidelong glance at concepts that have been critiqued by the emergent interest in diaspora, such as immigra- tion and ethnicity. In so doing, the usefulness of disapora in terms of both theory-building as well as relating to political struggles comes to the fore.

Diaspora, immigration and ethnicity Perhaps the most closely related concepts to diaspora and ones that have come under some scrutiny through the lens of diaspora are those of immi- gration and ethnicity. First, it marks groups who have never migrated but are the offspring of migrants as not belonging to a particular place. Where large settler populations have existed for some time, this conceptualization of immigrant carries less analytical weight but remains a political tool for marginalizing or racializing a group.

Secondly, it implies a one-off event that people migrate from one place and settle in another, end of story. However, research has now shown that migration can entail a number of shifts and movements and actually may even entail an incomplete process Papastergiadis Or does it emphasize difference by highlighting transnational affiliations? For now, let us assume a positive perspective. Combined with a hyphenated, hybrid identification, it can be argued that diaspora allows us to move beyond the static, fixed notion of immigrant.

We are talking here about a relationship that, to a greater or lesser extent, changes both the sending and receiving countries. This rela- tionship has many connotations which are absent when thinking in immi- gration terms alone.

Perhaps not in any fun- damental manner, but it might destabilize the dominance of an American nationalism and white supremacy which can easily accommodate new migrants, as long as they accept the American way of life. Perhaps, more fundamentally, the appellation of immigration carries with it sets of larger institutional connotations, such as laws, regulations and reciprocity between nation-states.

In both cases, the immigration system is oriented towards creating benefit for the receiving end. The same is true for earlier periods of immigration into Europe and the Americas, where labour short- ages have always required new sources of workers — either rural to urban migration or in international migration. Legal and institutional mechanisms governing diasporas are few and hard to find. The diversion away from institutional structures to cultural matters is a critique that can also be levelled at diaspora and, perhaps even more so, at hybrid- ity as we argue in Chapter 5.

A turn away from institutional structures does not necessarily mean a lack of concern with politics. Certain diasporic formations can sit easily in the political culture of a nation-state while others do not.

The clearest example of this is demonstrated by the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September Operating different policies for different diasporic groups in no way contradicts the foreign or domestic policy interests of the USA, but is an example of the way in which diasporic groups are treated unevenly by the state as a matter of strategy.

Diasporic understandings can add many dimensions to the study of immi- gration, but these are, on the whole, complementary rather than competing accounts. Even though the study of ethnicity has gen- erated a huge amount of literature, it has come under scrutiny from a number of quarters. This perspective on boundaries has been criticized by those who see ethnicity as overly concentrating upon cultural aspects to the denigration of politics CCCS and by those who have more contemporary concerns about essentialism Brah Here, the emphasis is on the way ethnicity draws attention to certain processes by which boundaries are maintained and fixed.

Much state and public discourse reproduces groups that are differentiated in terms of gender, class, etc. This then has rami- fications for how these people are treated see Sharma and Housee In contrast, diasporic understanding, by focusing on transnational links and emphasizing a multiplicity of belongings and identities, can challenge the fixity of identity invoked by ethnicity.

Anthias In other words, diasporic groups are just as likely to operate within the bounds of ethnic absolutism as any other group. For example, Black Muslims in the Nation of Islam or Sikh separatists may organize and exist as transna- tional groups, but they are also engaged in the process of building and main- taining quite rigid boundaries. Anthias Theoretically, therefore, diaspora and ethnicity may share more in common than is often acknowledged.

For our present purposes, it is sufficient to note that the problems of essentialism do not disappear with the invocation of diaspora and certainly diasporic and ethnic groups are not mutually exclusive categories.

Diaspora does, however, differ markedly from ethnicity in terms of where it draws our attention. Ethnicity reinstates the nation-state as the legitimate social sphere in which boundaries are made. In some ways, ethnicity is like the smaller version of the nation, in that the processes described to bind an ethnic group are often similar to those used to describe and bind the nation. Also, the space in which ethnicity is allowed to exist is often determined by the policies and institutional procedures of a nation-state.

For instance, in the Netherlands all children are allowed to learn their mother tongue in state schools regardless of whether it is Kurdish, Dutch or French. Policies of nation-states play a dialectical role in the creation and maintenance of ethnic groups. It is here that diaspora can be seen as almost a contradictory force to ethnicity, as it draws atten- tion away from the single nation-state and towards a potential multiplicity of nation-states or regions within states.

As we shall see later, the idea of ethnicity, as with that of the nation, is more difficult to sustain when the analysis moves away from a single society. It is in this context that diasporic understanding allows us to survey different kinds of identity formation, as well as of social organization. If there is any single theme that emerges from a study of diaspora, it is that of its multi-locational qualities, or the interac- tion between homes and abroads which cannot be reduced to one place or another.

It is this couplet that allows us to outline the substantive implica- tions of diaspora for politics and economics. There are crudely three social spheres which can be identified: 1 the dispersed group who have some form of collective identity or process of identification; 2 the contexts and nation-states in which these various groups reside; and 3 the nation-states to which an affiliation is maintained, through a series of social, economic and cultural ties.

These organizations embody a certain diasporicity. These organizations may be syncretic in their practices we would argue that this is inevitable but they certainly have little difficulty in directly relating to their home- lands. However, there is tremendous variety in the nature of connections with a homeland, from a very close engagement such as with Kashmiris in the UK to a less materially close relationship as with the Tamils in South Africa to minimal interaction in terms of visiting and material ties as demonstrated by the historical position of Indians in Guyana and the Caribbean Ramdin For instance, dual citizenship for the Indian diaspora resident in certain countries was made available in and is likely to make the relationship closer for those who can take up such status.

This is despite the fact that many migrants from India may have entitle- ment to ancestral land. In contrast, the Pakistani government has always recognized dual citizenship and, as such, the Pakistani diaspora has a much closer and intimate economic and political connection with Pakistan.

This example reflects how state structures and legal frameworks can restrict, enable or create certain diasporic effects and activities. Another aspect of homeland in diaspora studies that we need to address is the supposed unchanging nature of the homeland. Before , for example, there was only an Ethiopian diaspora, but since then there is now another independent state called Eritrea. In the post-war migration to Britain from South Asia, up to there was only a Pakistani and Indian diaspora.

After the struggle for independence, a third country, Bangladesh, came into formation and thus a new diaspora formed. Strictly speaking, both the Eritrean and Bangladeshi diasporas were not constituted through migration, exile, trade or any of the other reasons previously given, but nominally arose due to the creation of new nations.

The instability of ideas of home and abroad can be partially attributed to the commercially driven increased use of information communication tech- nologies ICTs and the decreasing costs of travel, which have enabled the movement of people, information and goods to take place in greater volume. Developing interconnectivity across international borders has meant that those with access are now able, to various extents, to maintain connections, deepen relationships and broaden networks with lesser investment in terms of time, cost and effort.

Though the question of infrastructure remains cen- tral to the enhanced use of technologies of communication, and there remains many that are excluded from the transnational ecumene, there is no doubt that extended diasporic connections have arisen as ICTs have become more ubiquitous.

This is not to say that it is ICTs that have some- how created diasporas in the sense of virtual communities on the internet, but rather the combination of cheaper travel and greater ease of communi- cation has supported what was already present see Kaur and Hutnyk However, the impact of ICTs repeats the old story of the centrality of the nation-state in diaspora studies.

It is the use of new technology, with its ability to transcend state borders, which is highlighted. This is indeed a hangover of the exile thesis, in which context there are barricades to return or limits on maintaining transnational links. Movements from village to city and upward mobility from working to middle class also evoke some of the temperaments of diaspora.

But this does not necessarily mean that the Nariobi-ite has had to question affiliation with the village in quite the same way as his London cousins may do. Questions of racism, loyalty to the nation and belonging all become per- tinent in transnational migration, questions which have their counterpart in rural—urban migration but do not always carry quite the same urgency or the same threat although it can be urgent and threatening in different ways, of course.

Political connections The problem that nation-states have with diasporas has to do with the ideal of loyalty.

In the modern era, the nation-state is supposed to be the princi- pal body of affiliation for all those who live within its borders. This is the manner in which the nation can then represent the interests of those it claims to represent. Diasporas complicate this easy formulation. In , Norman Tebbit summed up this problem by asking who British Asians would support in a cricket match, England or a South Asian team.

Similar critiques of the masculinist nature of the affilia- tion to the nation have been made by feminists see Anthias and Yuval- Davis ; Chatterjee But the diasporic context has a special significance here because the loyalties in question are concerned with other nation-states.

In this sense, unlike Marxist and feminist critiques, diasporic questioning often remains within the domain of nation-states. Yet, crucially, it is the fact that it is those residing in one place but influencing another that becomes problematic. However, the activities of these groups in influencing their homelands do not necessarily follow a progressive or even transgres- sive set of political aims. According to Yossi Shain , the impact of the American-Jewish diaspora on the politics of Israel has been to promote a peaceful solution.

This example reminds us that despite the activities of diasporas, inter-state relations tend to work towards mutual maintenance rather than criticism. The role of diasporas in homeland politics becomes all the more appar- ent when there is conflict at play. Often these conflicts become more prominent when large diasporas are involved.

The successful struggles of the Eritrean people for nationhood received scant attention in the Western media when compared to those groups who had diasporic connections. The list that Arjun Appadurai often reels off in his various commentaries include the Kurds, Sikhs, Tamils and Kashmiris — groups that all have a sig- nificant presence in Euro-America and therefore with relative ease of access to media and those deemed powerful in the New World Order.

Yet, this process is not that new: the Irish in America have long been both mate- rial and ideological supporters of the Irish Republican Army see Chapter 6. We have already twice noted the Jewish case. Anthias illustrates how Cypriots abroad differ according to whether they are Greek or Turkish in terms of their preferred political solution to the question of Cyprus. Yet, in all of these cases it is premature to dismiss the role of the nation-state.

The influence and impact that a diaspora can have at the level of realpolitik depends largely on the structures of the particular nation-state in question. Ostergaard-Nielson shows the lack of success that Turkish and Kurdish groups have when lobbying the German and Dutch parliaments. In contrast, Yossi Shain demonstrates how Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel are all kept high on the political agenda in the USA through well-organized lobbies led by diasporic groups.

The American polit- ical culture is premised on various vote-banks which are incorporated into the lobbying system as a vehicle for expressing state agendas. What becomes evident from this comparative work is the sustained role of the nation-state in framing and enabling the political activities of diasporic groups, even where this is to have a transnational impact.

Attempting to balance the role of the nation-state, the organization of a diaspora and the roots of an ethno-national conflict calls for analysis of some depth, which many accounts often fail to develop. For example, the Sikh secessionist movement calling for a Khalistan was heavily supported by and influenced by the diaspora in the UK and Canada see Tatla Yet, the reasons for this large participation cannot be solely reduced to expressions of sympathy directed against the actions of the Indian state in the Punjab.

To name such sympathies as deterritorialized ethnicity is a reduction that does not account for the fact that separate processes can produce a similar outcome. The ideological revivalism that was associated with the Sikh secessionist move- ment resonated with settler-migrant concerns.

At the same time, the impact of capitalism on rural livelihoods led to similar questions about Sikh identity in the Punjab. These separate processes came together due to an ongoing dialogue in a diasporic space, the significance of which led the Indian gov- ernment to accuse the diaspora of causing all the problems in the Punjab — a useful way of avoiding their own culpability. Perhaps an even more extreme example can be found among those engaged in the struggle for an independent Kashmiri state in the north of India and Pakistan.

One of the main organizations engaged in political activism in the region found its origins in Birmingham, UK, in the newly forming diaspora. This organization then later worked in Pakistan-administered Kashmir before crossing the border into Indian-administered Kashmir to become one of the main secu- lar organizations fighting for liberation.

Yet, the circulation of ideas and people that fostered this struggle has remained a closed case to the plethora of books written about the Kashmir situation.

It is perhaps because dias- poric analysis is too difficult to carry out in a context where international relations are still determined by inter-state concerns and diasporic involve- ment is seen as illegitimate or an unwelcome interference.

The Sikhs and Kurds are not looking for a new way to live with difference. Rather, they are concerned with gaining their own nation-state. In an era where many argue that the nation-state is no longer all that relevant see Held et al. This desire for nationhood among certain diasporas poses some problems for those theorists who have argued an anti-national line, and all the more so for those who at least have highlighted the tension that exists between notions of diaspora and the nation-state.

Once again, there are historical antecedents to the role of diasporas in political formations. The first Pan-African Congress took place in Paris in and the largest of these events was held in Manchester in The international struggle against colonialism and imperialism never respected extant nation-state borders.

The Ghadar movement was a revolutionary movement of the s in India with the aim of overthrowing British imperialism. Many of its members were exiled to North America where they continued their work of anti-imperialist struggle, finding a receptive American public, which had rid itself of the British in the late eighteenth century as a result of the Revolutionary War.

As previously discussed, the notion of migration contains with it the idea of transfer of people from one place to another. However, the flows in the other direction come in two forms: these are as remittances and as investment in productive capacity, that is, businesses. These forms of flow can be illustrated by com- paring the Indian and Chinese diasporas.

According to Devesh Kapur: The ratio of foreign investment [in China] by the Chinese diaspora is nearly twenty-fold that of the Indian diaspora [investment in India]. Kapur The difference here may be due to the relative size of an established entre- preneurial class among the Chinese diaspora and the large proportion of rural migrants among Indians although this is now changing due to newer migration to the USA. In either case, we are still talking about substantial amounts of money which have a considerable impact on the receiving economies.

This recent courting of diasporas by governments of the South has arisen because of their need to capture large flows of capital which can have a positive, if not major impact upon economic development. Rather, the impact of remittances is localized to those areas of mass migra- tion. For instance, certain parts of Mexico Gutierrez and parts of Pakistan Kalra have benefited greatly from remittances, but this phenomenon has not been widespread or even. In the case of the invest- ment from overseas Chinese, only certain provinces in China, such as Guandong and Fujian, have benefited Weidenbaum and Hughes This is another example of the discrepancy between nation-states which have particular plans for their diasporas and the groups themselves, who may pursue very different agendas.

The investment patterns of diasporic populations may not concur with national agendas of development but they do resonate with the current phase of global capitalism, which creates uneven regions within nation- states as well as between them.

Indeed, diasporic capital organization seems to fit into another trend of the new logic of advanced capitalist organization, that which favours small-scale networks over large, vertically-integrated forms of production see Castells Large organizations are seen as unresponsive to the requirements of contemporary consumers, who want more individually tailored and customized products.

The supposed rapidly changing nature of the market place can therefore benefit from networks of small producers who can respond quickly to market change and at the same time can harbour specialist knowledge. In this way, the flexibility and diverse capabilities of smaller companies are maintained while the market- ing and sales muscle of the co-ordinating firm makes for a mutually bene- ficial relationship.

While this ideal of the networking firm is closely bound up with the ideology of neo-liberalism, it is not too difficult to see how diasporas, with their links across nations, can be seen as tools for the facili- tation of economic growth.

Kapur persuasively argues that diaspo- ras are able to provide both local knowledge and credibility when firms wish to expand from the West into the developing world. This is particu- larly the case with the penetration of large information technology IT companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett Packard into India. Diaspora emerges, then, as it becomes useful to the market, or to the new logic of global finance capital.

She will be helpful in the emerging South Asian market precisely because she is a well-placed Southern diasporic. This shift in scholarly atten- tion still tells us little of the economic activities of the majority of diasporic groups, who are the service sector workers of the developing world and the Third World in the First. Ranging from Latino agricultural labour in California to Nigerian peddlers in Athens, Tamil flower sellers in Frankfurt and Bengali waiters in London, these groups constitute a seemingly endless list where each example evokes a different set of economic ties.

Perhaps even more than the hi-tech diasporics, this service sector labour also fur- nishes the essential requirements of contemporary globalizing capital. The service sector dias- porics were never counted as part of a brain-drain and are still not courted to any extent by their host governments. Yet these groups also play a transnational economic role, though this is more to do with protecting their families from the ravages of International Monetary Fund structural reform programmes in their homeland countries, and avoiding the harsh realities of life in those states that have, in a neo-liberal global agenda, abandoned all attempts at universal social development see Amin Thus, diasporic connections provide various new means for the mobi- lization of people and capital, and new insights into the ways in which social organizations can transcend nation-state boundaries.

But do these new methods necessarily form a challenge to the current neo-liberal global order? Or, evaluating the views canvassed in this section, does the emer- gence of an interest in diaspora coincide with a particular phase of capital- ist development? Is diaspora another tool for market penetration or a potential method for political network-building? Are these questions ask- ing too much of the diaspora concept when maybe we should be content with the critique it offers to homogeneity and essentialism?

The relationship between forms of exclusion, and indeed differentiated inclusion, and the emergence of diasporic solidarity and political projects of identity, on the one hand, and dialogue as in hybridisation , on the other, are important foci for research. Anthias Indeed, Anthias makes the significant point that a singular concern with diaspora can divert attention away from racialized social relations in any particular context.

Clifford is mimicking and depoliticizing a slogan that was used to assert the rights of racialized groups in Britain to equal treat- ment and value. In a previous section of this chapter, where we compared diaspora with immigration and ethnicity, we noted how a positive aspect of diaspora was its ability to present a more nuanced understanding of migra- tion, but this may be to the neglect of local particularities and political reali- ties. However, it may be that this is more to do with a confusion over the nature of political practice and its analysis rather than an inherent occlusion of local racialized power relations.

A further example will clarify this point. A complete reversal of the conventional logic of migration is presented here. In the post-colonial context, the rea- sons for the presence of racialized groups in Britain has to do with the colo- nial past. Current migration is predicated upon links developed through colonialism.

Viewed in this way, diasporic memory can act as a resource for contemporary political struggles, and it can be argued that all anti-colonial struggles actively involved diasporas. The literature here is vast, and we would point to texts by Rajani Palme Dutt and, for a further gen- dered complication, Jayawardene The main point is that even those groups struggling for rights within the settler context drew upon transna- tional inspiration.

It is therefore not inevitable that evoking diaspora will lead to de-politicization. Indeed, the civil rights movement in the USA in the s became a model for emancipatory movements throughout the world. Diaspora here takes on a progressive and transgressive hue at the same time. In both cases, the foil or target under attack is the limiting and restricting force of the nation-state. For many of those engaged in anti-racist struggle from the s, the British state was one of the primary sources of racism.

Sivanandan gives a direction out of the tussle between Clifford and Anthias, one which is bound by political struggle and the historical moment. Indeed, without a situated analysis of class, anyone trying to attach any progressive tinge to any diasporic formation will find the way fraught with many pitfalls. As diaspora becomes more an object of knowledge for circulation within the academy and other circuits of symbolic consumption, the distance between diaspora- talk, material struggles and active organizing increases.

As a descriptive tool, diaspora draws attention to groups of people in a way that is both useful but limiting. Indeed, it is transnationalism that has come to circulate widely in the spheres of economics and politics to indicate some of the spheres previously referred to as diasporic.

It is in the sphere of the cultural, to which we turn in the next chapter, that diaspora has retained its currency and has actually bloomed. But this condition will return us to the critique that motivates our interest in working through the terms of this debate, since diaspora, divorced from organized politics, is largely unable to help us in resisting the globalizing and transnational ravages of local and contemporary capitalism.

Available at www. In the Rwandan crises, the protagonists in the con- flict, the Hutu and Tutsi, were distinguished by European colonists in terms of how many heads of cattle each tribe owned. These initial differentiations led to the re-enforcement of once fluid social boundaries and ultimately to one of the worst acts of genocide witnessed in Africa since the slave trade itself see Eltringham ; Melvern