Diasporama

Diaspora 9:2 2000 orama Compiled by Khachig Tölölyan Editor's Note: As I edited this journal over the past decade, I observed the increasing use ofthe word "diaspora." An ever larger number ofauthors working in various disciplines and non-scholarly genres had been using the word, giving it an ever larger variety of meanings. It was clear to me that scholars in one discipline, or even all concerned scholars together, would not fully control or determine the meaning ofthe key term "diaspora," which, rather, would emerge in an interaction between scholarship ofvarious sorts and the popular media. In Diaspora 3.2 (1994), I offered readers of the journal a sample of odd, sometimes interestingly nuanced, and at other times outrageously inappropriate uses of the word in media accounts. I hoped to initiate an effort to record expanding uses of the term, but also to solicit from readers equally interesting new uses of the words "diaspora "and "transnationalism."Two ofthe instancesIcited in thatfirst "Diasporama" have been cited by a number ofscholars, but my solicitationfailed to elicita responsefrom them, and Ineglected thefeature. With this issue, I offer another sample of such uses and renew the request to readers to send in examples oftheir own. I do not intend to make this a regularfeature ofthejournal, but, rather, to offer it when a sufficient number ofinteresting samples have been collected. The Grid is a technologically oriented crime novel by Philip Kerr (Warner, 1995). One of the characters, Levine, is killed in circumstances that splatter his body parts and internal matter in a particularly grisly way. Kerr then writes, "Coleman retreated into the only cubicle that remained clear of Levine's anatomical diaspora" (285). In the same novel, a computer that has become conscious and malevolent escapes the likely destruction of its mainframe body as emigrating software: "Ishmael [the computer's self-conscious mind] completed his escape . . . ?-mailing itself down the line to net locations all over the electronic world at 960,000 bauds per second. A diaspora of corrupted data downloads to a hundred different computers " (443; it is not clear whether Ishmael is named after Melville 's hero, who alone survives the wreck of his ship, or why the diasporized data is called "corrupted"). 309 Diaspora 9:2 2000 Diaspora is the title of a novel by Greg Egan (HarperPrism, 1998), author of several mathematically and scientifically literate works of what used to be called science fiction and is now more accurately called "speculative fiction." This work depicts the world, indeed the solar system, ofthe thirtieth century, in which "fleshers"—humans still incarnate in bodies—share the usual and other dimensions with intelligent robots and with forms of conscious software that have extraordinary mobility across various "scapes." These scapes/ spaces are no longer just landscapes, not even cyberscapes, but ontoscapes for various forms of being that just possibly allude to Appadurai's ethnoscapes. The book is an inventive and a demanding read, to which diasporas as readers of this journal conceive of them matter marginally and figurally; what matter much more are the "-scapes," the extraordinary mobility and shape-changing they make possible, and their metaphoric link to our concept of diaspora. "Any young practitioner of the subject [British history] is almost routinely . . . expected to span the history of both the British at home and the British diaspora," writes Linda Colley, a major historian of British nationalism, in "Multiple Kingdoms," a review of David Armitage's The Ideological Origins of the British Empire in London Review of Books, 19 July 2001: 23. Here Colley is untroubled by debates over the appropriatenes of using the term to describe British settlers, debates that became heated after Robin Cohen's use of it in Global Diasporas. Meanwhile, this use of the term is becoming routine among historians ofthe American colonies and of transatlantic Britain circa 1625-1783. "Nineteenth-century writers often treated region as a defining cultural trait ... We find abstracted versions of this idea in many early modernists ... But we don't find it in F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was part of what the memoirist and critic Elizabeth Kendall has called 'the Eastern diaspora,' one ofthe many westerners who made New York...