Diasporas

Chapter 2. The Spaces of Dispersion

chapter 2 The Spaces of Dispersion A consideration of dispersion involves being able to name a commonpointofdepartureforit .Peoplecan’tbedispersedwithoutfirst having been together. But who is dispersed? What dispersed population (s) are we talking about? WriteshistorianWilliamMcNeill,“Itissafetoassumethatwhen ourancestorsfirstbecamefullyhumantheywerealreadymigratory, 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 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 reducedtosimpleoppositions: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 quantitativeway :theformationofasystemofstatesinEurope.Duringthe 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 36 / The Spaces of Dispersion 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 itconsiderstobewithoutaruler.Inthesecond,individualsleavethe territory where they live for political or economic reasons, more or lessunderduress.Inbothcases,humanbeingsmove.Itissignificant that colonial expansion led to the establishment of two different flows toward the colonies: those of the colonizers and those of the workforce(slaves,thencontractworkers).Inthenineteenthcentury, the conjunction of several factors—namely, the liberal-democratic, demographic,andindustrialrevolutions—promptedboththefreedom to emigrate to “new lands” (United States, Australia, and Canada)andtheEuropeancountries’needforcheaplabor.Progress in transportation allowed tens of millions of individuals to move: 52 millionEuropeanslefttheContinentbetween1820and1945.Inthe 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 The Spaces of Dispersion / 37 writingoccursbetweenthetwothatcombinestheoriginalplaceand the space of dispersion in an original geography. FOUR MIGRATORY PEOPLES In its classic usage—before its quantitative and semantic explosion —theword“diaspora”appliedparticularlytothosepeoplewith or without a state whose centenary, not to say millennial, migration traditions had not affected the persistence of a permanent...