Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered

Pays Reve, Pays Reel: Creolite and Its Diasporas

PAYS RÊVÉ, PAYS RÉEL Créolité and Its Diasporas j Natalie Melas The idea of diaspora has undergone a stark transvaluation in recent cultural criticism. From the Greek and meaning “to scatter throughout, or far and wide,” the term “diaspora” originally referred to the dispersal of the Jewish people in the Babylonian exile and after. It signified the continuity of a culture and a people despite displacement from the land of origin and indeed despite the lack of coincidence between the culture and the territory upon which it is lived. This notion of diaspora relies for its unity on an unchanging, stable, ancestral cultural identity, fundamentally resistant to the vicissitudes of secular history. It construes the lost land of origin as a fixed site of, in Stuart Hall’s words, “some final and absolute Return.”1 Even if return is never accomplished in actuality, the primary identification with the culture of origins predominates precisely because it is thought to transcend place and time. To what he calls this “literal” conception of diaspora, Hall counterposes a “metaphorical” sense of diaspora, one that positions itself squarely within histories of displacement, not above or beyond them: The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.2 Without dismissing the significance of ancestral cultures and symbolic returns, Hall emphasizes the transformations these cultures undergo in the 104 NATALIE MELAS diaspora that here names an experience rather than a condition. In this metaphorical definition, diaspora suggests a contingent, heterogeneous identification, quite contrary to its earlier association with enduring origins. Far from being predicated on the dream of absolute return, diaspora in the metaphorical sense fully inhabits the site of displacement, embracing rather than defending against the differential relations it offers. “It ain’t where you’re from it’s where you’re at,”3 as the lyrics Paul Gilroy uses as the title of an essay succinctly express it. Gilroy’s project of wresting diaspora from its association with ethnic absolutism in order to develop it as a critical term for a specifically black and transnational experience of modernity is not identical with Hall’s, but the two revaluations of diaspora in the framework of British cultural studies have in common the decisive shift in the term’s emphasis from the lost land of origins to the site of displacement. This transvaluation of the notion of diaspora from the solidarity and commonality of a community in exile to the transforming experience of difference and displacement also departs from the term’s original application in academic study of dispersed African peoples and harks to changing political contexts that frame the term’s shifting meanings. “Diaspora” emerged as a key term in the 1960s, taking up more or less where panAfricanism left off. According to St. Clair Drake, once African nationalist decolonizing movements overcame, at least provisionally, their objects of common struggle—first slavery and then colonialism—“cultural PanAfricanism would provide a broader basis of identification and cooperative endeavor in the black world than political Pan-Africanism.”4 Diaspora, a less explicitly political term, emerged in the postcolonial and post-independence period to denote this commonality of culture and values, thus replacing the hopes for a real return to Africa that fueled much pan-African discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with figurative returns mediated through cultural identifications. The critique of absolute returns in contemporary transvaluations of the idea of diaspora takes place against the backdrop, on the one hand, of the antifoundationalist critique of origins in literary and cultural theory and, on the other hand, of the extraordinary migrations of cultures and peoples, accelerated over recent decades by the increasing flow and spread of global capitalism. The breakdown, or at least reconfiguration, of nationalism in much of the overdeveloped world, together with increased travel and communications, have aggravated the disjuncture between people and place, culture and territory PAYS RÊVÉ, PAYS RÉEL 105 in confounding ways. It is worth remembering that the conditions for differential and transformational experiences of diaspora can also foster an uninterrupted or exaggerated...