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  • Why We Come Back to Diasporas: Heterogeneous Groups and the Persistent Dream of Political Action
  • Daphne Winland (bio)
Keywords

diaspora politics, conceptual approaches, citizenship regimes, creolization, identity and belonging

Opportunity Structures in Diaspora Relations: Comparisons in Contemporary Multilevel Politics of Diaspora and Transnational Identity. Gloria Totoricagüena, ed. Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies, Conference Series #4, 2007.

An uneven scholarly terrain marked by shifts in meaning, emphasis, and scope typifies the current scholarship on diaspora, due in part to multiple intersections with debates on national identity, migration, citizenship, and related contemporary iterations of modernity. Diaspora has thus in some ways become a victim of its own success. The ubiquitous, sometimes clumsy and politically loaded use of the term—Tölölyan (1996, 8) has referred to it as too “capacious,” to the point of being “promiscuous”—has not discouraged scholars, governments, civil society organizations, artists, and even bloggers from using diaspora as a preferred and meaningful category of analysis.

I always look forward to collections of this kind as they remind me that diaspora is not so much a persistent, capricious, and/or moribund category (as critics are often quick to point out), as one full of possibility; the essays here reaffirm the value of discussion and debate on a term that continues to provoke and inspire. This edited volume brings together an interdisciplinary array of scholars including a virtual who’s who of diaspora studies, including William Safran, Robin Cohen, Gabriel Sheffer, and Khachig Tölölyan, who are, each in their own way, responsible for blazing the trail for diaspora scholarship. The goal of this collection (the proceedings of a 2006 international conference at the Center for Basque Studies) is “to compare definitions, realities, case studies and approaches from different disciplines and to discuss [End Page 254] and debate possibilities for future interdisciplinary investigation” (13). While the themes covered in the volume may be familiar to students of diaspora studies, the perspectives taken by the authors provide refreshing insights into what has been deemed to be at best an opportunity to extend the analytical life and capacity of diaspora as a construct or, at worst, a never-ending definitional and conceptual exercise. The focus here is rather on how diasporas help us think about political communities through their actions; how they mobilize, strategize, and effect change locally, nationally, and transnationally. The point of departure for this volume is the strategic political and economic tactics used and the opportunities created by diasporas. The political engagements of diasporas have always been a defining yet undertheorized feature of diaspora existence; each of the contributors to the volume explores the intersection of diasporas and identity politics, both ethnographically and theoretically.

In the lead article, Kim Butler introduces the term metadiaspora to track the political strategies of African diaspora populations, both historic (i.e., following the slave trade and the trajectory of populations descending from slaves) and contemporary (e.g., recent arrivals to host nations), as these aimed to mobilize a pan-African diaspora consciousness. The value of this contribution lies in its attention to diversity in what is usually referred to as the African diaspora. Butler’s discussion highlights the immense diversity, both spatial and temporal, of peoples identified as comprising a singular diaspora, not to mention the sociopolitical and historical circumstances and “millions of microlevel iterations” (27) that contribute to the inherent complexity of her analytical task. Butler rightly identifies the multiplicity of localized and transnational networks used by people of African descent in diverse urban locales. The strategies of the “new African diaspora” reveal significant divergences, specifically in their relationships to what is referred to as “the homeland.” Butler also speaks to the potential of governments to harness the concerns of contemporary African diasporas—for example, the Nigerian diaspora—much like those of earlier past struggles against colonialism and slavery—for the betterment of persistent structural inequalities. What is particularly interesting to this reviewer is the foregrounding of African states’ efforts to attract diasporas “back” to the homeland. This is a very useful contribution to contemporary analyses of homeland efforts to promote return with the promise of tax benefits and other enticements; few such studies focus on the African...

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