Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora

This essay is an attempt to consider whether the poetics of diaspora can provide a point of entry to a critical understanding of globalization. This is not to imply that the terms are necessarily commensurate, much less synonymous: on the contrary, as James Clifford has reminded us, "diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism" (244). The term globalization, slippery and contested as it is, might be considered first and foremost "an attempt to name the present," whereas the term diaspora would seem to name a relation to a past, as a designation for the aftermath of the scattering of a population (Denning 24). Globalization implies the imposition of a single mode of exchange everywhere—even if that standardization is produced by and entails the proliferation of difference and inequity—whereas diaspora foregrounds divergence, the "friction of distance," the irreducibility of the specific conditions that produce transnational movement and transnational "sensibilities."¹

If diaspora can offer a critical lens into the condition of globalization, then it must be taken "not merely as a comparative social or historical phenomenon, not even only as a predicament shared by many people or peoples who otherwise have little else in common, but as a positive resource in the necessary rethinking of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of the modern nation-state system and ideal" (Boyarin and Boyarin 5). On the one hand, this means that diaspora as a framework of inquiry signals an alternative to the market teleology implicit in economic conceptions of globalization.² On the other hand, an invocation of diaspora must also remind us, once again, that globalization is itself a historical phenomenon stretching back in many of its key features at least to the sixteenth century.

Given the historical register implicit in the term diaspora, my title is meant to be a provocation. To invoke the "futures of diaspora" should first of all raise the question of the continuing viability of the term (at a moment when, by some accounts, the unchecked proliferation of its use may have vitiated any critical force it once possessed). But it should also imply a departure from an approach that considers diaspora to be essentially a matter of the past, stressing the work of collective memory as "foundational" in an uprooted people's relationship to a "homeland."³ It is to ask whether diaspora can be said to involve not only a relation to deprivation and dispossession, but also a particular link to possibility and potential.

One of the most disturbing flaws in the scholarship that has arisen in the past two decades to focus on the dynamics of diaspora in a wide variety of "new" contexts is its failure to engage with the rich and complex history of the term in its "original" milieu, the Jewish intellectual tradition in the Hellenistic period. In Jewish discourse, a vision of futurity is an important component of the condition of diaspora, because it comes to be imbued with an eschatological dimension: there arises a dialectical tension between dispersal and return, loss and restoration, castigation and absolution, exile and redemption.⁴ In fact, although it is almost always overlooked in recent "new diasporas" scholarship, this tension is signaled by the deeply significant distinction that emerges in the Jewish intellectual tradition between diaspora (the Greek term appropriated as a self-designation by Jewish communities around the Mediterranean basin) and galut (the Hebrew term for exile).⁵ Often, diaspora is used to indicate a state of dispersal resulting from voluntary migration, as with the far-flung Jewish communities of the Mediterranean region. In this context, the term is not necessarily laced with a sense of violence, suffering, and punition, in part because Jewish populations maintained a robust sense of an original "homeland," physically symbolized by the Temple in Jerusalem (strikingly, Jewish settlements around the Mediterranean Sea were commonly called apoikiai, or "colonies").⁶ Very differently, the term galut (exile) connotes "anguish, forced homelessness, and the sense of things being not as they should be" (Wettstein 2), and is often considered to be the result...