Diasporas (review)

Those of us with Caribbean friends often hear the comment that the Caribbean is a place to be from. This feeling could well arise from the fact that more than any other place on the planet, the Caribbean is itself a region of exile, its current populations created in the sixteenth century by those first modern world systems that ran on industrial agriculture and on the slave trade and the labor that maintained it. So unpropitious a beginning culminated in the ultimate exploitation and depletion of the region and its people. The post-slavery and later post-colonial Caribbean of the twentieth century produced, nonetheless, an exceptionally vibrant culture in four European languages, several local ones, many musical registers and across the graphic arts, all of which are practiced as much in Toronto, London, and New York City (for the Anglophone Caribbean) as in Kingston, Port of Spain, or Bridgetown.

The region’s second Nobel in literature, V.S. Naipaul, in his London press conference following the announcement of his receipt of the award in October of 2001, acknowledged his “ancestral homeland” India and his “adopted homeland” Britain, but never mentioned his natal city of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he spent almost the first twenty years of his life. On the other hand, the region’s first Nobel in literature (1993), the prodigiously gifted poet, dramatist, painter Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, celebrated, in his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Antillean art as “love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments . . . this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”

What is a homeland, or, even more simply, where is home? Stephane Dufoix’s Diasporas is a very small book, 106 pages of text and 27 pages of notes appended for the English translation, that accomplishes a major task with lucidity and elegance. Dufoix, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, demonstrates a breathtaking range of learning, moving with ease among several disciplines, across cultures and languages, skillfully historicizing. The book was written for the French series Que sais-je, rather like the Very Short Introduction series of Oxford University Press, and one can only hope the French series took its name from that same motto nailed to the lintel of Montaigne’s study. William Rodarmor’s translation is seamless, rendered with that appearance of effortlessness that only the most gifted and painstaking translators can accomplish.

In his preface to the American edition, Dufoix announces that “The book you have in your hands is deliberately and almost proudly schizophrenic. It still attempts to describe the evolution and current content of diaspora studies, while, at the same time, taking a sidelong glance at an alternate conceptual framework . . . .” The term diaspora, as those of us who have attempted to use it will attest, is slippery stuff to handle, a veritable shape shifter and has engendered innumerable synonyms or analogous terms within the equally numerous disciplinary contexts in which the phenomenon is studied. This is apparent to anyone who has recourse to a journal like Diaspora, the pages of which are peppered with such terms as “multicultural,” “transnational,” “global,” “postcolonial,” and so on. The use of the plural of the term as the title of this book reflects this anarchic scene and also prepares for Dufoix’s tracing of the historical, cultural, and often polemical contexts of the term as well as his setting suggested analytic frameworks later. It is in his introduction that he sets out succinctly what exactly the many uses of the term have failed to do, to describe “the relationship to what I call a ‘referent-origin’” and justifies his argument for a “broader, more complex analytical framework that takes into account the structuring of the collective experience abroad based on the link maintained with the referent-origin and the community stance this creates.” If the term, referent-origin, is bloodless, it is clean and removes the haze of fraught ambiguities attendant upon “homeland” and even...