Remittance; Or, Diasporic Economies of Yearning

It’s just the idea of being connected, right, and having that connection and knowing that there is rightness about it, a feeling about it.… I don’t know what the future will hold, but Jamaica is like … well, Africa is like my grandmother, Jamaica is like my mother, and Canada is like my spouse. That is the only way I can explain it. It can’t be a conflict.

—Lillian Allen

Oh God, I miss them. When I left in 1973 my youngest child was nine months old. I know that whenever we meet again he won’t even know me. It hurts.

—Molly, in Silenced

Migrant remittances are conventionally defined as money and goods sent by emigrants from the new dwelling-place to the place of origin. The concept of remittance, however, opens to much richer possibilities if we consider the affective content implied by the extended definition of “remit,” with its many nuances exceeding the act of sending: to surrender, to put back, to withdraw, to set free, to relieve from tension. I make a case here for an expansive use of remittance in interdisciplinary cultural criticism about and embedded in diasporic conditions. In what follows, remittance is treated as an investment—in the fullest sense of the word, which includes emotive investments—in places left behind, and as such it is mobilized to discuss diasporic popular culture, public commemoration of postcolonial independence, and the ambivalence characterizing everyday life in the Caribbeanized city of Toronto. My aim methodologically will become clear, but it is summed up thus: let the complex texture of human practices call into question traditional academic divisions between “moves” motivated by, on the one hand, financial interest or survival and, on the other, emotional attachments.

The term “diasporic”—compared to descriptives oriented toward “migration,” which are better suited to the analysis of quantifiable data—is both fraught and excited with a signifying excess due to its connotations of exile, loss, and remembrance. This emotive dimension makes it a rich concept for critical academic work that concerns itself with possibilities for agency and expressions of desire under globalization. I am particularly interested in a future-oriented and galvanizing mode of desire I will call yearning, later to be distinguished from nostalgic longing for the lost object. Yearning’s horizon, when brought to bear on diasporic conditions, presses us to think through the latter by looking around and ahead alongside the ever important act of looking back. I prefer the adjectival diasporic (along with the processual noun employed by Stuart Hall, “diasporization”) to the object diaspora, taking a cue from Appadurai’s use of “the cultural” instead of the problematic substantialization “culture.”¹ Further, the formulation “diasporic conditions” is helpful both for its shift to the diasporic and for the double intent of conditions, which refers first to states of being and becoming and second to criteria (what conditions enable diasporic modes of affiliation, identification and boundary formation?). A third layer comes into focus when “conditions” is understood as a verb; that is, the diasporic conditions the environment. The environment of concern here is the city of Toronto, a second-tier global city that has been transformed by encounters with diasporic Caribbean populations, especially since the relative liberalization of Canadian immigration policy in the late 1960s.

The increasing popularity of diaspora as a concept makes it less precise, as we move further from a sense of dispersal directly rooted in traumatic rupture, but just as interesting for contemporary criticism. Diaspora’s appeal is unsurprising given its invocation of deep feeling for a place other than one’s immediate surroundings, feeling that has an impact on everyday urban social relations and eventually on the very fabric of the city. One can avoid fetishizing the living connection to the former dwelling-place by ground ing it in the diasporic city as distinct from the immigrant city, which is represented more often as a stable site onto which new groups are grafted. The diasporic city, constituted by displacement but also emplacement and consequent transformations, automatically complicates external orientations by engendering coeval and cospatial encounters and...