From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept

I read Khachig Tölölyan's article when it first appeared in Diaspora in 1996, but, as I was working on an altogether different subject at the time, I forgot about it. I wrote the main argument of the following article before rereading his work and therefore independently of it. I was afterwards struck by the numerous points of convergence between the analysis proposed by an American man of diasporic Armenian descent, trained in literature, and that which I put forth here as a French woman from a partly Jewish (and highly assimilated) tradition, trained in sociology. I am particularly sensitive to the national character of intellectual traditions (Schnapper, La relation), so I note with pleasure that beyond these traditions, the convergences between intellectuals from diverse horizons also sometimes point out that truth is one and error multiple. Though taking Tölölyan's article into account, I did not alter my own argument. I hope I have avoided, as he did, "the mix of scholarship and policy" that characterizes too much of the discourse on diaspora.