Originally a term used to designate the experience of loss and alienation of Jews throughout centuries of European racism, the term Diaspora has acquired in recent decades overtones of a new celebration of identity through the transnational experience of migrant population from the third world to the West. In academic discourse the term has gained valency through several important publications, such as Robin Cohen’s excellent Global diasporas, in which he makes a survey of the historical and material conditions of the push factors which lead to mass population movements, from China to the Caribbean.
Initially all diasporas were to serve as manual labour, such as the Chinese who were brought in to build railway lines in America, similar to their Indian counterparts in Eastern Africa (an experience which has been beautifully chronicled by G. M. Vassanji) or to occupy low-paid factory jobs on the European continent. The gradual displacement of people and cultures has over time led to a reassessment of the significance of Culture, Identity and Nationalism which most Western countries are still in the process of resolving. However, the advent of blue-collar workers from the erstwhile third world to occupy professional positions in the developed world has substantially changed the notion of coloured migrants, as revolving on the periphery of these societies, to the present reality of their visible participation in the economic, political and cultural life of these societies.
The advent of satellite television, digital technology and the internet have gradually changed notions of home and elsewhere, nostalgia and adaptation as well as notions of cultural transmission. Diasporas everywhere have over the last twenty years evolved into a state of transnational connection to an idealized cultural network through the internet, films and literature. In fact, it is in the pages of literature that the human experience of migration, loss, alienation and hybridisation has been chronicled in the most complex manner. Be it through the work of Meera Alexander or Amy Tan, the complex patterning of the human landscape of emotion has found its best expression through the Arts but it is the world of economic and politics that have benefited from the overflow of emotion to notions of roots and belonging.
According to Henry Sbrenick, it is through its diasporic interconnections that the Mauritian population experienced the 1980s economic boom.
And we are now planning to call back the Mauritian Diaspora. Have we only begun to think about the nature of this double displacement towards a resident population who still sees itself as part of a larger geographical and cultural reality? Despite all efforts at building citizenship through powerful national symbols, all Mauritians function in the double bind of two cultures, recreating parallel worlds of reference which rarely interconnect. Because there are two things that we are talking about here. On the one hand the illusion of national wholeness and unity which all Mauritians who have lived abroad for a substantial period of time feel -- maybe by virtue of the fact that we are such an infinestimal minority in the world (we skip a heartbeat when we hear our Creole spoken in the streets of Paris, on or the London transport system. The measure of delight is indescribable when we smell the fragrance of local food in Toronto.)
All Mauritians know that we can by virtue of our complex cultural and linguistic inheritance simultaneously share the imaginative worlds of the French, English, Caribbeans, Africans, Indians and Chinese. This productive schism helps when we travel; when the population is resident, matters are far more complex -- the returning diasporas present us a mirror of desired transnationalism and they return to seek a nostalgic national wholeness forever being displaced in the Derridean sense. The elusiveness of this cultural wholeness is re-enacted at the local level by the resident population who go after their roots in the streets of Lyon and of the villages of Guilin and Bihar.
Identity is always after its nostalgic roots, forever recreated in the desire for the elusive, besetted by the slippage of ontological reference and the forced reconstruction of recreated authenticity through which communities fight against what they perceive as another form of slippage through the tidal wave of cultural homogenization. In the process the forces of nostalgia transmute into the regressive forces of cultural closure and reactionary refusal of the other.
Diasporas are not the same everywhere, the space of postcolonial power play is still in the process of being fought out in our local landscape. How will this new entry into the field -- a targeted diasporic society -- fit into the game? Which patterns of discourse and representation will they re-assert ? The die is cast.
Initially all diasporas were to serve as manual labour, such as the Chinese who were brought in to build railway lines in America, similar to their Indian counterparts in Eastern Africa (an experience which has been beautifully chronicled by G. M. Vassanji) or to occupy low-paid factory jobs on the European continent. The gradual displacement of people and cultures has over time led to a reassessment of the significance of Culture, Identity and Nationalism which most Western countries are still in the process of resolving. However, the advent of blue-collar workers from the erstwhile third world to occupy professional positions in the developed world has substantially changed the notion of coloured migrants, as revolving on the periphery of these societies, to the present reality of their visible participation in the economic, political and cultural life of these societies.
The advent of satellite television, digital technology and the internet have gradually changed notions of home and elsewhere, nostalgia and adaptation as well as notions of cultural transmission. Diasporas everywhere have over the last twenty years evolved into a state of transnational connection to an idealized cultural network through the internet, films and literature. In fact, it is in the pages of literature that the human experience of migration, loss, alienation and hybridisation has been chronicled in the most complex manner. Be it through the work of Meera Alexander or Amy Tan, the complex patterning of the human landscape of emotion has found its best expression through the Arts but it is the world of economic and politics that have benefited from the overflow of emotion to notions of roots and belonging.
According to Henry Sbrenick, it is through its diasporic interconnections that the Mauritian population experienced the 1980s economic boom.
And we are now planning to call back the Mauritian Diaspora. Have we only begun to think about the nature of this double displacement towards a resident population who still sees itself as part of a larger geographical and cultural reality? Despite all efforts at building citizenship through powerful national symbols, all Mauritians function in the double bind of two cultures, recreating parallel worlds of reference which rarely interconnect. Because there are two things that we are talking about here. On the one hand the illusion of national wholeness and unity which all Mauritians who have lived abroad for a substantial period of time feel -- maybe by virtue of the fact that we are such an infinestimal minority in the world (we skip a heartbeat when we hear our Creole spoken in the streets of Paris, on or the London transport system. The measure of delight is indescribable when we smell the fragrance of local food in Toronto.)
All Mauritians know that we can by virtue of our complex cultural and linguistic inheritance simultaneously share the imaginative worlds of the French, English, Caribbeans, Africans, Indians and Chinese. This productive schism helps when we travel; when the population is resident, matters are far more complex -- the returning diasporas present us a mirror of desired transnationalism and they return to seek a nostalgic national wholeness forever being displaced in the Derridean sense. The elusiveness of this cultural wholeness is re-enacted at the local level by the resident population who go after their roots in the streets of Lyon and of the villages of Guilin and Bihar.
Identity is always after its nostalgic roots, forever recreated in the desire for the elusive, besetted by the slippage of ontological reference and the forced reconstruction of recreated authenticity through which communities fight against what they perceive as another form of slippage through the tidal wave of cultural homogenization. In the process the forces of nostalgia transmute into the regressive forces of cultural closure and reactionary refusal of the other.
Diasporas are not the same everywhere, the space of postcolonial power play is still in the process of being fought out in our local landscape. How will this new entry into the field -- a targeted diasporic society -- fit into the game? Which patterns of discourse and representation will they re-assert ? The die is cast.
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