William Safran and Rogers Brubaker’s Views on Diaspora

Many researchers have set out various factors and rules to define diaspora and migration in accordance with their arguments and discussions put forth by them. William Safran characterises six sets of rules to distinguish diaspora from migrant communities. They include a few views that the group maintains a myth or a collecting memory of homeland; regarding their ancestral homeland as their homeland, to which they hope to return; to be committed to the restoration or maintenance of the homeland, and their relating themselves personally to the homeland that may shape and stabilise their identity as summarised from his “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”. His views are naturally influenced by the Jewish Diaspora, hence expanding its term. Rogers Brubaker touches on the point that the term diaspora is widened intellectually. In one of his essays “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora” he suggests that the idea of diaspora has been proliferating in the recent years.

As the term has proliferated, its meaning has been stretched to accommodate the various intellectual, cultural and political agendas in the service of which it has been enlisted. This has resulted in what one might call a ‘“Diaspora” diaspora’ – a dispersion of the meanings of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space. (1)

 Brubaker is of the opinion that several diasporas like Palestinian diaspora, as in Cohen’s term “victim diaspora” (2) and the concept of “trading diaspora”, modelled by John Armstrong as “mobilized diaspora” (2) are modelled and constructed on the basis of Jewish diaspora and other “‘classical’” (2) diasporas like Armenian and Greek. According to him, the recent extensions of the term in reference to paradigmatic cases have reduced and weakened thereby rising in other possible ways in various countries as mentioned by various writers. (2)

In several recent extensions of the term, however, the reference to the paradigmatic cases has become more attenuated. Some emigrant groups − characterized as ‘long-distance nationalists’ by Anderson (1998) − have been construed as diasporas because of their continued involvement in homeland politics, sometimes involving the support of terrorist or ultra-nationalist movements (Sheffer 1986, 2003; Angoustures and Pascal 1996; Bhatt and Mukta 2000). Albanians, Hindu Indians, Irish, Kashmiri, Kurds, Palestinians, Tamils and others have been construed as diasporas in this way. (2).

He also says that the term has further extended to labour migrants who are to some extent emotionally and socially tied up with a homeland like Algerian, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Greek, Haitian, Indian, Italian, Korean, Mexican, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, Polish, Salvadoran, Turkish, and Vietnamese who are conceptualised as diaspora (2).

          Brubaker points out that the reference to the “‘classical’ (3) diaspora’s aspect of a conceptual homeland has become largely attenuated “to the point of being lost altogether” (2-3); stating that the transethnic and transborder linguistic categories like, “Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone ‘communities’ (a word that should be used in inverted commas [Baumann 1996]) – have been conceptualised as diasporas” (3). He also mentions the global religious communities like, “Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Huguenot, Muslim and Catholic diaspora (3) that appear to be “little more than sheer dispersion that under rights the formulation of such population as ‘diasporas’” (3). One of the dimensions he speaks about regarding the dispersion involves, “the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category” (4) which he says is dispersed to some extent in space. The term that once described Jewish, Greek and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domains that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community’ (qtd. in safran 4).