The Dispersion [Illustrated] 9004326928, 9789004326927

Citation preview

The Dispersion

Brill’s Specials in Modern History Volume 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smh

The Dispersion A History of the Word Diaspora

By

Stéphane Dufoix

Previously published as ‘La dispersion. Une histoire des usages du mot diaspora’ (ISBN 978-235480-105-2), © Editions Amsterdam, 2011. Published by arrangements with Agence litteraire Astier-Pécher. All rights reserved. Chapter 9 was first published in French in Stéphane Dufoix, Carine Guerassimoff, Anne de Tinguy (ed.), ‘Loin des yeux, près du coeur’ © 2010, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po. Cover illustration: M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water I” (1938), © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company B.V., The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016046349

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2468-578X ISBN 978-90-04-32692-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-32691-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

We’re never suspicious enough of words, they look like nothing much, not at all dangerous, just little puffs of air, little sounds the mouth makes, neither hot nor cold and easily absorbed, once they reach the ear, by the vast gray boredom of the brain. We’re not suspicious enough of words, and calamity strikes. Certain words are hidden in with the rest, like stones. They’re not very noticeable, but before long they make all the life that’s in us tremble, every bit of it in its weakness and its strength… The outcome is panic… An avalanche… You’re left dangling like a hanged man, over a sea of emotion… A tempest comes and goes, much too powerful for you, so violent you’d never have thought mere emotions could lead to anything like it… I therefore conclude that we’re never suspicious enough of words. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, A Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions, 2006 (first French edition 1932), 418.

… What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things’. (…) To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge, 2002 (first French edition 1969), 52-53.

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures and Tables

xi

Introduction. Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue 1

Part 1 From the Word to the Concept Introduction to Part 1

23

1 The Word of the Septuagint

27

2 The Religious Space of Dispersion 3 Towards a Secular Concept

76

134

Part 2 Cham Dispersed: From the Jewish Model to the Reversal Introduction to Part 2

181

4 Next Year in Ethiopia: Blacks at the Jewish Mirror 185 5 A Name of One’s Own: The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora 231 6 The Reversal 279

Part 3 The Name of the Global Introduction to Part 3

337

7 Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

340

viii

Contents

8 The Critical Turn 392 9 States and Their Diasporas 444 Conclusion. Two Cats and Three Demons Bibliography 501 Index of Names 581

495

Acknowledgements More than ten years elapsed between the beginning of this task and the completion of a final draft, and another five years between its first publication as a book in Fench and its English translation. Throughout those years I was accompanied in various ways by dozens of individuals – colleagues, friends, students – who, each in their own manner, through their support, their enthusiasm, their doubts, their criticisms, their willingness to answer my questions, their readings of my text, their linguistic competences, their advice, their confidence, their writings, have all helped me to move this slightly mad undertaking forward. I would like to take the opportunity of thanking them all here, and I hope I have forgotten no-one: Jean-Loup Amselle, Lisa Anteby-Yemini, Sylvie Aprile, John Armstrong and his wife, Cécilia Baeza, Martin Baumann, Annette Becker, Eliezer Ben-Rafaël, William Berthomière, Didier Bigo, Pierre Birnbaum, Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Philippe Bobichon, Dominique Bourel, Michel Bruneau, Patrick Cabanel, Daniel Cefai, Christine Chivallon, Lily Cho, James Clifford, Robin Cohen, Alain Dieckhoff, Yolène Dilas-Rocherieux, Dana Diminescu, Hasia Diner, Gilles Dorival, Brent Hayes Edwards, Geneviève Fabre, Thomas Faist, Laurence Fontaine, Donna Gabaccia, Alan Gamlen, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gold, Yosip Gorny, Nancy L. Green, Stuart Hall, Sari Hanafi, Robert Hettlage, Marie-Antoinette Hily, Martine Hovanessian, Lionel Ifrah, Theodor Ikonomu, Francis Abiola Irele, Christophe Jaffrelot, Laurent Jeanpierre, Dave Kaplan, Riva Kastoryano, Martin Kilson, Matthias Krings, Smaïn Laacher, Jean-Michel Lafleur, Sandrine Lefranc, Peggy Levitt, Pierre Lurbe, Emmanuel Ma-Mung, Patrick Manning, Renaud Morieux, José Moya, Immanuel Ness, Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Orlando Patterson, Silvia Pedraza, Pauline Peretz, Sergio della Pergola, Pascale PetchotBacqué, Carine Pina-Guerassimoff, Ludger Pries, Francesco Ragazzi, Roland Robertson, William Rodarmor, Clifford Rosenberg, William Safran, Chantal Saint-Blancat, Saskia Sassen, Yossi Shain, Gabriel Sheffer, Yitzhak Sternberg, Ingrid Therwath, Anne de Tinguy, Khachig Tölölyan, Johannes Tromp, William Turner, William Tuttle, Steven Uran, Roger Waldinger, Sheila Walker, Immanuel Wallerstein, Patrick Weil, Michel Wieviorka and Andreas Wimmer. Carmen Bernand agreed to supervise the habilitation thesis upon which this text is based and I would like once again to express to her my affection and my profound respect. This habilitation was defended in December 2010 before a jury of seven other scholars: Alain Caillé, Denys Cuche, Nicole Lapierre, JeanBaptiste Meyer, Lutz Raphaël, Anne Raulin and Shmuel Trigano. I owe them

x

Acknowledgements

more than I can possibly express here, and I thank them for their readings and their critiques. The team at Éditions Amsterdam accepted this manuscript with their customary enthusiasm and professionalism, and I would like to thank them all here: Jérôme Vidal, Charlotte Nordmann, Joséphine Gross, and particularly Oury Goldman, Marion Duval and Clémence Garrot who undertook the onerous task of “working” an unreasonable manuscript. The English translation of this book was made possible by a number of friendly and scholarly encounters. Robin Cohen introduced me to Iain Walker, who agreed on starting writing the translation without any insurance of a publishing contract. May the both of them be thanked here. My friend and colleague Vincenzo Cicchelli made me meet my now friend Marti Huetink at Brill during a memorable week in Yokohama in July 2014, and this is certainly where it all really began, at the other end of the world. Vincenzo and Marti, dōmo arigatō gozaimasu. Finally, because nothing would have been possible without them, this book is dedicated to Valérie and to Clara. All now being aboard, the journey may begin…

List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures and Tables Maps 1 Map of Katrina’s Diaspora (1) 412 2 Map of Katrina’s Diaspora (2) 413 Illustrations 1 Israel Man and Diaspora Boy 128 2 Israel Man and Diaspora Boy: Anatomy of our Heroes 129 Figures 1 The Stratified Historical Evolution of Diaspora 25 2 The Table of the Diaspora (Edouard Glissant) 309 3 Yearly evolution of the French submitted thesis abstracts with “diaspora” or “diasporas” in their title (1980-2009) 384 4 Yearly evolution of the French thesis topics with “diaspora” or “diasporas” in their title (1980-2009) 384 5 Yearly evolution of the North-American theses with “diaspora,” “diasporas,” or “diasporic” in their title (1990-2009) 386 6 Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in the New York Times (1881-2000) 406 7 Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in the New York Times (1961-2000) 406 8 Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in Le Monde (1990 to October 2003) 407 9 Populations associated with the word “diaspora” in Le Monde (October 2002 – September 2003), n = 89 408 10 A Road Map for Diaspora Engagement 491 Tables 1 Diaspora in the Septuagint 42-45 2 Correspondences of Hebrew-Greek translations for galah and derived words, and for diaspora in the Septuagint 48 3 Diaspora in the New Testament 61 4 Latin translation – Vulgate Latin Bible of Jerome – of the Septuagint verses with diaspora 73

Introduction. Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things.1 In recent years, the concept of “diaspora” has been adapted by scholars in so many disciplines – and deployed by activists in so many communities – that the term itself has become somewhat diasporic. […] What exactly do we in the “Diaspora” diaspora mean by this ostensibly shared term? Can this fugitive concept sit still long enough for us to build an academic field – or even a two-day conference – around it?2 Over the past twenty years, at a scale that increasingly appears to be global, the word diaspora, which made its first appearance during Antiquity, has become a highly contemporary term capable of describing apparently new phenomena, that is, the capacity of certain populations, during the so-called era of globalisation, to form communities, collectivities, despite the spatial dispersion of their members, through the maintenance of links, and cultural or religious characteristics, through unifying references to a homeland or a territory, whether this be an already-existing state or the locus for a desired state. Conceived in a specific spatio-temporal context – that of the Jewish community during the 3rd century BCE, diaspora has so effectively dissociated itself from this context that it has come to embrace a global destiny and, for some, to serve as a symbol for a new type of globalised existence, within which belonging is compatible with distance. Rather than extol or critique this semantic state of affairs and the opportunities that these new usages may or may not afford us, I have chosen another path, one which refuses to take a stance in the debate while nevertheless 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 (first German edition 1878), 306 (emphasis in original). 2 Henry Goldschmidt, “Jews and Others in Brooklyn and its Diaspora: Constructing an Unlikely Homeland in a Diasporic World,” in Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity unichr2013 Proceedings from a two-day symposium held November 16-17, 2002 at Dickinson College, 43-54. The Clarke Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Contemporary Issues, 2003, 43.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_002

2

Introduction

recognising the importance of the question. In order to do so, I have voluntarily decided exclusively to consider the uses of the term diaspora, whatever they may be, since its first appearance. The aim of this inquiry is to attempt both to explain the reasons for its recent metamorphosis and to grasp, in the long term, the social, political, intellectual and economic patterns which have overseen the development of the various uses of the term and rendered it richer, with multiple and often contradictory significations. Exception made for a few early examples largely limited to a religious context,3 work on the term diaspora and its uses only appeared in the 1990s. They may be categorised as follows: entries in specialised dictionaries or encyclopaedias;4 analyses of the use of the term in Antiquity;5 analyses, sometimes critical, of the evolution of its recent academic uses;6 and finally, and less commonly, articles (rarely monographs) of an epistemological and histor-

3 Among the most important ones, let’s cite Simon Dubnow, “Diaspora,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, vol. v, 126-130. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930-1935; Karl Ludwig Schmidt, “Diaspora,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, vol. ii, 98-104. Grand Rapids: W.M.B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964 (first German edition 1933); Alfred Stuiber, “Diaspora,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. iii, 972-982. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1957. 4 Among many others, “Diaspora,” in The Dictionary of Global Culture, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 178-179. New York: Knopf, 1997; Robin Cohen, “Diaspora,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 3642-3645. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001; Denys Cuche, “Diaspora,” Pluriel Recherches, Cahier n° 8, 14-23, 2001; Steven Vertovec, “Diaspora,” in Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, edited by Ellis Cashmore, 106-107. London-New York: Routledge, 2004; Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Dominique Schnapper, “Diaspora,” in Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, ed. Sylvie Mesure and Patrick Savidan, 272-274. Paris: PUF, 2006. 5 Marguerite Harl, ““Et il rassemblera les ‘dispersions’ d’Israël”: une note sur le pluriel de διασπορά dans le psaume 146(147), 2b,” in Le Psautier chez les Pères. Cahiers de Biblia Patristica, n° 4 (1993), 281-290; Johannes Tromp, “The Ancient Jewish Diaspora: Some Linguistic and Sociological Observations,” in Religious Communities in the Diaspora: New Perspectives on Past and Present, ed. Gerrie Ter Haar, 13-35. Leuven: Peeters, 1998; Johan Lust, “Exile and Diaspora: Gathering from Dispersion in Ezekiel,” in Lectures et relectures de la Bible. Festschrift P.-M. Bogaert, edited by Jean-Marie Auwers and André Wénin, 99-122. Louvain: Presses de l’Université de Louvain, 1999. 6 Jose C. Moya, “Diaspora Studies: New Concepts, Approaches, and Realities?” paper presented at the Congress of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, November 18-21, 2004; Rogers Brubaker, “The “Diaspora” Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 28, n° 1 (January 2005), 1-19; Ruth Mayer, Diaspora. Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2005; Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

3

ical character, aimed at providing an historical overview of the evolution of the term.7 The aim of the present work is to revisit the objectives of the above-cited works: to grasp a synthetic logic, explore the details of certain types of usage, be they ancient or contemporary, and to render visible a long-term evolutionary dynamic, but in a new form. The intention is to follow as precisely as possible the uses of diaspora from its first appearance, during the 3rd century BCE, in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the sacred texts of the Hebrews (the Tanakh), to the present, thus exploring 2300 years of human history. This undertaking admittedly resembles the academic genre known in France as “histoire de mot”, “word’s history”, but it also borrows elements from other traditions such as historical semantics or the history of ideas; these latter merit a brief exploration before I develop the procedure followed in this work in greater detail, which I shall qualify as historical socio-semantics.

A Word’s History? On closer inspection it appears that it was in France, within the historical discipline, that an epistemological taste for the history of words was first developed. It is in the works of the historian Fustel de Coulanges that we first find, in the 1880s, a fundamental interest in semantics from a historical perspective. In his 1864 text on the ancient city he asserts that, from the past, “the words have remained, immutable witnesses of beliefs that have disappeared.”8 The historian of the disappeared past – but, suddenly, never entirely disappeared – must above all observe the terms of the language. A good number of the historical works of Fustel de Coulanges bear the traces of this conviction that the words of ancient texts have the capacity to grant us access to the reality of this past, as long as we concentrate on the meaning that a given word possessed at the time and that which it has in the texts under consideration.9 7 Martin Baumann, “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison,” Numen, n° 47 (2000), 313-337; Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text, vol. 19, n° 66 (Spring 2001), 45-73; Matthias Krings, “Diaspora: Historische Erfahrung oder wissenschaftliches Konzept? Zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs in den Sozialwissenschaften,” Paideuma, no. 49 (2003), 137-156. 8 Numa Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (first French edition 1864), 6. 9 See for instance Numa Fustel de Coulanges, “Le Problème des origines de la propriété foncière,” Revue des questions historiques, n° 45 (April 1889), reprinted in Numa Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques. Paris: Hachette, 1893, 17-117.

4

Introduction

At the turn of the century, linguists such as Michel Bréal and Antoine Meillet discarded a purely linguistic vision of semantic evolution in favour of a crucial human dimension. For Bréal, semantics belongs “to the class of historical investigations”.10 Innovations or changes in meaning are the product of human intelligence and not the product of things, for “[language] registers faithfully our prejudices and our mistakes”.11 It was on the basis of the suggestion that man and the social be included in the evolution of language that, several years later, the linguist Antoine Meillet proposed a socio-linguistic analysis of semantic change, believing particularly that linguistic conditions are necessary but insufficient conditions for change and that other conditions, particularly social ones, influence these transformations – for example, the division of human groups into distinct classes, notably professional ones.12 The combined influences of Fustel de Coulanges and of Meillet were felt by Marc Bloch for whom “a word is valued much less for its etymology than for the use to which it is put”, even if one should always be wary of “those emotional overtones with which so many of these words are charged as they come to us.”13 Nevertheless, a distinction is required. A consideration of the shortcomings of contemporary language and the importance of the facts of language do not necessarily, indeed rarely, call for the drafting of a word’s history. These histoires de mots only truly take root – in France at least – with the historical Ecole des Annales at the end of the 1920s. It is in Lucien Febvre’s work, and not that of Marc Bloch, that we find a serious concern for the articulation of semantic change and historical change. Febvre was close to Henri Berr,14 the founder of the Revue de synthèse and the Centre International de Synthèse. In 1926 one of the centre’s sections, the Section de Synthèse Historique, was dedicated to the establishment of a historical vocabulary. It was at one of the meetings of this section, in January 1928, that Feb-

10 11 12

13 14

Michel Bréal, Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning. London: William Heinemann, 1900 (first French edition 1897), 176. Ibid., 250. Antoine Meillet, “Comment les mots changent de sens,” L’Année sociologique, 9 (1905-1906), 1-38. Meillet was Bréal’s pupil. He later became the instructor of, among others, émile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil. In 1925 he published La Méthode comparative en linguistique historique. Paris: Champion. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992 (first French edition 1949), 141. On the Berr-Febvre relationship, see Lucien Febvre, Lettres à Henri Berr. Paris: Fayard, 1997.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

5

vre presented what appears to be his first histoire de mot on border.15 Others would follow, most notably at the First Semaine de Synthèse conference in May 1929, where Febvre gave a paper on the history of the idea of civilisation.16 He subsequently wrote at least two further similar papers, one on capitalism and capitalists, the other – somewhat later – on labour.17 Finally, he devoted two classes that he gave at the Collège de France (in 1945-1946 and in 1947) to a historical study of the expression “Honour and Fatherland”.18 In the unfinished manuscript that he devoted to this latter question he sketched out, in the form of small, undeveloped notes, some essential principles to be obeyed by scholars: mistrust of words, the obligation to consider the word or words in question together with those whose sense is contradictory or with which they function; and the importance of divesting oneself of theoretical definitions to focus on the study of usage. As he points out, “we need to know that, for our work, and for our lives, too, perhaps. The theoretical definition cannot be the concern of the historian. [A] theoretical definition is nothing. The history of the word, if done with precautions, is a great deal.”19 Writing a word’s history or the history of a concept is different from what is often called in France conceptual history – histoire conceptuelle20. The latter is generally the history of an idea or a notion, such as progress,21 the repub-

15

16

17

18

19 20 21

Lucien Febvre, “Frontière: le mot et la notion,” Bulletin du Centre international de synthèse, vol. xlv (June 1928), 31-44, reprinted in Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire à part entière. Paris: SEVPEN, 1962, 11-24. The proceedings of this First week were devoted to the notion of civilisation and were published in 1930: Civilisation, le mot et l’idée. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1930. Lucien Febvre’s presentation, entitled “Civilisation. Évolution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’idées,” is to be found p. 1-55. It was later reprinted in Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire à part entière, 481-528. I quote from this last edition. Lucien Febvre, “Capitalisme et capitaliste: mots et choses,” Annales d’histoire sociale, n° 4 (1939), 401-403, reprinted in Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire à part entière, 325-329; “Travail: évolution d’un mot et d’une idée,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, vol. xli, n° 1 (January-March 1948), 19-28, reprinted in Ibid., 649-658. This work did not result in a publication while Febvre was still alive. The unfinished manuscript had been lost and was found again in 1987 to be eventually published in 1996. Lucien Febvre, “Honneur et Patrie”. Paris: Pocket, 2001 (first edition, 1996). Ibid., 63. Not to be confused with the conceptual history advocated by Reinhart Koselleck and others, which I shall address infra. Pierre-André Taguieff, Le Sens du progrèss: une approche historique et philosophique. Paris: Flammarion, 2004.

6

Introduction

lic,22 life,23 nature,24 recognition,25 etc. All too often these works are inscribed within a history of ideas, within which it is held that ideas have a history, and that is possible to retrace this history without questioning the conditions of its possibility. It is therefore the accumulation of texts that provides the relevant chronology. In more linguistic terms, the accent is placed on semasiology and not on onomasiology, that is, on the study of an idea and the manner in which it has been translated by different words, and not on the study of a single word and its uses, through the different ideas and things that it has been called upon to express. In contrast to the conceptual history thus described, the examination of the word revolution by the linguist Alain Rey in 1989 is emblematic of a word’s history more onomasiological than semasiological. With remarkable erudition, and with attention to the incarnation of the word revolution in languages other than French or English,26 he sets forth the evolution of the meaning of the word using chapters as spotlights on critical moments, or that treat one or more authors (Stendhal, Hugo, Chateaubriand, amongst others). However, the processes of change are not subjected to any analysis and are simply noted or observed through the work of an author. The French historian of ideas Jean Starobinski’s work on the history of the linguistic couplet “action-reaction” appears at first sight to be inscribed within the same logic as Rey’s text.27 Once again, his chapters are often only analyses of the uses of the two terms by different authors (the second chapter is entirely consecrated to Diderot, the fifth to Balzac). Even so, in Starobinski we repeatedly find instances of greater attention to the historical and social origins of the processes of semantic transformation, as well as to a differentiated consideration of the changes. Far from seeing the paradigmatic change within the history of science in Europe in the 17th century as the agent of an immediate change in vocabulary, he observes the persistence of older modes of thought and of their accompanying lexicons.28 He also shows how in the 18th century the old idea, according to which the body possesses the “power

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France, 1789-1924. Paris: Gallimard, 1994 (first edition 1982). André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Jean Erhard, L’Idée de nature en France à l’aube des Lumières. Paris: Flammarion, 1970. Paul Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance. Paris: Stock, 2004. Alain Rey, “Révolution”: histoire d’un mot. Paris: Gallimard, 1989, 319-334. Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple. New York: Zone Books, 2003 (first French edition 1999). Ibid., 37-38.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

7

of spontaneous resistance to all noxious agents”, “encounters” the word reaction, and thereby simultaneously permits the imposition of the full force of the scientific lexicon and the association of that which occurs in the human body with other reactive properties observed in other natural domains.29 He notes the scientific blunting30 and the subsequent political banalisation of the term.31 If his study, which he himself describes as an “expanded semantic history”32 touches upon so many domains – physics, medicine, literature, politics, historiography –, it is less by way of a collection of vignettes independent of one another than by a desire to follow the extension and the expansion of the terms that he has taken as the objects of his enquiry. If history as a discipline demonstrates – among some authors at least – a rigorous respect for meaning as well as for the historical evolution of words, sociologists showed little interest until relatively recently.33 However, it is to sociology that we owe one of the more elegant examples of a complex analysis of the semantic evolution of a word, the study that the sociologists Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber undertook of the term serendipity in the 1950s.34 This word is a 1754 invention, the product of the great neologistic imagination of the British public figure Sir Horace Walpole, who was inspired by a Persian story called The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Sarendip35, published in London in 1722. He mentions his find in a letter to Horace Mann, giving serendipity the meaning “accidental sagacity”. Merton and Barber undertake the task of following the process by which the word – which is only found in print for the first time in 1833, when Walpole’s correspondence is published, and not used by another author until 1875 – subsequently insinuated itself into various social circles and, at each reappearance, underwent a semantic shift. Initially employed only in literary milieux, the word made 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

Ibid., 125-126, quotation p. 126. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 366. Among the French scholarly works incorporating the necessity of words’ history into a sociological-historical perspective, see Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (first French edition 1982); Christophe Charle, Birth of the Intellectuals 1880-1900. Cambridge: Polity, 2015 (first French edition 1990); Christian Topalov, La Naissance du chômeur, 1880-1910. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 (first Italian edition, 2002). Serendip or Sarendip was the Persian name of the island known as Ceylon and now Sri Lanka.

8

Introduction

its appearance in the scientific world in the 1930s before being introduced into the social sciences by Merton himself through his work on the sociology of science. In order to account for how they understand the travels and adventures of the word, in his preface Merton emphasises that the expression “sociological semantics” found in the subtitle is intended to indicate that the text does not call upon the research tools of “historical semantics”,36 but that it should be seen as “an early exercise in what can be better described as a barely emerging ‘sociological semantics’ that examines the ways in which the word serendipity acquired new meanings as it diffused through different social collectivities”37. If a word’s history as such is rare, the epistemological attention accorded to the meaning of words lies at the very heart of numerous historiographical undertakings in England, Germany and France from the 1970s onwards: the history of discourse, the history of concepts and historical discourse analysis. Under the influence of the complementary works of the British historians Quentin Skinner and John Pocock, the 1970s saw the development of a history of ideas which accorded a fundamental importance not only to texts but also to their meanings resituated in the context of the period.38 It is therefore an encounter between text and context that permits Skinner to attempt to understand both the meaning of the text at the moment of writing and the intention of the author, and Pocock to identify the linguistic resources at the disposal of the author or authors at that precise moment. In both cases, they consider the use of words and concepts synchronically (at a given moment in time) and not diachronically (over time). I believe that this distinction between synchrony and diachrony lies at the heart of the difference in perspective between, on the one hand, the writings of Pocock and Skinner (often referred to as the Cambridge School of intellectual history) and, on the other, the German

36

37 38

Merton does not provide any reference here but we may assume that he’s alluding to the “historical semantics” that was developed by linguist Leo Spitzer – who fled Germany in 1933 to for the United States via Turkey. An Essays in Historical Semantics book was published in his honour in 1948 (New York: Ed. S.F. Vanni). Spitzer’s work was much more focused on the different meanings of written words than on their migration from one social circle to another. See his “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 3, n° 1 (September 1942), 1-42. The second part of this essay was published in the same journal: vol. 3, n° 2 (December 1942), 169-218. Robert K. Merton, “Preface,” in Merton and Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, ix-x, quotation p. x (italics in original). Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978; John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

9

approach to the history of concepts known as Begriffsgeschichte. This latter project emerged from the proposed publication, between 1972 and 1997, of a voluminous historical dictionary of concepts entitled Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialer Sprache in Deutschland (Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Language in Germany), whose editors were the historians Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and, particularly, Reinhart Koselleck.39 In his own writings the latter focused specifically on the period between 1750 and 1850, which he called the Sattelzeit (the turning point).40 During this period a certain number of concepts, such as history, revolution and progress, acquired a temporality that they had not previously possessed: their meaning was thenceforth extended towards the future, towards what Koselleck called the “horizon of expectation”, for one of the characteristics of Sattelzeit was precisely that of dissociating the future from the past through rendering the future transformable by man.41 The history of concepts that he embarked upon differed from a traditional history of ideas in that it historicised the very use of the words themselves, thereby becoming an essential companion to social history.42 In France the history of concepts has recently undergone some noteworthy developments, in the form of programmatic articles43 or the establishment of research groups such as that in Political Science at the Université de Nanterre under the leadership of Bernard Lacroix and Xavier Landrin, or that which led historian Olivier Christin to raise the question of “nomadic concepts”.44

39 40

41

42

43 44

The Dictionary was published by Ernst Klett-J.G. Kotta, Stuttgart, from 1972 until 1997. By Koselleck, see Critique and Crises. The Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988 (first German edition 1959); Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 (first German edition 1979) and The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Reinhart Koselleck, “Le Concept d’histoire,” (1975) in Reinhart Koselleck, L’Expérience de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1997, 15-99; “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” (1969) in Futures Past, 43-57; “Neuzeit: Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of Movement,” (1977) in Ibid., 222-254. Koselleck wrote twice on the relation between those two historical trends. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” (1972) in Futures Past, 75-92, and “Social History and Conceptual History,” (1986) Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 2, N° 3 (March 1989), 308-325. On this point, see Alexandre Escudier, ““Temporalisation” et modernité politique: penser avec Koselleck,” Annales HSS, vol. 64, n° 6 (November-December 2009), 1269-1301. Olivier Christin (ed.), Dictionnaire des concepts nomades des sciences sociales. Paris: Métailié, 2010.

10

Introduction

Emerging quite independently, the Cambridge School and the Begriffsgeschichte nevertheless bore some resemblance to one another, notably by virtue of the importance that each accorded to the imperatives of studying the cognitive and linguistic categories of the periods in question in order to avoid falling into anachronism. It is through the historicisation both of the terms used and of their contemporaneous meanings that we can achieve a precise understanding of the ideas of the time, without attributing to them meanings that our contemporary categories would otherwise bestow upon them spontaneously.45 If it might be possible to fix meanings for certain texts, or even periods in any given country, it is unlikely that subsequent usage would be identical. It thus follows that these two schools were generally complementary rather than similar; and it was in an attempt to integrate these two currents of thought that in 1998 two historians, Kari Palonen and Melvin Richter, the former Finnish, the latter American, decided to form an international network dedicated to the question of the history of concepts: the History of Political and Social Concepts Group.46 Some of the representatives of the French academic movement known as the “Analyse de Discours du Côté de l’Histoire” (ADH – for discourse analyse from the historical perspective) belong to this group, notably Jacques Guilhaumou. Since the 1980s, and drawing on the methods of political lexicology developed at the ENS Saint-Cloud, which itself draws on lexicometry and thus computing, Guilhaumou has developed a new version of discourse analysis. If the priority is still the definition and demarcation of a corpus, there is no 45

46

For a confrontation between the approach of the Cambridge School and that of Begriffsgeschichte, see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; as well as the discussion between Pocock – who happens not to know anything about German conceptual history – and Koselleck as it appeared in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, edited by Hartmunt Lehmann and Melvin Richter, 47-70. Washington: German Historical Institute, 1996. Also see Kari Palonen, “The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart Koselleck’s Subversion of Normative Political Theory,”European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 1, n° 1 (July 2002), 91-106. This network has an Internet site (www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/hpscg) and a Newsletter. In 2006, the network created an International Research School in Conceptual History and Political Thought, the name of which is Concepta, in order to value teaching and research in conceptual history (www.concepta-net.org). A specific journal has been edited since March 2005: Contributions to the History of Concepts. Another European network named Europaeum, European Conceptual History was founded in 2006 by Henrik Stenius and Michael Freeden.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

11

longer an intention of drawing out a hidden meaning in texts, but rather of studying the configuration of utterances, the link between action and discourse, and to grasp in particular the influence of language on action.47 Essentially centred on the historical period of the French revolution,48 ADH is closer to Koselleck’s history of concepts than historical linguistics proper. Despite the quality of the numerous works that have emerged from ADH,49 they often remain closely linked to a predetermined corpus, thus privileging, with a few rare exceptions,50 the exhaustive study of the word, expression or phrase selected from within a text or a collection of texts to the detriment either of their multiplication, their passage from one text to another, or their long-term evolution. Each of these approaches, for reasons linked to the objectives pursued, marginalises at least one of the dimensions that I judge essential to the production of a history of the use of a term: the historical depth to the history of discourse, the extension of a word beyond a corpus predetermined within ADH and, in the history of concepts, a consideration of the manner in which certain words actively participate in the construction of reality.

47

48

49

50

Jacques Guilhaumou, Discours et événement: l’histoire langagière des concepts. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2006, notably 28-29. By the same author see “L’Analyse de discours du côté de l’histoire: une démarche interpretative,” Langage et société, n° 121-122 (September-December 2007), 177-187. Guilhaumou is the main advocate of this approach in France as well as its most notable spokesperson abroad. Most of his works have been devoted to the French Revolution. The most meaningful achievement of the ADH is the Dictionnaire des usages socio-politiques (1770-1815). Eight volumes have been published so far, the first six ones by INALF-Klincksieck from 1985 until 1999, the last two ones by Honoré Champion in 2003 and 2006. Besides Guilhaumou’s works, especially his Sieyès et l’ordre de la langue: l’invention de la politique moderne. Paris: Kimé, 2002, see among others Raymonde Monnier, Républicanisme, patriotisme et Révolution française. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005 and Marc Deleplace, L’Anarchie de Mably à Proudhon, 1750-1850: histoire d’une appropriation polémique. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2000. Alice Krieg-Planque’s and Marie-France Piguet’s works are undoubtedly less dependent on the analysis of a limited corpus as they insist on a more extensive approach. See MarieFrance Piguet, Classe: histoire du mot et genèse du concept des Physiocrates aux Historiens de la Restauration. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996; Alice Krieg-Planque, La Notion de formule en analyse du discours. Besançon: Presses universitaires de FrancheComté, 2009 and, by the latter, “Purification ethnique”: une formule et son histoire. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2003.

12

Introduction Perspectives for a Historical Socio-semantics of Diaspora

The perspective that I am defending here attempts to take into concurrent consideration the semantic, historical and social aspects of the usage of a term. The historicity is conceptualised here not as a simple contextualisation but as an analysis of a long-term evolution – an evolution of the meaning and the types of usage of the terms under consideration – taking as a point of departure the principle that this evolution is not inscribed within a “history of the word” where internal logic presides over its evolution, but rather within the conditions of possibility – social, political, intellectual – of these usages. Simultaneously, the study cannot limit itself solely to a consideration of the latter without considering how certain terms act on reality, to the point of calling into existence that which they profess only to describe. There is an entire philosophical and sociological tradition concerned with how language – and above all the use of language – contributes to the production of social reality. We find it notably in the writings of Ernst Cassirer in the 1930s.51 The practical application of this sociological importance of language implies an important point of departure: a refusal of the substantialism of terms and a corresponding obligation therefore to seek their meanings in the effects that they produce. This refusal of essence and valorisation of usage is most notably influenced by the works of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and particularly the Blue Book (1933-1935) and Philosophical Investigations (published in 1953), in which he appears to completely contradict that which had lain at the heart of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. If, in this latter text, which appeared in 1921, he defends an idea of language as image and reflection of the world, his perspective appears to undergo a radical change in subsequent years as he insists on the importance of the practice of language. Questions about the meaning of a word generally stumble over the existence of a real referent, which Wittgenstein considers to be one of the principle sources of philosophical error: the fact that “a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it”.52 Far from this form of linguistic realism, often called cratylism in recognition of Plato’s dialogue within which Cratylus defends, against Hermogenes, the idea of a correspondence between the form of a noun and the properties of the thing that it describes,53 Wittgenstein postu51

52 53

Ernst Cassirer, “Language and the Construction of the World of Objects,” (1932) in Ernst Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919-1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, 334-362. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, 1. Plato, Cratylus.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

13

lates instead the existence of certain conventions by which meaning is given to a word: “But let’s not forget that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means.”54 It follows that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.55 The emphasis placed on usage does not dissociate meaning and referent. It postulates a complex link between the two in rejecting the possibility of a straightforward and unidirectional relationship from the thing to the word. It even invites us to contemplate its reversal from the word to the thing, from saying to doing. We find a description of this possibility of language in the work of the British philosopher John Austin, which he calls the “performative utterance”. In the lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1955 Austin distinguished between two types of discursive act: the constative utterance (assertion) and the performative utterance (that which does something in saying it).56 As he lectured, Austin constantly refined this distinction to arrive, during his eighth lecture, at a distinction between three types of linguistic acts: the locutionary act (the act of saying something), the illocutionary act (the act of doing something while saying it) and the perlocutionary act (the act produced by the language, the result of the illocutionary act). If, for Austin, performatives are neither true nor false, but only happy or unhappy according to the circumstances – and notably according to the appropriateness or otherwise of the character who speaks57 – he nevertheless considers that utterances possess a illocutionary “force” or “value”. Austin has frequently been influential among sociologists, particularly Pierre Bourdieu, yet his influence is often marked by a certain ambiguity. Bourdieu has tended to elide the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary in his own writings, deeming that to “do things with words” is the equivalent of “utterances can produce effects.”58 Still, he regularly has recourse to the idea of “performativity” to demonstrate the capacity of certain discourses to bring into existence that of which they speak. In this regard, he writes that “Regionalist discourse is a performative discourse which aims to im-

54 55 56 57 58

Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, §43, 20. Wittgenstein then adds that this is valid “for a large class of cases – though not for all”. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Ibid., notably 14 and 45. Pierre Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, 147.

14

Introduction

pose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognise the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition, which is misrecognised as such and thus recognised and legitimate, and which does not acknowledge that new region.”59 If I find this formulation particularly attractive – because it corresponds closely to a process that I am attempting to reveal in my work on diaspora – it nevertheless seems to me that it is the use of the adjective performative that is in error here. In Austin’s work, performative refers precisely to the fact of performance of that of which the act speaks, and this performance is accomplished not through nouns (such as region) but through verbs (such as proclaim), as is demonstrated in particular in his twelfth lecture: the five classes of utterances which are distinguished include only verbs.60 How then to set forth the social properties of a discourse that creates the object of which it speaks while maintaining the appearance of a simple observation? How to name the faculty socially acquired – in particular by the institutional force accorded to the language used by the owners of an authorised word, but also by the force that the word itself may acquire in the process of its diffusion within social groups who find in this word a means of describing a lived experience, a form of division of the world or an identity hitherto unnamed or misnamed – by certain discourses that prescribe while claiming to describe? Rather than use the word “performativity”, I would prefer henceforth to invoke the “formativity” of a term, a fundamental dimension as far as the word diaspora is concerned, in order to reserve the term “performativity” for the description of contexts within which it is the verb uttered that acts. Formativity certainly includes an action, through which the use of the term creates, or contributes to the creation of a group or an entity, but this action is often prolonged by the constitution of spokespersons, by linguistic, political or juridical objectification and by media or academic recognition, as well as by the growing evidence for the existence of the entity thus produced. The aims of this work are thus triple: to describe the evolution of usage in the longue durée; to analyse the polysemy of the term and its coexistence in documents significantly different from one another – which implies the absence of a corpus as such – and finally, to consider this evolution in terms of success, that is, of the intersection of the uses of a term, its values and the potentialities that it thereby offers us to describe a particular situation that, reciprocally, it contributes both to changing and to fixing it, all while describing it. 59 60

Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, 223. Austin, How to do Things with Words, 150-162.

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

15

Bearing this in mind, the question of occurrence of the term is important but not determining. Such a work could be an enquiry whose primary aim consists in retrieving its first appearance(s), thus becoming something of a quest for the “first time”: the first time it appears in Greek, the first time it is used to describe Christians, thus opening up a path out of a unique usage – out of hapax61 – as it appears in the Septuagint, the first time that it appears in the European vernacular, the first time it is qualified by different adjectives (black, African, Armenian, Chinese, Palestinian, the list is almost infinite), the first time it appears in the plural to become, more or less explicitly, a category that could expand while respecting certain characteristics, the first time that the use of the term is refused for such and such a population, and so on. The undertaking would then come to resemble the sort of erudite fantasy of which Jorge Luis Borges showed us all the literary beauty but also all the vanity that emerges as soon as we forego a willingness to seize a movement, a dynamic, a logic of emergence but also of success. A double caution thus seems to be called for, firstly with respect to the very possibility of identifying the first occurrence; and secondly, a caution with respect to the importance that we accord to it, whether it is indeed a question of the very first occurrence or simple the first identifiable – and identified – by the scholar. Clearly the method here consists in challenging the religion of the first occurrence to grant a greater importance to the period when a new meaning “takes root”, dissipates, is transmitted from one text to another, is discussed, contested or refused. It is in the space opened up by these concomitant uses, temporally close to one another, that the transformation may be read. Decades may elapse between the first occurrence of a term, of a phrase, or of a specific acceptance of one or the other and its anchoring, that is, its implantation in a linguistic context – political, economic, journalistic, scientific, and so on. Still, if the fact of this anchoring doubtless permits us to identify the historical, social and intellectual conditions that allow for the possibility of this emergence, it tells us little about the reasons for which possible prior occurrences have not been transmitted. To be able to assert that a term, an expression or an acceptance does become important as of such and such a moment is one thing: it implies a capacity to establish links or the plausibility of links between uses. An attempt to identify older occurrences not only permits us to verify, if only by inference, when this anchoring occurred – the absence of occurrences being as revealing as their presence – but also to propose hypotheses as to the conditions for the impossibility of such an anchoring earlier on. This dual enquiry

61

The Greek phrase hapax legoumenon, usually shortened as hapax, means “told only once”.

16

Introduction

into the conditions of impossibility and possibility permits us to better grasp the differences and develop a more nuanced, a more precise understanding of the chains of transmission, within the limits of available knowledge. It is here that the enquiry becomes more than a simple question of semantics. It is necessary to hypothesise that the evolution of the term does not only depend upon an internal dynamic, but that it is the result of strategies linked to the values associated with it. In contemporary usage, diaspora is perfectly appropriate to the contemporary world. Freed from its heavy burden of misery, persecution and chastisement, essentially linked to the history of the Jewish people, the word has adapted perfectly to transformations over distance as a result of the almost complete disappearance of the temporal factor in spatial relationships. The technical possibility of a proximity between those who resemble one another, whatever the basis for this resemblance (religious, national, ethnic, cultural, professional) permits the emergence of deterritorialised links (networks) whose multiplication favourises a vision of planetary reality – or a part of this reality – in terms of a “global world”. Be it a common word, a scientifically elaborated concept or a watchword conferring meaning on a collective reality, diaspora is current. We need therefore to understand what is at stake in this contemporaneity of an ancient term and how the encounter between the word – diaspora –, the idea – the possibility of basing or maintaining an identity despite distance and the territorial discontinuity of that identity –, and the contemporary world was made possible in order to create a framework capable of being applied to an almost infinite number of contexts. None of this necessarily explains why the term is of interest, nor why I should engage in such a voluminous undertaking. By way of explanation, I have been working on this project for more than ten years without being entirely sure what the outcome might be. In September 2007, at the invitation of Eliezer Ben-Rafaël and Yitzhak Sternberg, I attended a conference entitled “Transnational Diasporas in Comparative Perspective” at Tel Aviv University which brought together some twenty scholars – Israeli, American, French, German and Mexican. On the final day, following a panel that had included a paper on Russian immigrants in Israel, Gabriel Sheffer, one of the pioneers of the conceptualisation of diaspora, expressed his irritation at the way in which the paper’s presenters had been using the term. He said “If it were possible to use diaspora in such a way, I would withdraw from the field and give up working on the term.” I found this to be a brilliant and direct confirmation of something that until then I had only remarked upon in the texts: 1. The use of diaspora over the past thirty years had indeed favoured the constitution of a rather singular transnational academic space, diaspora studies, whose ob-

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

17

ject was as much the study of the object thus constructed as the study of the name that had been given to it, as much the study of diasporas as the study of diaspora; 2. this space, for its “founders” as much as for new entrants, was still concerned with the question of the parameters for the use of the term: for the former, it is as useless if it is too narrow – for it would thereby not permit comparative studies and thus have no academic specificity – as is it if it is too broad – for the specificity would thereby be diluted in the flood of possible cases. In 1986, Gilles Deleuze presented Arnaud Villani with three arguments to justify the writing of a book: “If (1) you think that the books on the same or a related subject fall into a general sort of error (polemical function of a book); (2) you think that something essential about the subject has been forgotten (inventive function); (3) you consider that you are capable of creating a new concept (creative function).”62 Following modestly in the footsteps of Deleuze, it seems to me that the three questions of error, forgetting and novelty lie at the heart of the present work: to correct a certain number of errors regarding the history and the use of the term; to reveal the processes through which the semantic field of the work has steadily grown; and finally to establish the conditions of possibility and of felicity of the transformation of an ancient word into a contemporary word through a historical socio-semantics. The great majority of works, both French and foreign, using the concept of diaspora and questioning the origins of the term, merely reflect the old errors regarding its origins, be it its use in ancient Greek to describe colonisation in the Mediterranean or in the translational links between diaspora and the Hebrew terms golah or galuth. The capacity to explain and to understand the evolution in the meaning of the term depends on the elimination of these errors. Even so, this undertaking of deconstruction has little intrinsic interest if it is not accompanied by a reconstruction of the historical conditions of the possibility of the expansion and the “far-reaching polysemous process” of the word.63 However, this double task is only feasible on the condition that there is a distancing from any personal definitions of what might constitute a diaspora to the advantage of an exclusive attention to semantic trajectories. This requires a double undertaking, both sociological and historical, epistemological and empirical. The first concerns the connotations of diaspora: a 62

63

Letter from Gilles Deleuze to Arnaud Villani, 29 December 1986, reprinted in Arnaud Villani, La Guêpe et l’orchidée. Paris: Belin, 1999, 56, quoted in François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 (first French edition 2007), 112. Starobinski, Action and Reaction, 19.

18

Introduction

genealogical inquiry into the transformations undergone by the term between its first appearance, its gradual expansion beginning in the 1960s to become a concept within the social sciences and the humanities, and its growing use in journalistic and political vocabulary. The second concerns the denotation of diaspora and is aimed at understanding the contemporary transformations – since the 1960s – of the transnational relationship and its representations. The aim is therefore to draw out the tangible developments of the historical reality of the forms of the relationship – growth in migrations, evolution of juridical framework, modifications of the relationships with space and with the world through the intermediary of new information and communication technologies – but also the institutional and intellectual changes in the academic environment. It is within this latter context, in particular, that certain thoughts emerge valorising these new modes of being on the basis of a plural vision of ethnicity and of a decentered, even fluid conceptualisation of identity. These transformations in the historical and academic perspectives on distance constitute the conditions for the possibility of the success of the term diaspora. It is clear, I hope, that these two fields of enquiry are only distinguished for the purposes of analytical clarity: their respective strands ceaselessly intertwine, forming a single thread of research. The preceding considerations underline the importance of a work on the very historicity of the popularity of the term diaspora, not simply in the social sciences but also in the media, in governmental and non-governmental organisations and in state politics. It appears essential that an attempt be made to explain why a term that appeared some 2300 years ago has, over the past five decades, increasingly come into use as a highly contemporary word. Indeed, we need to attempt to understand the conditions for the possibility of the semantic evolutions of the word, just as we also need to equip ourselves to describe these latter and to follow them closely and step by step, both to understand their particular historicity and to attempt to explain how and why diaspora has become the privileged term to describe these groups and their relationships with a place of origin.

From Chastisement to Best Practice Tracing the evolution of such a rich term over the course of more than two thousand years calls for a degree of humility. This is why I do not pretend to write the history of the uses of diaspora, but only a history, such as I think I am now able to tell it with a minimum of coherence and precision. If it most certainly has a beginning, this should not be mistaken for a unique and precise

Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue

19

origin, for not only is the creation of a neologism surrounded by that nebulosity that characterised the ancient past, but it is clothed in the sacredness of the divine text. As for the end of the story, it can but be provisional because it reaches us in the present, with all the absence of clarity and comprehension that the very close present imposes upon us. Still, I have chosen to tell this story not in a linear fashion, but to organise it according to the logic which has governed the deployment of the uses of the term. The principal originality of the contemporary success of diaspora lies in the coexistence of two main but entirely contradictory acceptations: the first, so-called centred or modern, considers the “diaspora” from the perspective of continuity, necessarily linked to a territory, often that of a state, with the dream of a future return or, at the very least, of a privileged relationship between the two entities; the other, so-called decentered, or postmodern, sees the “diaspora” within a framework of discontinuity and hybridisation, more cultural than political, where the reference to origins is always a (re)creation, a (re)invention and not the trace of an essence or a fixed identity. The establishment of these two principal acceptations is based on the historical experiences of two distinct populations, the Jews for the former, Blacks for the latter. Each of the first two parts of my text deal with the long history of the conceptualisation of one of these experiences, which, in both cases, become institutionalised from the 1970s onwards. The first traces the long history of the term and its uses in the religious domain from the Greek translation of the sacred text of the Hebrews during the 3rd century BCE to its progressive secularisation and subsequent conceptualisation during the 20th century. The second concentrates on showing the links that have existed between the Jewish and the African experiences of dispersion since the 16th century, links articulated about the biblical text but equally about a shared present of discrimination and persecution. This is the background upon which, just before the middle of the 20th century, we find the first uses of “black diaspora” or “African diaspora”. The effective absence in academic discourse of any convergence between these two lineages until the 1990s justifies their formal separation into two parts, chronologically disconnected and largely independent of one another. Nevertheless, the autonomy of each of these two conceptual histories does not preclude the existence of reciprocal identifications in the collective imagination in these two populations, whether they draw upon their common experience of historical dispersion or on their common experience of stigmatisation, discrimination, even persecution in the countries in which they reside. Rather, it is precisely this symbolic reference to the Jewish experience that furnished Africans with the first underpinnings of their identification as a “diaspora” on the basis of a model identical to that of the Jewish diaspora, before the ap-

20

Introduction

pearance, in the middle of the 1970s, of another modality of “Black diaspora”, cultural and decentered. As of the beginning of the 1990s, in tandem with an international reconfiguration of the fields of interest of several disciplines (geography, anthropology, sociology and political science in particular) and in order to take into consideration both the visible transformations of spatial relations between geographically distant individuals and a tendency towards an increasingly rapid circulation of all kinds of information on a global scale – the famous “globalisation” –, diaspora became the object of increasing academic attention, for many saw in it a term susceptible of describing the changes under way, most notably the possibility of constructing or maintaining a certain form of unity over significant distances. It is through the encounter between the two contradictory acceptations of the term referred to above, as well as through the numerous critiques prompted by the growing use of a term judged problematic, that this complex field came into existence, united only by the term that gave it its name, diaspora studies. This global diffusion through the intermediary of a significant number of texts, journals, articles, reviews, seminars and conferences, was destined to spread the use and popularity of the term well beyond its previous limits, before it underwent a further transformation. Absorbed into the language of the state and international bureaucracy thanks to the success of the scientific literature and the work of certain experts (sociologists, economists, geographers), serving as intermediaries between the worlds of academia and politics, it acquired a new dimension since its positive character, often linked to its decentered and non-territorial definition, is here associated with the existence of a state to whose development diasporas could contribute socially and economically. Progressively axiomatised, diaspora became the nodal point of new political strategies on an international scale and took its place, via the constitution of a global politico-administrative lexicon intended to permit the communication and the comprehension of all actors concerned, in the majority of state discourses on expatriate populations. The biblical chastisement has been transformed into political benediction, in the framework of public politics whose modalities of engagement are henceforth compared in the international arena, enumerated in the form of recommendation and good practice, thus according to the neologism forged by the translators of the Septuagint an audience and an aura that is global.

Part 1 From the Word to the Concept

∵

Introduction to Part 1 Each word in either an oral or written communication reaches us charged with the potential of its entire history. All previous uses of this word or phrase are implicit or, as the physicists would say, ‘implosive’ in it. We know strictly nothing of its invention except where it is a neologism or technical terms whose first appearance we can more or less confidently document. Who devised, who used for the very first time the words which articulate our consciousness and organize our relations to the world and to each other?1 Do words have their own histories, histories that can be traced by sketching out the course of their presence in one or more languages, from their birth until their possible disappearance into the purgatory of so-called “anachronisms”? If so, the word in question takes on the consistence of an entity, the force of an autonomous trajectory, an independent existence – even if this existence be consecrated to the representation of an external reality and of which it conserves only echoes and traces. This heroic vision of onomastic history found a champion in the guise of Louis Lambert under the pen of Honoré de Balzac. According to Lambert, “What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word!”2 Lambert makes a veritable personage of the word, both simple and mysterious, at once autonomous and dependant: “It has, of course, received various stamps from the occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? […] The combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose traces survive in us.”3

1 George Steiner, “What is comparative literature?” in George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996. London: Faber and Faber, 1996, 201. 2 Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert (1832), Auckland: The Floating Press, 2011, 7. Although he proceeds in a different manner, Jean Starobinski draws upon Balzac’s Louis Lambert and the passages that concern the life of words in order to recount himself “the life and the adventures” of the couple formed by action and reaction. See Starobinski, Action and Reaction. 3 Balzac, Louis Lambert, 7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_003

24

Introduction to Part 1

Constituting a word as a personage in this way, and retracing its history, it becomes tempting to bestow it with an essence, an original signification, or even a destiny embedded in itself, waiting to be revealed, and which would, somehow, be its concept, the weft upon which its entire history may be woven, such as the image of the creative project identified by Sartre in the life of Flaubert.4 The recent evolution of diaspora, which has transformed it into a non-religious concept, with a broad spectrum, capable of being applied to a large, although not infinite number of populations on the basis of national, ethnic, linguistic or religious criteria, would, according to this logic, become the vocation of diaspora, thereby pushing the rare observers of the trajectory of its uses to ferret out the precursory signs and the multiple promises in the first appearances of the word, often to the detriment of observable facts. Beginning with the principle that the history of a word is in reality the history of its uses, this work proposes not a return to origins but rather to follow the course of this history in order to identify its first visible forms as well as to trace how it evolves during the course of its geographical, social, political and religious diffusion. When it appears in the 3rd century BCE, in the Greek translation of the sacred text of the Hebraic religion – the Greek text known as the Septuagint –, it is only a neologism of restricted use, a common noun whose use elsewhere is rare and strictly limited to the Hebrews, for it is generally founded on the principle of the identical, or scarcely modified reprise of a prior occurrence. In this sense, diaspora is effectively what is known as a hapax. Thereafter other uses emerge. They have the particularity of always proceeding in the direction of a wider applicability of the term, whether it be that of diaspora as a theological concept in the 1st century of the Christian era, or as a scientific concept – almost as a proper noun, in the terminology of Jean-Claude Passeron5 – in the 20th century. Still, this apparent constancy in the progression of uses of the word should not be permitted to conceal two fundamental elements. Firstly, semantic evolution does not proceed according to a logic of substitution of older uses, but a veritable stratification of these different uses, which co-exist in the semantic space of the term. The scientific concept does not arrive and displace the theological concept: it is cumulative, even if this proceeds through denial, thereby contributing to an increasingly complex semantic stratification.

4 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, 5 vol., Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981-1993 (first French edition 1971-1972). 5 Jean-Claude Passeron, Sociological Reasoning: A Non-Popperian Space of Argumentation. Oxford: Bardwell, 2013 (first French edition 1991).

Introduction to Part 1

25

Secondly, this evolution is not the product of a single and unique process which would serve as a sort of key to the history of the term, but rather of several different processes, some of them concomitant. If the constitution of diaspora as a proper noun, as a theological concept, calls into existence three different versions (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant), it is nevertheless a singularising logic that has made them possible, each of them revealing itself as different, unique, and not comparable. Moreover, the emergence of the concept is the result of several processes that last approximately from the first decades of the 20th century until the 1980s: progressively dissociated from the strictly religious connotations that had previously characterised it, the use of the term is banalised and applied to a growing number of populations, most of the time on the basis of a comparison with the past or present history of the Jewish people, before finally – only at the end of the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s – the formalisation of the concept is established by the intermediary of different undertakings of definition and of demarcation of the criteria permitting the delimitation of the conceptual boundaries of diaspora. Each of these transformations possessed its own temporality, and any schema attempting to account for these evolutions cannot claim to be linear, continuous, progressive or simple:

Figure 1

The Stratified Historical Evolution of Diaspora.

This transformation of uses and of meanings of diaspora has proceeded in tandem with its geographical distribution. Apparently restricted for many centuries to certain parts of Egypt and ancient Israel in its ancient Hebrew manifestations, its Christian version spread throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean basin before settling, along with a knowledge of Greek, in the Byzantine Empire. Due to circulation of texts that emerged from Byzantium as it faced the Ottoman threat, a lost body of knowledge re-emerged, on

26

Introduction to Part 1

Antiquity, i.e. the Greek texts of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Diaspora formally reappeared in the eighteenth century in the Germanic-speaking areas of Europe, in the context of the birth of different Protestant groups, and in the form of a Protestant theological concept distinct from its two predecessors (Hebrew and Christian). It is from this understanding, and essentially from the German, that the written use of diaspora spread in languages such as English and French. This geographical expansion was the prelude to a diffusion beyond the specialist circles of the religious world. More or less unnoticed, the term entered the vocabulary of a number of disciplines – history, anthropology, sociology, African studies, Chinese studies, political science, and so on – but, for all that, without these different disciplinary uses reinforcing one another or calling for a more formal conceptualisation. For almost eight decades the academic trajectories of diaspora were parallel trajectories, before the word of the Septuagint, the neologism of Alexandria, became the object of a real synthesis in the middle of the 1980s.

Chapter 1

The Word of the Septuagint Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.1 In 1952 the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges asserted that “few disciplines are of greater interest than etymology: this is because of the unpredictable transformations of the primitive sense of words, through time.”2 It would appear, however, that his definition of “etymology” is somewhat more expansive than the one to which we are accustomed. Far from restricting it solely to the study of the origin of a word, it encompasses the history of the word3 to the point that its origin is considered to be an almost negligible element: “Given that such transformations may appear paradoxical, the origin of a word is of no (or little) help in shedding light on a concept.”4 That is undoubtedly true when the avowed objective is to trace the “true” meaning of the said concept. However, when one proposes to retrace the historical evolution of a term, one cannot do without the first step. This is even more crucial when the term in question has undergone important transformations, such that its first meaning has been completely overthrown and its value depends most notably on its capacity to describe the world. As Émile Benveniste reminds us with respect

1 José Saramago, All the Names. London: The Harvill Press, 2000 (first Portuguese edition 1997), 115. 2 Jorge Luis Borges, “On the Classics,” (1952), New York Review of Books, vol. 15, no. 3 (August 13, 1970), 3. 3 Moreover, this evolution is the one that etymology has undergone since the beginning of the 20th century: the simple question of origins, origin-etymology, is completed by the study of the history of the world, history-etymology. The first real step in this direction was the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch published by Walther von Wartburg en 1922. See the encyclopaedic article “Étymologie,” by M.J. Brochard, in Le Robert: dictionnaire historique de la langue française, tome I, ed. Alain Rey, 1338-1340. Paris: Le Robert, 1998. 4 Borges, “On the Classics,” 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_004

28

Chapter 1

to the word civilisation, “Precisely because civilisation is one of those words which show a new vision of the world, it is important to describe as specifically as possible the conditions under which it was created.”5 A consideration of origins is fundamental in order to transcend the etymological logic of a truth embedded in the letters of a word, and to transform a stratified semantic evolution into a single red thread on the basis of which it will become possible to grasp the contemporary meaning. Origins? Why a plural here? For two reasons. First, focalisation on a singular origin often implies that this origin conceals the essence, the truth of the phenomenon under consideration, while the plural permits us to envisage the question of provenance in a more complex manner, also uncovering in it the traces of the constitutive struggles of its birth.6 Then, if it is important to set out on a quest for the true origins of the word – insofar as that expression has meaning – it is no less so to seize how and why these origins have sometimes been misunderstood or deformed. In the case of diaspora, it is even essential to clasp together the true and the false origins of the term, for only an elucidation of these two aspects can allow for an explanation of the modalities of transformation of the meaning of the word.

False Origins A reading of the specialised literature that has appeared over the past thirty years on the term diaspora allows us to reveal the presence, in most of the studies, of three factual elements, one etymological, the other two contextual, concerning its “birth”. Διασπορά (diasporá) is a Greek word, constructed from the Greek verb διασπείρω (diaspeírô), and meaning “dispersion”, “scattering”; closely associated with Jewish history, it is the translation, or the equivalent, of the Hebrew word galuth (‫ ;) ׇגּלוּת‬finally, prior to its association with the Jewish people, it belonged to the Greek lexicon of colonisation. If no-one can 5 Émile Benveniste, “Civilisation: A Contribution to the history of the word,” in Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971 (first French edition 1966), 289. This text was first published in Éventail de l’histoire vivante: hommage à Lucien Febvre, tome i. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954), 47-54. 6 See Michel Foucault’s discussion of the three German terms Ursprung, Herkunft and Entstehung used by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality and his plea for the establishment of a genealogical, “effective history” (wirkliche Historie), which would be neither linear nor teleological. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (1971) in Language, Countermemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), notably 141-152.

The Word of the Septuagint

29

deny the truth of the first affirmation, the two subsequent ones present serious problems. In the first place, and contrary to what the British sociologist Robin Cohen – who is, incidentally, an eminent specialist on diasporas – has written in the great majority of his texts consecrated to this question since 1995, diaspora was never used in Antiquity, either before or after the establishment of a semantic link between the term and the Jews, to describe the Greek colonisation of the Mediterranean or Greek settlement far from their homeland.7 Of all the occurrences of diaspora in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), which draws upon almost the entire written corpus in the Greek language from Homer to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 – 281 in number to date (March 2016) – none refer to colonisation. The most common Greek noun used to describe this migratory phenomenon is apoikía (ἀποικία), the first definition of which describes the fact of finding oneself far from home.8 Even so, this claim is repeated in numerous texts that consider the evolution of the term or its conceptual use. It allows their authors, who generally refer to Robin Cohen,9 to maintain that diaspora originally had a positive connotation, certain of them going as far as to write that “the original use of the term by the Greeks connotes a triumphalist migration/colonisation (speírô = to sow; et dia = over) from the point of view of the coloniser/occupier.”10 It also offers the possibility of contemplating the existence of an “original meaning” of diaspora anterior to the occurrences in the Septuagint, this original meaning possessing the particularity of being associated with a voluntary migration and not with the migration, considered forced, of the Jews. Adam McKeown could therefore write that “until recently, the idea of diaspora has been intimately linked to the history of the Jews,” be7

8 9

10

In chronological order, “Rethinking “Babylon”: Iconoclastic Conceptions of the Diaspora Experience,” New Community, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995), 6; “Diasporas and the NationState: From Victims to Challengers,” International Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (1996), 507; Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997, ix and  83; “‘Diaspora’: Changing Meanings and Limits of the Concept,” in Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, ed. William Berthomière and Christine Chivallon (Paris: Karthala-MSHA, 2006), 40. Michel Casevitz, Le Vocabulaire de la colonisation en grec ancien. Étude lexicologique: les familles de κτίζω et de οἰκέω-οἰκίζω. Paris: Klincksieck, 1985, 120-121. See, for example, Judith T. Shuval, “Diaspora Migration: Definitional Ambiguities and a Theoretical Paradigm,” International Migration, vol. 38, no. 5 (2000), 42; Michele Reis, “Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on “Classical” and “Contemporary” Diaspora,” International Migration, vol. 42, no. 2 (2004), 44; Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Dominique Schnapper, Diasporas et nations. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006, 20. Balasubramanyam Chandramohan, “Diasporic Writing,” in Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, ed. John Charles Hawley (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 145.

30

Chapter 1

fore adding in a footnote, with reference to Robin Cohen, “the word diaspora can be traced back still earlier, to a Greek word used to describe the sowing of seed, and then applied to Greek colonisation in the Mediterranean.”11 By this same logic, for other authors, the “nature” of diaspora thereby becomes Greek and ceases to be Jewish: “Given that ‘diaspora’ is a Greek word, it has naturally been used since antiquity to refer to the many migrations of the Greek people.”12 Curiously, this exaggeration of the Greek character of the word is equally identifiable when scholars sought to prove exactly the opposite, and attribute to diaspora not only an original Greek – not Jewish – meaning, but a negative one. In this case, the term is falsely attributed to Greek authors such as Herodotus or, more frequently, Thucydides. Hence the affirmation by Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger, whose statement “the Greek term diaspora, meaning dispersion, was first used in ancient Greece to characterise the exile of the Aegean population after the Peloponnesian War”13 is incorrect on several counts. First, if the use of the Greek verb diaspeírô (διασπείρω) has been attested since at least the 5th century BCE, this is not the case for the noun. Not only does the study of the available Greek corpus show that there is no occurrence of diaspora before the 3rd century BCE, epoch at which it appears in the Septuagint, but moreover it is a neologism forged by translators drafting the Greek text. It follows that the uses allegedly found in Thucydides or Herodotus cannot be of diaspora but, at best, of the verb diaspeírô or certain of its derivatives. It seems that the first appearance of an example of the forced migration of the population of Aegina – and not the Aegean, as Münz and Ohliger write – as proof of a “pre-Septuagint” usage of diaspora occurred in 1991 when it was mentioned by Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau in the introduction to their Atlas des diasporas. They write therein that “the Greek word diaspora is used by Thucydides (Peloponnesian War, II, 27) to describe the exile of the population of Aegina14. » Now, if the passage in question is indeed translated into English with the help of the verb “disperse”, not only is the noun diaspora quite absent from the Greek original, but the original does not include the 11 12 13

14

Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 2 (May 1999), 308, emphasis added [but not to the word “diaspora”]. Anupam Chander, “Diaspora Bonds,” New York University Law Review, vol. 76, no. 4 (September 2001), 1020. Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger, “Introduction,” in Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants: Germany, Israel, and Post-Soviet Successor States in Comparative Perspective, ed. Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger (London: Cass, 2003), 3. Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, Penguin Atlas of Diasporas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 (first French edition 1991), xiii note 1.

The Word of the Septuagint

31

verb diaspeírô either. The verb used is the verb speírô conjugated in the passive aorist.15 Moreover, if “disperse” is indubitably one of the possible meanings of this verb, it is not the only one, and its uses hold no particular negative connotation. We therefore find it in works penned by Herodotus,16 Sophocles,17 Plato18 and Isocrates19 – to cite but a few – meaning, respectively, of “distribute”, “share”, “dissipate”, “diffuse”. Despite the misrepresentations that these scientific references to Herodotus and Thucydides represent, we nevertheless find them repeated in text after text,20 including in those by scholars most attentive to the historicisation of the idea of diaspora as well as to the meaning of words.21 A final element for a better understanding of the uses of the Greek word diaspora up to the modern period: they all emerge from the religious domain, generally scriptural, be it Jewish or Christian (Catholic or Protestant).22 In fact, to my knowledge, there exist only three exceptions to this observation, three non-religious uses, all found in Plutarch (1st century CE).23 First, in his account of the life of Solon he evokes the scattering of the latter’s ashes on the island of Salamis.24 Then, in his Moralia, he twice uses the term in connection with 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.27. Note, however, that Thucydides sometimes used the word diaspeírô. It appears in 1.11 and in 3.30. Herodotus, Histories III.13.4. Sophocles, Electra 1287-1291. Plato, Republic V.455e. Isocrates, To Philip 104. Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Trans-National Moment,” Diaspora, vol. 5, no. 1 (1996), 10; Chander, “Diaspora Bonds,” 1020-1021. For example in Jon Stratton, Coming out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities. London: Routledge, 2000, 140. For an indication of usage posterior to the Septuagint, and in addition to the references already cited, we may usefully consult A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke, 1893, 141, and G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968 (first edition 1961), 359. Plutarch is mentioned in the entries for “diaspora” in the two principal dictionaries of Ancient Greek, Liddell-Scott and Bailly. See Anatole Bailly, Dictionnaire grec-français. Paris: Hachette, 1910, 490; Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940 (first edition 1843), 412. Plutarch, Parallel Lives. Solon 32.4. Most English translations read “scattered”. In his French translation, Dominique Ricard wrote that the ashes were “sown” (“semées”): Les Vies des hommes illustres par Plutarque. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1836, tome i: 150. This theme of the dispersion of ashes finds a particular resonance in a text on the death of Jews written by Nadine Fresco in 1981. Nadine Fresco, “La Diaspora des cendres,” (1981), in Nadine Fresco, La Mort des Juifs. Paris: Seuil, 2008, 117-140.

32

Chapter 1

the atomist theory of Epicurus. This example is interesting since, contrary to the meaning that diaspora has subsequently assumed, it implies not the idea of a link, but rather that of annihilation. Dispersion is thus loss of contact, and disappearance. In his essay “It is Impossible to Live Pleasantly in the Manner of Epicurus,” Plutarch writes that, according to Epicurus, the dissolution of matter – “this very thing is it that nature most dreads,” he adds – is a dispersion (diaspora) in the form of void and atoms, with no contact between the parts thus dispersed.25 Finally, the last occurrence is in the essay “Against Colotes”. According to Plutarch, Epicurus explains the possible heating due to the consumption of wine by the “the compressions and disseminations of the atoms”.26 Second, the establishment of a link between diaspora and the highly complicated Jewish notion of galuth27 is not illegitimate in itself, for it is true that these two terms share a common history. Nevertheless, it is not the history that is usually told. Most academic texts that discuss this link – and we must recognise that this is not the majority of them, and that this interest of diasporas scholars in galuth seems only to have emerged fairly recently, doubtless at the beginning of the 1990s – present the two terms as being not only linked to one another, but inextricably linked and mixed without us being truly capable of distinguishing the one from the other, equivalent as they are indiscriminate. It is almost unanimously believed that diaspora is indissociably associated with galuth since it is supposed to be, against all the historical evidence, the translation or the transcription thereof.28 Sometimes this claim

25

26 27

28

Plutarch, Plutarch’s Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. vol. ii. Cambridge: Press Of John Wilson and Son, 1874, 198. In ibid., vol. 5, 343. For a global vision of this complexity, see Simon Rawidowicz, “On the Concept of Galut,” (1943), in Simon Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the Ever-Dying People. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1986, 96-117, as well as Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. For a global study, but impregnated with the Zionist vision of galuth, see Yitzhak Baer, Galut. New York: Schocken Books, 1947 (first German edition 1936). Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 9; Lisa Anteby-Yemini et William Berthomière (William), “Di[a]spositif: décrire et comprendre les diasporas,” in Les Diasporas, 2 000 ans d’histoire, ed. Lisa Anteby-Yemini, William Berthomière and Gabriel Sheffer (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 9; Michel Bruneau, “Les Mots de la diaspora grecque: société, État et

The Word of the Septuagint

33

goes even further, galuth becoming the “equivalent” of diaspora, thus suggesting that the latter is anterior to the former.29 Galuth then becomes “the Hebrew word for diaspora”.30 Finally, the meaning of galuth is often mistreated. For Bryan Cheyette, the distinction between golah and galuth corresponds to the distinction between voluntary migration and forced migration:31 “The Hebrew root for exile or diaspora has two distinct connotations. Golah implies residence in a foreign country (where the migrant is in charge of his or her destiny), whereas galut denotes a tragic sense of displacement (where the migrant is essentially the passive object of an impersonal history.”32 Unfortunately, as I will show below, this interpretation can in no way be supported by the historical, linguistic and semantic reality of the links between galuth and diaspora. Regardless, beyond the sphere of biblical studies, few social science scholars working on this question33 have considered any of the three elements here discussed: the non-indifferentiation of galuth and diaspora; the inexistence of the term in the Greek language before the Septuagint and its non-utilisation to describe Greek colonisation; and finally, the absence of either positive or negative connotations of the verb diaspeírô, as opposed to diaspora. How to explain the fact that diaspora has found itself thus endowed with false origins? The simplest reason doubtless lies in the frequent lack of understanding of Hebrew and Greek, which prevents most authors from contesting the conclusions put forward by earlier scholars. As plausible as this may be, this explanation is insufficient, for the obliteration of the real origins of diaspora is not the prerogative of non-Greek-speaking or non-Hebrew-speaking scholars. For example, the entry “Diaspora” written in 1931 by the Russian

29 30 31

32

33

diaspora,” in Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière and Sheffer, Les Diasporas, 80; Chantal BordesBenayoun and Dominique Schnapper, Les Mots des diasporas. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2008, 42. Chandramohan, “Diasporic Writing,” 145. Peter Braham and Aldo Zargani, “Diaspora,” in Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture, ed. Guido Bolaffi (London: Sage, 2003), 73. Note that this distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration often serves as a basis for distinguishing diaspora from galuth. See, inter alii, Richard Marienstras, “On the Notion of Diaspora,” in Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation States, ed. Gérard Chaliand (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 120. Bryan Cheyette, “Diasporas of the Mind: British-Jewish Writing Beyond Multiculturalism,” in Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, ed. Monika Fludernik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 45. Nevertheless, we might cite Baumann, “Diaspora,” and Krings, “Diaspora,” 138-139.

34

Chapter 1

Jewish historian Simon Dubnow for the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences contains the following statement “Diaspora has its equivalents in the Hebrew words galuth (exile) and golah (the exiled), which, since the Babylonian captivity, have been used to describe the dispersion of Jewry.”34 If he does not refer to Greek colonisation, he nevertheless believes that the Greeks – like the Armenians – also constitute diasporas. Doubtless the principal reason for the search for a Greek origin of the term, an origin which would not be uniquely Jewish and thus less marked by history, lies in a desire to constitute a concept applicable to several populations – this is particularly so in the contemporary context in which the term has assumed positive connotations. That way, it becomes easier to open diaspora to other populations since it is therefore no longer the distinctive, and negative mark of a single people. The two operations of linking of diaspora with a Hebrew word of which it is not the translation, and with a historical process that it has never been used to describe, have formed a semantic horizon in which a historically positive Greek experience and a historically negative Jewish experience cohabit. If we do not deconstruct it, this situation not only renders any precise comprehension of the historicity of the distinction between galuth and diaspora impossible, but also denies their subsequent reconciliation – for reconciliation there was – and the multiple significations and bifurcations associated with these two terms. Deconstruction here only has any sense if it serves an enterprise of methodical reconstruction of the parts followed by the uses of diaspora. To do this, it is necessary to try to trace – as closely as possible – the operation which consists in giving life to things by giving them a name – that same operation with which the Book of Genesis opens. If this naming can have a point of departure, and this will be an opportunity to plunge into the text of the Septuagint itself, it only rarely remains unique. It is prolonged by other operations of nomination, carried out by other denominating agents which modify not only the meaning of previous uses, but each time bring forth something new. Origins intertwine in this lattice of births, all equally real, even equally true as one another. The first is not a root, a source or a foundation: it is a path which has given birth to others and which demands that it be followed and retraced. This path begins in Alexandria, in the second half of the 3rd century BCE.

34

Dubnow, “Diaspora,” 127. I will return to this text of Dubnow in chapter iii. Note that, according to the language and the transliterations, we find Dubnow, Dubnov or Doubnov. Exception made for texts in which the original orthography of the name is maintained, I will use Dubnow, the most widespread English version of the name.

The Word of the Septuagint

35

Lexicography of the Septuagint The Hebrew bible, the Tanakh,35 is, from beginning to end, like the Septuagint and the Old Testament, a text about exile, expulsion, a search and the departure from the land, to the extent that it can be described as “the book of exile”.36 Whether it be the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the departure of Abraham and his family for Canaan, the condemnation of Cain to eternal wandering, the flight to and then from Egypt, the theme of flight, voluntary or forced, of wandering and of return is omnipresent, as is that of the collective deportation of the Jewish people by a neighbouring power. In 722 BCE, the fall of the northern kingdom of Samaria led to the deportation of several thousand Jews to Assyria.37 The attacks of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar upon the kingdom of Judah had similar consequences: in 597 BCE, with the exile to Babylon of King Jeconiah and ten thousand of his men; in 586 BCE, with the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, the deportation to Babylon of King Zedekiah and part of the elite of the kingdom, and the flight to Egypt of several important groups of individuals; and finally, in 581 BCE with a last campaign aimed at displacement. During the course of these events the land of Israel was not entirely emptied of its inhabitants, for the rural population was not affected by the deportations. However, it is this period, beginning in 597 BCE, that the Bible calls the Exile and it is in relation to this period that we need to explore the links with diaspora. Diaspora is a familiar term in the domain of biblical and religious studies. In addition to critical works dealing with its use in Antiquity, there are numerous entries consecrated to it in the dictionaries of the Old as well as the New Testament, in Greek-Hebrew biblical lexicons and in specialised journals in religious history, particularly among German Protestant writers. We can therefore identify three very different visions of the meaning of diaspora:

35

36

37

Each of the three Hebrew characters that compose the word Tanakh correspond to one of the three parts of the Hebrew Bible such as it was established in the 10th century: Torah (the law), which includes the first five books, Nebiim (the prophets) which contains nineteen, and Ketoubim (the writings), which contains eleven. Robert P. Carroll, “Deportation and Diasporic Discourses in the Prophetic Literature,” in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions, ed. James M. Scott (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 64. Following the death of Solomon in 928 BCE, there were two Kingdoms of Israel, that of Samaria in the north and that of Judea in the south.

36

Chapter 1

1) a uniquely religious vision combining positive and negative connotations. We find it very clearly among the German Protestant theologians for whom, in a manner analogous to the classic rabbinical vision, diaspora – which is not distinguished from galuth – is a religious concept indissociably mixing malediction and choice. Dispersion is a divine chastisement which can only be understood in the context of the particular relationship established between God and the chosen people. If, for the rabbis, this latter is evidently the Jewish people, it is not the same for German Protestant writers, for whom it is rather Christians collectively, thus combining the visions of the Old Testament and of the New Testament. So, in 1936, Robert Frick identifies five characteristics of the religious concept of diaspora as it appears in the Old Testament: an existence as strangers on earth; the anger of God; the promise of the regathering of the dispersed; the necessity for proselytism; and finally, the eschatological mission conferred upon the Christian church between the first and the second coming of Jesus Christ.38 2) a positive and negative perspective not uniquely religious. Here, the emphasis is on the relationship between the Hebrew terms golah and galuth on the one hand, and diaspora on the other. In the article that he wrote on diaspora in 1933 for the Theologisches Wörterbuch des Neues Testament, Karl Ludwig Schmidt suggests that the extremely severe and negative connotation of the Hebrew words had progressively given way to diaspora because the torments of the Babylonian exile had themselves gradually been replaced by more favourable conditions abroad, such as those experienced by the Jews during the Greek period.39 Diaspora thus acquired a positive dimension, not far removed from the one we are to encounter later in the human and social sciences, associating the word with a voluntary migra-

38

39

Robert Frick, “Not Verheissung und Aufgabe der Diaspora nach dem biblischen Zeugnis. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Frage der eschatologischen Bestimmtheit der Kirche,” Monatsschrift für Pastoraltheologie, no. 32 (1936), 261-272. This article is cited in Aiyenakun P. J. Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament: Studies on the Idea of Christian Sojourn, Pilgrimage and Dispersion according to the New Testament, Theology Dissertation of the Bavarian Julius-Maximilian University Würzburg, 1977, 10-13. I am grateful to Lutz Raphaël who helped me to locate and obtain a copy of this thesis. Frick’s interpretation is taken up by Hans Lubczyk as well as Rudolf Schnackenburg. Hans Lubczyk, “Die Diaspora im alten Testament,” Lebendiges Zeugnis, no. 2-3-4 (October 1966), 5-17; Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Gottes Volk in der Zerstreeung,” (1966) in Rudolf Schnackenburg, Schriften zum neuen Testament. Munich: Kösel, 1971, 336. Schmidt, “Diaspora,”.

The Word of the Septuagint

37

tion, an expansion even, in any case a dimension more geographical than theological.40 3) a vision not uniquely religious but purely negative. This is the one invoked by the Dutch theologian Willem Cornelis van Unnik in a series of lectures that he gave in Jerusalem in 1967.41 He explicitly set himself the task of refuting the thesis of Rendtorff and Schmidt on Jewish pride in the dispersion and the optimism linked to the use of the term. Drawing on a thorough analysis of Greek sources, he wanted to show that if diaspora was an uncommon term, it was generally a negative one – according to him, much like the verb diaspeirein – and that there is to be found in Epicurus a use of the word signifying not only dispersion but disappearance, annihilation.42 Observing that the Septuagint never translates galuth or golah by diaspora,43 he raises the hypothesis that the translators used diaspora to indicate a state not of geographical displacement but of the dissolution of the body of the Jewish people in chastisement for their sins. Thus, according to him, a word that, because it was present in the Greek lexicon before the Septuagint, was non-religious came to designate for the Jews a uniquely theological situation, one even worse than exile. These three visions may appear completely incompatible. Yet, each of them permits us to grasp a part of the historical and linguistic reality, while simultaneously concealing or incorrectly analysing the elements that could have permitted a more complex consideration. The Protestant vision, particularly that of Alfred Stuiber, most perceptively identifies the interpenetrations be-

40

41

42 43

This rather optimistic vision of diaspora seems to be the product of an earlier work, cited by Schmidt, that of Franz Rendtorff, author of the article “Diaspora” in the encyclopedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1918, cited in Schmidt, “Diaspora,” 100. However, for Schmidt, the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Christian era once again sees a convergence in usage of diaspora and galuth. This idea was taken up by Alfred Stuiber in 1957 in his “Diaspora,” article. The text of these lectures was published in 1993 by Pieter Willem van der Horst, one of Van Unnik’s students. Willem Cornelis Van Unnik, Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora in der hellenistisch-römischen Zeit. Leiden: Brill, 1993. For those who do not read German, there is a detailed presentation of Van Unnik’s analysis in James M. Scott, “Exile and the Self-Understanding of Diaspora Jews in the Greco-Roman Period,” in Scott, Exile, 178-185. Van Unnik, Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora, 75. Ibid., 81-83.

38

Chapter 1

tween the Jewish and the Christian meanings of diaspora while bracketing the question of the evolution of the relationships between diaspora and galuth. In contrast, Rendtorff and Schmidt’s perspective clearly distinguishes this aspect, but errs on the optimism of diaspora. Finally, if Van Unnik’s analysis establishes the absence of a direct link between the two words and insists on their negative connotations, he bases this latter assertion on the hypothesis of a fairly unlikely rereading of Epicurus by his translators44 – thereby suggesting the existence of a prior, non-religious meaning of diaspora – and discards entirely any consideration of the Christian meaning such as it appears in the New Testament. If we accept the fact that diaspora is a neologism forged by translators of Hebrew into Greek, the question of translation and the particularities of the Greek text, compared to the Hebrew Masoretic Text,45 become capital.46 As the French biblical scholar Marguerite Harl has shown, the debate over the nature of the Greek language used for the translation of the Hebrew Bible is not over: was it a particular Greek resulting from a desire to “stick” to the Hebrew text including in its syntax; or was it a Greek that conformed to the usage

44

45

46

Indeed, no fragment of Epicurus contains diaspora. We therefore can only draw on those of Plutarch’s texts that refer to the theories of Epicurus, and should not be taken as citations of the latter. For a stance identical to my own on this point, see Johannes Tromp, “The Ancient Jewish Diaspora,” 21, note 28. The Masoretic Text, often abbreviated as MT, is the “official” text of the Hebrew Bible, such as it was established by scholars, the Masoretes, who worked through several iterations to produce a definitive text. This task of consolidation gathered pace between the 7th and 9th centuries CE. The definitive version of the MT is generally considered to be the Aleppo Codex of ben Asher, the name of the Masorete Aaron ben Moses ben Asher who wrote it in the second half of the 10th century. There is along tradition of scholarship of the Septuagint. I have drawn particularly on the most recent developments in the field, and notably on French scholarship, which has been extremely active in this respect since the pioneering work of Marguerite Harl and the establishment of a research group working on a French translation of the Septuagint. For an overview of the work of this group, see Gilles Dorival, Marguerite Harl and Olivier Munnich eds., La Bible grecque des Septante: du judaïsme hellénistique au christianisme ancien. Paris: Cerf, 1994 (first French edition 1988); Cécile Dogniez and Marguerite Harl eds., Le Pentateuque: la Bible d’Alexandrie, Paris: Gallimard, 2002 (first French edition 2001), as well as Gilles Dorival and Olivier Munnich eds., “Selon les Septante”: hommage à Marguerite Harl. Paris: Cerf, 1995. See also Robert David and Manuel Jinbachian eds., Traduire la Bible hébraïque: de la Septante à la Nouvelle Bible Segond. Montréal: Médiaspaul, 2005; and Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (first Spanish edition 1979).

The Word of the Septuagint

39

of the period in question?47 Very few Hebrew words have been left intact in the translated text, either in Hebrew script or transcribed. As Marguerite Harl wrote, “the lexical choices are even more evident since several Greek words may correspond to the same Hebrew word according to the context, and, conversely, that the translator uses the same Greek word in several different passages, where the Hebrew uses different words.”48 For Harl, as a result of the work of the translator the meaning of the words of the Septuagint are not to be found uniquely in the Hebrew, nor, as a result of the particularities of the text of the Septuagint itself, are they to be found uniquely in the Greek language of the time, nor even, finally, are they to be found in the meanings that they might subsequently acquire, notably in the New Testament. In this sense the language of the Septuagint is not a simple translation of the Hebrew, but a true Greek heedful of the initial organisation of sentences and of preserving the meaning of the original text, all while reserving the possibility of innovation. If the team of French specialists and translators of the Septuagint under the direction of Marguerite Harl and Cécile Dogniez have highlighted the numerous verbal innovations in the Greek Bible, it nevertheless appears that the Greek employed rests on an archaic foundation of the language and that real neologisms are both rare49 and, in most respects, consistent with the general evolution of the Greek language. This is notably the case of diaspora. Michel Casevitz writes that it is a “neologism consistent with the character of the Greek language. […] The formation and the meaning of a word ending in –ά are entirely consistent with the process of Greek word formation, on the model διαφθείρω/διαφθορά: it is the act of dispersal and the state of being that results.”50 Harl and Dogniez write elsewhere that “this neologism[…] is still

47

48 49

50

Marguerite Harl, “La Bible d’Alexandrie dans les débats actuels sur la Septante,” in La Double Transmission du texte biblique: études d’histoire du texte offertes en hommage à Adrian Schenker, ed. Yohanan Goldman and Christoph Uehlinger (Fribourg: Éditions de l’université de Fribourg, 2001), 16-21. Ibid., 17. On this point, see particularly Clyde Weber Votaw, “The Septuagint Greek Version of the Old Testament,” The Biblical World, vol. 16, no. 3 (1900), 186-198; Elias J. Bickerman, “The Septuagint as a Translation,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, no. 28 (1959), 1-39; Harry Orlinski, “The Septuagint and Its Hebrew Text,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2, The Hellenistic Age, ed. William David Davies and Louis Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 534-562. Michel Casevitz, “D’Homère aux historiens romains: le grec du Pentateuque alexandrin,” in Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 645.

40

Chapter 1

rare in the LXX [Septuagint] but will become commonplace and remain thus in modern languages, in the form transcribed from the Greek, to designate Jewish communities outside Palestine.”51 Marguerite Harl adds that this word “seems to have been somehow introduced, deliberately chosen, as a ‘favourite’ word, in preference to other Greek words that would have been more faithful translations of the related notions of exile and dispersion.”52 Why was this word chosen? And, specifically, since the response to the first question proves to be rather complicated, is there a logic to its use in the Septuagint? In an attempt to dispel certain confusions around the meaning of diaspora, we need to turn to the text of the Septuagint itself and its relationship to the Hebrew text. In order to do so I will draw on aforementioned studies specifically consecrated to the term diaspora in the Septuagint by Arowele, Van Unnik, Tromp and Lust53, on other brief notices on the subject54 as well as on precious aids such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible55 and Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament.56 Diaspora57 appears fourteen times – with three uncertain occurrences – in the text of the Septuagint: twice in Deuteronomy (28:25 and 30:4), once in Nehemiah (1:9), once in Judith (5:19), twice in the Psalms (138[139] and 146[147]:2),58 once in Isaiah (49:6), thrice in Jeremiah (13:14, 15:7 and 41(34):17), once in Daniel (12:2), once in 2 Maccabees (1:27), and finally twice in the 51 52 53 54

55

56 57

58

Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 797. Marguerite Harl, “‘Et il rassemblera les “dispersions” d’Israël’,”  282. The reader not conversant with Greek will find a more accessible synthesis in Baumann, “Diaspora”. See, for example, Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, 232-252, and Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski, “How to Be a Jew in Hellenistic Egypt?” in Diasporas in Antiquity, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen and Ernest S. Frerichs, 65-92. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. James Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Vendor: Hendrickson Publishers, 1890. Strong’s dictionary is available online: http://www.htmlbible.com/ sacrednamebiblecom/kjvstrongs/CONINDEX.htm. Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990 (first German edition 1834). I have deliberately chosen to concern myself only with diaspora and not with the verb diaspeirein, believing that they are not in any way equivalent. Diaspora is rare in the text of the Septuagint, which is not at all the case for diaspeirein. The numbering of the psalms differs between the Hebrew and Greek texts following the so-called “alphabetical” psalms, numbers IX and X in the Masoretic Text but combined into one in the Septuagint. Psalm138 in the Septuagint therefore corresponds the 139 in the Hebrew Bible, and likewise 146 to 147.

The Word of the Septuagint

41

Psalms of Solomon (8:28 and 9:2).59 Undertaking a study of the correspondences between the Hebrew text and the Greek text allow us to make two valuable observations: diaspora does not translate a single Hebrew word but several, whose meanings are very different; and it never translates the Hebrew words drawn from the root ‫( גלה‬guimel-lamed-he, that is, glh), such as galah, golah or even galuth (even if galuth is written with the consonants guimellamed-thav, ‫)גלת‬, the translations of which in the Septuagint are of significance for the question at hand. Most authors who have considered, one way or another, the presence of diaspora in the Septuagint, affirm without hesitation that it is not the translation of galuth or even of another Hebrew word constructed on the same glh root;60 yet it is useful to attempt to grasp which terms it has translated to thus sketch out a space of associations of ideas and to perhaps glimpse a logic to its use in the Septuagint (see Table 1 infra, p. 42-45). In the two occurrences in Deuteronomy, which in many respects constitute the inspiration for subsequent usage, it is not the same Hebrew root which is thus translated. In Deuteronomy 28: 25, the Hebrew term is ‫( ַזֲע ׇוה‬za’avah), whose meaning is associated with the idea of trouble, terror: “you will be an object of terror for all.”61 To this aspect is added that of banishment. Indeed, 59 60

61

I respect here the sequence in which the books of the Septuagint are arranged, different from both that of the Torah and that of the Old Testament. In addition to Van Unnik, Arowele, Tromp, Harl and Lust, we may cite William David Davies, “Reflections about the Use of the Old Testament in the New in Its Historical Context,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 74, no. 2 (198), 130; Gruen, Diaspora, 342. Some scholars even see the persistent correspondence between the two terms as a paradox. Harl, “‘Et il rassemblera les “dispersions” d’Israël’,” 282-283, particularly footnote 2 p.  283: “the phenomenon of ‘synonymy” between galout and diaspora does not seem clear to me.” The other occurrences of this Hebrew term in the Hebrew Bible have all been translated in the Septuagint by nouns belonging to the same semantic field of “terror”, be it ταραχή (tarakhế, Ezekiel 23:46) or ἔκστασις (ékstasis, 2 Chronicles 29:8). Scholars differ on the reasons for the correspondence between za’avah and diaspora in this verse. Roger Le Déaut holds that the Jewish translators of the Septuagint preferred to temper the somewhat brutal character of the original text by substituting for it the idea of exile associated with dispersion. Johan Lust prefers to highlight the resemblance between za’avah and zara’ (‫ ) ׇז ַרע‬or zarah (‫ ) ָז ַרה‬which mean to sow, to disperse; a resemblance would therefore have been to the advantage of the translators who wished to use diaspora – which would then no longer have been a neologism – in Epicurus’ sense, that of disappearance and of annihilation. Roger Le Déaut, “La Septante, un targum?” in Études sur le judaïsme hellénistique, ed. Association catholique française pour l’étude de la Bible (Paris: Cerf, 1984), 174. Also see Lust, “Exile and Diaspora,” 104-105.

42

Chapter 1

Table 1

Diaspora in the Septuagint.

Original Greek text of the Septuagint

Brenton’s English translation62

Deuteronomy 28:25 : δῴη σε κύριος ἐπικοπὴν ἐναντίον τῶν ἐχθρῶν σου· ἐν ὁδῷ μιᾷ ἐξελεύσῃ πρὸς αὐτοὺς καὶ ἐν ἑπτὰ ὁδοῖς φεύξῃ ἀπὸ προσώπου αὐτῶν· καὶ ἔσῃ ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς.

The Lord give thee up for slaughter before thine enemies: thou shalt go out against them one way, and flee from their face seven ways; and thou shalt be a dispersion in all the kingdoms of the earth.

Deuteronomy 30:4 : ἐὰν ᾖ ἡ διασπορά σου ἀπ’ ἄκρου τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ἕως ἄκρου τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, ἐκεῖθεν συνάξει σε κύριος ὁ θεός σου, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν λήμψεταί σε κύριος ὁ θεός σου·

If thy dispersion be from one end of heaven to the other, thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and thence will the Lord thy God take thee.

Ezra 11:9 (Nehemiah 1:9)63 : καὶ ἐὰν ἐπιστρέψητε πρός με καὶ φυλάξητε τὰς ἐντολάς μου καὶ ποιήσητε αὐτάς, ἐὰν ᾖ ἡ διασπορὰ ὑμῶν ἀπ’ ἄκρου τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, ἐκεῖθεν συνάξω αὐτοὺς καὶ εἰσάξω αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸν τόπον, ὃν ἐξελεξάμην κατασκηνῶσαι τὸ ὄνομά μου ἐκεῖ

But if ye turn again to me, and keep my commandments, and do them; if ye should be scattered under the utmost [bound] of heaven, thence will I gather them, and I will bring them into the place which I have chosen to cause my name to dwell there.

in Deut. 30:4, the term translated by diaspora is a conjugated – in the nif’al, that is, in the passive voice – form of the verb ‫( ׇנ ַדח‬nadach) which means to banish. Horror for the other and the state of dispersion are the product

62

63

The Septuagint version of the Old Testament. With an English translation, and with various readings and critical notes [by Sir L. C. L. Brenton]. Reprint. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House. 1971. Ezra 11:9 is the verse in the Septuagint. The corresponding text in the Hebrew Bible as in the Old Testament is Nehemiah 1:9. The previous verse, Nehemiah 1:8, refers to dispersion by God too but the verb used is διασκορπίζω (disperse).

The Word of the Septuagint

43

Original Greek text of the Septuagint

Brenton’s English translation

Judith 5:19 : καὶ νῦν ἐπιστρέψαντες ἐπὶ τὸν θεὸν αὐτῶν ἀνέβησαν ἐκ τῆς διασπορᾶς, οὗ διεσπάρησαν ἐκεῖ, καὶ κατέσχον τὴν Ιερουσαλημ, οὗ τὸ ἁγίασμα αὐτῶν, καὶ κατῳκίσθησαν ἐντῇ ὀρεινῇ, ὅτι ἦν ἔρημος.

But now are they returned to their God, and are come up from the places where they were scattered, and have possessed Jerusalem, where their sanctuary is, and are seated in the hill country; for it was desolate.

2 Maccabees 1:27 : ἐπισυνάγαγε τὴν διασπορὰν ἡμῶν, ἐλευθέρωσον τοὺς δουλεύοντας ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, τοὺς ἐξουθενημένους καὶ βδελυκτοὺς ἔπιδε, καὶ γνώτωσαν τὰ ἔθνη ὅτι σὺ εἶ ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν.

Gather those together that are scattered from us, deliver them that serve among the heathen, look upon them that are despised and abhorred, and let the heathen know that thou art our God.

Psalms 138(139), title64 : τῷ Δαυιδ ψαλμὸς Ζαχαρίου ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ

A psalm of David, of Zacharias in the dispersion

Psalms 146(147):2 : οἰκοδομῶν Ιερουσαλημ ὁ κύριος καὶ τὰς διασπορὰς τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐπισυνάξει,

The Lord builds up Jerusalem; and he will gather together the dispersed of Israel.

Psalms of Solomon 8:28 : συνάγαγε τὴν διασπορὰν Ισραηλ μετὰ ἐλέους καὶ χρηστότητος, ὅτι ἡ πίστις σου μεθ’ ἡμῶν.

Bring together the dispersion of Israel with mercy and goodness, because your faithfulness [is] with us.

of an act accomplished by an external force. It is this dimension that appears again in Ezra 11:9, which corresponds to Nehemiah 1:9 of the Hebrew Bible – where Nehemiah faithfully cites a passage from Deut. 30:4. Moreover, the texts using diaspora frequently do so while citing a prior text more or less explicitly. Thus, if the Psalms of Solomon are doubtless the translation of a

64

The mention “of Zacharias, in the dispersion” is to be found in only one of the three major codices of the Septuagint, the Codex Alexandrinus.

44 Table 1

Chapter 1 Diaspora in the Septuagint (cont.)

Original Greek text of the Septuagint

Brenton’s English translation

Psalms of Solomon 9:2 : ἐν παντὶ ἔθνει ἡ διασπορὰ τοῦ Ισραηλ κατὰ τὸ δῆμα τοῦ θεοῦ, ινα δικαιωὅτι σὺ κριτὴς δίκαιος ἐπὶ πάντας τοὺς λαοὺς τῆς γῆς.

The dispersion of Israel [was] among every nation according to the saying of God, so that your righteousness might be proved right, o God, in our lawlessness. For you are a righteous judge over all the peoples of the earth.

Isaiah 49:6 : καὶ εἶπέν μοι Μέγα σοί ἐστιν τοῦ κληθῆναί σε παῖδά μου τοῦ στῆσαι τὰς φυλὰς Ιακωβ καὶ τὴν διασπορὰν τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐπιστρέψαι· ἰδοὺ τέθεικά σε εἰς διαθήκην γένους εἰς φῶς ἐθνῶν τοῦ εἶναί σε εἰς σωτηρίαν ἕ ως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς.

And he said to me, [It is] a great thing for thee to be called my servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob, and to recover the dispersion of Israel: behold, I have given thee for the covenant of a race, for a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation to the end of the earth.

Jeremiah 13:14 : καὶ διασκορπιῶ αὐτοὺς ἄνδρα καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ τοὺς πατέρας αὐτῶν καὶ τοὺς υἱοὺς αὐτῶν ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ. οὐκ ἐπιποθήσω, λέγει Κύριος, καὶ οὐ φείσομαι, καὶ οὐκ οἰκτιρήσω ἀπὸ διασπορᾶς αὐτῶν.

And I will scatter them a man and his brother, and their fathers and their sons together: I will not have compassion, saith the Lord, and I will not spare, neither will I pity [to save them] from destruction.

Jeremiah 15:7 καὶ διασπερῶ αὐτοὺς ἐν διασπορᾷ· ἐν πύλαις λαοῦ μου ἠτεκνώθησαν, ἀπώλεσαν τὸν λαόν μου διὰ τὰς κακίας αὐτῶν.

And I will completely scatter them; in the gates of my people they are bereaved of children: they have destroyed my people because of their iniquities.

Hebrew original dating from the 1st century CE, the occurrences of diaspora seem in both cases to be either a reprise or an echo of the antecedent text: Ps 146(147):2 for PsSal 8:28, and Deut. 28:25 for PsSal 9:2. The same applies

The Word of the Septuagint

45

Original Greek text of the Septuagint

Brenton’s English translation

Jeremiah 41:1765 : διὰ τοῦτο οὕτως εἶπεν κύριος Ὑμεῖς οὐκ ἠκούσατέ μου τοῦ καλέσαι ἄφεσιν ἕ καστος πρὸς τὸν πλησίον αὐτοῦ· ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ καλῶ ἄφεσιν ὑμῖν εἰς μάχαιραν καὶ εἰς τὸν θάνατον καὶ εἰς τὸν λιμὸν καὶ δώσω ὑμᾶς εἰς διασπορὰν πάσαις ταῖς βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς.

Therefore thus said the Lord; Ye have not hearkened to me, to proclaim a release every one to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a release to you, to the sword, and to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will give you up to dispersion [among] all the kingdoms of the earth.

Daniel 12:2 : καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν καθευδόντων ἐν τῷ πλάτει τῆς γῆς ἀναστήσονται, οἱ μὲν εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον, οἱ δὲ εἰς ὀνειδισμόν, οἱ δὲ εἰς διασπορὰν καὶ αἰσχύνην αἰώνιον.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproach and everlasting shame.

to 2 Maccabees – a text written directly in Greek, without evidence of a Hebrew original. This is the only known occurrence in the Septuagint of diaspora in the plural, even if it is a translation of the nif’al of nadach, as in Deut. 30:4.66 Marguerite Harl, who has specifically studied this verse, sees in it an evolution of the meaning of diaspora which, according to her, would have acquired a more positive gloss, that of colonies established in diverse places and waiting to be gathered together.67 A more direct reference for 2 Macc. 1:27 might be the text of Isaiah 49:6 which also includes the idea of gathering on the basis of the past participle of the verb ‫( ׇנַצר‬natsar), which means “preserve”, but which may also have the sense of “hide” as seen in other uses in Isaiah.68

65 66 67 68

This verse translates the Hebrew Bible verse 34:17. Lust reads a reference to the text of Psalms 146(147):2. Lust, “Exile and Diaspora,” 109. Harl, “‘Et il rassemblera les ‘dispersions’ d’Israël’,” 287-288. For Gesenius, the translation should read “the preserved (from the exile)”. Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon, 563. The 19th century English translator of Gesenius, Samuel Tregelles, added in brackets “destruction, rather”, thereby suggesting that exile or dispersion could be alternatives to destruction.

46

Chapter 1

Where Psalm 146(147) and Isaiah insist on gathering, the book of Jeremiah, the book in which diaspora is most present, emphasises chastisement. In 15:7, the translators associate the verbal root ‫( ׇז ַרע‬zara’, to sow) with dispersion. In 41:17 – which is in fact the translation of verse 34:17 of the Hebrew text – the text is a reprise of Deut. 28:25, but even more explicit. Indeed the meaning here indicates explicitly that it is God who transforms the Hebrew people into an object of horror. The construction of the sentence shows that diaspora here is in a direct relation with other chastisements (violence, plague and famine) and that dispersion is necessarily the outcome.69 Some verses are ambiguous or should be approached with circumspect. The Hebrew original of Psalm 138(139) contains no word susceptible of being translated as diaspora and the word does not appear in every manuscript of the Septuagint.70 Similarly, in most manuscripts, Jeremiah 13:14 offers ἀπὸ διαφθορᾶς (apò diaphthorâs, from destruction, from ruin) and not ἀπὸ διασπορᾶς (apò diasporâs, from dispersion). However, if the confusion is possible in Greek, there is little room for it in the Hebrew text, the corresponding term being the verb ‫( ָשַׁחת‬shachath, to destroy, to ruin). It is the same for Daniel 12:2, since again the mention of diaspora does not appear in all manuscripts and it does not correspond directly to any Hebrew word in the original. But there, too, its presence in this verse associates it clearly with ὀνειδισμός (oneidismós, reproach, outrage) and with αἰσχύνη (aiskhúnê, shame, dishonour). After this first examination, it is possible to draw several preliminary conclusions: 1) diaspora never translates a term based on the Hebrew root glh; 2) it is always associated with dimensions of horror, dishonour, divine chastisement, banishment, even ruin; 3) that said, these negative visions can be counterbalanced by promises of regathering by the very agent of dispersal, that is, God. 4) finally, if we linger on the denotation of diaspora – that is on the realities that it is supposed to describe –, we realise that, with one exception,71 the term refers to a possible future and not an accomplished past. 69 70 71

Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament, 31-32. The phrase “in the diaspora” is even found as a marginal note. Lust, “Exile and Diaspora,” 106. Most editions of the Old Testament do not note the usage. An occurrence in Judith, a book which is not part of the Tanakh, even if specialists generally consider that its Greek text is the translation of an original in Hebrew or Aramaic. See Mathias Delcor, “The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hellenistic Period,” in Davies and Finkelstein (Louis), The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. II, 443. It is possible that diaspora here refers to the Babylonian captivity, even if this latter is never explicitly mentioned. Certain Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages published by André-Marie

The Word of the Septuagint

47

To conclude this semantic journey, it only remains to envisage the inverse of the path followed so far. It is no longer a question of taking into consideration the Hebrew words translated by diaspora, but the Greek terms translating the two derivatives of the Hebraic root ‫( ׇגׇּלה‬galah) which are golah (‫ )גּוׇֹלה‬and galuth (‫) ׇגּלוּת‬, for these latter two cannot be understood in isolation from the first. Galah is a verb whose initial sense is “to be naked”, as well as “to make naked”, which includes a semantic field which is as much that of denudation as that of dis- or un-covering, or of revelation, understood as the fact of showing “things which were before concealed”.72 It follows that, completely logically, galah is most of the time translated in the Septuagint by the verb ἀποκαλύπτω (apokalúptô, to reveal) and its derivations, and only sometimes, when connotations of exile become more evident, by the verb ἀποικίζω (apoikízô, to lead far away, to transport). It is only by extension of this primary meaning that galah may also signify the fact of “depopulating a land,” “dispossessing its inhabitants,” that is, to leave a land, voluntarily or involuntarily. Originally, therefore, golah and galuth cannot be understood without reference to the land. The first is a nominalised feminine participle while the second is a noun. Both originally had an abstract of collective sense of exile: they evoked either an exile as such, or exiles understood as a particular group. These two terms are not widely used in the Tanakh, and where used, golah much more so than galuth. The first appears 42 times, the second 15 times – scarcely more often than diaspora. If we order them in the sequence of the books of the Tanakh, we realise that neither of the two is used before the second book of Reigns, where their use refers to the deportation of the elite of the Kingdom of Judah to Babylon at the beginning of the 6th century BCE. In fact, the most numerous occurrences appear in the books which directly concern this period of Babylonian exile: 2 Reigns, which ends on this episode, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah and Ezra–Nehemiah, which all invoke it at more or less length. The two terms therefore refer almost exclusively to this part of Jewish history, to designate either the act of deportation itself or the group thus formed by the exiles.73

72 73

Dubarle suggest a link between diaspora and the Hebrew term shebuth, captivity. AndréMarie Dubarle, Judith: formes et sens des diverses traditions, vol. ii, Textes. Rome: Institut biblique pontifical, 1966. Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon, 170-171. Donald Gowan suggests convincingly that the usage of glh in 2 Reigns (17:23 and 25:21) seems to be a citation of the book of prophecies of Amos in which there are thirteen occurrences of terms using the root glh. He therefore sees in the book of Amos a sort of matrix of the theology of exile. Donal E. Gowan, “The Beginnings of Exile-Theology and the Root ‘glh’,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 87, no. 2 (1975), 206.

48

Chapter 1

Table 2

Correspondences of Hebrew-Greek translations for galah and derived words, and for diaspora in the Septuagint.

Hebrew terms

Greek terms

galah ‫ׇגׇּלה‬

ἀποκαλύπτω – apokalúptô (reveal) ἀποικίζω – apoíkizô (send away) αἰχμαλωσία – aikhmalôsía (war captivity)

galuth ‫ׇגּלוּת‬ golah ‫גּוׇֹלה‬

μετοικεσια – metoikesia (deportation) παροικία – paroikía (sojourn abroad) ἀποικία – apoikía (emigration – home away from home)

za’avah ‫ַזֲע ׇוה‬ nadach ‫ׇנ ַדח‬ natsar ‫ׇנַצר‬ zara’ ‫ׇז ַרע‬ naphats ‫ׇנַפץ‬

διασπορά – diaspora (dispersion, scattering)

If we now focus on the translation of these two terms, we observe that they are generally rendered into Greek by a relatively limited number of equivalents: ἀποικία (apoikía, considered here in its initial meaning of displacement towards another land, of migration, and not that of colony74), μετοικεσία (metoikesía, deportation), παροικία (paroikía, sojourn abroad) and αἰχμαλωσία (aikhmalôsía, war captivity). It is immediately clear that these translations are not in the least homogeneous. Either they refer to a profoundly negative condition (metoikesia and aikhmalôsía) or they refer to a simple localisation, like apoikía and paroikía 75 (see Table 2, p. 48). It seems that the principal conclusion that may be drawn from these observations concerns the fact that galuth and diaspora are drawn from two completely distinct lexicons. The first refers to episodes, precise and datable, in 74 75

It is not impossible that these translations of galuth are the origins of the error of assimilation of “diaspora” and “Greek colonisation”. Paroikía is often used in the Septuagint in contexts other than those of the Exile strictly speaking. It refers to a temporary place of residence. Pároikos is itself a common word in Greek, meaning foreigner or neighbour.

The Word of the Septuagint

49

the history of the people of Israel, when the latter was subjected to a foreign occupation, such as that of Babylon, and in which most of the occurrences are found. The second, with perhaps a single exception that remains debatable, is never used to speak of the past and does not concern Babylon; the instrument of dispersion is never the historical sovereign of another country. Diaspora is the word of chastisement, but the dispersion in question has not occurred yet: it is potential, conditional upon the Jews not respecting the law of God. If that occurred, it would be God who would disperse, but it would also be He who regathered the dispersed. It follows that diaspora belongs, not to the domain of history, but to that of theology, and that its meaning, at the moment when the translators of the Septuagint created the word, is unique, as distinct from that of galuth.

History of a Translation It is important to consider the circumstance of this translation which, indeed, may legitimately be considered as the first translation ever undertaken76 and therefore, in itself, “a completely new event”.77 In order to understand the passage of the text of the Torah from the Hebrew into Greek, we need to grasp the evolution of the relationship between the Hebrew language and the Jewish people. This implies considering not only its status as a sacred language, the language in which the Tanakh is written as well as the language in which God engraved the law on the tablets (Exodus, 32:16), but also its evolution as a language. Hebrew is a language which had known numerous vicissitudes in Antiquity. Even before the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE contact with the Aramaic language was important; this was particularly true following the fall of the town of Samaria, taken by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, an event which marked the fall of the Northern Kingdom and led to the settlement of Aramaic-speaking peoples among those Israelites who remained. Subsequently, with the disappearance of the Kingdom of Judah and the exile to Babylon in 586 BCE, the influence of Aramaic grew. Hebrew did not disappear, for the exiles remained faithful to their language, but it was strongly 76

77

For a presentation of the exceptional character of this translation compared to other translations in Antiquity, see Alexis Léonas, L’Aube des traducteurs. De l’hébreu au grec : traducteurs et lecteurs de la Bible des Septante (iiie siècle av. J.-C. – ive siècle apr. J.-C). Paris: Cerf, 2007, 33-38. Marguerite Harl, “Le Rôle du grec dans la diffusion de la Bible,” in Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 535.

50

Chapter 1

influenced by Aramaic, particularly in the book of Ezekiel.78 The situation was little changed by the decree of the Persian king Cyrus in 539 BCE authorising the restoration of the Kingdom of Judah and the reconstruction of the Temple, for the inhabitants of Judea had offered even less resistance than the exiles to the influence of Aramaic. Furthermore, the latter became the administrative language of the Persian Empire during the following two centuries.79 In 333 BCE the beginning of Greek domination saw a transformed Greek language – the koinè – take the official place of Aramaic. From 301 BCE, Judea fell under the influence of the Hellenistic Egypt of Ptolemy I, who deported numerous Jews to Alexandria. Alexandria, founded in the 4th century BCE, rapidly became the principal centre of the Jewish presence in Egypt. One of the five quarters of the town was reserved for its Jewish inhabitants, whose numbers have been estimated at some 100,000, half the Jewish population of Egypt. It is in this historical-political context – the inclusion of Judea within a Greek community dominated by the Egypt of the Ptolemys –, demographic – the Jewish colony of Alexandria was large and important – and linguistic – Hebrew would thenceforth be unknown to the great majority of Jews – that a Greek translation of the Torah is understaken from the mid-3rd century BCE. There exists an antique document that recounts in detail the history of this translation. This is the Letter of Aristeas, a document dating from the 2nd century BCE – we cannot be more precise – in which Aristeas, doubtless a Jew of Alexandria even though he describes himself as a Greek, tells his brother Philocrates about the message King Ptolemy charged him with delivering to Eleazar, the Great Priest of Jerusalem: send seventy-two scholars to Egypt to translate the Torah into Greek.80 Once in Alexandria, the seventy-two indeed

78

79

80

For a presentation of the contents of the grammatical and lexical modifications under the influence of Aramaic, see Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Histoire de la langue hébraïque: des origines à l’époque de la Mishna. Paris-Leuven: Peeters, 1995, 107-112. This is not to suggest that the use of Hebrew disappeared entirely from Jewish practice, since the Mishna – a written version of a body of oral legal tradition finally compiled at the beginning of the 3rd century CE and written in Hebrew – included anecdotes concerning daily life. On this point, see Mireille Hadas-Lebel, L’Hébreu: 3000 ans d’histoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992, 61. On the Letter of Aristeas, its authenticity and the information that it contains on the genesis of the Septuagint, see Dries De Crom, “The Letter of Aristeas and the Authority of the Septuagint,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 17, no. 2 (2008), 141-160; Léonas, L’Aube des traducteurs, 17-22; Gilles Dorival, “La Traduction de la Torah en grec,” in Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 565-567; Orlinski, “The Septuagint and Its Hebrew

The Word of the Septuagint

51

translated the Law, which was then read by Jews and submitted to Eleazar for his approval. Despite the different problems posed by the Letter of Aristeas (the identity of the author, the dating of the document, and the interpretation of its objectives: is it a defence of the Jewish religion in the face of the growing presence of Hellenistic religion? of the Greek text compared to the Hebrew text? of Alexandrine Jews against the Jews of Palestine?), even today it remains the touchstone of research on the birth of the Greek text of the Torah. If other antique texts concerning the translation are available,81 the Letter of Aristeas was long the principal source of information on the origin of the Septuagint. The Valencian humanist Luis Vives, in 1522, and the Englishman Humphrey Hody in 1685, both questioned the authenticity of the text,82 which led to the formulation of other hypotheses to explain the undertaking of a translation that was subsequently thought to be a product of the needs of the Jewish community of Alexandria. Since the works of Elias Bickerman, it is nevertheless considered that the hypothesis of a royal initiative is the more plausible.83 Moreover, for the period of Antiquity, we know of no cases of translations that were not undertaken at the initiative of a sovereign. At the very least it is certain that the five books of the Pentateuch were translated during the 3rd century BCE since Greek extracts from the text of these books were cited by the Jewish historian Demetrius the Chronographer in a work composed during the 220s or 210s BCE. Who translated it? Research carried out on this question, based on the seventy-two names cited by Aristeas as well as on the analysis of the translation itself, tends to privilege the hypothesis that they were Palestinian Jews who were not professional translators, but specialists of the Law, which would suggest that they were attached to the Temple of Jerusalem.84 Were there seventy or seventy-two translators? The number seventy appears frequently in

81

82 83 84

Text,” 536-548; Dorival, Harl and Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante, 40-44, as well as, more recently, Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancien Jewish Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 24-63. Dorival, Harl and Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante, 45-50. Among the Greek sources from Antiquity that refer to the translation are Aristobulus during the first half of the 2nd century CE, Philo of Alexandria in the first half of the 1st century CE, and Josephus, at the end of the 1st century CE, although this latter relies largely on the Letter of Aristeas. On Vivès and Hody, see Rajak, Translation and Survival, 38-39. Bickerman, “The Septuagint as a Translation,” 7-11. Dorival, “La Traduction de la Torah en grec,” 571-572.

52

Chapter 1

the Bible: amongst others, the “threescore and ten persons” who left for Egypt (Deuteronomy, 10:2285), the seventy years of servitude of the Jewish people under the Babylonian yoke prophesied by Jeremiah (Jeremiah, 25:11-12), or, again, in the Hebrew testament of Naphtali written during the 1st century BCE, which relates how, during the episode of the Tower of Babel, God descended from Heaven accompanied by seventy angels whom he asked to go and teach seventy different languages to the seventy families descended from Noah.86 But if the number seventy-two does not appear in the text of the Bible, we are justified in suggesting it by virtue of its appearance in several rabbinical traditions, which see in it the figure six multiplied by the twelve tribes. It is also the number that Josephus gives in his Antiquities,87 referring to six elders of each tribe as translators before then, a few lines later, writing seventy. In reality, these differences seem above all to demonstrate that the real number of translators is not as important as the symbolism inherent in the number. Seventy or seventy-two are, above all, associated with God. Thus accomplished by a divine number of translators, according to modalities often described as miraculous,88 and endorsed by the Great Priest Eleazar, the Greek translation could claim the same sacred status as the Hebrew original, and thus not be a translation as such, but a text perfectly equivalent not to the Tanakh, but to the very word of God. It was therefore not an ordinary translation, and its usage was not ordinary either. For who read the Septuagint and why? Even if the initiative for the translation did not come from the Jews of Alexandria themselves, it is clear that the existence of this translation was an asset for the transmission of the text of the Law itself for those who no longer mastered the Hebrew language. It seems logical therefore to link the existence of this translation to liturgical practice. So, the oldest traces of Jewish prayer houses – oîkos proseukhês in Greek – date precisely to the 3rd century BCE in Egypt, not only in Alexandria but also in Fayoum and in the Delta. These are less sites of prayer than 85

86 87 88

Note that elsewhere in the Septuagint we find the number seventy-five for the “souls” who entered Egypt (e.g., Genesis 46:27 or Exodus 1:5) whereas the Masoretic Text always gives seventy. See the note on Genesis 46:27 in Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 715. The Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, 8, 4-6, cited in Léonas, L’Aube des traducteurs, 73. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities, xii, 49 and xii, 57. In paragraph 176 Aristeas states that the translation of the Law had been accomplished in seventy-two days, but it is in Irenaeus, writing in the 2nd century CE that we find the most “miraculous” account: the translators worked individually, but the results of their work were identical: “God was glorified, and the scriptures proved truly divine”. Irenaeus, Five Books of S. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons: Against Heresies, Book III, Chap. 21, ed. John Keble, Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1872, 288.

The Word of the Septuagint

53

meeting places where readings of sacred texts were essential, even if we do not know for certain in which language they were read.89 In all likelihood it was Greek. The Septuagint spread in areas of the Greek world where Jews who no longer understood Hebrew lived: fragments of the Greek Pentateuch have been found in a number of places, in the caves of Qumran as in Fayoum. Sharing the sacred text in Greek presumably became a cohesive element in the gatherings of Jews living far from the Temple. It is not by chance that prayer houses would soon assume the name of “synagogue” (sunagoguè means “assembly” in Greek), which first appears from the pens of Alexandrine Jewish authors in the 1st century. The body of Jewish literature in the Greek language bears few traces of the neologism diaspora. Two examples from the 1st century CE merit closer inspection: that of Josephus and that of Philo of Alexandria.90 In the texts of the former, a Roman Jew writing after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, we never find diaspora, either in its biblical sense91 or to describe the dispersion of the Jewish people, for which he uses either κατοικία (katoikía) or κατοίκησις (katoíkêsis), two terms which designate residence in a colony.92 Similarly, Philo uses ἀποικία (apoikía) to evoke the Jewish presence outside Palestine, a Jewish presence for which he is most enthusiastic.93 However, we do find diaspora twice in Philo, the first time to recall the chastisement of dispersion and the promise of regathering,94 the second in a moral sense, where the “dispersion of the soul” is condemned.95 To summarise, we may observed that three different Greek terms are used to represent the different aspects of the “dispersion” of the Jews: αἰχμαλωσία (aikhmalôsía) for the Babylonian exile, διασπορά (diaspora) for the potential 89 90

91 92 93 94 95

Mireille Hadas-Lebel, “Qui utilisait la LXX dans le monde juif?” in Dogniez and Harl, Le Pentateuque, 583. On these two individuals, see Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Flavius Josephus: Eyewitness to Rome’s First-Century Conquest of Judaea. New York: Macmillan, 1993 (first French edition 1989) and by the same author Philo of Alexandria: A Thinker in the Jewish Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2012 (first French edition 2003). See Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament, 50. The first in Antiquities of the Jews, X, 223 and XIV, 117, the second in Against Apion, II, 35. See particularly Against Flaccus, 45; Vita Mosis, ii, 232. Philo of Alexandria, De confusione linguarum, XXXVIII, 197. Philo actually quotes Deut. 30,4. Philo of Alexandria, De praemiis et poenis, 115. Philo uses the expression ἐκ διασπορᾶς ψυχικῆς (ek diasporas psukhikês). On Philo’s usages, see Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament, 49-50, as well as Van Unnik, Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora, 132-133.

54

Chapter 1

divine chastisement that awaits Hebrews who do not respect the Law, and finally ἀποικία (apoikía) for a non-forced Jewish presence abroad.96 This linguistic situation would evolve in response to the political changes in Palestine. At the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, Judea fell under the sway of the Babylonian Selucid dynasty. During the subsequent fifty years, the Temple of Jerusalem was “soiled” by the intrusion of non-Jews and, in 167 BCE, a decree of Antiochus IV required Jews to abandon their religion since the Temple would thenceforth be consecrated to Zeus. This prompted the so-called Maccabean Revolt – from the name of the family who led the revolt, that of Mattathias and his sons Simon and Judas Maccabee – against Antiochus. The death of the latter in 164 BCE marked the end of persecution and the “purification” of the Temple. In 142 BCE the independence of the Jewish state was recognised by the Selucid king Demetrius. Two years later, Simon Maccabee was proclaimed Great Priest, Strategos and Ethnarch, three functions which became hereditary in the context of this new Hasmonean state. It was swiftly beset by conflicts between the priests and the ruling dynasty and in 63 BCE Pompey conquered Palestine, which became a Roman province. Decades of instability followed, marked by power struggles, a war against the Parthians (40 BCE), and the repression of Jesus and his followers, but also Jewish revolts against the occupiers, first in 55 BCE, and particularly from 66 CE onwards, when troubles broke out in Caesarea and soon spread to the other provinces. This four years’ war culminated in the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the troops of the emperor Titus in 70 CE. The last pockets of resistance were overcome over the course of the three subsequent years, notably the citadel of Masada where, in 73 CE, 960 Jews preferred death to surrender to the Romans. The troubles continued despite all this until the middle of the 2nd century. The final event was the revolt of Bar Kokhba which began in Judea in 132 CE and culminated in the storming of the fortress of Bethar by the Romans in 135 CE. The loss of the Temple, the end of Jewish polical independence and the setback of Bar Kokhba appeared to mark the end of religious and political authority founded on Judaism. This was not so, however, for the year 70 CE also marked the beginning of a new movement, that of Rabbinic Judaism, founded on the study of the Torah. According to rabbinical legend, this movement was launched by the foundation in the town of Yabneh, in Judea, by Johanan ben Zakai, and with the authorisation of the Roman authorities, of a school for the

96

This would imply an evolution of the meaning of apoikía among the Jews since an examination of the Greek translations of golah and galuth have shown that apoikía was one of the words used to refer to the Babylonian exile.

The Word of the Septuagint

55

study of the Law. It was at Yabneh – and subsequently in other towns – that the institution of the Sanhedrin – the Jewish tribunal – and the traditions of the study and the interpretation of the Torah was established, led by ben Zakai and other rabbis such as Akiva in the 2nd century. It was there, too, that the Jewish reaction to the Christian vision of contemporary events was gradually elaborated.97

After 70 Not only did the destruction of the Second Temple and the setback of the revolt of Bar Kokhba mark the unequivocal end of all political autonomy of the Jewish people until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but these two events played a fundamental role in the constitution of a system of theological thought – that of Rabbinic Judaism – in which the history of Israel inscribed itself in a temporal line of succession in which sin, punishment, repentance, atonement and reconciliation all follow one another. At the heart of this system is galuth, in its complex meaning of exile but also that of desolation and denudation. To understand the meaning adopted by galuth in Rabbinic Judaism, we need to cast off the simplifying vision of exile – understood as a flight or expulsion, as a life far from home, far from the homeland, far from one’s origins. In the sense that it acquires during the first centuries of the Christian era, galuth implies a particular relationship with God, with the land, and with time. If the destruction of the Second Temple and the revolt of Bar Kokhba appear in rabbinical texts of the 2nd century CE, it is never as a simple description of events. Instead, references to them always seem to be inscribed within a perspective of dating of events with respect to one another, a calculation of the time that elapsed between them, in a sense consistent with that of the first books of the Tanakh (from Genesis to Reigns) where there is a very clear distinction between the past, the present and the future.98 Not only does

97

98

On the birth of Rabbinic Judaism, see Günther Stemberger, “The Formation of Rabbinic Judaism, 70-640 CE,” in The Blackwell Companion to Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner and Allan J. Avery-Peck (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 78-92 as well as Hayim Lapin, “The Origins and Development of the Rabbinic Movement in the Land of Israel,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. iv: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 206-229. On this point, see particularly Jacob Neusner, The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2004 (first American edition 1996), 15-44.

56

Chapter 1

the rabbinical literature only really emerge at the beginning of the 3rd century, thus long after the events being described, but the passages dealing with 70 CE and 132-135 CE in no way constitute an attempt at reconstituting those events as they occurred. These rabbinical texts are not historical in the sense in which we normally understand the word: they do not furnish a linear narrative of what has happened any more, in which past, present and future could be clearly distinguished.99 However, they certainly set themselves the task of attempting to understand what had happened in order to account for these events in the context of a specific interpretation of a time when past, present and future were not pertinent categories. Thus, the most striking element of the place occupied by the destruction of the two Temples and by the end of the revolt of Bar Kokhba is without doubt that of the confusion of date. According to the tractate of Ta’anit, the destruction of the First and Second Temple are dated to the same day, the 9th day of Av, just as are three other inauspicious episodes: the breaking of the tablets of the Law, the taking of the fortress of Bethar and the breaking of the ground of ancient Jerusalem for the construction of Aelia Capitolina.100 The 9th of Av thus became a symbolic day well beyond any historical reality, a fateful day, the very day of mourning for Israel, and requiring commemoration as such by all Jews. There follows a possible reciprocal identification and confusion of the actors of these catastrophes. If, at the end of the 1st century, Rome is called Babylon, in the 2nd century it is associated with the name of Edom, the hereditary enemy of Israel in the Bible. This evolution leads to a dehistoricisation, a growing desingularisation of the event and its characteristics in order to move towards a general theological understanding. Indeed, the enemies of Israel finish by disappearing as singular entities with agency to be but the instruments of a greater design. Behind Rome, behind Babylon, behind Edom, there is a God who punishes his people, for none of these enemies has the power to destroy the Temple. The voice heard from within the Temple at the moment of the entrance of the Roman troops would be none other than that of the divine presence, the Shekhinah, permitting by her exile the destruction of the Temple, we read in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, known as 2 Baruch: “Enter, you enemies, and come, you adversaries; For he who kept the house has forsaken (it).”101 99 100 101

Ibid., as well as Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem against Rome. Leuven: Peeters, 2006 (first French edition 1990) 130-131. Ibid., 128. II Baruch 8:2, quoted in ibid., 120. See R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913, 2: 484.

The Word of the Septuagint

57

This inscription of events within a temporal context where past, present and future merge but also sometimes collide corresponds to a specific vision of the time of Israel and the time of humanity, a vision governed by the eschatological horizon, messianic or otherwise.102 The end of time, conceived as the reconciliation of God and the people of Israel, only makes sense in a divine plan which surpasses man and his acts but whose arrival it is tempting to anticipate through the interpretation of harbingers. At the end of the 1st century, the two apocalyptic texts, 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, bear witness to the feverish expectation of messianic redemption following the destruction of the Temple.103 Among certain tannaïm such as Rabbi Akiva the unleashing of the revolt of Bar Kokhba could therefore be understood as the arrival of the long awaited Messiah. The repression and failure of the revolt seems to mark a significant setback for Jewish apocalyptic literature, the active messianism aimed at “hastening the end” giving way to a more patient and more discreet messianism.104 Despite everything, the confusion between the destruction of the two Temples should not lead us to believe that these two events were identical. Basing his conclusions on a thorough study of references to 586 BCE, 70 and 135 CE in the Jewish religious literature of the Mishnah105 until the beginning of the 7th century, Jacob Neusner demonstrates that the year 70 does not constitute a turning point in the formation of Rabbinic Judaism because this event adds nothing that was not already present in the Biblical interpretation of 586 BCE.106 The accuracy of an interpretation based on the internal coherence of these texts does not oblige us, assuming we adopt a historical perspective, to consider 70 CE as a secondary event: indeed, it is the destruction of the Second Temple, and not the First, which explains Bar Kokhba, just as it allows us to account for the Jewish apocalypses of the end of the 1st century and the creation of the School of Yabneh. An understanding of the logic of rabbinical writing and thought in no way requires an occultation of the historical conditions of the creation of these writings.

102

103 104 105 106

Eschatology is the religious doctrine of the end of time, while messianism implies the coming of a Messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Messianism is an eschatology, but the converse is not necessarily true. From an apocalyptic perspective, the coming of the Messiah is heralded by catastrophes. Hadas-Lebel, Jérusalem against Rome, 484-496. The Mishnah is the written compilation of Jewish oral law, completed at the beginning of the 3rd century. Jacob Neusner, How Important Was the Destruction of the Second Temple in the Formation of Rabbinic Judaism? Lanham: University Press of America, 2006, 305-310.

58

Chapter 1

Likewise, the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE should not be analytically conflated with that of 70 CE for, in the case of the former, the historical facts and their interpretation have led to the formulation of the essential paradigm of Judaism, the association of the question of exile and that of the return of the exiles.107 The period between the loss of the Temple in 586 BCE and the proclamation of the Torah by Ezra in Jerusalem in 450 BCE not only plays a fundamental symbolic role in the ulterior Jewish imaginary, it constitutes a crucial episode of the writing – or of the rewriting – of the Torah itself. Through the establishment of what is known as “Deuteronomistic history”108 and the compilation of the Torah, true exile, lived by a minority of the population of the Kingdom of Judah, and the return from exile, lived only by a minority of those who had been deported, then becomes the source of the paradigm of the existence of Israel.109 The normative formulation of the previous stages in the history of Israel – while insisting on the conditional character of the existence of Israel and the fragility of the Shekhinah – thereby permits an interpretation of the Babylonian exile no longer as an unexpected catastrophe, but as a potential risk, as a constitutive stage, even, in the very history of the chosen people, which is already present in the form of a threat in the Torah. The Babylonian galuth is then no longer a rupture or a fall, but an element consubstantial with Israel,110 even if it has not been predicted, since the term galuth does not appear in the Torah but emerges in the Book of Reigns in order to account for a novel historical situation, although this situation is thenceforth explicable and comprehensible. 107 108

109

110

See Jacob Neusner, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Following the publication in 1943 of an essay by Martin Noth devoted to the question, this has been taken to refer, collectively, to the Biblical books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and Samuel 1 and 2, as well as Reigns 1 and 2, in order to emphasise the cohesiveness of their relationship, thereby assuming that if they are not the work of a single author, then at least of a more or less homogeneous group of authors. Martin Noth, Deuteronomistic History. Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1990. For an overview of the origins and evolution of this hypothesis, see Anthony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien eds., Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2000. On the importance of the period of the exile for the establishment of the text of the Bible, see, for example, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Touchstone, 2002 (first American edition 2001), 296-310, as well as William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 139-190. See also Eisen, Galut, 31-32.

The Word of the Septuagint

59

It remains for us to understand what galuth really means in the rabbinic literature in order to grasp the existing link between this term and dispersion in a geographical sense. Drawing on different manuscript versions of a passage of rabbinical commentaries on the Book of Numbers (Sifre to Numbers, 84) concerning the presence of God accompanying the people of Israel in galuth, in Egypt, in Babylon and in Edom, as well as on equivalent passages in the Talmud of Jerusalem – Ta’anit 1.1 (64a) –, Chaim Milikowsky reveals that galuth occurs not three but five times, in relation to Elam – that is, Persia – and Yavan – Greece – as well as Egypt, Babylon and Edom.111 In this instance, galuth cannot mean “exile” in the classical sense for there were no known deportations of Jews to Egypt, Rome, Persia or Greece. On the other hand, the allusion becomes clearer if we consider that the term does not necessarily designate a geographical distancing but rather servitude to a foreign power in the context of the occupation of the land of Israel. Seen thus, the history of Israel is more that of a series of occupations and enslavements of the land and its people – the ravaged, denuded land having less the sense of a depopulated land than that of a land emptied of its substance – than a history of geographic exile. Although he might be mistaken in identifying galuth with dispersion, Isaiah Gafni’s analysis is particularly interesting when he suggests that the Jews, after 70 CE, interpreted galuth in three different ways: as a punishment, as a benediction, or as a universal mission.112 The rabbinical debate on the Shekhinah, who either abandoned the Jews (Histalkuth ha-Shekhinah) or accompanied them into exile (Shekhinta ba-galuta),113 bears witness to a fundamental tension at the heart of the vision of galuth, which simultaneously constitutes a malediction, indeed, the worst of maledictions,114 and proof that the Jews were the chosen people since it promised them a regathering. Galuth may thus be described as being simultaneously malediction and the sign of election: what we could call a malelection, a precursor to repentance, to the remission of sins and to the reconciliation which is promised at the end of time.115

111 112 113 114 115

Chaim Milikowsky, “Notions of Exile, Subjugation and Return in Rabbinic Literature,” in Scott, Exile, 266-281. Sifre to Numbers dates to the middle of the 3rd century BCE. Isaiah M. Gafni, Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997, 19-40. Norman J. Cohen, “Shekhinta ba-Galuta: A Midrashic Response to Destruction and Persecution,” Journal for the Study of Judaism, no. 13 (1982), 147-159. See Gary Porton, “The Idea of Exile in Early Rabbinic Midrash,” in Scott, Exile, 260. Solomon Zeitlin, “Judaism as a Religion: An Historical Study: VI. Galuth: Diaspora,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (1943), 207-241.

60

Chapter 1

If the Deuteronomistic history of the 6th century BCE renders the Babylonian galuth comprehensible by inscribing in the Torah the possibility of divine chastisement, it does not pronounce the name – the root glh does not appear until the very end of the Deuteronomistic history, in 2 Reigns – nor does it envisage a simple correspondence between chastisement and God’s dispersion of the people of Israel, in all likelihood precisely because this version was written upon the return from exile and once the Temple had been rebuilt. The Deuteronomistic menace is even more frightful and in the Septuagint it would take the name of diaspora, which associated dispersion and regathering, doubtless an echo of the dispersion of the Jewish people in the 6th century – some in Egypt, others in Babylon, still others remaining in the land of Israel – and of the return of a minority. Diaspora is then the name of a process which is yet to occur, and whose link with galuth is that much less direct, given that the latter is apparently not a synonym for geographic exile and that the interpretation of the events of 70 CE do not clearly imply the rapprochement between diaspora and galuth. How then can we explain the establishment of this relationship?

Jews and Christians So far I have tried to demonstrate the place of the destructions of the Temple and the meaning of galuth at the very heart of the system of rabbinical thought. If this stage was important, it is in no way decisive. Indeed, Judaism such as it has invented itself as a religion from the 2nd century onward cannot be dissociated from the concomitant invention of Christianity, particularly regarding the role of exile and its temporality. Diaspora is not simply a word from the Septuagint. It is also used in the New Testament, on three occasions: in the Gospel according to John, in the Letter of James and in the First Letter of Peter (see Table 3, p. 61). Each of these three texts reveals a different meaning of diaspora, which maintains its link with the Old Testament meaning while nevertheless acquiring a specifically Christian connotation.116 The French translators of John considered, following the example of numerous other commentators, that the text implied that diaspora applied to the Jews and that it should not be read as “the diaspora of the Greeks”, despite this being the original text. However, if we take into consideration the historical and linguistic context, the appellations “Jews” and “Greeks” are very frequently used as antonyms, “Greek” in fact having the 116

For this section, I have drawn on Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament.

The Word of the Septuagint Table 3

61

Diaspora in the New Testament.117

John 7:35: εἶπον οὖν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι πρὸς ἑαυτούς, Ποῦ οὗτος μέλλει πορεύεσθαι ὅτι ἡμεῖς οὐχ εὑρήσομεν αὐτόν; μὴ εἰς τὴν διασπορὰν τῶν Ἑλλήνων μέλλει πορεύεσθαι καὶ διδάσκειν τοὺς Ἕλληνας; (Then said the Jews among themselves, Whither will he go, that we shall not find him? will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles, and teach the Gentiles?) James 1:1: Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος ταῖς δώδεκαφυλαῖς ταῖς ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ χαίρειν. (James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting.) 1 Peter 1: Πέτρος ἀπόστολος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐκλεκτοῖς παρεπιδήμοις διασπορᾶς Πόντου, Γαλατίας, Καππαδοκίας, Ἀσίας, καὶ Βιθυνίας, (Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,)

sense of “non-Jew”.118 It follows that the “diaspora of the Greeks” refers to the other diaspora, that of the Gentiles – of the Christians – thereby alluding to the way in which a nascent Christianity would appropriate diaspora to make of it a term in itself. This distinction between Jews and Christians also appears in the Letter of James. If it is tempting to read the passage relating “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” as an explicit reference to Jewish history, and to the twelve tribes of Israel, this does not appear to be the most likely hypothesis. The direct link established between the designation of James as “servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” and the twelve tribes prohibits any assimilation of these latter to the Jewish tribes. We need to recognise that he is addressing Christians, thus Christian Jews, but also that he is addressing 117 118

The English translation is from the King James Version of the Bible. One of the best-known texts in this regard is that of Paul (Paul, Third Epistle to the Colossians: 11) on the “new man” who is neither Greek nor Jewish. On the antinomy between “Jew” and “Greek” in Antiquity, see Erich Gruen, Diaspora, 213-231.

62

Chapter 1

them as Christians whose condition is that of dispersion not from an earthly Jerusalem but from a celestial Jerusalem.119 With the text of the Letter of Peter the ambiguity of the translation reappears: in English, as in other languages, diaspora has been translated as it if were a complement of place (“scattered throughout Pontus…”; “vivant dans la dispersion”) whereas the original Greek indicates a noun complement (“of the diaspora”). If one then reads “to the ones living as strangers of the diaspora”, diaspora is no longer a geographic localisation – Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia… – but a theological referent. Contrary to what, for example, William Ramsay claimed at the beginning of the 20th century, the usage of diaspora in 1 Peter does not reflect the idea that the only hope for unity after the destruction of the Temple lies in the Christian congregations dispersed in Asia Minor,120 but, according to Arowele, refers to an ecclesiological formula designating the members of the Church of Christ whose earthly condition is that of the passing stranger, whose dispersion, a bitter experience of divine origin, will come to an end with the return to the City of God.121 In John, as in James and Peter, the “chosen people” in diaspora are no longer the Jews but the Christians. This vision of a non-Jewish “Christian dispersion”, both historical and theological, is identifiable in other passages of the New Testament. Thus in Acts of the Apostles we read that the Church of Jerusalem was dispersed after the stoning of Stephen and that the dispersed began to preach not only among the Jews, but also among the Gentiles, the Greeks.122 If it is not made explicit in the writings of Paul, the latter’s thought is entirely consistent with the meaning of diaspora as acquired in the New Testament: that of a Christian earthly sojourn outside their true homeland, which is the kingdom of heaven, the celestial Jerusalem, “the mother of us all.”123 For all that, however, this appropriation of diaspora by the Christians was without consequences. With the exception of Justin Martyr,124 all citations of

119 120 121 122 123 124

Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament, 302-347, particularly 328-338 on the expression “the Twelve Tribes in Dispersion” as a Christian formulation. William M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911, 287. Arowele, Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament, 351-363. Acts, 8:1-4. Paul, Letter to the Galatians, 4:26. On Paul, see Shmuel Trigano, L’E(xc)lu: entre Juifs et chrétiens. Paris: Denoël, 2003. And of Clement of Alexandria, in a sense that is not directly religious (Protrepticus, IX, 88, 2-3). See Clement of Alexandria, “Exhortation to the Heathen,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. II, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. II, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913, 197.

The Word of the Septuagint

63

subsequent Christian authors using diaspora refer explicitly to the text of the New Testament. Only in his Dialogue with Trypho, a major work in the controversy between Christians and Jews in which he pleads, against Trypho, for the conversions of the Jews to the “true Israel” – which is Christianity –, does Justin Martyr seem alternately to use the Jewish and Christian meanings of the term. He uses diaspora on five occasions, three of which occur in chapter 117 (117,2; 117,3 and 117,5), where the term clearly refers to the Jews, since he respectively refers to “the individuals of that nation then dispersed” (διὰ τῶν ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ τότε δὴ ὄντων ἀπὸ τοῦ γένους ἐκείνου ἀνθρώπων”), “those of your nation then in dispersion” (περὶ τῶν ὑμῶν ἐν τῇ διασπορᾷ) as well as to “your dispersion over all the earth” (ἡ διασπορὰ ὑμῶν ἐν πάσῃ τῇ γῇ)125.) In chapter 113,4, on the other hand, we read that “Jesus the Christ will turn again the dispersion of the people” (Ἰησοῦς ὁ Χριστὸς τὴν διασπορὰν τοῦ λαοῦ ἐπιστρέψει).126 The Dialogue with Trypho is among the works which established the polemic between Christians and Jews, and it marks an important moment in which two meanings of diaspora are juxtaposed, one drawing on the text of the Septuagint and invoking the dispersion of the Jewish people – while divesting itself of its voluntary aspects –, the other inherited from the New Testament in which the transposition between Jews and Christians appears, and which accords the latter the status of the true chosen people in opposition to the Jewish people, whose dispersion can only be regathered by Jesus Christ through the mediation of conversion. Rapidly, the transposition and the opposition between Jews and Christians remains but the terms change. During the course of the Judaeo-Christian controversy, as in the writings of Justin, diaspora loses the complexity of the theme 125

126

Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 117,2; 117,3, and 117,5. For the English translation, see “Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew,” in The Writings of Justin Martyr and Athenagoras, vol. ii, ed. and transl. Marcus Dods, George Reith, and B.P. Pratten (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1867), 246-247. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 113,4. The English translation comes from The Writings of Justin Martyr and Athenagoras, 241. In Chapter 121, the allusion to “raise up the tribes of Jacob, and turn again the dispersed of Israel” (τοῦ στῆσαι τὰς φυλὰς τοῦ Ἰακὼβ καὶ τὰς διασπορὰς τοῦ Ἰσραὴλ ἐπιστρέψαι), even though a quote from Isaiah (49:6), is not a reference to the gathering of the Jewish people, but rather to that of the people of Israel, the chosen people, a title to which the Jewish people can no longer lay claim in view of their lack of observation of the law of God, and which subsequently becomes that of the Christian peoples. On Justin and the Dialogue, the key text is that of Philippe Bobichon, Justin martyr. Dialogue avec Tryphon. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2004. Indeed, I am grateful to Philippe Bobichon for having taken the time to answer my questions and for having elucidated some of the complexities of usage of diaspora in Justin. Naturally, any errors of interpretation are mine alone.

64

Chapter 1

of malediction. The term disappears from the Jewish lexicon while the Christian lexicon restricts it to its Jewish meaning in order to adopt, for its own purposes, an unsullied term, that of paroikia.127 As I have mentioned above, this latter term is also a neologism of the Septuagint – we find 14 occurrences therein – which sometimes serves to translate galuth or golah but which, more generally, corresponds to Hebrew words whose root is ger, that is, foreigner. It thereby invokes the sojourn, the residence of a foreigner on a land that is not his own, while pároikos most often refers to the resident foreigner, including metaphorically speaking. Pároikos, paroikía and paroikein thus serve to invoke a theological situation, that of the temporary resident on earth in the expectation of the final eschatological regathering.128 After Justin, diaspora resumes its negative Jewish denotation, while paroikía, far less imbued, becomes the terrestrial sojourn of the Christians. The term diaspora thus sits in opposition to paroikía as error does to truth, or the Jewish people to the Christians.129 In the 2nd century, we therefore witness an astonishing semantic crossover. One of the translations of galuth and of golah, paroikía, becomes the very symbol of the chosen people, the Christian people exiled on earth in the expectation of their return to God, while diaspora, reclaimed by the Christianised Jews of the 1st century to describe the situation of the Church, is ultimately abandoned in this particular manifestation to henceforth only describe the divine chastisement inflicted on the Jews, the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people across the whole surface of the earth in punishment for the crucifixion of Christ. The dimension of the malediction has here completely replaced that of the malelection. This substitution is that much less anodyne in that it almost certainly provides us with the explanation for the transfer which occurs later between galuth and diaspora. Indeed, the Christian literature of the 2nd century draws upon both the destruction of the Temple, and, above all, on the repression of the revolt of Bar Kokhba, to affirm that the chastisement of the Jews is not

127

128 129

On this evolution, see Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Martin Anton Schmidt, “Paroikos, paroikia, paroikeô,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. v, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: W.M.B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967), 853. See Psalm 118(119):19: “I’m a stranger in the earth,” but also 1 Peter 1:17. Arowele, DiasporaConcept in the New Testament, 122-123. Paroikía is swiftly replaced by the concept of the “City of God on Earth” such as it appears in the works of St Augustine in the 5th century. Nevertheless, paroikía remains present in the Christian lexicon: it is the source of the words parish in English and paroisse in French.

The Word of the Septuagint

65

simply the burning of the Temple but also their dispersion such as it emerges in the Septuagint. This affirmation rests partially – and only partially – on historical facts. After 135 CE, the Jews are forbidden to reside in Jerusalem and its vicinity, and the Jewish population of Judea begins to decline. However, contrary to what may frequently be read, there is during this period no forced exile of Jews, nor any sudden emigration.130 Consequently, we should not see any historical basis to the Christian mention of a “dispersion of the Jews”, as in the Jewish mention of a specific galuth implying the departure from the land, but rather a product of the confrontation between two visions of the chosen people and of redemption.131 For the former, diaspora is the name of the malediction described in the Septuagint, rendered real during the course of the 2nd century by the effective dispersion of the Jewish people, their alienation from Jerusalem. Justin sees in this the fulfilling of the prophecy about the desolation of the earth and this interpretation is also found among other authors of influential during the first centuries CE: Tertullian, a student of Justin (mid 2nd century), Origen (early 3rd century), Eusebius of Caesarea (end of the 3rd century) then, later, Augustine.132 For the latter, the meaning of galuth, deeply rooted in the episode of the Babylonian deportation and associated particularly with coming under a foreign yoke, progressively incorporates the geographical and migratory dimension contained in diaspora. Why? For one, because the Jews gradually abandoned the land of Israel without being exiled as such; on the other hand, because the rabbinical reaction to Christian condemnation of the Jews via the term diaspora is not a denegation but a specific and differentiated appropriation. It is because of – in reaction to – the Christian vision of a dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple and the revolt of Bar Kokhba that rabbinical Judaism appropriated the idea of an exile following these tragedies, just as after the destruction of the First Temple. The Babylonian Talmud (6th century) thus preserves the trace of a phrase attributed to Rabbi Yohanan, a sage of the 3rd century: “Our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land.”133

130 131

132 133

Israel Jacob Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile From the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship,” Common Knowledge, vol. 12, no. 1 (2006), 16-33. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand accords great importance to this question of the “invention of exile”, even if he does not draw in any sustained fashion on the writings of specialists in ancient Judaism. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2009 (first Israeli edition 2008), 129-143. Tertullian, Against the Jews, 10; Origen, Contra Celsus, IV, Chapter LXXIII; Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, I, 3:13; Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book XVIII, chap. XLVI. Quoted in Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile,” 19-20.

66

Chapter 1

Even so, this appropriation does not occur either in the same terms (galuth and not diaspora), or in the same language (Hebrew and not Greek), or even with the same signification (galuth is a divine ordeal which must finish at the end of time with the return of the exiles, and not with the departure of the Jews from the history of the world). At the very moment when western Christianity finally restricts usage of diaspora to the Jews to better mark the difference between Jews and Christians, between those who disobeyed God and were punished for refusing Jesus and those who follow the true faith, rabbinical Judaism turns away from the text of the Septuagint to adopt a new Greek translation of the Torah in which diaspora has disappeared altogether. Indeed, the Septuagint is not the only Greek translation of the Torah: thanks to a collection compiled under the direction of Origen at the beginning of the 3rd century CE,134 we can identify three other principal Greek translations – or revisions of the text of the Septuagint – that have come down to us: one by Theodotion (mid-1st century), a second by Aquila (beginning of the 2nd century) and the third by Symmachus (end of the 2nd century).135 The inadequacy of the so-called “kaige”136 revision, aimed at rendering the Greek text more faithful to the Hebrew text known at the time (the so-called Proto-Masoretic text) no doubt also required more substantial and more radical undertakings, such as those of Aquila and of Symmachus. That of Aquila is the most important, for it seeks to privilege great fidelity to the Hebrew text: every Hebrew word is rendered by a single and the same

134

135

136

This compilation is known as the Hexapla, so called because it presents six different versions of the Bible in six parallel columns: the Hebrew text, its transliteration – and not its translation – in Greek characters; the Septuagint; and translations by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Each of these translations has its own peculiarities. Beyond the fact that it is the oldest, Theodotion’s translation – he was one of a group of translators but his name alone has come down to us – is noteworthy for the fact that it follows particularly closely the text of the Septuagint, which it appears to have wanted to “revise”. This revision included transliterations into Greek characters of Hebrew terms apparently judged to have been poorly translated in the Septuagint. Theodotion’s undertaking was inscribed within the rise, during the first half of the 1st century, of a rabbinic reaction to the growth in power of Christianity and the appropriation by the Christians of the text of the Septuagint. I draw here on Dorival, Harl and Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante, 142-157, as well as on Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context, 109-154. So called because the “revisions” of Theodotion, and of other translators, did not translate the Hebrew particle ‫( ַגם‬gam, meaning “also”) by the word καί (kaí, meaning “and”) but by καίγε (kaíge, meaning “at least”). On the identification of this group, see Dominique Barthélémy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila. Leiden: Brill, 1963.

The Word of the Septuagint

67

Greek word. It is largely in Aquila’s text, and not in the Septuagint, that the Greek Bible continued to occupy a place not only in Mediterranean Judaism during the Roman period, but particularly in Byzantine Judaism, quite directly until the 8th or 9th centuries and doubtless in a more indirect manner until the 16th century, when a translation, in modern Greek but in Hebrew characters, of the Pentateuque, was published in Constantinople in 1547.137 However, diaspora appears in none of these translations.138 To take but two examples, in their translation of Psalm 146(147): 2, Aquila and Symmachus alike translate the root ‫( ׇנ ַדח‬nadach) by a Greek noun – τοὺς ἐξωσμένους (toùs exôsménous, the banished) –, and not by diaspora. Similarly, their version of Jeremiah 15: 7 does not translate ‫( ׇז ַרע‬zara’) by diaspora, but by a Greek noun semantically related to agriculture, and particularly winnowing, as the Hebrew text indicates: ἐν τῷ λικμῷ (en tỗ likmỗi, with a sieve) for Aquila, ἐν τῷ λικμητηρίῷ (én tỗ likmêtêríỗi) with the same meaning for Symmachus.139 Given the role occupied by these translations in the defence of the uniqueness of Judaism, and of the “original” text of the Torah with respect to that of the Septuagint, the disappearance of diaspora from the Greek biblical text used by the Jews bears witness to the importance of the term in the reciprocal invention of the Christian and Jewish religions during the controversy. Indeed, despite the apparent antecedence of Judaism,140 these two religions in fact invented themselves at much the same time during their confrontation in the first centuries CE: Christianity invented itself in the context of its interpretation of Judaism, and vice versa. To illustrate the importance of this con137

138 139

140

The publication by Nicholas de Lange of Hebrew fragments discovered in the Genizah has shown that Aquila’s translation continued to be used in Byzantine Judaism until the 8th or 9th centuries and that it subsequently continued to serve as a reference to shed light on the meaning of Hebrew words. See Nicholas De Lange, “Sem et Japhet: les Juifs et la langue grecque,” Pardès, no. 12 (1990),  90-107. Gilles Dorival was kind enough to a supply these details, and I thank him here for having patiently answered my various questions in an email dated 30 March 2007. Lust, “Exile and Diaspora,” 107. Lust observes that both Symmachus and Aquila offer translations of galuth and golah as they appear in the book of Ezekiel, where they differ from the Septuagint. The latter uses aikhmalôsía; Aquila prefers metoikesía while Symmachus chose to create a neologism, exoikismós (ἐξοικισμός), the construction of which evokes an expulsion from one’s home. Ibid., 102-103. According to Jacob Neusner, Judaism, which was formerly a philosophy, only became a religion, with the implied constitution of a coherent and ordered body of thought, after the destruction of the Second Temple. See Jacob Neusner, The Emergence of Judaism: Jewish Religion in Response to the Critical Issues of the First Six Centuries. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000.

68

Chapter 1

troversy whose evolution would come to structure these religions in opposition to one another, the historian Israël Jacob Yuval has clearly shown that the writing of the Haggadah of Pesach (the order of the Passover Seder) can only be explained by the confrontation with the rival interpretation of Easter proposed by Christian liturgy and the necessity of fabricating a counter-narrative: the sacrifice of Christ on Good Friday and his resurrection as the promise of a new revelation corresponds to the sacrifice of the pascal lamb in the Old Testament, while the Jewish Haggadah – of which certain elements could be as old as the 2nd century and thus contemporary with the construction of the Christian liturgy – turns its back on the sacrifice to articulate itself about the narrative of the exodus from Egypt.141 There where the Christian festival marks the birth of a rupture with the Biblical Passover, the Jewish festival comes to confirm the existence of a continuity: the two versions mutually beget one another.142 This Christian-Jew opposition between rupture and continuity evident in the description of the Passover is equally visible in the opposition between feminine and masculine. As Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin show, rabbinical thought has constructed a feminine image of the Jew – and of the Jewish galuth143 – in opposition to the masculine image of the Roman.144 Likewise, the episode of Masada is considered to be an act of heroism by the Romans but finds no place in the rabbinical memory, which on the contrary valorises the choice of life and of patience.145 This opposition, which has its origins in rivalry, is never so evident as when it touches upon questions of time and of history. As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes, “Christian Jewish conceptualisations of history developed in parallel from the second century onwards through a constant polemical dialogue. Both drew on the same texts and the same events, most notably the destruction of 141 142

143 144

145

Israël Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 56-90. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, particularly 1-21. See also, by the same author, “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,” Representations, no. 85 (2004), 21-57. Remember that galuth is a feminine noun. This opposition is particularly visible in the Biblical episode of Jacob and Esau. See Daniel Boyarin, “Tricksters, Martyrs, and Collaborators: Diaspora and the Gendered Politics of Resistance,” in Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 55 and 78-81, and Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 3-20. Daniel Boyarin, “Tricksters, Martyrs, and Collaborators,” 46-54.

The Word of the Septuagint

69

the Temple, to draw opposing conclusions.”146 For Christians, the dispersion of the Jews following the destruction of the Temple marks their exit from history, their belonging to the world of the non-chosen, while, on the contrary, for the chosen Christians it represents the proof of the entrance into a new era, that of the Messiah. For Jews, the reality of galuth, in its new guise associating past exile, divine punishment and the present dispersion, does not constitute a rupture: rather, it is inscribed within a continuity which is that of exile from the presence of God, a metaphorical exile which did not end with the rebuilding of the Temple. In this sense, the exile has endured since the destruction of the First Temple, which marked the end of history for humanity collectively and the entrance into a time which is of God and of God alone. No event can have any real meaning because the only acts that bear meaning come from God alone: the return to history is uniquely inscribed in the divine will to offer redemption. In this sense, and as Jacob Neusner has shown, the destruction of the Second Temple is inscribed within a particular logic and in no sense constitutes a rupture: the two destructions can thus merge. Rabbinical thought is founded less on simple recollection, as Yosef Yerushalmi affirms,147 than on a mode of apprehension of time that is fundamentally different from that of history, a mode within which there exists no strict barrier between past, present and future.148 In the Old Testament, the verses in which diaspora appears already only show a single agent, God. It is He who disperses and He who regathers, and the time within which the perspective of regathering is inscribed belongs only to Him. In rabbinical Judaism, and particularly after the setback of the revolt of Bar Kokhba, not only is the temptation to bring forth the messianic horizon discredited, but the calculation of time itself is condemned.149 The requirement for patience appears in the Middle Ages in the doctrine of the Three Oaths, which all Jews in galuth are expected to respect. It appears that there were four oaths, but one of them concerns the nations on whose territories Jews live, inciting them not to encourage their persecution. The three others are addressed to the Jews themselves, emphasising that respect for the divine law requires obedience to these three rules: do not “storm the wall”, that 146 147 148

149

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté: judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale. Paris: La Fabrique, 2007, 45. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. On this mode of apprehension, which he calls “paradigmatic thinking”, see Neusner, The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism, 15-44. Neusner devotes two sections of this book to a refutation of Yerushalmi’s hypothesis (206-219 and 252-267). Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem against Rome, 492-493.

70

Chapter 1

is, do not return to the land of Israel before the appointed hour; do not “force the end”, and thus do nothing to hasten the end of time and the return of the Shekhinah; and finally, do not rise up against the nations amongst whom Jews live.150 This messianic and eschatological patience is both the price of exile and of the redemption that is the end of galuth.151 Despite the fact that active messianism did not entirely disappear from the Jewish world – we know that it inspired the Sabbatean movement of the 17th century (see Chapter II) –;152 that secularised interpretations of the land of Israel made their appearance during both the Middle Ages and the modern era, notably in the 18th century writings of Moses Mendelsohn; and that certain 19th century rabbis, such as Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai, defended the idea that redemption also depends upon human action aimed at a return on earth; despite all that, the eschatological vision of galuth founded on expectation occupied a predominant place among Jews until the second half of the 19th century. The unification of the people was not produced by language, by territory, by the existence of a central politico-religious authority or even by space, but rather by the timings of religious practice, by gatherings facilitated

150

151

152

Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 211-234. See also David Banon, “L’Exil et la doctrine des trois serments chez le Maharal de Prague,” in Messianismes: variations sur une figure juive, ed. Jean-Christophe Attias, Pierre Gisel and Lucie Kaennel (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000), 77-91. Alphabetically, these two conditions are very close in Hebrew. The word for redemption, ‫( ְּגֻאׇלּה‬gueulah), is formed on the same glh root as golah. The first two Hasidic admorim of Gur, Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Alter (1799-1866) and Rabbi Yehouda Leib Alter (1847-1905) theorised the importance of this proximity between the two words in their teachings, a proximity that becomes even more significant when we modify the way in which these two words are written. If gueulah is not written using the four letters guimel-aleph-lamed-he but rather, as Hebrew permits, guimel-aleph-vav-lamed-he ‫ – ְגּאוׇּלה‬which does not alter the pronunciation –, the only difference between ‫( גּוׇֹלה‬golah) and ‫( ְגּאוׇּלה‬gueulah) is the letter ‫( א‬alef), which represents unity and whose numerical value in the gematria system – a method of exegesis in which each letter possesses a specific numerical value – is one. Exile is then separated from redemption by the absence of unity: the return of the divine letter, which indicates redemption, is the equivalent of the return of the divine presence. David Patterson, Hebrew Language and Jewish Thought. London: Routledge, 2005, 113. See also Alexandre Safran, Israël et ses racines. Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, 147. Other examples date from the 18th century. For a position that defends the antiquity of movements aimed at a return to Zion, see Arie Morgenstern, “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840,” Azure, no. 12 (Winter 2002), 71-132.

The Word of the Septuagint

71

by the synagogue, and by the Torah itself, which functioned as a “portable territory” or a “portable homeland”.153 Only the Zionist movement, emerging at the end of the 19th century and impatient in its desire to return the Jewish people “to history”, would finally succeed in undermining this state of affairs.154

A Quasi-disappearance If certain authors, diaspora specialists, biblical scholars or experts on Antiquity, have studied the uses of diaspora in the biblical literature or among Jewish or Christian authors writing in Greek from the beginning of the first millennium onwards, rare are those who have extended their task to consider later periods. In a synthetical approach to the question, the religious historian Martin Baumann wrote that “the notion of a sojourning people of God quickly vanished in Christian reasoning and treatises, as the one-time minority religion changed to become the established church in the late fourth century,” and that the eschatological sense of the word had been forgotten. Referring to the context of the Reformation and the Counter-reformation, he observed that “a millennium later, the term came into use again, primarily employed as a geographic-sociological signifier.”155 This statement is problematic on two levels. First, it never appears in this guise in the secondary literature that Baumann draws upon. Indeed, on the question of Christian usage in the first millennium he refers largely on the work of Aiyenakun Arowele, but if the latter asserts that diaspora as a theological concept was abandoned by Christian authors, he certainly does not suggest that the word disappeared entirely. Indeed, we observe that the term did not disappear from the religious literature.156 Admittedly used sparingly, 153

154

155 156

See Emanuel Maier, “Torah as Movable Territory,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 65, no. 1 (March 1975), 18-23. The German phrase “portatives Vaterland” comes from Heinrich Heine (Geständnisse. Sämmtliche Werke, vol. vi, p. 58) cited in Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000 (first edition in Hebrew 1958), 340. See particularly Alain Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel. London: Hurst & Company, 2003 (first French edition 1993); see also Jonathan Frankel, “La ‘Diaspora’ et la fragmentation de la pensée politique juive à l’époque moderne,” Raisons politiques, no. 7 (2002), 79-102. Baumann, “Diaspora,” 320. In Baumann’s defence, we might note that none of the authors who had written on the topic noted this persistence, not even Cornelius van Unnik, who was responsible for the most systematic study from a chronological perspective.

72

Chapter 1

as was already the case in Greek literature, we nevertheless find it scattered through post-4th century texts produced by Christianity, western and eastern alike. From the 3rd century CE onwards, Christianity gradually abandoned Greek in favour of Latin. If there were pre-existing collections of the different biblical texts in Latin, we have no record of any reliable translation earlier than that of Eusebius Hieronymus – the future Saint Jerome – in the 4th century, an undertaking that gave birth to the first true bible in Latin, known today as the Vulgate.157 With his knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Eusebius was commissioned by Pope Damasus I, at the end of the 4th century, to prepare a complete Latin text of the Bible. If the Gospels were necessarily translated from the Greek – or, more exactly, “revised”, for St Jerome drew on a Latin version of the Gospels that was already circulating in Rome – the Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew. Logically it follows that diaspora does not appear in the text. In those instances where it appeared in the Greek text, we generally find the noun dispersio or conjugated forms of the verb dispergere. Of the fourteen occurrences in the Septuagint, only eleven are found in the Vulgate. Five verses use other terms or circumlocutions whose meaning is not trivial: the past participle dissipatus indeed means dispersed, but it also means annihilated, destroyed; the word obprobrium refers to shame, dishonour; the eiectos Israhel are the “expelled”, the “banished of Israel”; the feces are the rejects while the noun commotio (dabo vos in commotionem) indicates, in a more neutral manner, agitation or shaking. The six remaining verses use dispersio or dispergere.158 However, the translations by dispersio or dispergere do not correspond to a single Hebrew noun or verb. Thus, where the Septuagint, following the Hebrew text, uses a similar formulation in Deut. 30:4 and Néhémie 1:9, Jerome uses radically different turns of phrase, employing dissipatus for the former and dispergere for the latter. Consequently, based on the evidence of the Latin lexicon of Jerome, and with the exception of the verses that he translated directly from the Greek, there is no logic of correspondence and continuity between the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint and the Vulgate (see Table 4 infra, p. 73). 157

158

On this translation, see Hedley Frederick Davis Sparks, “Jerome as Biblical Scholar,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible. vol. i, From the Beginnings to Jerome, ed. Peter R. Ackroyd and Christopher Francis Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 517-526 and 530-531. These are: Deut. 28:25; Jeremiah 13:14; Jeremiah 15:7; Nehemiah 1:8 – the equivalent of Nehemiah 1:9 –; Judith 5:23 – the equivalent of Judith 5:19 in the Septuagint – and 2 Maccabees 1:27.

The Word of the Septuagint

Table 4

73

Latin translation – Vulgate Latin Bible of Jerome – of the Septuagint verses with diaspora.

Deuteronomy 28:25

Tradat te Dominus corruentem ante hostes tuos per unam viam egrediaris contra eos et per septem fugias et dispergaris per omnia regna terrae.

Deuteronomy 30:4

Si ad cardines caeli fueris dissipatus inde te retrahet Dominus Deus tuus.

Isaiah 49:6

Et dixit parum est ut sis mihi servus ad suscitandas tribus Iacob et feces Israhel convertendas dedi te in lucem gentium ut sis salus mea usque ad extremum terrae.

Jeremiah 13:14

Et dispergam eos virum a fratre suo et patres et filios pariter ait Dominus non parcam et non concedam neque miserebor ut non disperdam eos.

Jeremiah 15:7

Et dispergam eos ventilabro in portis terrae interfeci et perdidi populum meum et tamen a viis suis non sunt reversi.

Jeremiah 34:17

Propterea haec dicit Dominus vos non audistis me ut praedicaretis libertatem unusquisque fratri suo et unusquisque amico suo ecce ego praedico libertatem ait Dominus ad gladium et pestem et famem et dabo vos in commotionem cunctis regnis terrae.

Psalm 146:2

Aedificabit Hierusalem Dominus eiectos Israhel congregabit.

Daniel 12:2

Et multi de his qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere evigilabunt alii in vitam aeternam et alii in obprobrium ut videant semper.

Nehemiah 1:8

et si revertamini ad me et custodiatis mandata mea et faciatis eaetiam si abducti fueritis ad extrema caeli inde congregabo vos et inducam in locum quem elegi ut habitaret nomen meum ibi.

Judith 5:23

Nuper autem reversi ad Deum suum ex dispersione qua dispersi fuerant adunati sunt et ascenderunt montana haec omnia et iterum possident Hierusalem ubi sunt sancta eorum.

2 Maccabees 1:27

Congrega dispersionem nostram libera eos qui serviunt gentibus contemptos et abominatos respice ut sciant gentes quod tu es Deus noster.

74

Chapter 1

If the Vulgate did not immediately find widespread acceptance and remained in competition with other Latin versions until its consecration as the official Bible of the Church by the Council of Trent in 1546, it nevertheless marks an important transition: that of the language of the Church or, more exactly, of a part of the Church, from Greek to Latin. Indeed, it was only in the western part of the Roman Empire that Latin was used: Greek remained the language of the eastern part. This linguistic division entailed different uses of the Bible, the Vulgate progressively becoming the western Bible while the Septuagint remained the Bible used in the east. It is therefore not surprising to identify uses of diaspora among authors from the eastern part of the Roman Empire, not only in the 2nd (Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria), third (Origen) and 4th centuries (Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa) but also later, in the 5th century (Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret). Of the 271 occurrences of diaspora in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, fully 134 (slightly fewer than half) are attributable to only nine authors – Eusebius (22), John Chrysostom (18), Thedoret (18), Origen (16), George Hamartolos (14), Basil of Caesarea (11), Cyril of Alexandria (10), George Syncellus (9), Photios (9) et George Kedrenos (7). All these authors, without exception, are from the eastern part of the Roman Empire, or its successor, the Byzantine Empire. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 474 effectively separated the two Christian blocs, leading gradually to mutual incomprehensibility: this de facto state of affairs eventually led to the Great Schism of 1054, which formalised the rupture between Rome and Constantinople. In the 10th century Symeon the New Theologian had invoked the “dispersion of the peoples” (Ἀπὸ τῆς διασπορᾶς τῶν ἐθνῶν),159 an expression generally used to refer both to the dispersion of people and to the confusion of tongues after Babel. It is in this sense that George Syncellus (late 8th century) used diaspora several times in his Ecloga Chronographica: “the dispersion following the construction of the tower” (τῆς κατὰ τὴν πυργοποιίαν διασπορᾶς).160 The presence of the term can be attested until the end of the Byzantine Empire. There are a number of uses of diaspora in the texts of Gennadius Scholarius, who became ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in 1454, the year following the fall the city to the Turks, which reveal a variety of meanings, always linked to religion, but not necessarily to Judaism or Christianity. If he

159 160

Symeon the New Theologian, Second Ethical Discourse, Chapter vi, line 2. Georges Syncellus, Chronography, 56,9 and 58,13.

The Word of the Septuagint

75

refers to the “diffusion of the gospel in the entire world”161  (τὴν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου διασπορὰν πανταχοῦ), he also uses it when writing of the “dispersion of men”162 (τῶν ἀνθρώπων διασπορὰ). Thus, contrary to what hitherto generally been claimed, diaspora by no means disappears after the 5th century: its thread continues to weave its way through Byzantine texts, in a scattered but nevertheless uninterrupted fashion. When Byzantium fell in 1453, the Greek language, which had all but disappeared in the western part of Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, was just beginning to emerge again. A migration would permit this new diffusion of the Greek language, that of Byzantine scholars leaving a Constantinople under threat to settle in the west, particularly in Venice, between the late 14th and the 16th centuries, taking with them not only manuscripts but their methods of interpretation, thus rendering possible what previously had only been so with difficulty, that is, the study of the texts of Antiquity, which played an essential role in the intellectual revolution of the Renaissance and European humanism more generally.163 This migration of manuscripts led to a rediscovery of a number of original texts, such as the Hebrew Bible and the Greek text of the New Testament, which would be at the heart of the return to the source which constituted the Protestant reformation. It is the religious context, in Moravia and the Germanic lands, which marked the next step in the peregrinations of the uses of the word, that of its translation into the vocabulary of the European vernaculars before then creating its own unique place.

161

162

163

Gennadius Scholarius, Quaestiones et responsiones de divinitate Domini nostri Jesu Christi, in Œuvres complètes de Georges Scholarios, vol. iii, ed. Louis Petit, Xénophon Sidéridès and Martin Jugie (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1930), 464, line 39. Gennadius Scholarius, Oration 15:3,6, Œuvres complètes de Georges Scholarios, vol. i, ed. Louis Petit, Xénophon Sidéridès and Martin Jugie (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1928), 225. See particularly Deno John Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962, and by the same author Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaelogan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman Churches. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Chapter 2

The Religious Space of Dispersion Satan, being thus confin’d to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode: for tho’ he has, in consequence of his Angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air: yet this is certainly part of his punishment that he is continually hovering over this inhabited globe of earth; swelling with the rage of envy at the felicity of his rival Man: and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him: but extremely limited in power, to his unspeakable mortification: This is his present state, without any fix’d abode, place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.1 Words have borders, borders of their areas of circulation in their original form, but also those of their meanings. This observation prompts us to interrogate the question of translation, envisaged, of course, in the context of the passage of meaning of a word in one language to another word in another language, but also from the perspective of a displacement – semantic as much as spatial – which is coiled up within. This aspect is present in the etymology of the word translation itself (from the low Latin translatare, to transport to another place, to displace). Translation was therefore the agency through whose mediation an operation of displacement from one language to another was effected. The same word – translation – was employed in French until the 16th century, and the original meaning of the German word – übersetzen – was also to cross or to transport across. This displacement of words is fundamental, for it is at the heart of their spatial, social and semantic geographies. If their initial distribution depended on the extent of the distribution of the language in question, their subsequent expansion is linked to the capacity to translate them, that is, to displace them into other spaces in the form of words in other languages, but also to displace, even if only infinitely slightly, both meaning and direction. Diaspora was born in the context of a translation, but not entirely as a translation: it was invented in Greek not so much to take the place of a Hebrew

1 Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil. Containing his Original. A State of His Circumstances. His Conduct, Public and Private. Birmingham: printed by C. Earl., 1772 (sixth edition), 71.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_005

The Religious Space of Dispersion

77

word, but rather to represent several and thereby acquire, by the multiplication of its occurrences, a meaning of its own, representing more a particular theological condition that a word or a group of words in Hebrew of which it would be the Greek equivalent. It is by this translators’ invention – in a context of working towards affording better access, and thus a greater diffusion, of a sacred text originally written in a language that was no longer widely understood – that diaspora spread in a Greek language Jewish religious context (at least in Egypt and Judea). Between the 1st and 4th centuries it gradually and almost completely disappears from the religious lexicon. Its reappropriation by a nascent, Greek speaking, Christianity, is a displacement without translation. If the same word still refers to a situation of dispersion of divine origin for the chosen people, this people is no longer that of Israel but that of Christ. Diaspora will subsequently designate once again the Jews, but with a further reversal: it is a dispersion without choice, the punishment of a deicide people, while paroikia, then city of men, replaces it. Despite this eviction, the Greek Old and New Testaments convey diaspora beyond the eastern Mediterranean before the first Latin translations replace it with dispersio, a translation without semantic displacement since the term is largely reserved for the Jews. Disappearing from the Christian religious lexicon as a result of the substitution of Latin for Greek, diaspora also disappeared from the Greek used by the Jews themselves, and in particular from the translation of the Hebrew Bible. The three other Greek translations, those of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, do not use diaspora, and rabbinical Judaism, anxious to distance itself from the reappropriation of the Septuagint by Christianity, even made Aquila’s translation the official Greek version of the Torah. Yet, here, too, translation and displacement meet, for even if the word disappeared, its theological signification endured, finding new life in the shell of a Hebrew word even older than itself and whose meaning it had also absorbed: galuth. In this case galuth can in a certain manner be considered as a retrospective translation of diaspora, displaced, and with added semantic content. For more than a millennium, diaspora would be limited to the Greek Byzantine world, and even there its usage was apparently not widespread. Despite the Greek revival in Christian Europe during the Renaissance, diaspora does not reappear there until the 18th century, when it resurfaces in its retranscribed Greek form or, increasingly frequently from the 19th century onwards, as a singular term, imported from the Greek, whose meaning was more restricted than those hitherto carried by words referring to scattering in the vernacular tongues: dispersion in French, dispersion, dispersal or scattering itself in English, Zerstreuung in German. Significantly, the negative connotations of diaspora and its dispersed derivations was focused on Jewish history, and on

78

Chapter 2

the text of the Old Testament, while Christian history and the New Testament gave birth, in the specific context of the emergence of Protestantism in Europe, to a positive vision of “diaspora”. This became a fundamental element of the lexicon of a particular Protestant church, that of the Moravian Brethren.

Connotations of the Dispersion The history of the Moravian Church is not well known.2 Its origins lie in the Christian refoundation movement established in Bohemia at the beginning of the 15th century by Jan Hus, before his death at the stake in 1416. Under his successors the movement fragmented into rival branches until, at the beginning of the 1450s and under the leadership of a priest named Rokyzan, a form of religious society was established whose members gradually withdrew from the Church. In 1456, they obtained authorisation to settle in the barony of Lititz in Moravia. The organisation of the “Brothers and sister of the Law of Christ” was officially created in 1457 in the town of Kunwald under the aegis of Gregory, a nephew of Rokyzan. It would subsequently also be known by the name of Unitas Fratrum, the Unity of the Brethren. Its teachings grew more and more distant from Roman Christianity. The Unity endured numerous waves of persecutions, including under the reign of the Czech Hussite king, George of Poděbrady, in the second half of the 15th century, before they were eventually outlawed in 1508. Some of its members left Bohemia for Moravia and Poland. The defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 heralded the victory of the Counter-Reformation; in 1627 the Unity was obliged to leave Czech soil in the face of repression under King Ferdinand. Its last bishop, Comenius, fled to Poland: “The sanctuaries of the Brethren, Lutherans, and Reformed were closed; their congregations scattered, and, as sheep without a shepherd, wandered from place to place”.3 Thus began a new era for the Unity of the Brethren, 2 On the history of the Unity of the Brethren, see particularly Guido Burckhardt, Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine. Gotha: Besser, 1866; Ami Bost, Histoire ancienne et moderne de l’Église des Frères de Bohême et de Moravie depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: L. R. Delay, 1844; Edmund de Schweinitz, The History of the Church known as the Unitas Fratrum or the Unity of the Brethren. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Publication Concern, 1901 (first edition 1885); as well as James E. Hutton, A History of the Moravian Church. London: Moravian Publication Office, 1902. The historical details that follow are drawn from these texts. 3 Edmund de Schweinitz, The Moravian Manual: Containing an Account of the Protestant Church of the Moravian United Brethren or Unitas Fratrum. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Publication Office, 1859, 32. The exile of the Brethren is compared to that of the Jews to Babylon (p. 34).

The Religious Space of Dispersion

79

that of the so-called Hidden Seed, during the course of which the faith was sustained thanks to the texts written by Comenius and the ordination of two new bishops, as well as clandestine voyages to Bohemia with the aim of maintaining links with certain Brethren there still practicing their religion in secret. It was the journeys to Moravia by Christian David, a carpenter from Görlitz in Saxony, which favoured the renaissance of the Church of the Unity. In 1722 David was presented to Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf and persuaded the latter to found a host community for the Moravian Brethren on his lands at Berthelsdorf (Saxony), to be baptised Herrnhut. In 1727, it officially became the Church of the Unity of the Brethren. It was here, under the guidance of Zinzendorf, by now a bishop of the Unity, that one of the most important objectives of the Moravian Brethren was established: the organisation of evangelising missions abroad. This evangelising mission is frequently claimed to be both particularity and priority of the Unitas Fratrum, “the particular purpose for which God had brought about this renewal [of the Church]”.4 These foreign missions began in 1732, from their base at Herrnhut, with the stated objective of building a second Church of the Unity. As participants in these missions, members of the Unity of the Brethren set out for the countries of continental Europe – the other German states, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France and Russia –, Great Britain, where they influenced early Methodists, as well as the United States, where the conversion of the natives became one of their principal tasks. Three provinces – continental, British and American – were thereby constituted, within which missions multiplied and communities of believers were created. In the mid-18th century another aspect of the evangelising mission developed in parallel with this work, officially known since the mid-19th century by the name of Diaspora and whose reach was limited to the continental province.5 Each missionary was attached to a district within which he worked with two categories of people: the “Brothers and Sisters of the Diaspora” and the “Societies of the Brethren”. The former were the object of visits on the part of the missionary and attended his ordinary offices. The latter were more integrated to the Unity of the Brethren: they were organised in bands and benefited from all religious services of the congregation with the exception of holy sacraments, which remained the prerogative of their 4 Ibid., 48. 5 Without providing any details, James Henry dates the beginning of the “Diaspora” to 1742. See James Henry, Sketches of Moravian Life and Character, Comprising a General View of the History, Life, Character, and Religious and Educational Institutions of the Unitas Fratrum. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1859, 55, note 1.

80

Chapter 2

State Church, which they never abandoned. In that way the Moravians forged links with Protestants belonging to other churches without seeking to separate them. Why give this evangelical mission the name Diaspora? The Moravian Manual explicitly attaches the use of the term to the New Testament and the passage in the epistle of Peter cited in the previous chapter.6 According to James Hutton, a historian of the Moravian church, it was a means of emphasising the fact that the vocation of the Church of the Brethren was not to spread itself, but rather to constitute a home for all the dispersed of other Churches.7 It would seem that we owe this usage of the word to Zinzendorf himself, who first used it 17498 to designate two different but fundamentally linked concepts: the presence, outside the structures of the Unity of the Brethren, of isolated Christians who feel close to them and whom the Church should be able to look after; and the worldwide dispersal of the children of God, who constituted their Church independently of their official religious affiliation. The situation of the Church of the Brethren functions as a metonym for word Christianity. Zinzendorf composed a hymn in honour of the diaspora, believing that at the Last Judgement its members would receive “the white robes of the victors and the palms of the martyrs.”9 Not only is idea close to that of the “little churches within the Church” (ecclesiolae in ecclesia) that we find in the pietist teaching of Philip Jacob Spener – to whom Zinzendorf was very close before his “conversion” to the Unity of the Brethren – it also bears a very clear affinity with the Lutheran conception of the true Church, invisible and dispersed, in contrast to the visible and assembled Church of Rome.10 Edmund de Schweinitz estimated the size of this “diaspora” at some 80,000 members in the middle of the 19th century.11 The attention that the Moravians accorded to this “diasporic mission” exceeded the boundaries of the Unity of the Brethren alone. In 1842, nearly a century after its use by Zinzendorf, diaspora appeared in another Protestant

6 7 8

9 10

11

Schweinitz, The Moravian Manual, 67. Hutton, A History of the Moravian Church, 151. Herman-Josef Röhrig, Diaspora-Kirche in der Minderheit. Leipzig: St Benno-Verlag, 1991, 36-37. I am deeply grateful to Hermann-Josef Röhrig who generously answered my questions and provided me with copies of his works. Ibid., 37. See particularly Martin Luther, “The Papacy at Rome: An Answer to the Celebrated Romanist at Leipzig,” (1520), in Works of Martin Luther, vol. I. Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Company, 1915, 353-354. Schweinitz, The Moravian Manual, 176.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

81

context, where it would come to represent the collective Protestant communities living as minorities among Catholic populations. This notion is at the heart of the development, within German Protestantism, of a policy of support for Protestant minorities. In 1843 this policy was institutionalised, with the creation in Frankfurt of an organisation named Evangelische Verein der GustavAdolf-Stiftung (Evangelical Association of the Gustav-Adolf Foundation), usually called Gustav-Adolf-Werk (GAW), which set itself the goal of organising assistance for these minorities.12 The reference to the religious concept of diaspora, considered here not as a chastisement but as a dispersed geographical condition calling for the maintenance of a link between the dispersed communities, is constant – hence not only the fact that the annual review of the GAW, founded in 1919, was called Die evangelische Diaspora, but also the importance of theological debates, in the 19th as well as the 20th century, in German protestant circles, on the importance of the concept.13 In 1838 this conceptualisation of the “Protestant diaspora” as a minority in Catholic countries was taken up and inverted by German Catholics, through the intermediary of the Ludwig Missionary Association (Ludwigsmissionsverein), and particularly following the creation of the Boniface Association (Bonifatiusverein) – from the name of an early 8th century Catholic missionary saint – in 1849.14 In both Protestant and Catholic usage in the 18th and 19th centuries, diaspora is not primarily associated with chastisement, but rather with the characteristics of the dispersed Church of God, with which it was necessary to maintain ties. It is this concern with ties that takes precedence, particularly in the Moravian case, but in the Protestant context more generally. In contrast, in Christian Europe of both the Middle Ages and the modern period, dispersion rarely has positive connotations since it is intimately linked to Christian history – fundamentally organised on, in the past, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the terrestrial paradise and, in the future, the life eternal that awaits

12

13 14

Although officially created in 1843, early initiatives date to 1832, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the death of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus II (1594-1632) who supported the Protestant princes in their struggle against the Habsburg empire during the Thirty Years’ War. On Gustav-Adolf-Werk, see Hermann-Josef Röhrig, “Gustav-AdolfWerk – Diaspora aus evangelischer Sicht”, in Diaspora: Zeugnis von Christen für Christen. 150 Jahre Bonifatiuswerk der deutschen Katholischen, ed. Günter Riße and Clemens A. Kathke (Paderborn: Bonifatius Verlag, 1999), 183-202. For an extremely thorough treatment of these debates, see Röhrig, Diaspora-Kirche in der Minderheit, 81-147. Hermann-Josef Röhrig, “Diaspora in römisch-katholischer Sicht,” Die evangelische Diaspora. Jahrbuch des Gustav-Adolf-Werks, no. 62 (1993), 81-100.

82

Chapter 2

Christians after the final judgment – as well as to the history of the Jewish people and their chastisement by God. Four episodes drawn from the Bible can account for the connotations attached to the idea of dispersion in the Middle Ages and the modern period: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the Tower of Babel, the lost tribes of Israel and the Wandering Jew. Each of these has a particular resonance: the nostalgia for origins, the quest for lost unity, the regathering of the dispersed and the chastisement of those who do not rally to the word of the Christian God. As the French historian Jean Delumeau has shown, until the 18th century Christians deplored the expulsion of Adam and Eve and the ensuing loss of Paradise such as it is recounted in Genesis. They await the end of the world, which will reunite man with God but, despite its manifest inaccessibility, they also hope to discover the earthly localisation of Paradise.15 The quest, the knowledge, even the understanding of that which has been lost would, with the hoped for re-establishment of unity, seem to be the only consolation for the loss which produced their dispersion. Likewise concerning the episode of Babel. Interpreted at length in the different talmudic treatises – far more than by the Fathers of the Church, with the exception of Irenaeus, Theophilus of Alexandria, Origen and of course Augustine16 –, it only really diffused in the West from the 12th century onwards, doubtless due to the rediscovery of the Hebrew sources.17 It is of great importance, for the two processes that it unleashed, the dispersion of the peoples and the confusion of languages (dispersio gentium et confusio linguarum), confront the question of divine punishment inflicted on man and that of origins, in the Adamic, or pre-Babelian period. As the French medievalist historian Paul Zumthor writes, “for Middle Age man, the diversity of tongues, the incomprehension, the misunderstandings, the hatreds, even, that were its product, must be the result of some ancient sin, of great gravity, and thus punished by God.”18 But Babel, like the expulsion from Paradise, also encouraged a search for that which had been lost, the quest for the mother tongue, the unique language which had been that both of Adam and of the builders of Babel. The rediscovery of Hebrew during the Renaissance, a consequence of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and their settlement in other Euro15 16 17 18

Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. New York: Continuum Books, 1995 (first French edition 1992). Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book xvi, chap. iv-vi, Edinburgh: John Grant, 1909, 93-95. Paul Zumthor, Babel ou l’inachèvement. Paris: Seuil, 1997, 85. Ibid., 91.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

83

pean spaces such as the Netherlands or the Hanseatic towns, comforts the old idea, frequent among the Fathers of the Church and particularly Augustine, according to which Hebrew is the Adamic language,19 the one from which all other languages are derived.20 Yet, in the 16th century, the original character of Hebrew was challenged, either by the development of arguments of a nationalist character according to which one or another language (Flemish, German, Swedish, Celtic) was the first language, or at least the oldest, or from the 17th century onwards, by the polygenic hypothesis according to which certain civilisations, such as that of China, predated Adam without being affected by the dispersion of the languages. If the French Encyclopédie continued to link Babel and the “dispersion of the nations,”21 the 18th century saw the birth of what Sylvain Auroux called “the secularisation of enquiry into the origin of language,”22 which emerges particularly with the rediscovery of Sanskrit and the birth of the Indo-European concept of the mother language.23 Dispersion cannot simply be reduced to the loss of a place or a language: it is also the loss of unity, that of Israel. According to the text of the Bible, the unity of Israel was not lost with the destruction of the First or the Second Temple, but with the disappearance of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel in the 8th century BCE. In the 10th century BCE, after the death of King Solomon, the kingdom of Israel split into two: the Northern Kingdom, organised around ten of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob (those of Ruben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim and half of the tribe of Manasseh), and Southern Kingdom, around the tribes of Benjamin and Judah. In 722 BCE, the Assyrians took Samaria, capital of the Northern Kingdom, and 19 20 21

22 23

Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book xvi, chap. xi, 99-101. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language. Malden: Blackwell, 1995 (first Italian edition 1993), 74-85. See particularly the articles “Babel,” and “Langue,” in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Paris: Briasson, David l’aîné, Le Breton and Durand, vol. ii, 1751, 4; and vol. ix, 1765, 249-266. Sylvain Auroux, La Question de l’origine des langues. Paris: PUF, 2007, 22-23. On Indo-European as mother language, see particularly Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 (first French edition 1989). The hypothesis of a single mother language perdures, particularly in the search for relationships between the major linguistic families so far identified. In this context, the pioneering works of the American linguist Joseph Greenberg have been continued by one of his students, Merritt Ruhlen. See Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language. Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. New York: Wiley, 1994.

84

Chapter 2

deported a substantial part of the population to Assyria. Subsequently, we lose track of these tribes; a passage in the Bible (1 Chronicles, 5:26), referring to the members of the tribes of Ruben, Gad and Manasseh, explains that the God of Israel “stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria […] and he carried them away, […] and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan, unto this day.” This latter temporal reference, as well as the existence of numerous prophesies on the reunification of all the tribes of Israel (Isaiah 11:12-14, Isaiah 27:13 and Ezekiel 37:16-22) maintains the hope of an eschatological regathering within rabbinical Judaism.24 The discovery of the location of the lost tribes being considered to be a prior condition for the return of the exiles, the narratives – generally in Hebrew – of the discovery of certain of them by Jewish travellers such as Eldad ha-Dani25 in the 9th century, Benjamin of Tudela or Petachiah of Regensburg in the 12th century, David Reubeni in the 16th century or Jacob Sapir in the 19th century bolstered belief in their existence.26 This belief is not limited to the Jews. Indeed, Christianity’s appropriation of the name “Israel” and the Greek text of the Old Testament implies a similar interest in the ten or twelve tribes of Israel, whether in association with the twelve apostles, whose reunion will announce the return of Jesus Christ on earth (parousia), through identification with the “cursed” people of Gog and Magog27 who will be unleashed on the world at the end of time, or indeed, whether the reappearance of these Jews should be considered as a sign of their

24 25

26

27

On the ten tribes, the reference text is Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002. As Eliakim Carmoly wrote in his “Discours préliminaire” to his translation of the narrative of Eldad ha-Dani, “dispersed across the surface of the earth following the destruction of Jerusalem, the Hebrews of necessity had to undertake long journeys.” See Relation d’Eldad le Danite, voyageur du ixe siècle. Paris: Librairie orientale de Mme Dondey-Dupré, 1838, 3-4. An English translation can be found in Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts, ed. Elkan Nathan Adler (New York: Dover, 2011, first English edition 1930), 4-21. This belief and this quest are still very much alive, particularly in Africa. See Edith Bruder, “Tribus perdues d’Israël en Afrique: la rencontre des Africains avec le judaïsme, jalons historiques,” Pardès, no. 44 (2008), 48-50. As we may read, for example, in the travel narrative of Jean de Mandeville in 1356, but it would appear that the association between the locations where the ten tribes were to be found and the land of Gog and Magog had already been well-established. See Xavier Walter, Avant les grandes découvertes: une image de la Terre au xive siècle. Le Voyage de Mandeville. Paris: Alban, 1997, 599-600. In English, see The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated and edited by Charles Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005).

The Religious Space of Dispersion

85

future conversion to Christianity and thus likewise a sign of parousia.28 Moreover, these tribal imaginaries provide explanations for the presence of other populations beyond distant frontiers or over the seas. Thus at the beginning of the 17th century, the Englishman Giles Fletcher published An Essay upon some probable grounds, that the present Tartars near the Caspian Sea, are the posterity of the ten tribes of Israel.29 But the interest of this question is deeper. As demonstrated by the enthusiasm that met the announcement of the discovery of Indian tribes of America considered to be dispersed members of the tribe of Ruben by Antonio de Montezinos in 1644, the discovery of descendants of these tribes conform to the biblical prophesy according to which their return is the sign of the end of time.30 It should nevertheless be noted that, in the Christian context, the disappearance of the ten tribes is not a disappearance at all. It is either a confinement, analogous to that of the cursed people of Gog and Magog, or on the contrary, a dissipation, a dispersion throughout the world. In either case, they will be revealed at the end of time, liberated or discovered. Their renewed visibility, announcing the beginning of the end, is paradoxically and simultaneously a testimony of evil and a promise of alliance. So, too, with the myth of the Wandering Jew. Although it first appeared in the 13th century, it only became widespread in Christian Europe at the beginning of the 17th with the publication in Leiden in 1602 of a chapbook entitled Kurze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus. 28

29

30

The theme of the ten tribes also served as an incitement to the discovery of new lands, on the pretext that they could be hiding places for the Ten Tribes, including in the Pacific Ocean. See, for example, Tudor Parfitt, “The Development of Fictive Israelite Identities in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific (17th-21th c.),” Diasporas: histoire et sociétés, no. 5 (2nd sem. 2004), 49-56. Giles Fletcher, Israel redux, or, The restauration of Israel, exhibited in two short treatises the first contains an essay upon some probable grounds, that the present Tartars near the Caspian Sea, are the posterity of the ten tribes of Israel (London, 1977). This treatise is likely to have been written between 1609 and Fletcher’s death in 1611. See Lionel Ifrah, Sion et Albion: Juifs et puritains attendent le Messie. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006, 49-51. Significantly, hope remains present as much among Christians as among Jews. Menasseh ben Israël believed that this news announced the imminent arrival of the Messianic time for the presence of Jews in the New World indeed meant that they had been dispersed across the whole world. Menasseh Ben Israël, The Hope of Israel, (1650), translated and edited by Henri Méchoulan and Gérard Nahon (Oxford-New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004). The Hebrew hypothesis underlies several attempts at understanding the “Indian” presence in the New World. See Giuliano Gliozzi, Adam et le Nouveau Monde. La naissance de l’anthropologie comme idéologie coloniale: des généalogies bibliques aux théories raciales (1500-1700). Paris: Théétète, 2000 (first Italian edition 1977).

86

Chapter 2

A number of versions of this story exist, but they all describe a Jew who, on the day of the crucifixion, strikes Christ and thus finds himself condemned to wander until the end of time.31 This figure, which has a number of different names – Cartaphilus, Ahasverus, Isaac Laquedem –, becomes the incarnation of divine punishment, of the wandering and the dispersion of the Jews of course, but also of the abnormality of their condition. Dispersion and wandering rebut the character of the Jewish people as chosen and proclaim it instead as that of the Christians. The scattering marks their defeat by imposing upon them the yoke of other nations and condemning them to being landless, as French Protestant pastor Jacques Abbadie reminds us at the end of the 17th century: “And heaven having sufficiently declared itself against the Jews by the destruction of their city, the confusion of their tribes, and families, and that general dispersion which made them tributaries to all other nations, there was no need of any further reasons to prove that the Jews were not the only nation called to the knowledge of the true God.”32 But wandering is not simply evidence of their non-election: it also marks their non-belonging to human nature. In the Middle Ages, Jews, along with idolaters and women, belonged to the trilogy of the “agents of Satan”.33 In 1609, the English jurist Edward Coke called them perpetui inimici, perpetual enemies, alongside demons, animals and heretics.34 Accused of detesting the human race, an argument that dates to Antiquity35 and has recurred ever since,36 this prejudice was particularly prevalent in Europe in the 13th century, when the Jews were accused, collectively, of ritual murders as well as the poisoning of 31 32

33 34

35 36

On this myth, see particularly the rich contributions collected in Le Juif errant: un témoin du temps, Paris: Adam Biro et Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, 2001. Jacques Abbadie, A Vindication of the Truth of Christian Religion against the Objections of All Modern Opposers. Part 2. London: Printed for J. Wyat at the Rose, and R. Wilkins at the Kings Head in St Pauls Churchyard, 1698, 38. (first edition in French, Rotterdam, 1684). Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 (first French edition 1978), chap. ix. See Richard Marienstras, “The Near and the Far: the Calvin Affair and the Status of Foreigners under James I of England,” 99-125, in Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, first French edition 1981). Also see Pierre Lurbe, “Introduction,” in John Toland, Raisons de naturaliser les Juifs (1714), ed. Pierre Lurbe (Paris: PUF, 1998). On this, see Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, 208-209. See for example how Abbé Grégoire, in connection with the Jews, refers to their “aversion towards other peoples.” Abbé Henri Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs. Metz: Claude Lamort, 1789, 65-71.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

87

springs, fountains and wells, which leads either to their massacre or to their expulsion. Indeed, from this period onwards “the Jews became eternal wanderers”.37 They were expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I; from France by Philip II Augustus in 1182, by Philip the Fair in 1306, yet again by Louis X in 1321 and then, more definitively, by Charles VI in 1394 – an edict of expulsion renewed in 1615 –; from Saxony in 1342; from Austria in 1420; from Spain in 1492; from the Kingdom of Naples in 1510; and from Vienna in 1670, to cite but a selection of the multiple expulsions that punctuated both the Middle Ages and the early modern period.38 Dispersed and wandering, Jews nevertheless constituted a crucial element in the Christian religion, for the causes, but particularly the possible end of their dispersion are of great significance for Christianity. Dispersed by God, they are, despite everything, the witness-people, those whose conversion to Christianity is expected to immediately precede the second coming of Christ. One of the oldest versions of the myth of the Wandering Jew, written by the monk John Moschus in the 7th century, represents him as repenting of his act – slapping Jesus – and being completely won over to Christ’s cause.39 The reference to the “call of the Jews”, of biblical origin, is understood by Jews to herald their return to Zion and the coming of the Messiah, but among Christians it finds a particular resonance: the “call of the Jews” is rather their conversion to Christianity, the precursor to Christ’s return to Earth. It is an element that we find present among the English millenarians who have believed, at least since the end of the 16th century, that the eschaton – the end of time – will be marked by the return of the Jews, either by their return to Jerusalem or by their conversion.40 This millenarian expectation ended after 1666, a purportedly fateful year by virtue of the number 666, that of the Beast in the Apocalypse of St John. Significantly, 1666 was the year of Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam, whom since 1665 numerous Jews had nevertheless considered to be

37 38

39 40

Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism. vol. 1, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974 (first French edition 1956), 118. See Joseph H. Yerushalmi, “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3–22. See Marcello Massenzio, La Passion selon le Juif errant. Paris: L’Échoppe, 2006, 45-48. The coexistence of Puritan and Jewish Messianisms in the 16th and 17th centuries was most competently described in Ifrah, Sion et Albion. More details on the history of nonJewish millenarian movements that refer to Zion in the 16th and 17th centuries may be found in Jean Delumeau, Une Histoire du paradis, vol. ii, Mille ans de bonheur. Paris: Fayard, 1995.

88

Chapter 2

the long awaited Jewish messiah and herald of the coming return to Zion (see infra). Dispersion invokes its own end, the return to a prior unitary state or the passage to a new, more ordered state, the beginning of a new era. The monogenetic hypothesis backed by the Bible – the human species was born in a single place whence men dispersed across the earth – is a good illustration of the potential of dispersion. It implies, as we saw above, a prior and lost unity, but towards which it is possible to return. Dispersion is thus an intermediate time between the loss of unity and the return to unity, simultaneously a malediction in the present and the promise of reuniting. It comes to mark the tension between unity and discontinuity, Undesirable, it is despite everything, present, and its mission consists in shaping one or recovering one out of many. It is clearly so in constructions such as that of the two cities – the city of Men and the city of God – but St Augustine provides other examples of the necessity of overcoming a state of dispersion considered negative and undesirable.41 Older dictionaries systematically associate the noun dispersion, the verb to disperse, or the adjectival past participle dispersed with Jews. The oldest occurrences of dispersion in the Oxford English Dictionary date from the 14th and 15th centuries and all concern the Jews. We need to wait for the 17th century in order for dispersion to lose this principal religious connotation in favour of a more neutral meaning. It is the same for scattering whose usage is initially linked to the historical situation of the Jews. Like dispersion, it appears in the 14th century to translate certain passages of the Old and New Testaments alike. On the other hand, the verb to scatter does not seem to be specifically linked to the Jews since it enters the English language in the 12th century with the sense of “to dissipate, disperse, disseminate, squander”. In French, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1743-1752) is fairly neutral, seeing in “dispersion” “the act of dispersion, & of spreading on one side & another. Dispersus, usage. The dispersion of the Jews was predicted by the Prophets, and by Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Likewise, in his own dictionary, Antoine Furetière wrote in the entry for “disperser”: “To put in many places, to be in separate places. To invest one’s money, one must disperse it to several people, not put it all in one place. The Jews are dispersed throughout the whole world. His wealth consists of numerous small dispersed inheritances, he could not make a good farm of it. Scripture says, I would strike the Shepherd and the flock

41

See particularly Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book x, chap. xi, Garden City: International Collectors Library, 1876, 199, as well as The City of God, Book xxii, chap. xx, 355-356.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

89

will be dispersed.” Again, in 1694 the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, drew upon the Scriptures to better emphasise the negative dimension of dispersion: “The act of dispersing, or by which one is dispersed. Dispersion is one of the chastisements with which God threatened and punished the Jews. The dispersion of the Jews was predicted by the Prophets, and by Our Lord in the Gospel.” This definition remained unchanged for almost 150 years, through four consecutive editions of the dictionary (1718, 1740, 1762 and 1798) until the 1835 edition in which the dispersion of the Jews, still mentioned, now constitutes but one example among others: “The act of dispersing, of being dispersed, or the result of this act. The dispersion of the materials of a structure. The dispersion of rays of light. The dispersion of an army, of a fleet. The dispersion of the Jews.” The 1878 edition maintains the entry unchanged, while that of 1932-1935 simply removes all references to Jews. To disperse, is above all to “separate”, to “put into disorder”. It is not therefore by chance if, in French, dispersion also refers to a lack of concentration. To be dispersed, “être dispersé”, is to demonstrate a lack, as the two citations in the entry “Dispersé” in the Grand dictionnaire universel bear witness: that of Michelet – “We others, cultivated people, we become annoyed by the dispersion of the mind” – and that of Madame de Staël: “A light education taken lightly disperses the thought.” If for some dispersion is a waste of time or a source of irritation, it had long been synonymous with malediction and a complete loss of identity, analogous to the dispersion of atoms in Epicurus’s theory cited by Plutarch. So, in an 1816 text by French philosopher Maine de Biran, we read of the explicit link between dispersion and the death of a nation: “You will have war and all its scourges; you will be trampled, crushed by all kinds of oppression and tyranny: dispersed, annihilated, you will no longer be a nation. What then is this pestilence within the nation that stirs it and since 1798 has incessantly fostered the seeds of corruption and of death?”42 The importance of the theme of dispersion and its influence on the constitution of western modernity can also be read in the birth of contractualist philosophies. The passage from the state of nature to the social state was conceived of as a meeting, a gathering of men, previously naturally dispersed, into a society united by a contract that they established together. From Samuel Pufendorf, in the second half of the 17th century, onwards, we can see the extent to which the passage from dispersion, or at least separation, to unity – be it described or desired – is a constant: “we must first therefore inquire into the reasons, why men, formerly dispersed into families separate and independent

42

Maine de Biran, Journal, vol. i (1816), Neufchâtel: Éditions H. Gouhier, 1954, 64.

90

Chapter 2

from one another, should join together under a single government.”43 This dispersion of families is also referred to in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where men are “épars”,44 dispersed among the animals45, “wandering about in the forests”46 before the convention which transforms them into social beings. We see it also in the work of Thomas Hobbes, who, in On The Citizen (De Cive), writes of “mankind, (disperst by families) before the constitution of civill societies”.47 We read something similar from the pen of Emmanuel Kant, who sees the tilling of the soil, and the defence of the soil that one has tilled, as representations of the fact that “human beings could no longer live as scattered families”.48 The fixation with the soil and the tilling of it are often associated, and this key concept is at the heart of Rousseau’s thinking: “the earth had to be populated before cultivating it: the two cannot very well be done together. During the first dispersion of mankind until the family had settled down and man had a fixed abode there was no more agriculture at all”.49 From when does this “first dispersion” date? There are two possible answers: from the Flood or from Babel, the two Biblical episodes that produced dispersion, wandering and incommunicability between human beings. Rousseau calls “first times those of men’s, at whatever age of mankind one might wish to fix the epoch”:50 he writes of “the wandering life of Noah’s descendants”51 43

44

45 46 47 48

49

50 51

Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), Book vii, chap. i, London: Walthoe et al., 1729, 623. The French translation by Jean Barbeyrac reads: “Il faut donc rechercher ici d’abord ce qui peut avoir porté les hommes, auparavant dispersés en familles séparées et indépendantes les unes des autres, à se joindre plusieurs ensemble sous un même gouvernement, pour composer un État.” Samuel Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens, tome ii, Leyden: Wetstein, 1771, 262. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), Book i, chap. v, London-Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1913, 13. The original French text has “individus épars”. The English translation by G.D.H Cole in 1782 has “scattered individuals” too. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1754), London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1761, 18 and 47. Ibid., 86 and 111. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in The Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. ii, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 164. Emmanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” (1786), in Emmanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 163-175 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” (text published posthumously in 1781), in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, 289-332 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 307. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 307.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

91

and thinks he has found “the fathers of mankind” in the “sands of Chaldea, the rocks of Phoenecia”.52 As for Locke, he believes that it is Babel that mixes. As he refutes the thesis of Robert Filmer according to which the “dispersion of Babel” was at the origin of the establishment of royal power, Locke writes that “the Monarchy he erects thereon […], will serve only to divide and scatter them as that Tower did, will produce nothing but confusion.”53 So, for Hobbes too, it is Babel that represents the moment when words, language, “sublime” and “necessary”, words taught to Adam by God, were lost, forcing humans to disperse and to shape new languages.54 If the printing press is “a profitable invention”, it is because it “[continues] the memory of time past, and the conjunction of mankind, dispersed into so many, and distant regions of the Earth.”55 The gathering of men not only modifies their relations, it also modifies their communication. If sight and hearing are the “passive organs of language among dispersed men”56 for Rousseau, it is only at the moment of gathering that they “speak and make themselves spoken of”.57 However, among social contract philosophers, the only one who truly seems to see the consequences of the tension between the dispersion of the human species and the constitution of national groups is Kant, amongst whose writings we find the draft of a cosmopolitan law, distinct from the law of states and the law of people. The foreigner who finds himself on the territory of a state that is not his own can then claim the right to visit: “One speaks here only of the right all men have, of demanding of others to be admitted into their society; a right founded upon that of the common possession of the surface of the earth, whose spherical form obliges them to suffer others to subsist contiguous to them, because they cannot disperse themselves to an indefinite distance, and because originally one has not a greater right to a country than another.”58 Dispersion is then no longer a pre-civil, pre-political state of being, which must be ended by the

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 310. John Locke, The First Treatise (1689), § 143, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government. London: Printed for C. and J. Rivington et al., 1824, 112. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, The matter, forme, and power of a common wealth, ecclesiasticall and civil. London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651, 13. Ibid., 12. We also find a reference to the state of dispersion of the Jews in Leviathan, 353. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” 290. Ibid., 310. Emmanuel Kant, Project for a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. London: Printed by S. Couchman for Vernor and Hood, 1796, 28. On Kant’s cosmopolitan right, see Stéphane Chauvier, Du droit d’être étranger: essai sur le concept kantien d’un droit cosmopolitique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.

92

Chapter 2

contract, but rather a mode of occupation of the land, of which traces remain, even after the formation of civil society. For Locke, however, the state of dispersion is synonymous with the natural state: it is that to which men return when their society dissolves. When, in the Second Treatise of Government, he describes the mechanism of dissolution of societies, notably by conquest, he eloquently demonstrates that each returns “to the state he was in before”: the conqueror’s sword “cut up governments by the roots, and mangle societies to pieces, separating the subdued or scattered multitude from the protection of and dependence on that society which ought to have preserved”.59 Nature resumes her rights and the gathered elements are again “scattered and displaced by a whirlwind, or jumbled into a confused heap by an earthquake”.60 However, certain populations present the particularity of being able to conserve the ties that bind them together despite their disappearance as a society. This is clearly the case of the Jews, but not them alone. If their dispersion has a clear theological meaning, it is not historically unique. Other populations, also dispersed, have been compared to them. Some, such as David Hume in his essay Of National Characters (1748), places the Jews on the same footing as the Armenians: “Where any set of men, scattered over distant nations, maintain a close society or communication together, they acquire a similitude of manners, and have but little in common with the nations amongst whom they live. Thus the Jews in Europe, and the Armenians in the east, have a peculiar character; and the former are as much noted for fraud, as the latter for probity”.61 Others, such as Voltaire, compare them to Asiatic people such as the Ghebers and the Banyans62. Just as Hume extols the honesty of the Armenians, Voltaire recommends that the Jews follow the example of the Ghebers and the Banyans: “Would you live in peace? Imitate the Banians and the Guebers. They are much more ancient than you are; they are dispersed like you; they are like you without a country. […] They say not a word. Follow their

59 60 61

62

John Locke, Second Treatise, § 211, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, chapter xix, 256. Ibid. David Hume, “Of National Characters,” (1748), in David Hume, Essays and treatises on several subjects, 119-129, London: Printed for A. Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1758, 123. Banian was the name given by the Portuguese to the Hindu merchants that they encountered in the Indian Ocean. They have given their name to the banyan tree, a species of fig that are characterised by aerial roots that hang from their branches and thereby produce new trunks. Gueber was a term formerly applied to Zoroastrians, now considered offensive.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

93

example.”63 A few years earlier, the same Voltaire was happy to observe a similar state of dispersion among the Jews as among the Parsis:64 “Benjamin [of Tudela] does not speak of Parsis, who are as dispersed as the Jewish nation, and in equally large numbers; he has only concerned himself with his compatriots. The result of all this research is that the Jews are everywhere, and that they dominate nowhere; while the Parsis are scattered in India, in Persia and in a part of Tartary.”65 This comparison with the Parsis and the Ghebers may also be found in the writings of Baron d’Holbach, for whom the dispersion of the Jews is explained by causes consubstantial with the Hebrew people: “To this I answer, it was easy to foretell the dispersion and destruction of a restless, turbulent, and rebellious people, continually torn and convulsed by intestine divisions. Besides, this people was often conquered and dispersed. The temple destroyed by Titus, had previously suffered the same fate from Nebuchadnezzar, who carried the captive tribes into Assyria, and spread them through his territories”.66 The very state of dispersion and its visibility is explained by the particular complexion of the Jews: The dispersion of the Jews is more perceptible than that of other conquered nations, because they have generally, after a certain time, become confounded with their conquerors; whereas the Jews refuse to intermingle, by domestic connections, with the nations where they reside, and have religiously maintained this distinction. It is not the same with the Parsis, of Persia and Indostan, as well as the Armenians, who dwell in Mahometan countries! The Jews remain dispersed, because they are unsocial, intolerant, and blindly attached to their superstitions.67

63

64 65 66

67

Voltaire, “Jews,” in Philosophical Dictionary, in The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biography, ed. John Morley (New York: E.R. DuMont, 1901) 314. In the same article, also see 266-267 and 295. The Dictionary was written between 1750 and 1764, which is the date of the first edition. Zoroastrians who migrated to India after the Muslim conquest of Persia are known as Parsis. Voltaire, La Bible enfin expliquée. Genève, 1776, 408 [Our translation, I. W]. Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Christianity Unveiled, Being, an Examination of the Principles and Effects of the Christian Religion. New York: Columbian Press, 1795, 84. The text was in fact the work of Nicolas Boulanger. Ibid., 84-85 Although less violently expressed, we find the same explanation from the pen of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Studies of Nature (1784). vol. i, London: Printed for J. Mawman et al., 1801, 346-347.

94

Chapter 2

The evident anti-Judaism which manifests itself in these texts if of course of a religious character, but it also rests on the fact that Jews very often form a distinct group, separate, held apart from the rest of the population, and who cannot claim to being completely included. However, by the end of the 18th century, the process of the emancipation of the Jews – that is, their inclusion within nations and thus the disappearance of this specificity, so often prominent – is set into motion. In France, under the influence of “regenerators”, such as Abbé Grégoire, partisans of the dejudaisation of the Jews,68 their emancipation was voted into law on 27 September 1791. In the German states, under the Napoleonic influence, similar decrees were enacted at the beginning of the 19th century. In Great Britain, after the repeal of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, Jews were again subject to statutes governing “non-conformists”, that is, non-Anglicans: they could not therefore be elected to the Commons. We would have to wait more than a century before an act of emancipation would be passed, in July 1858. At more or less the same time as Jews saw themselves being integrated into national societies, the term diaspora entered the vocabulary of these different languages.

The Entrance of the Term into the Vernacular Languages Once we realise that it was in the 18th century Germany that diaspora reappeared, after a long and almost total eclipse, and at the instigation of the Moravian Brethren, it is not surprising to find that it was also in German that its use first was officially sanctioned, and it was granted an entry in a dictionary. Absent from the large German dictionaries of the 18th century, such as those of the Brothers Grimm, Weigand or Sanders,69 in 1880 it found its place in the Dictionnaire encyclopédique Sachs-Villatte allemand-français, with the French meaning of scattering (“éparpillement”). The entry specifically indicates that it is a religious term for which the following examples are given: “Christen in der Diaspora” translates as “Christians living dispersed among the gentiles”, 68

69

Grégoire pleaded for a regeneration that, while it certainly implied the acceptance of Jews by Christians, also required them to renounce entire elements of their religion. Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, 14. On Grégoire and the Jews, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “Les Paradoxes de la régénération révolutionnaire: le cas de l’Abbé Grégoire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 321 (2000), 69-90. Daniel Sanders, Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1860; Friedrich Ludwig Karl Weigand, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Gieβen: Richter, 1881 (first edition 1873).

The Religious Space of Dispersion

95

while “Diasporagemeinde” (a term specific to the Moravian Church), translates as “disseminated parish of Christians (Protestants, etc.).”70 Twenty-five years later, we find an entry in Muret-Sanders encyclopaedic English-German and German-English dictionary where, in a manner very similar to the French equivalences, diaspora is translated by the English term dispersion, preceded by the note “particularly religious”.71 In English, the earliest dictionary entry occurs in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in its first edition published in fascicules and then in volumes between 1884 and 1928. Since the fascicule Deceit to Deject had been published on 1st January 1895, it seems likely that the publication of the fascicule containing the entry “Diaspora” also dates from that year, or possibly from 1896.72 The definition given only mentions the Jewish and Christian examples from the Old and New Testaments: “The Dispersion; i.e. (among the Hellenistic Jews) the whole body of Jews living dispersed among the Gentiles after the Captivity (John vii. 35); (among the early Jewish Christians) the body of Jewish Christians outside of Palestine (Jas. i. 1, 1 Pet. i. 1) […].” Four citations follow, ranging from 1876 to 1889 (see infra). It is not until 1913, in the section “Department of New Words”, that diaspora makes an appearance in the American Webster, with a definition that includes Moravian usage: Diaspora. Cf. Diaspore. Lit., “Dispersion.” – applied collectively: (a) To those Jews who, after the Exile, were scattered through the Old World, and afterwards to Jewish Christians living among heathen. Cf. James i. 1. (b) By extension, to Christians isolated from their own communion, as among the Moravians to those living, usually as missionaries, outside of the parent congregation.73 The coexistence of these three definitions – Jewish, Christian and Moravian Protestant – corresponds well with the picture which emerges, for example, from an inspection of the general encyclopaedias for the 19th and early

70

71

72 73

Sachs-Villatte enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch der franzözischen und deutschen Sprache, vol. iii, 2nd part (Deutsch-Franzözisch), Berlin-Schöneberg: Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1880, 371. Muret-Sanders enzyklopädisches English-Deutsches und Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch, 2nd part (Deutsch-Englisch), 1st half A-J, Berlin-Schöneberg: Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905, 474. Definition from the OED website : http://www.oed.com/about/milestones.html. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1913, 1978.

96

Chapter 2

20th centuries. Generally speaking, they have no entry for “diaspora”. Amongst those I have consulted, only one contains an entry for “dispersion”, devoted solely to the Jewish people, and the first line of which restores the Greek spelling of the word.74 When the term does appear, it is more frequently linked to the Moravian Brethren than to the Jews and reflects the official name of the Inner Mission of the Church of the Unity of the Brethren in Europe.75 This link between Jews and Moravians appears fairly frequently in encyclopaedias of religion. In 1860, the entry “Diaspora” in the Protestant Theological and Ecclesiastical Encyclopedia starts thus: “Diaspora, dispersion, the. Thus the Jews living beyond Judea are styled. (John 7: 35, &c,; see Jews) – In modern times the term has been applied to similar cases. The Moravian […] have their diaspora.”76 The text is more expansive in a later version of the same encyclopedia, having in the intervening period become the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: DIASPORA. (Gk. “a scattering, dispersion”): A term used in the New Testament and other literature about the beginning of the Christian era to denote the Jews living outside of Palestine after the captivity (see ISRAEL); also applied to the Christians as the spiritual Israel among those of other faiths (Jas. i. 1; I Pet. 1. 1; cf. Schürer, Geschichte, Eng. transl., II, ii. 31). The Moravians used the word to signify their friends living apart from them and in spiritual union with them, but not officially and constitutionally belonging to them. In modern German Usage the term signifies any people living scattered among those of a different faith, and more particularly a Protestant minority in a Roman Catholic region.77 If we look at the entries in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, we observe a predominance of Protestant references to di74 75

76 77

“Dispersion,” in A Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature Originally Edited by John Kitto, ed. William Lindsay Alexander (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1865-66), 680-682. See particularly Edmund de Schweinitz, “Moravian Church,” in Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia: a Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge; With Numerous Contributions from Writers of Distinguished Eminence in Every Department of Letters and Science in the United States and in Europe. New York: A.J. Johnson & Son, 1875-1878, 615-616. Johann Jakob Herzog ed., The Protestant Theological and Ecclesiastical Encyclopedia, vol. ii, Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1860, 101. The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: Embracing Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology and Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Biography from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, vol. iii, New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1908, 419.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

97

aspora, for example in the articles about the Lutheran societies of assistance to brothers living abroad,78 Gustav-Adolf-Verein79 or the United Brethren.80 The inclusion of non-religious uses of the term, and its potential application to national, non-religious populations previously not included in the definition, did not seem to occur in English until the early 1960s, in Webster: Diaspora. […] 1. usu cap a: the settling of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile b: the area outside Palestine settled by Jews (in Israel or in the Diaspora) c: the Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel d: the state of the Jews living in the Gentile world. 2: a dispersion (as of a people of common national origin or of common beliefs) : spread (as of a national culture) : EXILE, SCATTERING, MIGRATION. 3: the people of one country dispersed into other countries (certain sections of the Armenian scattered over the world could be attracted – Walter Kolarz). 4: the dispersion of Christians isolated from their own communion.81 This definition is crucial in several respects: beyond the fact that it has perfectly synthesised the different layers of the religious connotations of the word, it incorporates different levels of understanding: diaspora as a process, a space, a population and a state of being; it indicates that the extension of the semantic horizon of the word occurred prior to the early 1960s. The recognition of this extension of meaning became widespread during the 1970s.82 A popular version of Webster, published in 1975, includes under the term diaspora, “The dispersion of Jews to areas outside Palestine since the 6th century BC, Babylonian exile; the areas so settled; the Jewish people, collectively, now living outside Israel; […] a dispersion, scattering or decentralisation as of national or religious groups living outside their homeland but maintaining their cultural identity; the people of such a group.”83 78 79 80 81 82

83

Ibid., vol. v, 33-34, “Gotteskasten”. Ibid., vol. v, 100-101, “Gustav-Adolf-Verein”. Ibid., vol. x, 91-94, “Unitas Fratrum”. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (unabridged), vol. i, London: Bell & Sons Ltd, 1961, 625. To the contrary of what Gabriel Sheffer (for example) wrote, for whom recognition of this extension of usage of the word would not occur until the 1990s. Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 9. The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, Chicago, 1975, cited in Peter Lyon, “On Diasporas – the Jewish, the British and Some Others: A Note,” in The Diaspora of the British. London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1982, 72.

98

Chapter 2

German and English dictionaries are notable in that their definitions embrace the entire scope of the religious spectrum within which diaspora is deployed. This is not the case in France where Christian uses – be they the occurrences in the New Testament or the Moravian example – are very seldom indicated.84 The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française notes that diaspora is a recent borrowing into French, dating from 1908. From the Greek, “by extension (1949), it refers to the state of dispersion of an ethnic group with the same metonymic usage (the Armenian diaspora).”85 To the best of my knowledge, beyond the fact that the word appears in French before 1908 (see infra), the first dictionary to include an entry Diaspora is the Larousse du xxe siècle in 1929: “Hist. relig. Dispersion, throughout the world in Antiquity, Jews forced to leave their country by the vicissitudes of their history”.86 Moreover, not only does no French dictionary before the 1980s indicate the extension of usage of the term, but it is rare to find the term included at all. It is absent from the 1966 Dictionnaire Larousse du français contemporain,87 from Paul Robert’s six volume Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, from the 1972 edition of the Grand Larousse de la langue française and from Jean Girodet’s 1976 Dictionnaire de la langue française.88 At the end of the 1970s, it is manifestly not a word considered to be usual. In the 1970s it only appears in the 1975 Dictionnaire Quillet de la langue française: “Diaspora. Gr. word meaning dispersion and applied to the dispersion of the Jews in the world over the centuries.”89 Rare though it be, this definition, linking it to the destiny of the Jewish people, is considered to be the basis of the meaning of the word. We need to wait until 1980 for the Dictionnaire des mots contemporains to note the uses of the term “with respect to populations other than Jewish”: three citations drawn from the newspapers Le Monde and L’Express at the end of the 1960s mark the extension of usage since they use diaspora to refer to Czechs, Basques and Bretons.90 Subsequently these examples are taken up by other

84

85 86 87 88 89 90

For an exception, see a quote from Jacques Maritain referring to “a sort of Christian diaspora”, dating from 1939. Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’un nouveau chrétien. Paris: Aubier, 1939, 271, quoted in Le Trésor de la langue française, ed. Paul Imbs, vol. vii, Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1979, 165. Alain Rey ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1998 (first edition 1992), 1076-1077. Larousse du xxe siècle. Paris: Larousse, 1929. Jean Dubois et al., Dictionnaire du français contemporain. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Jean Girodet, Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Bordas, 1976. Dictionnnaire Quillet de la langue française en 4 volumes, vol. ii, Paris: Quillet, 1975, no page indicated. Pierre Gilbert ed. Dictionnaire des mots contemporains. Paris: Le Robert, 1980, 171.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

99

dictionaries. The 1985 nine-volume edition of Le Robert indicates that the extension of the word was attested in 1968 (date of the quote in Le Monde regarding the “Czech diaspora”) and gives as examples “the Czech, Arab, Basque and Chinese diasporas”.91 Interestingly, the cited examples of “diaspora” change. In 1994 the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française refers to “the Armenian, Greek [and] Chinese diasporas”.92 The German, English and French examples93 tend to demonstrate that diaspora starts to appear in dictionaries between the 1880s and the end of the 1920s, but no earlier. That is not to suggest that the adoption of the term by these languages also dates from the end of the 19th century. Indeed, if we are to believe the dictionaries, diaspora only becomes a common term at the very end of the 19th century. The first occurrence furnished by the OED dates from 1876.94 However, the texts that I have been able to consult demonstrate something else. Usage is older than that: diaspora is present in numerous 19th century works concerning religion, whether Judaism or Christianity. Even if we are unable to analyse the exact frequency of the term, the existence of electronic databases for books and journals that appeared in the 19th century95 allows us at least the opportunity of identifying these uses and to reveal the meaning of the word. The evidence does not allow us to suggest that the term was commonly used before the 19th century. The first occurrence that I have been able to identify is quite isolated and hardly significant since diaspora is in Greek characters. In 1754 it appeared in that form in the title of a pamphlet devoted to the question of the naturalisation of Jews in Great Britain by the British writer Edward Weston.96 It remains frequent, throughout the 19th century and in the writings of 91 92 93

94 95

96

Le Robert: dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. ii, Paris: Le Robert, 1985, 514. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, vol. i, Paris: Imprimerie nationale-Julliard, 1994, 1492. Searches of Italian and Spanish dictionaries were not particularly fruitful. The Grande Dizionario italiano dell’uso nevertheless recognises that diaspora had been in use since 1913, without further details. Tullio de Mauro ed., Grande Dizionario italiano dell’uso, vol. ii, Turin: UTET, 2000, 575. Rather significantly, it refers not to the Jews, but to the Moravian Brethren. I used the following databases for this analysis: Gallica, Google Books, Jstor, Periodicals on Line, as well as Making of America, a database hosted by the University of Michigan, http: //moa.umdl.umich.edu. By way of example, of the 8500 texts indexed by the Making of America database, only sixteen contained diaspora, all from 1850-1880. The two decades 1880-1900 returned no occurrences. Edward Weston, Diaspora. Some Reflections upon the Question Relating to the Naturalization of Jews, Considered as a Point of Religion. London: Jacob Robinson, 1754. I have not been able to see a copy of this pamphlet but the entry in the online catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxford notes that the title is in Greek.

100

Chapter 2

Biblical scholars, to find the word in the Greek script – or in a transcription intended to render the Greek word legible – in the context of a study, or of a section of a longer work, attempting to unveil the true meaning of the word in the New Testament. Historically it seems that it was the term diaspore that made its appearance first. Invented in 1801 by the French scholar René-Just Haüy in his Traité de minéralogie, it was used to describe a mineral of which “a rather remarkable property […] consists in that, if one exposes a small fragment to a candle flame, after a few seconds it sparkles, and dissipates in a multitude of particles which, thrown in every direction, produces a sort of scintillation in the air […] It is this property that I have designated by the name of diaspore.”97 Here the Greek word serves as a point of reference without any historical context. The appellation was rapidly adopted to designate a particular form of wallerite, which we find mentioned in numerous scientific works of the early 19th century.98 Once again it is to Germany that we need to turn for the first common and repeated uses of diaspora. In 1817, in an enquiry into the meaning of the syntagma “the Greeks” in the Gospel of John (John 7:35, see Chapter 1), Friedrich Leopold Stoberg wrote that “beyond its particular meaning, to the evangelists ‘Greeks’ also referred to the who were in the diaspora, that is, the Jews living in the dispersion in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Syria and in Egypt”.99 During the first half of the 19th century the term appears with several meanings. We find it, for example, in the First Epistle of Peter, in Greek script and transcribed into Latin characters, with the general meaning of Zerstreuung.100 Indeed, Zerstreuung is proposed as the German equivalent of diaspora, but the Greek term was also imported directly into German.101 Again, the word is used in its strictly Protestant sense, thus returning to the term used by Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren.102 97 98

99 100 101

102

René-Just Haüy, Traité de minéralogie, vol. iv, Paris: Louis, 1801, 358-359. See Pierre Jacotot, Élémens de physique expérimentale, de chimie et de minéralogie. Suivis d’un abrégé d’astronomie à l’usage des lycées. Paris: Crapart, 1804, 89; or Jons Jakob de Berzelius, Nouveau système de minéralogie. Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1819, 282-283. Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg, Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi, vol. v, Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1817, 314. For example Wilhelm Steiger, Der erste Brief Petri mit Berücksichtigung des ganzen biblischen Lehrbegriffs ausgelegt. Berlin: Ludwig Dehmigte, 1832, 35-36. Georg Benedikt Winer, Biblisches Realwörterbuch zum Handgebrauch für Studirende, Candidaten, Gymnasiallehrer und Prediger. Leipzig: C.H. Reclam, 1838 (first edition 1833), 839-843. Christian Ferdinand Schulze, Von der Entstehung und Einrichtung der evangelischen Brüdergemeinde. Leipzig: J.C. Reyher, 1822, 69; Ludwig Schaaf, Die evangelische Brüdergemeine, geschichtlich dargestellt. Leipzig: J.F. Gleditsch, 1825, 100.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

101

In other languages, such as French or English, diaspora often owes its implantation to translations, from the German, of articles or texts written by specialists of Christianity or Judaism. Four types of usage can be advanced. First, in a classical sense, diaspora refers to the Jews, of whom “scattered portions of the nation [were] known from early times under the title of diaspora in Greek.”103 From the beginning of the 1820s onwards, translations of German texts brought the word to a wider audience, generally to refer to Antiquity. Hence, for example, “the Diaspora, or body of the Jews dispersed in foreign countries, was divided at this time [in Antiquity] into Hellenists and Aramæan Jews”.104 In the late 19th century, and with the same meaning, it occurs repeatedly in French in Ernest Renan’s Histoire du peuple d’Israël, in volumes iv and v.105 However, contrary to what is sometimes stated,106 he is far from being the first to use it, as suggested by the fact that he specifies neither meaning nor etymology for the word. Fifty years earlier Johan Josef Ignaz von Doellinger’s book on the origins of Christianity had appeared in French translation, in which he mentions the “leaders of the Jewish Diaspora,”107 while Joseph Darras, in his Histoire générale de l’Église in 1855, specifies that “the socalled Jews of the Diaspora were those who had been dispersed in the Roman provinces.”108 Second case: diaspora appears as the original term translated as dispersion in the New Testament, in the Epistles of Peter and James and in the Gospel of John. The oldest occurrence, from the pen of George Bennett in 1800, belongs to this category: “so Peter and James employ the term dispersion (diaspora)

103

104

105

106 107 108

John Pentland Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought from the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest. London: Macmillan, 1896, 505. The Hebrew equivalent given by Mahaffy is niddach. For diaspora, he mentions Deut. 30 and Psalms CXLVII: 2. Gerhard Friedrich A. Strauss, Helon’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, vol. i, London: Mawman, 1824 (first German edition 1820), 22. See also T. R. Glover, The World of the New Testament. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1931, 103. Ernest Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. iv (1893), in Ernest Renan, Œuvres complètes, vol. vi, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1953, 1135. There are other occurrences, in the same volume (1140), as well as in the last volume of the work, vol. v, which appeared in 1893, of which Chapter III is titled “Diffusion des Juifs dans le monde entier. La ‘diaspora’”. Renan, Œuvres complètes, vol. vi, 189. The term dispersion nevertheless remains more usual. Diaspora appears p. 1399 and p. 1404, always in italics. See the entry “Diaspora,” by Michel Valière in Dictionnaire de l’altérité et des relations interculturelles, ed. Gilles Ferréol and Guy Jucquois (Paris: Armand Colin, 2003), 89-90. Johann Josef Ignaz von Doellinger, Origine du christianisme, vol. i, Paris: Debécourt et Hachette, 1842 (first German edition 1833-1835), 66 and 368, quote is from 368. Joseph Epiphane Darras, Histoire générale de l’Église depuis le commencement de l’ère chrétienne jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Librairie Louis Vivès, 1855, 30.

102

Chapter 2

as comprehending all Jews who were living in foreign countries”.109 The other occurrences are generally found in the works of German authors translated into English, such as Johann Peter Lange110 or the German specialist of the history of the Church, Philip Schaff. In 1851 the latter refers to the Epistle of Peter in his history of the apostolic church, about which, in a particularly lucid manner, he wrote that it substituted the Christian notion for the Jewish one: “Peter conceiving all believers as pilgrims to a heavenly home, an incorruptible inheritance, and transferring the notion of the Diaspora to the Christians, as the true spiritual Israel, dispersed in the unbelieving world”.111 Thirdly, and all the evidence suggests that this is the most common usage, Diaspora, with a capital letter, is inscribed within a Protestant universe, and in particular that of the Moravian Brethren. References to the “Dispersed Brothers and Sisters” are frequent in all three languages during the first half of the 19th century, and particularly in the publications of the Moravian Brethren. The Journal de l’Unité des Frères, a French language periodical whose publication began in 1836, is thick with abundant uses of diaspora and the first issues even provide explanations concerning the use of the word: “The synod is also greatly interested in the work of the Diaspora, that is to say, the friendly relations that exist between all the Protestant Churches, through the exertions of our brothers who are dispersed among them.112 The heading “Nouvelles de la Diaspora” (News from the Diaspora) was accompanied by a footnote: “The word diaspora has been borrowed from the Greek and means dispersion. By this term the Brethren mean to refer to all their friends dispersed in different countries who find themselves in a relationship with the Church of the Unity.”113 In subsequent issues, explanations of the term gradually disappear, no doubt because of a growing understanding of its meaning.114 Diaspora is

109

110

111 112 113 114

George Bennett, Olam Haneshamoth, or a View of the Intermediate State, as it Appears in the Records of the Old and New Testament; the Apocraphal [sic] Books; in Heathen Authors; and the Greek and Latin Fathers. London: W. J. and J. Richardsons, 1800, 389. Johann Peter Lange, The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ: A Complete Critical Examination of the Origin, Contents, and Connection of the Gospels, vol. vi, New York: T. & T. Clark, 1864, 346. Philip Schaff, History of the Apostolic Church: With a General Introduction to Church History. New York: T. & T. Clark, 1853 (first German edition 1851), 356. “Coup d’œil sur la situation de l’église de l’Unité des Frères en 1836, communiqué par la Direction de l’Unité,” Journal de l’Unité des Frères, vol. 3 (September 1837), 83. “Nouvelles de la Diaspora,” Journal de l’Unité des Frères, vol. 4 (November 1839), 369 note 1. However, in the case where a publication is destined for a different, wider audience, diaspora is accompanied by an explanation, as in this extract on Count Zinzendorf: “He also composed a number of new hymns for the use of the various choirs in their meetings, and

The Religious Space of Dispersion

103

used to speak of a localisation (“in diaspora”) or even, capitalised, the specifically Moravian institution (“the service of the Diaspora”).115 Likewise, referring to those Christians “awoken” by the Brethren and who remained in a “spiritual community” with them while nevertheless remaining members of their own churches, Leonard Woods wrote that “These are collectively called the Diaspora” before adding in parentheses the word in Greek script as well as the corresponding verse from the Epistle of Peter.116 If the collective aspects of the term are present in these mid-19th century texts, the same is true of the missionary dimension. In his history of the Church of the United Brethren, Edward Reichel included a chart of the operations of the “diaspora” in Europe up to 1847.117 Fourth, and quite unexpectedly, we note the appearance, in the 19th century, of non-religious and quasi-conceptual uses. In 1851, in an article discussing a Protestant Church close to the Moravian Brethren, W. Gwimmer uses the expression “German diaspora” to designate Germans living abroad.118 The following year, in a book on the relationship between anatomical science and graphic arts, Ludwig Choulant describes the continuous and triumphal progression of naturalism during the 15th century in surprising terms, since he believed that it spread from Florence, across Italy and then Western Europe “in the swift seasons of the diaspora of Florentine science”.119 The term’s entry into a language does not imply that it spread uniformly. Largely restricted to the religious context, it did not enter the lexicon of the growing antisemitism of the second half of the 19th century. In French antisemitic texts, we find dispersion, not diaspora. Furthermore, in this context,

115

116 117 118

119

one specially designed for the Diaspora, or the children of God scattered throughout the world.” Félix Bovet, The Banished Count; or, The Life of Nicholas Louis Zinzendorf (1860), London: James Nisbet and Co., 1865, 277. See particularly “Biographie du frère Jean-Adam Fuchs,” Journal de l’Unité des Frères, vol. 15 (February 1850), 52, as well as the second part of this biography in vol. 15 (April 1850), 111, 113, and 114. Leonard Woods, “United Brethren’s Society,” Literary and Theological Review, no. 12 (December 1836), 602. Edward H. Reichel, Historical Sketch of the Church and Missions of the United Brethren, Commonly Called Moravians, Bethlehem (PA): J. and W. Held, 1848, 97-98. W. Gwimmer, “Deutschland und die innere Mission,” Germania. Die Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der deutschen Nation, vol. i, Leipzig: Avenarius & Mendelssohn, 1851, 431. Ludwig Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration in Its Relation to Anatomic Science and the Graphic Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920 (first German edition 1852), 389.

104

Chapter 2

the meaning of dispersion is not the same: it changed in the process of biologisation and racialisation of discourses about human beings – the birth of a distinction between Aryans and Semites.120 The dispersed character of the Jewish people was certainly present in the catalogue of accusations levelled against them, but it was no longer the sign of divine punishment, it no longer constituted the trace of a singular history. It was now the characteristic of a specific nature, of a unique complexion: dispersion was a racial given, an echo of the incapacity to have a homeland, and for this very reason the mark of a parasitic and dangerous race, for the Jews then turned out to be members of a race that had no need of a land. The collected representations hostile to Jews at the end of the 19th century thus constituted what Marc Angenot called, based on the French example, the “deterritorialisation paradigm”,121 an intertextual paradigm at the heart of which are logically assembled a certain number of notions which only find meaning in relation to the antagonistic paradigm of territorialisation: dislocation compared to stability, non-entity and entity, the invisible and the visible, the Wandering Jew and the rooted Frenchman,122 cosmopolitanism and patriotism, degeneracy and purity, uprooting and settlement… The consequence of this new context within which racial hostility replaced religious hostility and within which instances of hatred towards Jews increased in several countries – particularly in Russia in the form of the pogroms which started in 1881 and culminated with that of Kishinev in 1903 and only ended with the Bolshevik Revolution – is that new terms appeared. Amongst them, there are multiple derivations of the German word semitisch, which dates from the late 18th century – such as the French sémite (1845), sémiticisme (1848) and sémitisme (1857), the English semitism (1848) and anti-Semitism (1881), the German antisemitisch (1860) and Antisemitismus (1879),123 but also

120 121 122

123

On this process of racialization, see Pierre-André Taguieff, La Judéophobie des Modernes: des Lumières au Jihad mondial. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008, 179-212. Marc Angenot, Ce que l’on dit des Juifs en 1889: antisémitisme et discours social. Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1989, 159-177. On the non-disappearance of the figure of the Wandering Jew in the last decade of the 19th century, see Pierre Birnbaum, “De l’errance à l’État: la figure du Juif errant, de part et d’autre du Rhin,” in Pierre Birnbaum, Sur la corde raide: parcours juifs entre exil et citoyenneté. Paris: Flammarion, 2002, 83-95. The word Antisemitismus first appeared in German in a pamphlet by the publicist Wilhelm Marr entitled Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanenthum. Von nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of Judaism over Germanism, considered from a non-denominational standpoint). Bern: Rudolph Costenoble, 1879. The adjective

The Religious Space of Dispersion

105

words such as Judaeophobia (1882)124 or again, zionistisch and Zionismus which were first used in 1890 in German by the Austrian – and Jewish – publicist Nathan Birnbaum in the columns of his periodical, Selbst-Emanzipation.125 Indeed, at the very moment when diaspora was appearing in western languages, and when antisemitism was developing somewhat dramatically, the Jewish world was undergoing an important intellectual transformation. In response to growing racialisation, but also to the rise of national aspirations, there arose in the Jewish world a double movement whose separate lines would meet at the end of the 19th century: the birth of the concept of Jewish history centered not on Judaism but on the history of the Jewish people, of the Jewish race even, and the formation of a political movement – Zionism – orientated towards the foundation of a state for the Jewish people. In both contexts, the Jewish dispersion is seen as an obstacle to the existence of the people and as a state of affairs destined to disappear. This radical questioning of the galuth led to a great debate on the future of the Jews in which several contradictory definitions of the meaning of diaspora confronted one another.

The Future of a Utopia: Zionism and the “Diaspora” Until the beginning of the 19th century the history of the Jews had been considered from the perspective of religious history, including by Protestant authors of the 18th and 19th centuries. Noting that the “Jewish nation” had persisted since the destruction of the Second Temple, Jacques Basnage saw an

124

125

antisemitisch was used in 1860 by the Austrian – and Jewish – orientalist Moritz Steinschneider. The term appeared under the pen of the Jewish doctor Leo Pinsker in his pamphlet entitled Auto-Emancipation. Published in 1882 in Germany, it has been reproduced in Arthur Herzberg ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997 (first edition 1959), 181-198. Although a single occurrence does not set a precedent, it would appear to be possible to date with some precision the first written appearance of these two terms. Birnbaum used the term zionistisch for the first time 1st April 1890 and Zionismus on 16 May 1890. Still, zionistisch was a term that had already been in use since the early 1880s within the Kadimah group of students founded in 1882, by Nathan Birnbaum amongst others. See Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990 (first German edition 1980), 284 and 669. An early study of the emergence of Zionism had been published by the same author in 1959: Alex Bein, “The Origin of the Term and Concept ‘Zionism’,” Herzl Yearbook, vol. ii, New York: Herzl Press, 1959, 1-27.

106

Chapter 2

analogy between the destiny of the Jews and that of the Protestants, in the context of a theological history guided by divine intervention.126 Conversely, for Heinrich Ewald, the end of the revolt of Bar-Kokhba marked the end of history for the Jewish people.127 The beginnings of Jewish historiography are themselves marked by the abandon of theological logic in favour of a focus on the history of the Israelites, and not that of the Jews. They were not considered as scattered members of a collective entity founded on a common religion, but as individuals sharing a belief in a common God. The Wissenschaft des Judentums, the science of Judaism, born in Germany in the decade 1810-1820, defended this idea.128 For its principal proponents, Isaac Markus Jost, Leopold Zunz and Abraham Geiger, all three partisans of the reformed Judaism, it was necessary not only to return to Judaism its dignity, through an expunging of its superstitions and its restoration to its universalist dimension, but to encourage the assimilation of Jews to national societies of their country of residence. In contrast, Heinrich Graetz, an eminent member of the second generation of the Wissenschaft, and the author of a monumental history of the history of the Jews in eleven volumes published between 1853 et 1876, rejected the assimilationist perspective to propose instead a unitary history of a people whose origins were located in the land of Canaan, not in the biblical text.129 The Jewish people, the “Jewish tribe”, was a living organism, a veritable body, whose soul was Jewish law and whose unity was preserved beyond time and space. Graetz’s text, which became more and more nationalist as he approached the modern period, played a fundamental role in the organic and biological definition of the Jews as a people, a nation, even as a race;130 in 1862 we read in the work of Moses Hess, influenced as much by Graetz’s history as by the vogue 126

127

128 129 130

Jacques Basnage, The History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to The Present Time, Containing TheirAntiquitie, the Religion, Their Rites, the Dispersions of the Ten Tribes in the East, and the Persecutions This Nation Has Suffered in the West, Being a Supplement and Continuation of the History of Josephus. London, 1708 (first edition in French: Rotterdam, 1706-1707). On Basnage and his history of the Jews, see Jonathan M. Elukin, “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no. 4 (1992), 603-630. Heinrich Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1843-1859. On Ewald, see Francis Schmidt, La Pensée du Temple. De Jérusalem à Qoumrân: identité et lien social dans le judaïsme ancien. Paris: Seuil, 1994, 43-47. On the Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, La Science du judaïsme. Paris: PUF, 1995. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig: Leiner, 1853-1876. See Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 78-81.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

107

of racial theories in the 1850s: “The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its integrity, in spite of the continual change of its climatic environment, and the Jewish type has conserved its purity through the centuries.”131. Living in a German state, Hess felt particularly strongly the racial prejudice directed towards Jews. Still, far from believing that this prejudice was without foundation, he felt that the Jewish race was threatened as much by this eternal foreignness within the nations in which they lived as by the assimilationist position which deluded itself regarding the ability of the Jews to win the respect of the societies amongst which they lived: the future of the Jewish nation founded upon race could only exist on the soil of its homeland. If Hess’s text did not find fertile ground in Jewish circles,132 the idea that the Jews constituted a race, the insistence upon their racial characteristics, on Jewish blood and on the impossibility of denying their origins nevertheless spread during the 1880s: the response to discourses on the abnormality of the Jewish presence was precisely the normalisation of their racial existence and a foregrounding of their right to defend themselves and obtain a land for their survival. We find traces of this among the first Zionists, such as Nathan Birnbaum, for whom biology explains the character of peoples, or Max Nordau, for whom it is blood that creates the link between the members of the Jewish people. If the national, if not racial idea was present among Jewish intellectuals from the middle of the 19th century, it was the pogroms of 1881 that hastened the search for solutions, theoretical as much as practical, to the persecutions suffered by the Jews. It was from this date that Moshe Lev Lilienblum, until then more of a partisan of assimilation, began to espouse the nationalist cause. Likewise Leo Pinsker, who turned his back on assimilation to promote, in Auto-Emancipation, published in 1882, the right of Jews to defend themselves as a people: “If the nationalistic endeavours of the various peoples who have risen before our eyes bore their own justification, can it still be questioned whether similar aspirations on the part of the Jews would not be justified? […] As men, we, too, would fain live and be a nation as the others.”133 131 132

133

Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism (1862), New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1918, 59. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. New York: Schocken Books, 2003 (first edition 1972), 44. Herzl himself only read Rome and Jerusalem after having written A Jewish State. He wrote in his journal: “Everything we have attempted to do is already in this book”. Cited in Laqueur, History of Zionism, 51. Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: A Call to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), London: R. Searl, 1947, 22-23 and 26.

108

Chapter 2

In 1881 a number of Jewish associations were established in Russia – without any apparent coordination – whose gaze was turned towards Palestine, either with the aim of raising funds for the rare Jewish communities found there, or to organise emigration to Palestine. Among these latter is an association that was known by the name of Bilu, founded in Kharkov in 1881, and whose manifesto proclaimed: “If we want to live, here are the obligations that history has forced upon us: the creation of a place which, through growth, may become the centre of Jewish civilisation; the creation of a basis upon which Jewish nationalism may be born and may develop, a territory without which no people are worthy of the name. This territory can be no other than Eretz Yisrael134. » Describing themselves as Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), these militants for a return met in Kattowitz in 1884 to found a more coordinated movement, Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), led by Leo Pinsker and Moshe Lev Lilienblum. But Zionism as a political movement only emerged in the last years of the 19th century. Sent to Paris as a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl attended the cashiering of Captain Dreyfus in January 1895. Thirteen months later, in February 1896, the text that gave birth to Zionism, The Jewish State, appeared in Vienna; in it we find an expression of the idea of the unity and homogeneity of the Jewish people – “We are a people – one people”135 –, a description of the menaces that it faced and against which it had to protect itself, as well as a programme for the foundation of a state to welcome the Jews: We might perhaps be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a period of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace. For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again […] It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more. Thus, whether we like it or not, we are now, and shall henceforth remain, a historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all. 134

135

Bilu is an acronym formed form the first letters of a Biblical verse (Isaiah 2:5): Beit Ya’akov lekhu ve-nelkha (House of Jacob, rise and go). The emigration to Palestine of fifteen boys and one girl, members of the Bilu movement, in July 1882 marked the beginning of the first aliyah. The manifesto is cited in Renée Neher-Bernheim, Histoire juive de la Révolution à l’État d’Israël: faits et documents. Paris: Seuil, 2002, 640-641, quotation 640. Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question (1896), New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1917 (3rd edition), 2.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

109

We are one people – our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and a model State.136 Zionism is indeed above all a defensive movement aimed at protecting Jews threatened by growing antisemitism in Russia and in Europe, west and east. This theme is particularly prominent in the speeches at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel in August 1897, as indeed is the corollary, in Zionism, of the foundation of a state: the negation of the diaspora. Until the second half of the 19th century support for a return to the land among the Jewish people is very limited. Two centuries earlier, in 1665, the heralding of the coming of the Messiah in the guise of a man named Sabbatai Zevi, whose was born the 9 Av, the day of the mourning of the two Temples, enflamed Jewish communities for more than a year, until Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666.137 The news spread rapidly, not only through Zevi’s travels, and those of his “prophet” Nathan of Gaza, but also thanks to the role of printed matter in the circulation of news between the different Jewish communities of the time.138 One of the consequences of his false messianity was a reinforcement of the rabbinical eschatological vision, to the detriment of the messianic vision: the insistence upon waiting and on the necessity of not “hastening the end”. Zionism represented a fundamental rupture in this respect. For Zionists, the return to Zion depended on human action and not on Divine will. It thus manifested the “return to history”, and the return to the times of the Gentiles: the migration to the land of Israel and the creation of a national state represented at once – and this is the paradox of Zionism – a normalisation of the Jewish people, now able to claim, as a people, a national existence, and the consecration of their link with the Hebrew people of the Bible. This dual dimension, resolutely modern but resting on the elaboration of a link of continuity with the Biblical narrative and ancient history, had already been expressed in Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem: “Among the nations believed to be dead and which, when they become conscious of their historic mission, will struggle for their national 136 137 138

Ibid., 10. The most detailed study is certainly that of Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 (first Israeli edition 1957). On these points, see Jacob Barnai, “La Diffusion du mouvement sabbatéen au xviie-xviiie siècle,” in La Société juive à travers l’histoire, vol. iv, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 309-328.

110

Chapter 2

rights, is also Israel – the nation which for two thousand years has defied the storms of time, and in spite of having been tossed by the currents of history to every part of the globe, has always cast yearning glances toward Jerusalem and is still directing its gaze thither.”139 The notion of “shlilath ha-galuth” or of “shlilath ha-golah”, the negation of exile in the religious sense of the term, and generally translated by “negation of the diaspora”, is absolutely central to Zionism, for it represents the very objective of the movement: to put an end to a deleterious and deadly historical dispersion to grant Jews a political centre in the form of a state. This idea is present in Herzl. In 1896 he wrote about Jews that “once fixed in their own land, it will no longer be possible for them to scatter all over the world. The diaspora cannot take place again, unless the civilisation of the whole earth is destroyed; and such a consummation could be feared by none but foolish men.”140 It is nevertheless in the writings and speeches of Max Nordau, one of Herzl’s closest collaborators, that we find one of the most accomplished visions of this distinction between life in galuth and life in the land of one’s ancestors. Author in 1892 of an essay entitled Degeneration in which he stigmatises the decadence of modern society,141 he, too, applies this analytical framework to the Jews, opposing “Muscular Judaism” (Muskeljudentum) to the Judaism of the ghetto, particularly in a speech that he gave at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898: according to Nordau, it would be necessary to recreate a lost “Muscular Judaism”.142 The Jew should muscle up and lift his head through gymnastics, open-air exercise and work, particularly work in the fields. This vision of redemption through bodily exertion and the ardour of physical labour is found in a more emblematic manner in the valorisation of the return to nature such as it appears in the writings of Aaron David Gordon, agronomist by profession and ardent defender of the principle of the kibbutz, who wrote in 1911: “we are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil; there is no ground beneath our feet […] We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either. […] It 139 140 141

142

Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, 36. Herzl, A Jewish State, 42. Max Nordau, Degeneration. London: Heinemann, 1895 (first German edition 1892). This text was republished by University of Nebraska Press in 1993. On Nordau, see Jacqueline Bechtel, Dominique Bourel and Jacques Le Rider eds., Max Nordau 1849-1923. Paris: Cerf, 1996. On the construction of the modern masculine stereotype since the 18th century, see George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. On Nordau’s role in the constitution of the “New Jew”, see p. 152-153. Voir Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. London: Routledge, 2007, 58.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

111

is not our fault that we have reached this point, but that is the fact: that is what exile is like.”143 Degeneration produced by a life in diaspora must give way to a regeneration of the Jewish people through physical labour. Life, real and full, is found in the Holy Land and must be realised through labour in the fields,144 while “galutic” life is incomplete and diminished. If the Jewish people have not disappeared, Gordon continued, it is because they have been mummified. The opposition between true life and mummified life intersects that between the virility of the new Jewish man, the man of the kibbutz, and the femininity of the Jew of galuth. This denunciation of the diaspora goes even further. As Simon Rawidowicz wrote in 1943, “the accusation ‘galutist’ is one of the mightiest stones that different Zionist groups and certain sectors of the yishuv can throw at one another”.145 All which is bad, all which is felt as being counter to Israel, is therefore the trace of the mentality of galuth. If the term does not have exactly the same signification or the same importance for everyone, it nevertheless represents something which the great majority of Zionists oppose, despite their differences. The emergence of Zionism and the “negation of the diaspora” corresponds to the birth, at the heart of the Jewish world, of a new regime of historicity,146 of a new conception of Jewish time, thenceforth orientated by a “horizon of expectation”, to use Reinhart Koselleck’s expression.147 The project of the founding of a state manifests the desire to return to history but also to ensure the normality of the Jewish people – or the Jewish race – with respect to other peoples. Quite logically, this new temporality unleashed the anger of the religious, for whom galuth was inscribed within the acceptance of a divine will.148 For the rabbis, Zionism represented a transgression of tradition, 143

144 145 146

147 148

Aaron David Gordon, “Méat Hitbonénout” (“On Closer inspection”), cited in Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 (first French edition 1996), 48. Here we find the opposition between agriculture and industry such as it appears in French antisemitic texts at the end of the 19th century. Rawidowicz, “On the Concept of Galut,” 104. See Hartog (François), Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 (first French edition 2003), as well as Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia eds., Historicités (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). See particularly Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’: two historical categories,” in Koselleck, Futures Past, 255-275. On the history of religions reactions against Zionism, see Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. London:, Zed Books, 2006, as well as Laqueur, A History of Zionism, 421-427.

112

Chapter 2

for it valorised a historical return to Earth, not an eschatological one: a return driven by men and not decided by God. Thus the rabbi of Koidanov, Aaron Perlow, declared that “whoever gives money to Hovevei Zion forfeits his reward in the world to come,”149 while the rabbi of Galicia, Joseph Samuel Bloch, compared Zionism to the movement of the “false prophet” Sabbatai Zevi, leading Judaism in a false direction.150 But the orthodoxes also accused Zionists of “semantic usurpation”,151 condemning their secularised and nationalistic appropriation of religious terms. Indeed, for the Zionists, the foundation of a state was the path to redemption, thus diverting the religious scope of a fundamental notion associated with the end of time and with the end of galuth to confer upon it a meaning, sacred, certainly, but not religious, linked to the conquest of the soil of the Holy Land. Likewise, other terms or expressions, such as bitahon – trust in God –, keren kayemeth – “permanent funds”, that is, the accumulation of merit in this life – or kibbutz galuyoth – gathering of the exiles – were secularised by Zionism, which gave them new meanings, respectively “military security”, “Jewish National Fund” – the funding organisation of the Zionist movement – and “immigration”.152 Orthodox Jews were not the only ones to oppose Zionism. The debates and the groups invoking a different view of the future of the Jewish people includes two other visions, for which a physical return to the land is not helpful, and the existence of a diaspora possible, even desirable. These two visions, which share neither the Orthodox nor the Zionist conceptions, are also notable for their opposition to one another manifested as an astonishing but amicable polemic between two great Jewish intellectual personalities of the end of the 19th century: Simon Dubnow and Ahad Ha’am. If somewhat forgotten today, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) was an important figure of Jewish thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author of a great number of essays on the history of the Jewish people, including a monumental History of the Jews published in several volumes between 1901 and 1905, he sketches, in opposition to the solutions then being proposed to the Jews, an original vision that is sometimes presented under the name of autonomism. In the intense debates on the future of the Jews, Dubnow opposed to the assimilationists as much as he did the Zionists. Despite the 149 150 151 152

This declaration dates from 1884, when Hoveveï Tsion acquired two secular leaders. Cited in Rabkin, A Threat from Within, 149. Cited in ibid., 30. The expression comes from Denis Charbit in Qu’est-ce que le sionisme? Paris: Albin Michel, 2007, 231. See particularly Rabkin, A Threat from Within, 57.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

113

pogroms and the rise of antisemitism he defended the assimilation of the Jews, in Russia as elsewhere, and reproached the classic assimilationists of only supporting “the civic rights of the Jews as members of the nations among whom they live and consider Jews to be linked with each other solely by a common religion,” thereby forgetting that the Jews belong to the Jewish nation. Conversely, he also attacks the political Zionists, who see the Jews as an “abnormal” nation and “maintain that in order to preserve the Jewish nation for the future it must be transformed into a normal nation by acquiring a particular piece of territory with independent political rule.”153 Furthermore, as a staunch opponent of a religious definition of the Jewish people, Dubnow defends a definition at once cultural and political of the dispersed Jewish nation. If his refusal of political Zionism is clear and unequivocal,154 the more complex exposition of his vision emerges from his intellectual battle against another branch of Zionism, cultural Zionism, of which the founding figure is Asher Ginzberg (1858-1927), better known under the pen name which he adopted in 1889, Ahad Ha’am.155 If their 1909 articles, which best summarised their opposition, bear titles divested of ambiguity – Ahad Ha’am’s “Negation of the diaspora”, Simon Dubnow’s “The Affirmation of the diaspora” – their respective positions in reflexions on the future of the Jews were closer than might be expected. Zionist though he may have been, Ahad Ha’am shared Dubnow’s concerns regarding the dangers facing the Jewish people, whether antisemitism or disappearance through assimilation, but he did not believe the solution consisted in forming a state. According to Ahad Ha’am, Jewish strength and unity would reside not in the occupation of a territory, but in the existence of a nation needing a spiritual centre in order to be able to exist in a dispersed form. He was indeed a Zionist, for he believed in the necessity of founding this spiritual centre in Palestine; but after 1897 he no longer believed that the formation of a state would resolve the problem of the unity of the people for “the

153

154 155

Simon Dubnow, “Sixth letter: reality and fantasy in Zionism,” (1898), in Simon Dubnow, Nationalism And History: Essays On Old And New Judaism. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society Of America, 1958, 155. He drew closer to it in the 1920s, feeling that conditions, particularly in Russia, were not favourable to the establishment of cultural and political autonomy. On the career and thinking of Ahad Ha’am, see Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, and David Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad HaAm, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1996, 217-291.

114

Chapter 2

greater part of the Jewish people would remain dispersed in foreign lands”.156 For Ahad Ha’am, the nation already existed but had been spoiled by dispersion: it needed to rejuvenate itself, less by the intermediary of religion than by that of Jewish culture. It was this latter that would be reborn in Palestine, in the context of a “Jewish colony”157 which would, with time, become “the centre of the nation.”158 This vision presents the particularity of being opposed to religious orthodoxy by according culture a preeminent place in the maintenance of unity; to political Zionism by privileging the role of the nation over that of the state; to assimilation by emphasising the national existence of the Jews; and to the maintenance of Jews in a single diaspora in the name of the necessity of regenerating a national culture threatened by impoverishment. It was on this latter point that he disagreed with Dubnow. Dubnow also considered that it was necessary and urgent to find a solution to the situation of the Jews. Having survived the greatest catastrophe possible, that is, the disappearance of their land and the dispersion of the people, Jews had proven their capacity to attain the highest degree of collective identity, that of a spiritual nation whose bonds would not, however, be Orthodox Judaism, but what Dubnow called an “evolutionary Judaism”, a Judaism capable, from generation to generation, of adapting to the new conditions of Jewish cultural life. Only the establishment of autonomous communitarian institutions had permitted this adaptation in the past; it was the only solution that would further the maintenance of the Jewish nation among the other nations, that is, in diaspora. But the emancipation of the European Jews liberated individual Jews while denationalising them, that is, by assimilating them, thereby creating the conditions for a crisis in Judaism, understood not as the Jewish religion as such, but as Jewish existence. Dubnow attempted to respond to this crisis with autonomism, an autonomism that would not be a simple return to earlier community institutions, but rather a new synthesis permitting both collective cultural autonomy and individual political participation in the state. In 1898, he assessed the existence of the Jewish nation in its non-territorial form. Within this framework, the Jewish man can – and must – be simultaneously a citizen of the country in which he lives and a faithful member of the Jewish nation: 156 157

158

Ahad Ha’am, “The Jewish State and Jewish Problem,” (1897), in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. Hans Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), 72. On Ahad Ha’am and “national culture”, see Alain Dieckhoff, “La Question de la culture nationale dans le sionisme,” in Le Temps de l’État: mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Birnbaum, 203-222, ed. Bertrand Badie and Yves Déloye (Paris: Fayard, 2007). Ha’am, “The Jewish State and Jewish Problem,” 78.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

115

The Jews as inhabitants of Europe since ancient times demand equal political and civic rights; as members of a historic nationality united by a common culture, they demand as much autonomy as is appropriate for any nationality that strives to develop freely. If these two demands are satisfied, the patriotism of the Jews in all the different countries will be beyond doubt. The Jew who lives a life of peace and quiet in his fatherland, can well be an English, French or German patriot and can, at the same time, be a true and devoted son of the Jewish nationality, which, though dispersed, is held together by national ties.159 The two men engaged in a dialogue through their interposed texts. Dubnow insisted on the profound ambiguity of cultural Zionism, which defended the idea of a centre without entirely wishing for the disappearance of the diaspora.160 Ahad Ha’am responded that the diaspora corresponded to the “position of a lamb among wolves”161 and that “our spiritual isolation is ended, because we have no longer any defence against the ocean of foreign culture, which threatens to obliterate our national characteristics and traditions, and thus gradually put an end to our existence as a people.162 The only way to preserve the existence of the diaspora was of course through the establishment of a spiritual centre. In the same year Dubnow recognised that “the autonomists and the spiritual Zionists thus stand together against those who completely negate the diaspora,” before adding “Both of us affirm the Diaspora”.163 According to Dubnow, in their desire to preserve both the diaspora and the centre, while refusing both the autonomist and the political Zionist options, the cultural Zionists were trapped in a “vicious circle”:164 either the cultural centre reinforced the diaspora and the latter benefited from this energy to struggle more effectively in favour of rights to autonomy, or the cultural centre would not manage to create this dynamism and the diaspora would disappear.

159 160

161 162 163 164

Simon Dubnow, “Second Letter: The Jews as a Spiritual (Cultural-Historical) Nationality in the midst of Political Nations,” (1898), in Dubnow, Nationalism And History, 109. Simon Dubnow, “Seven Letter: The Jewish Nationality Now and in the Future,” in Dubnow, Nationalism and History, notably 175-181. Originally written in 1899, Dubnow revised this letter in 1907. Ahad Ha’am, “The Negation of Diaspora,” (1909), in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg, Garden City, Doubleday, 1959, 270. Ibid. Simon Dubnow, “Eighth Letter: The Affirmation of the Diaspora,” (1909), in Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 185. Ibid., 188.

116

Chapter 2

In barely three decades, debates on the future of the Jews split over the question of the perennity of the existence of the diaspora. There were four camps. Two of them – the religious and the political Zionists – favoured a return but were deeply divided on its temporality; the two others affirmed the importance of the diaspora but disagreed on the necessity of the existence of a cultural centre in the Holy Land. Of these four visions, the only one that came to fruition was that of the Zionists. The realisation of the Zionist project implied the accomplishment of four operations: the choice of a land, the migration of the Jews to that land, the fabrication of a new Jewish man and finally the construction of a historical continuity between the Jews of Antiquity and contemporary Jews. The choice of a land for the Jews was not as simple a question as it may have seemed. If the precursors of the Zionist movement, the Biluites – the member of the Bilu group – or the Hovevei Zion imagined for the Jews no other homeland than Palestine, this was not so for Leo Pinsker, the first president of the organisation, when he wrote Auto-Emancipation in 1882. Neither was it so for Herzl who, in A Jewish State, also envisaged, although as a second choice, Argentina as an option, in case the Palestinian option proved impossible.165 Indeed, until 1904, the question of the location of Jewish territorialisation was the subject of no little debate, pitting the “Zionists of Zion”,166 for whom no other territory than Palestine was feasible, and the territorialist Zionists, for whom the urgency was to relived the distress of the Jews and find them a land in which to gather. The First Zionist Congress of Basel in 1897 produced a clear first response, for the final declaration affirmed that “the object of Zionism is to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.”167 In light of this resolution, Herzl engaged numerous diplomatic steps, notably with the Ottoman Empire. However, in 1902, after the setback of these negotiations, Herzl turned to Great Britain and its Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who proposed that he reflect upon a possible Jewish settlement in Cyprus, in the Sinai or in Uganda. After an initial refusal, the pogrom of Kishinev, launched in April 1903 and followed by several others, as well as the publication in the same year of the first version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,168 encouraged Herzl to seize the Ugandan option, and it was proposed 165 166 167 168

Herzl, A Jewish State, 12-13. The expression is Denis Charbit’s, in Qu’est-ce que le sionisme?, 45. Richard J.H. Gottheil, Zionism, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1914, 114. On the history of this forgery, see Pierre-André Taguieff, Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion: faux et usages d’un faux. Paris: Berg-international/Fayard, 2004 (first edition 1992).

The Religious Space of Dispersion

117

during the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903.169 Despite strong opposition, it was accepted by the majority of delegates (295 votes against 178), but never realised, undoubtedly due to Herzl’s death in July 1904. At the following Congress, in July 1905, the Ugandan project was rejected: Zion became the unique goal of the Zionist movement. It was then that aliyah, migration to the Holy Land, gathered pace. It was not an entirely new phenomenon. Between 1740 and 1880, migratory movements had swollen the Jewish colony in Palestine, initially from the Ottoman Empire, then from Poland and Lithuania.170 The number of Jews in Palestine rose from some 3000 in 1740 to 26,000 at the beginning of the 1880s.171 However, it was the migrations that began with the Biluites in 1882 and continued with Hibbat Zion, then Zionism – which in 1929 began to manage the movement through the Jewish Agency –, which transformed the demographic profile of Palestine. These migrations comprised five phases – five aliyoth – between 1882 and 1948, each phase involving a growing number of immigrants: 35 000 between 1882 and 1903, 40 000 between 1904 and 1914, 40 000 between 1919 and 1923, 82 000 between 1924 and 1929 and 250 000 between 1929 and 1940. The years 1945-1948 saw the arrival of a significant number of illegal immigrants, some 80,000. In so doing, Zionism sought not only to occupy the land and to try and invert the demographic profile to its advantage, but also to impose a fait accompli on the British colonisers who, in the words of Lord Balfour in 1917, had committed to the establishment of a “Jewish home” in Palestine. The significance of this migration was not solely political: it equally bore the imprint of a fundamentally religious dimension. The very term aliyah is not neutral, far from it. Derived from the Hebrew verb alo, meaning “to climb, to rise”, the word designates a movement from below to above, a movement which, as with its opposite, the movement from above to below, encompasses the entire symbolism and history of the Jews. The descent is the initial movement of God towards man in order that man then rise up in accomplishing His

169

170

171

On the Uganda project, see Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, vol. i, 1799-1922: L’Invention de la Terre sainte, Paris: Fayard, 1999, 189-194; and Charbit, Qu’est-ce que le sionisme?, 42-44. These were religious migrations, of Hasidic Jews and Perushim. The latter were disciples of Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-1797), better known as Vilna Gaon, and whose teachings were opposed to Hasidism. Given the negative natural growth rate of the Jewish population of Palestine at the time, Yosef Salmon believed that this increase could only have been due to immigration. See Yosef Salmon, “Les émigrations traditionnelles vers la Palestine (1740-1880),” in Trigano, La Société juive à travers l’histoire, vol. iv, 123-138.

118

Chapter 2

will. The ascent is thus an ascent towards Jerusalem, towards Israel, towards God. The opposite, galuth is descent – yerridah –, that is, a distancing from the conditions that would permit the re-establishment of unity, the presence of God, by the conjunction of the people, of the land of Israel and of Jerusalem. The yerridah towards galuth is a descent towards loss, towards absence and towards the night, while aliyah is an ascent towards redemption, gueulah, towards plenitude, towards presence and towards the light.172 It is difficult to grasp the extent of the Zionist project without understanding to what extent it is imbued with a sacred dimension. If it does not explicitly take a religious form, it nevertheless rests on biblical history and on fundamental concepts permeated with religiosity, such as that of “redemption”, which we find in Herzl and Nordau173 as well as among the proponents of the Labour movement such as Aaron David Gordon or David Ben-Gurion. This insistence must be understood as a re-elaboration that firmly opposes the passivity and the waiting advocated by the rabbis. Redemption is here achieved by action, by immigration and by the regeneration of the Jews through contact with the ancestral land. It is for this reason that the Zionists need to rely on the Bible: understood as a historical book – the truth of which archaeologists strive to demonstrate in excavating its traces buried in the ground –, it is the guarantor of the legitimacy of the Jewish people to “return” to “their” land in order to “revive” there a state which had disappeared at the time of the Maccabees. As Herzl wrote: “And what glory awaits those who fight unselfishly for the cause! […] The Maccabeans will rise again.”174 A secular movement nevertheless shaped by religiosity, by the sacred, and by biblical references, Zionism attracted the support of religious figures who, taking a position opposed to orthodoxy, affirmed the necessity of denying the diaspora.175 As early as 1862, the same year that Hess published Rome and Jerusalem, a pamphlet appeared signed by a rabbi from Poznán, Hirsch Kalischer. Called Derishat Tsion (Seeking Zion), it proposed a new vision, at once religious and non-orthodox, of the redemption of Israel, the result of human action: “My dear reader! Cast aside the conventional view that the Messiah will suddenly sound a blast on the great trumpet and cause all the inhabitants of the earth to tremble. On the 172 173

174 175

See Safran, Israël et ses racines, 140-141. See particularly Max Nordau, “Le Sionisme, les puissances et la question juive,” (1900), reproduced partly in Denis Charbit, Sionismes: textes fondamentaux, Paris: Albin MichelMenorah, 1998, 103-105. Herzl, A Jewish State, 44. See particularly Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “The Negation of Galut in Religious Zionism,” Modern Judaism, no. 12 (1992), 129-155.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

119

contrary, the Redemption will begin by awakening support among the philanthropists and by gaining the consent of the nations to the gathering of some of the scattered of Israel into the Holy Land.”176 Twenty-five years later, Mordecai Eliasberg, a Russian rabbi close to Hovevei Zion, distinguished between a miraculous path and a natural path – the result of the agreement of other peoples – towards redemption, while nevertheless continuing to associate the latter with Divine will.177 These rabbis, to cite but two of them, thus found a way of breaking with the Three Oaths without abandoning the religious significance of the return and its divine foundations. If the return was possible, it was precisely because it accorded with the will of God. Nevertheless, the greatest support for Zionism did not come from a rabbi of the diaspora, but from a highly placed religious dignitary in Palestine, Abraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, better know as Rav Kook. Born in Russia in 1865, he had emigrated in 1904 and was named Ashkenazi Great Rabbi of Jerusalem in 1923. Not only did his teachings wholly reconcile immigration to Palestine with respect for the Torah, they also considered that only the land of Israel would render the Jew complete: “It is impossible for a Jew to be faithful to his thoughts and visions outside of the Land in the same way that he is faithful in the Land of Israel. Manifestations of holiness, of whatever level, tend to be pure in the Land, and outside the Land, mixed with dross.”178 Contrary to the traditional eschatological rabbinic vision, Kook believed that the “true life” was in the Holy Land and that life in diaspora was necessarily limited, amputated. The Judaism of the diaspora “would really have no actual basis – only vision of the heart, founded on pictures of hope and rare reflection, of the future ad the past.” The constraints of this existence require a return to Zion, “planting it in the source of life, real life, of essential holiness, which may be found only in the Land of Israel.”179 This incompleteness of the diaspora justified not only the valorisation of the land and settlement in Palestine but also support for the Zionist ideology of the creation of a state considered as a first step, a promise of redemption to come and, furthermore, the very sign of the coming redemption. Support for the Zionist project did not make a political Zionist of Kook, for he did not 176 177 178 179

Hirsch Kalischer, Derishat Tsion (1862), partially reproduced in Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, 111. Mordecaï Eliasberg, “La Voie miraculeuse et la voie naturelle,” (1887), partially reproduced in Charbit, Sionismes, 95-96. Abraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, “Erets Yisrael (The Land of Israel),” (1920) in Orot (Lights), Northvale NJ, Jason Aronson Inc., 1993, 91. Abraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, “Orot Ha-Tehiyah (Lights of Renascence),” in Ibid., 165.

120

Chapter 2

accept the secular dimension of a Zionist vision detached from the religious and particularly focused on establishing a refuge for the Jews.180 Even so, Zionism is not limited to this humanitarian dimension; it also encompasses a certain form of religiosity, biblical if not theological, sometimes where least expected, as in the field of historiography. The Zionist vision of Jewish history rests on the development of a national historiography, established in the history department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. Known as the Jerusalem School, this interpretation of Jewish history followed in the tradition of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, privileging an approach placed under the sign of historical objectivity and demystification,181 but distinguished from the latter by the rejection of any assimilation of Jews to the societies within which they found themselves, and by an emphasis on the necessity of founding a state for the Jews.182 This school of thought included historians such as Yitzhak Baer, head of the history department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1930 to 1959,183 and Ben Zion Dinur, who trained in the rabbinical tradition, migrated to Palestine in 1921, and was a colleague of Baer as well as being a very active member of Ben-Gurion’s party, the Mapai.184 For these two historians, the writing of history was not just a profession: it was a true vocation linked to a national mission. Not only did they claim, as good Zionists, the “negation of the diaspora”, but their historical writings insisted

180 181

182

183

184

On Kook, see Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation, 190-202. This historiography was aimed at contesting a religious approach to Jewish history, reluctant to accept assimilation. On this fundamental tension, see David Myers, “History as Ideology: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur, Zionist Historian ‘Par Excellence’,” Modern Judaism, vol. 8, no. 2 (May 1988), 167-193. On the Jerusalem School, and its heterogeneity, see David Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Efraïm Shmueli, “The Jerusalem School of Jewish History (A Critical Evaluation),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, no. 53 (1986), 147-178; and Yitzhak Conforti, “Alternative Voices in Zionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2005), 1-12. On Baer, in addition to Yosef Yerushalmi’s long preface in Yitzhak Baer, Galout: l’imaginaire de l’exil dans le judaïsme. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2000 (first German edition 1936), 9-56, see Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 77-87; and Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past, 109-128. On Ben Zion Dinur, see Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: the Case of Ben Zion Dinur,” History and Memory, vol. 7, no. 1 (1995), 1-24.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

121

upon the unity of the Jewish people and on the abnormality of galuth whose part in Jewish history they tried to reduce. For Ben-Zion Dinur, galuth began not with the destruction of the Second Temple, but several centuries later, and the exile only lasted eleven centuries, from the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 7th century of the Christian era to the beginning of Sabbatai Zevi’s movement in the 17th century, and particularly the migration to Palestine of the rabbi Yehuda He-Hasid in 1700, which, according to him, marked the beginnings of a more realistic messianism.185 If, for his part, Baer did not transform the periodisation of the exile, he performed a veritable “judgement”186 of this latter, whose ideology and whose deviations he firmly condemned in a work published in Germany in 1936 and entitled, somewhat significantly, Galut: For the Galut is the abolition of God’s order. God gave to every nation its place, and to the Jews he gave Palestine. The Galut means that the Jews have left their natural place. But everything that leaves its natural place loses thereby its natural support until it returns. The dispersion of Israel among the nations is unnatural. Since the Jews manifest a national unity, even in a higher sense than the other nations, it is necessary that they return to a state of actual unity. Nor is it in accord with the order of nature that one nation should be enslaved by the others, for God made each nation for itself. Thus, by natural law, the Galut cannot last forever.187 As this extract eloquently demonstrates, the refusal of eschatological expectation does not render the negation of galuth secular. Whether or not these actors adopt a religious viewpoint, the negation of exile is at the heart of the Zionist project and of its principal attributes. Since Zionism did not end with the proclamation of the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948, it is logical that the attacks against galuth also persisted, against Jews who did not wish to emigrate to Israel.

The Path from Galuth to Tfutsoth In the context of the foundation of the new state the deep imbrication of the sacred and the political in Zionism – an imbrication paradoxical only in 185 186 187

Ben Zion Dinur, Yisrael ba-golah (Israël en exil), Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1926. See Myers, “History and Ideology,” 177-181. The term is Yerushalmi’s: “Préface,” in Baer, Galout, 29. Baer, Galut, 200.

122

Chapter 2

appearance – gave birth to what the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin called a “national-colonial theology”,188 which found its concretisation in four principal spheres: the symbolic, the legal, the historiographical and the national memory, as well as in the relationships with Jews living outside Israel. The principal symbols of the state bear the traces of the biblical religion. The Declaration of Independence, proclaimed on 14 May 1948 by David BenGurion, contains numerous examples. In addition to specifying that “The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles (aliyah),” it refers particularly to the biblical past of the Jewish people: “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom”.189 “Restore” here is not anodyne. It underlines that this is a “restoration” of the state and not the founding of one. Galuth had yielded its place to gueulah, exile to redemption: “We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realisation of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.” The declaration ends with a final religious reference, placing confidence in the Almighty, Tsur Yisrael, the “rock of Israel”, an expression used in Judaism to invoke God. This pervasiveness of the religious is underpinned by the symbols which decorate the Israeli flags: that of the state bears the Star of David, while the presidential standard bears the menorah, the seven-armed candlestick that represents the Temple. The colours of the flags, blue and white, are also those of the talith, the Jewish prayer shawl. The two laws that symbolically marked the creation of the state as a reconstitution, a return to the land, were, firstly, the Law of Return, adopted by the Knesset 5 July 1950 and which affirms the right of every Jew, recognised as such, to immigrate freely to Israel as an oleh (the oleh is one who practices aliyah, plural olim); and the nationality law, adopted 1 April 1952, which automatically accords Israeli citizenship to olim. For the first time, the return to the land signified entry to a territory for the Jews. The transition from a Zionist historiography – that of the Jerusalem School – to an official Israeli history was achieved in the 1950s through the nomination of Ben Zion Dinur to the position of Minister of Education and Culture and the proclamation of a continuity between the last Jewish state,

188 189

Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 88-102. The English text of the Declaration of Independence is available on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: www.mfa.gov.il.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

123

that of the Maccabees, and the State of Israel. Not only was the period of galuth considered as a parenthesis between the Hasmonean period and the (re)foundation of the state, but Zionists were presented as the new Maccabees, heroes struggling for the rehabilitation of the Hebrew people as well as for the purification of the Temple, as witnessed by the Zionist appropriation – pre-1948 – of the festival of Hannukah, which commemorated the revolt of the Maccabees. This biblical symbolism is particularly evident in Ben-Gurion’s speeches.190 If political appeals to the revolt of the Maccabees and the festival of Hannukah were more common before 1948, they are still invoked in certain circles.191 The celebration of the resistance of the citadel of Masada and the revolt of Bar-Kokhba perdure, however, even post-1948: essential reference points in the construction of a virile history in absolute opposition to galuth, whose feebleness and femininity are constantly recalled.192 Neglected, forgotten even, by Jewish history, Masada found a place in Zionist symbolism in the 1930s and rapidly assumed the status of a national myth on the basis of archaeological digs undertaken on the Masada site at the beginning of the 1960s.193 Archaeology became a state science empowered with the task of justifying the Jewish presence in the Holy Land and the constitution of the state, “the royal road to Jewish-Israeli identity, one in which the claim is repeatedly made that in the present-day land of Israel the Bible is materially realised”.194 The land of Israel was also scoured for evidence of the revolt of Bar-Kokhba, symbol of the resistance of the Jewish people against the foreign oppressor, symbol of non-resignation.195 In both of these cases, revolt and action were celebrated, that it to say, the very opposite of the attitude considered to be emblematic of galuth.

190

191

192 193

194 195

Georges Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable: Israël, le sionisme et la destruction des Juifs d’Europe. Paris: Seuil, 2008, 44-45. See also Ilan Greilsammer, La Nouvelle histoire d’Israël: essai sur une identité nationale. Paris: Gallimard, 1998, 162. By the Gadna military battalion, for example. Voir Nachman Ben Yehouda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Myth-Making in Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, 160-162. Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 78. On the construction of the myth of Masada, and in addition to Ben Yehouda’s aforementioned book, see Yael Zerubavel, “The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors,” Representations, no. 45 (Winter 1994), 72-100. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003, 46. Greilsammer, La Nouvelle Histoire d’Israël, 77-82.

124

Chapter 2

The doctrine that constituted the very weapon of rabbinical Judaism and underpinned its patience in eschatological temporality was thus transformed into a fundamental incapacity to act in the context of a historical temporality. If Ben Zion Dinur had already declared in 1943, before a group of youths, that “opposition to the diaspora […] for me, has these days been transformed into hatred. I hate it as one hates an infirmity of which one is ashamed and for the treatment of which one is ready to give one’s life,” this vision was further reinforced by the millions of dead in the Shoah.196 The belated integration of this latter into the Israeli national narrative constituted a further stage in the virilisation of Israel and the negation of galuth, for, through the image of Jews deported and executed almost without resistance, it came to symbolise the impotence and the passivity of the exile mentality. Only the rebel of the ghettos, who rose up to resist and die, conformed to the image of the new man of Israel, only he was a “Hebrew”, the others were only Jews.197 The Shoah was present within Israeli society after 1948 but in an ambiguous manner, for it contradicted national mythology.198 Two episodes linked to the memory of the extermination played a fundamental role in the inclusion of the Shoah in the national narrative as well as the reworking of the relationship between Israel and the diaspora: the Eichmann trial in 1961 and the Six Days’ War in 1967. The insistence of the Zionists on the negation of galuth and on the regathering of the exiles on the land of Israel led, post-1948, to the development of tensions, often serious, between the leaders of the state and the representatives of Jewish associations or groups who did not consider aliyah and the acquisition of Israeli nationality to be an obligation. After the creation of the State of Israel, differences arose between the prime minister David Ben-Gurion and American and British representatives of the Zionist movement who, in the summer of 1948, not wishing to see the World Zionist Organization disappear, called for the establishment of the principle of a strict separation between the State of Israel and the Jewish diaspora, each of the two entities undertaking not to interfere in the affairs of the other.199 Likewise, Jacob Blaustein, invited to Israel by Ben-Gurion in April 1949 in his capacity as president of the American Jewish Committee, attempted to negotiate a verbal agreement on the non196 197 198

199

Cited in Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable, 69. Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable, 66-69, but also 75-79 and 122. Although the Yad Vashem was established in 1946, and the memorial of the same name was mandated by law on 18 May 1953, until the early 1960s its remit was not specifically the Shoah but antisemitism more generally. Ariel L. Feldestein, Ben-Gurion, Zionism, and American Jewry, 1948-1963. London-New York: Routledge, 2006, 15.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

125

interference of Israel in the affairs of the diaspora, and vice versa. Blaustein finally obtained a public declaration from Ben-Gurion on this point during a second visit to Israel in August 1950.200 Despite this “exchange of views” – the official name for this agreement –, Ben-Gurion remained aligned with a typically Zionist position towards the defence of the principle of immigration to Israel and the regathering of the exiles, rejecting in the same opprobrium all those, Zionists and non-Zionists alike, who did not wish to “rise up” towards Israel. Thus, during the 23rd Zionist Congress held in Jerusalem in August 1952, he declared that “at present there is no barrier or occasion for a Zionist not to emigrate to Israel.”201 Even less ambiguously, he wrote in one of the letters that he exchanged with Simon Rawidowicz in the mid-1950s on the theme of the definition of Israel, that “the Jew in the golah, even a Jew like yourself who lives an entirely Jewish life, is not able to be a complete Jew, and no Jewish community in the golah is able to live a complete Jewish life. Only in the State of Israel is a full Jewish life possible.”202 Ten years after independence, during the World Ideological Conference, which brought together Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, he declared that “the galut in which Jews lived, in which they still live, is in my eyes pitiful, poor, wretched, tenuous – and nothing to be proud of. On the contrary: we must negate it absolutely.”203 But it was the speech that he gave on 28 December 1960 to the World Zionist Congress that finally unleashed the anger of American Jews. If the general tone was fairly moderate, insisting on a necessary interdependency between Israel and the diaspora, certain passages were explicit in describing American Jews as being on the edge of extinction through assimilation. Considering that “the elementary duty of those who inscribe the name of Zion on their banner” is to maintain “A personal bond with Israel – if only by a visit from time to time”,204 he also renewed his criticisms of the diaspora by proclaim-

200 201 202

203 204

Ibid., 23-25, as well as Charles S. Liebman, Pressure without Sanctions: the Influence of World Jewry on Israeli Policy. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977, 120-125. Cited in Alan R. Taylor, “Zionism and Jewish History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1972), 49. Second letter from Ben-Gourion to Rawidowicz, 24 November 1954, reproduced in “Excerpts from a Correspondence between David Ben-Gurion and Simon Rawidowicz on the State of Israël, the Diaspora, and the Unity of the Jewish People,” in Rawidowicz, State of Israel, Diaspora and Jewish Continuity, 197. Quoted in Eisen, Galut, 119. On the World Ideological Conference, see Feldestein, BenGurion, Zionism, and American Jewry, 106-111. David Ben Gourion, “Text of Ben-Gurion’s Address Before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem,” New York Times, 8 January 1961, 53.

126

Chapter 2

ing the alliance of religion and politics through the question of redemption. The “Messianic vision of redemption for the Jewish people and all mankind […] is the soul of prophetic Jewry” and that vision depended “on the redemption of Israel, which will assume two forms: the ingathering of the exiles and the creation of a model nation, as Isaiah, the son of Amotz, prophesied”.205 Most logically, the emphasis placed on redemption disqualified all Jews outside Israel who refused to return to the Land: “A large part of the [religious] laws cannot be observed in the Diaspora, and since the day when the Jewish state was established and the gates of Israel were flung open to every Jew who wanted to come, every religious Jew has daily violated the precepts of Judaism and the Torah of Israel by remaining in the Diaspora. Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God, the sages said.”206 These statements unleashed the fury of numerous Jews, religious or not, Zionists and non-Zionists alike.207 Orthodox Jews criticised Ben-Gurion for his lack of understanding of theology while those who defended the possibility of being both American and Jewish, like the leaders of the American Council for Judaism, accused him of imposing an ethnic and national definition of Jewishness. Proponents of the three visions of the diaspora identified above found themselves thus engaged in a polemic over the possibility of developing a new vision, within which the diaspora would be linked to the existence of a state. Two factors were to play a role in the reconciliation of these different groups over the acceptance of the existence of Israel and that of the diaspora. Firstly, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, following his kidnapping by the Israeli secret service in 1960, revived the past and granted the surviving witnesses of the Shoah a place that they had not hitherto enjoyed. Invited to testify at the bar, they could finally not only have their say, but explain their impotence in the face of Nazi barbarity. It was not the mentality of galuth that allowed for a comprehension of their passiveness, but the horror that they had been forced to face.208 Subsequently, while the repercussions of the Eichmann trial brought forth among American Jews, and particularly among the intellectuals, a growing and unprecedented awareness of

205 206 207 208

Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. See particularly Oscar Handlin, Milton Himmelfarb, and Charles E. Shulman, “Ben Gurion Against the Diaspora: Three Comments,” Commentary, vol. 31, no. 3 (1961), 193-202. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, 127-145

The Religious Space of Dispersion

127

the importance of the Shoah,209 the threats uttered by Arab leaders against the Israeli people during the spring of 1967 led them to believe that the Shoah could reoccur, in the Middle East, certainly, but why not also in the United States.210 It was this fear, as much as the victory, considered “miraculous”, of Israel in the Six Days’ War, that led to an awareness of the emergence of a new type of relationship between Israel and Jews around the world. Post-1967, there emerged, a singular relationship of recognition between these two entities that bestowed a new meaning upon the word diaspora and which was manifested in Hebrew through the adoption of the term tfutsoth in place of galuth. That way a form of link was established with a particular state that did not imply the possession of the nationality of the said state: a type of belonging that was not a legally constituted and which went beyond the exclusively juridical link which tied the expatriate – the citizen of a state living on the territory of another – to a state that recognised him as such and whose legitimacy he himself recognised. Between 1948 and 1967, Jews who did not wish to practice aliyah were stigmatised by galuth; they were incomplete Jews, still exiled from their land. After 1967 their support for Israel, moral and financial, granted them a place in the body of a nation that could no longer be exclusively understood as national, for it thenceforth included them among its number as full members, even though non-citizens. Proof may be seen in the fact that after the wars of 1967 and 1973, Masada ceased to served as the symbol of the anti-galuth, and became a general symbol of the resistance of Israel, both in diaspora and following the creation of the state.211 Although this development might not necessarily have marked the disappearance of the structuring schema distinguished between the Jew of Israel and that of the diaspora – as clearly demonstrated by the 2008 comic strip “Israel Man and Diaspora Boy” by the cartoonist Eli Valley (see Illustrations 1 and 2 infra, p. 128 and 129) – the birth of this tfutsoth was, to cite Gabriel Sheffer, the birth of a “historical state-linked diaspora.”212

209

210 211 212

This growing consciousness even incited some, who since the late 1950s had used the theme of the holocaust in the defence of Black American civil rights, to disengage from this struggle to subsequently only speak of the holocaust with reference to the Jews. On this, see Michael E. Staub, “‘Negroes are not Jews’: Race, Holocaust Consciousness, and the Rise of Jewish Neoconservatism,” Radical History Review, no. 75 (1999), 3-27. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 147-153. See also Eisen, Galut, 120. Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable, 259-260. Gabriel Sheffer, “A Nation and its Diaspora: A Re-Examination of Israeli-Jewish Diaspora Relations,” Diaspora, vol. 11, no. 3 (2002), 334.

128

Chapter 2

Illustration 1

213

Israel Man and Diaspora Boy.213

Illustration 1 and 2 are two cartoons created by Eli Valley, published 13 May 2008 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. They’re available on the website jewcy.com: http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_man_and_diaspora_boy. The author would like to thank Eli Valley for authorization to reproduce these cartoons.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

Illustration 2

129

Israel Man and Diaspora Boy: Anatomy of our Heroes.

Was it coincidence that, in 1967, as the layers of meaning of diaspora became ever more complex in languages other than Hebrew, as the possibility of a non-juridical, non-state link between Israel and non-Israeli Jews materialised, as, by mutual recognition of their respective interdependence and fragility, a trans-national space within which the concept of a nation transcending the strict framework of nationality invented itself, the world’s attention turned, more than ever, towards another people without a state, whose dispersion was produced and whose survival was menaced by the very state that put an end to galuth: the Palestinians? Jewish territorialisation, through

130

Chapter 2

the creation of the State of Israel, had resulted in another dispersal that functioned as an echo of a time past: the weakness of the dispersed Palestinian people only rendered more apparent the strength of the newly grounded Israeli people, and only confirmed, a posteriori, the vacuity and the inanity of galuth. The fear of a new disappearance of the people of Israel due to war led to the reformulation of the link between the land and the people in which geographical distance from the land did not imply a lesser or diminished belonging to the nation. It was in this solution to the unresolved question of galuth, as well as in the waging of war and the responses to Israeli military endeavours, that we see a historical condition of possibility of the transition to the conceptual state of “diaspora”. In 1967, the materialisation of a Jewish tfutsoth rendered possible, by analogy with the ancient history of the Jewish people but also in opposition to its recent history, the transformation of “Palestinian refugees” into a “Palestinian diaspora”. This transformation of relations, accompanied by a degree of normalisation of the relationship between Israel and Jews not living in Israel seemed to find its visible expression in the opening of Beit Hatfutsoth, literally the “House of Dispersions” but always translated into English as “Museum of the Diaspora”,214 in Tel Aviv, 15 May 1978. The idea was launched in 1959 by Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress. For Arnold Eisen, the opening of the museum was the sign of a new consensus between Jews on the relationship between the state and the diaspora, Zionists admitting the existence of Jews living outside Israel and the latter increasing their supporting for the existence of the state. The choice of tfutsoth, “a more neutral term, ostensibly free of opprobrium,”215 is indicative of the tensions that persisted around the term galuth. As Steve Uran wrote, the museum was the “the first non-Israeli project undertaken in Israel that was not entirely devoted to Eretz Yisrael”.216 Regardless, the guided tour that he proposes in his text demonstrates most eloquently the ambiguities of the perspective adopted; for example, the refusal to confront the phenomenon of the assimilation of the Jews. Equally symptomatic is the statement by Ely Ben Gal, the museum’s historian, that “the museum is Zionist and Israelo-centric,” adding that “we wanted to show the return to Eretz Yisrael as a closed circle and the fulfilment of Jew-

214 215 216

Tfutsoth is the plural of tfutsah, one of the Hebrew words meaning dispersion. Eisen, Galut, 147. Steve Uran, “Les Paradoxes de l’identité juive: réflexions sur le musée Beth Hatefutsoth,” Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 61 (1980), 53. I thank Steve Uran, who was kind enough to obtain a copy of this article for me.

The Religious Space of Dispersion

131

ish history.”217 And, indeed, a visit to Beit Hatefutsoth ends with an exhibition on the creation of the state and a presentation of immigration to Israel. Not a single exhibit concerns Jews outside Israel post-1947. If the name tfutsoth was chosen for the name of the museum, its subject is certainly galuth. The visit finishes with the end of galuth and the centrality of Israel: it offers no perspectives on the dilemmas of contemporary Jewish identity. Inaugurated on the thirtieth anniversary of independence, Beit Hatefutsoth may well stand for the official inscription of the diaspora in the memory of Israel, but it may also be understood as one last reminder from the state that its final objective is the regathering of the exiles, and that, post-independence, there is no longer any justification for the maintenance of the diaspora. It would appear that, as long ago as the end of the 1970s, the museum’s designers had envisaged extending the permanent exhibition to include themes of modern antisemitism and contemporary life in the diaspora,218 but it was only very recently, in January 2009, that the first concrete signs of this change appeared, with the project of a new permanent exhibition permitting, in particular, according to the designers, an exploration of “the complex continuities of the Jewish people in the contemporary communities of the Jewish Diaspora”.219 Can we then speak of a “Jewish diaspora” in the singular? It would seem so, when the emphasis is placed on the origins or on the actual links maintained by Jews, considered as a group, with the State of Israel. If instead we employ the plural, does there exist, has there existed “Jewish diasporas”? Without a doubt, when we consider the need to distinguish among the histories and the experiences of certain “components” of the Jewish people, such as the “Ashkenazi diaspora” or the “Sepharadi diaspora”, but also when we wish to refer to a presence in a given country: the Jewish diaspora in France, or in the United States. The noun appears then to be at once singular and plural. However, these distinctions are not the most important. What is singular, is to realise that the same word encompasses not only two Hebrew terms – galuth and tfutsoth – but that it also embraces four meanings fundamentally different from one another. We can organise these meanings according to two 217 218 219

Quoted in ibid., 56. Beth Hatefutsoth. The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Museum Catalog, Tel-Aviv, 2003, 7. Extracts of the “conceptual project” drawn up by professors Israel Bartal and Gideon Shimoni for the new permanent exhibition can be found on the Beith Hatefutsoth website (http://www.bh.org.il). The website currently (as of April 2016) indicates that the “New Core Exhibition” with a section devoted to “Our Story today” will open in 2018.

132

Chapter 2

axes: the first separates conceptions founded on exile from those founded on community. In the first case, galuth calls for a return which must occur in time; in the second, galuth is separated from the question of a return and calls for the constitution of links in space. The second axis separates the visions requiring the existence of a state and those which have no such need. Four forms of diaspora thus emerge, whose emergence is not simultaneous but historically stratified. The eschatological horizon, already present in the Torah as well as in the Jewish apocalypses, is reinforced following the destruction of the Second Temple and the defeat of Bar Kokhba, to be symbolically incarnated in the Three Oaths. The historical horizon only truly emerges with the foundation of Zionism during the second half of the 19th century: the complex signification of galuth in its religious aspect (malediction) is simplified to henceforth only assume a negative and mortal connotation. If the Zionists reject galuth, they nevertheless grant it a new signification, associating it with loss of identity and seeing in the constitution of a state the end of galuth in both senses of the term: the objective of galuth is the regathering on the territory of a state, simultaneously marking the end of exile. The historical horizon resembles the eschatological horizon through the emphasis on exile and return, but distinguishes itself from the latter by the importance that it accords to the question of the state and human intervention in the return to the land. The transnational link, the cultural horizon, of which the most striking incarnation is found in Simon Dubnow, makes its appearance at the same time as Zionism, for it largely constitutes a reaction to the emergence of Zionism. Founding Jewish identity on unity in dispersion and on the possible existence of a dispersed community without the requirement of a return thus doubly opposes the return of the Jews in history to the historical horizon of Zionism, through the insistence upon the community and by the refusal of a political centre, while this latter element – and only this one – draws it closer to the eschatological horizon. Finally, the centre-peripheral link, the only form in which galuth would disappear to the advantage of tfutsoth, potentially came into existence with the creation of the State of Israel, but it only truly took shape towards the second half of the 1960s, in the context of a normalisation of relations between Israel and Jews living beyond its borders. The appearance of a new form, a new signification, is not sufficient to make the others disappear. All are continually maintained and renewed, but they also remain in competition with one another. The vision of a galuth that will only cease with the end of time remains very much alive, as does a certain form of diasporism. This latter tendency is represented by the Cercle GastonCrémieux, created in 1967, which claims to be “without attachment to any par-

The Religious Space of Dispersion

133

Breakdown of the signification of diaspora according to the relationship with origins in the context of Jewish history Exile

Community

Eschatological horizon

Trans-state link

Historical and political horizon

Centre-periphery link

ticular synagogue or to Zionism,”220 and in the writings of George Steiner, for whom the biblical text is the true homeland and there is “[no] better lodging for the Jew”.221 The recent work of the Boyarin brothers, and of Alex Weingrod and André Lévy has insisted on the impossibility of limiting the Jewish historical experience of the diaspora to that of the relationship between centre and periphery, according to the metaphor of the “solar system”.222 Similarly, the Zionist vision of galuth maintains both debate and conflict with the new notion of tfutsoth, which sees the presence of Jews outside Israel not as an aberration but as a particular form of link. More or less religious, more or less political, more or less cultural, more or less Jewish, diaspora has found itself progressively imbued with a range of interpretations which have released the term from the religious space within which it had been confined for twenty-five centuries.

220 221 222

The website of the Cercle is to be found here: http://www.cercle-gaston-cremieux.org. George Steiner, “Our homeland, the text,” in Steiner, No Passion Spent, 327. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993), 693-725; Alex Weingrod and André Lévy, “Paradoxes of Homecoming: the Jews and Their Diasporas,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 4 (Fall 2006), 691-716.

Chapter 3

Towards a Secular Concept Men take the words they find in use amongst their neighbours; and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for, use them confidently, without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning; whereby, besides the ease of it, they obtain this advantage, that as in such discourses they seldom are in the right, so they are as seldom to be convinced that they are in the wrong; it being all one to go about to draw those men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode.1 For more than 2000 years, diaspora had been confined to a fairly restricted semantic space, limited either to the Judaeo-Christian religious domain or to the history, both ancient and more recent, of the Jewish people. This semantic stability in the longue durée was transformed rather significantly in the 20th century, during the course of which the uses of diaspora and its power of attraction saw substantial growth, and the semantic field of the term expanded quite markedly. The principal characteristic of this evolution in usage was the appearance of diaspora in different disciplinary lexicons, and particularly in the human and social sciences. We might suppose that this expansion beyond the religious domain occurred following a logical sequence of stages, inscribed with a general linear chronology, from an identifiable point of departure in time, or from a particular author, or from a situation which would have served as a trigger for a possible dispersion of diaspora. I long clung to this possibility, hoping to discover the fossil, the missing link, which would permit me to unravel the thread and trace the origin. Clearly, this was a vain hope. As my research progressed the picture that emerged was comprised of an assembly of zones, generally clearly delimited, separated by blank spaces, which could certainly be filled in by collective research or through the use of more powerful research tools. This aim for completeness presupposed a rather naïve epistemology, on the one hand a dream of an complete Library of Babel, on the other, a vision thoroughly impregnated with the history of the usage of words that excluded as unrecordable – and thus negligible – an entire corpus of human history, of orality, 1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; with Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding (1690), vol. ii, London: Printed for Allen & West, 1795, 229.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_006

Towards a Secular Concept

135

the transmission by the spoken word: of discussion and of conversation. But if the written text is the only form of communication that can be substantially preserved, if the history of the uses of a word that the study of written texts permits us to trace is surely largely faithful to its real history, it nevertheless remains a lacunary history: the relationships between occurrences are often unattested, at the very best only suggested as plausible. This constraint on the task undertaken here is never so clearly visible as in the first section of this chapter. The examples presented are aimed less at providing a precise description of the situation at the beginning of the 20th century than at attempting to demonstrate, by a sort of swarming, that an evolution is already underway. None of these occurrences is proof whatsoever: their contribution proves a minima that something is already occurring, slow though it be.

A Space of Sparse Usage Before the 20th century, uses of diaspora that could be considered to be transfer of the term beyond the Judaeo-Christian religious context are scarce. Following its entrance, untranslated, into the European languages, it rapidly passed into scientific terminology as a term that, either by analogy with Jewish or Protestant history, or through a desire to enhance the idea of dispersion by giving it a more academic flavour, allows us to identify a situation or a particular process. It can subsequently be qualified by an adjective indicating a people or a given entity, thus taking the shape of a category that is admittedly somewhat loose, or to evoke a certain type of migration, not necessarily from a negative perspective. At the beginning of the 1970s, we start find diaspora in this guise, increasingly frequently, at once evocative and vague, often without any prior usage being cited to justify the use of this term rather than any other. The oldest occurrences that I have been able to find date from the first decade of the 20th century. They rapidly revealed two different tendencies: one which saw in diaspora a dispersion, taken in the general sense of a diffusion from a point of origin, or more specifically of migration; and one which saw in diaspora a group, generally a minority within a larger population from which it differentiated itself by one or more criteria. Sometimes this double appearance is present in the work of a single author, such as that of the British archaeologist John Myres, who in 1907 referred to “the diaspora of antiques”, dispersed in the great museums,2 but also used 2 John L. Myres, “The Making of Modern Archaeology,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 10, no. 47 (February 1907), 318.

136

Chapter 3

the term for the ancient migration of the Pelasgians, the original inhabitants of Greece.3 Later, on the basis of his research into events that influenced the evolution of the Troad in the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, he cites among those events “the diaspora which followed the Fall of Knossos,” leading to the arrival in the Troad of a Teucrian population.4 Although less frequent, diaspora as dispersion is found in several texts of the early 20th century, often in a negative form, in a call for a return to unity. Kuno Francke, a specialist in German literature, thus wrote of 14th century German mysticism that these beliefs saw the world in terms of growing and ceaseless differentiation and dispersal from a unique and undifferentiated Divine origin, and that the power of man, through the intermediary of the force of the will, was “to reverse this incessant process of differentiation, and thus to return from the diaspora of manifold phenomena into the oneness of the undivided Divine.”5 Everything can enact “diaspora”, things as well as beings. But in all cases, or almost all, it concerns migration in a very loose sense, without any qualifications regarding its character, voluntary or otherwise, enduring or not, political or economic… It included the “Albanian diaspora” from the Ottoman Empire between the late 17th and the 19th centuries,6 as well as the prodigious process that was “the great Diaspora, […] the spreading of the Greeks through all the Orient” during the Alexandrine conquest;7 it could also include the “diaspora of the pioneer” referred to by Lewis Mumford in the title of a chapter in his work on the history of American architecture,8 as well as the diffusion of Bantu languages in Africa.9

3 John L. Myres, “A History of the Pelasgian Theory,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, no. 27 (1907), 187. 4 John L. Myres and K. T. Frost, “The Historical Background of the Trojan War,” Klio, no. 14 (1915), 460. 5 Kuno Francke, “Mediaeval German Scepticism,” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1912), 110. The same idea appears in Kuno Francke, Personality in German Literature before Luther. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916, 58. 6 Traian Stoianovitch, “Land Tenure and Related Sectors of the Balkan Economy, 1600-1800,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1953), 401. 7 James T. Shotwell, The History of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, 229. 8 Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924, 73. 9 H. H. Johnston, “Review,” (of Theal McCall, Ethnography and Condition of South Africa before 1505), Geographical Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (February 1920), 145-146.

Towards a Secular Concept

137

Second, the “diaspora” is also a group. Setting out to enquire into the explanatory causes of criminality, the Hungarian economist Béla Földes used it in its sense of a religious minority. Initially proposing the idea that migration is generally linked to criminality, he subsequently believed that “the statistics of crime indicate that, as a rule, the members of a small community isolated in a larger diaspora are less criminal than their neighbours, because, being in the minority, they feel that they are liable to more severe criticism than the rest”.10 This usage of diaspora in Földes’ work should not be particularly surprising, partly given the precocity of the adoption of the term in German – the language in which Földes generally wrote –, but also considering the historical and geopolitical context. At the twilight of the twin Empire of Austria-Hungary, the question of minorities aspiring to a national existence or to significant cultural autonomy, was of primary importance. It is this element that we find in the works of the Hungarian historian Oszkár Jászi: diaspora no longer refers to the dispersed condition of a people but to a minority within which are found a fraction of a ethnic, religious or cultural entity: “This exclusive German character of the Jews, however, ceased in the later periods, though the German language remained in the majority of cases their family language. With the growing national consciousness of the various nations of the monarchy, the Jewry became more and more assimilated with the language and customs of those nations among which it lived as diaspora.”11 For some authors, this minority status could represent a historically permanent status and not a specific geo-historical situation. The people who fell into this category were few, and I have already cited them in the previous chapter: the Jews, of course, frequently the Parsis, and others such as the Armenians: “Who are these nationless, landless, permanent minorities? Disregarding a number of very small communities strewn through eastern Europe and the Near East, this classification includes the Armenians, Assyrians, and the overwhelming majority of European Jews… The Armenians have not known peace in their Diaspora, and they will not know it until settled as a compact, autonomous community…. No single community, not even the Jews, has been subjected to so much persecution during this time [the last thirty years].”12 In 1934 Carlile Aylmer Macartney, one of the first great specialists of national minorities, of10 11 12

Béla Földes, “The Criminal,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 69, no. 3 (September 1906), 569. Oszkar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929, 173. Albert Viton, “Permanent Minorities: A World Problem,” Antioch Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1941), 479.

138

Chapter 3

fers another example. Here, too diaspora is relative to the absence of a state, but he uses the term to refer to a people who refuse the state itself, that of the Gypsies who, “unlike all the others, has never attempted to found a state of its own, but has been content, it appears, to live in an eternal diaspora”.13 “Diaspora” as minority is thus a concept used when the question is viewed from the perspective of the encompassing state. There exists another possibility, which is quite familiar to us today,14 that which envisages diaspora from the perspective of the state of origin, the state which claims the allegiance of individuals sharing the same nationality, the same origins or the same language, or which are claimed by these same individuals. The usage of diaspora in the general sense that denotes a fraction of a people living outside the frontiers of the national state is present in connection with the Germans as early as the beginning of the 20th century. Thus we read in a review of a collection of essays by the Viennese journalist Karl Kraus that his journal, Die Fackel, was reputed to be “one of the most interesting journalistic publications of the German diaspora,”15 while the anthropologist Franz Boas when writing about Germans in an article in the New York Times used the term in 1915 to describe the basis of Germanic nationalism founded, according to him, on the desire to regroup the scattered members of the “German diaspora.”16 Some also see Nazi Pan-Germanism as such, the “German Diaspora” being conceptualised as a population to rally to the new regime.17 The capital letter here bears witness not to the birth of a category but, on the contrary, to the permanence of a proper noun. We also find the name with a capital D in the work of the French geographer Jean Brunhes in the 1910s. Analysing the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the context of what he calls an “exhaustive monography” of human geography, Brunhes emphasises the coexistence of three religious groups in the country – Muslims, Orthodoxes and 13

14 15

16 17

Carlile Aylmer Macartney, National States and National Minorities. London: Oxford University Press, 1934, 57. A few years later, Macartney also uses diasporas, this time with the meaning of “colonial minorities” in connection with three cases: the Armenians of the Maritsa valley, the Cumans of Vardar, and the Arumans. See Carlile Aylmer Macartney, Problems of the Danube Basin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942, 31. See infra Chapter ix. Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 1, no. 6 (March 1911), 983. It is a review of Karl Kraus, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität. Vienna-Leipzig: Buchhandlung L. Rosner, 1908. Franz Boas, “Kinship of Language a Vital Factor in the War,” The New York Times, 3 January 1915. Jacob R. Marcus, The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew. Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1934, 302-303.

Towards a Secular Concept

139

Catholics –, each of whom present themselves as a people: Turks, Serbs and Croats. However, according to Brunhes, not only do they all resemble one another, both in physical appearance and in their manner of dress, but they also constitute a single people: “In truth, it is the same race that is represented by these three religious groups: the single great race of Serbs who, with Serbia, Montenegro, Dalmatia and the Diasporas, constitute a homogeneous whole of nearly ten million individuals.”18 If the idea of a Serbian diaspora did not become particularly popular, at least not until the beginning of the 1990s,19 the same cannot be said for that of Ireland. The diaspora-as-migration pattern, identifiable from the 1920s and 1930s as the “diaspora of the Irish race”20 coexisted with the diaspora-as-group pattern, sometimes identified with an evangelical dispersion,21 that of the “Irish diaspora” or the “Irish of the Diaspora”,22 two options destined for a bright future,23 but still without the least reflection on the reasons for the use of the term. As we can see, diaspora was not necessarily a term associated with misfortune or persecution. That is not to imply that this aspect had disappeared. Beyond the fact that it was applied to certain nations without a state, it was also used to designate, in the sense of a migration as much as a group, the exile of Protestants driven out of countries such as France. The first use that I have identified in reference to the Protestant Refuge dates from the early 20th century in a text on British economic history, where the “Protestant diaspora” refers to the refugees seeking asylum in Great Britain.24 This use of diaspora for the Protestants differs notably from that of diaspora by Protestant groups such 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

Jean Brunhes, “Du caractère propre et du caractère complexe des faits de géographie humaine,” Annales de géographie, vol. 22, no. 121 (1913), 17. Note also the case of the Polish, described by Roman Dyboski barely five years after the rebirth of the Polish state. Roman Dyboski, “Poland and the Problem of National Minorities,” Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, vol. 2, no. 5 (September 1923), 197. Saorstát Eireann (Irish Free State), Official Handbook. London: Benn, 1932, 65 and 71. James J. Walsh, The World’s Debt to the Irish. Boston: The Stratford Company, 1926, 26. W. J. L. Ryan, “Some Irish Population Problems,” Population Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (November 1955), 187. For example John Archer Jackson, “The Irish in Britain,” Sociological Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (1962), 10, in the sense of “migration”; Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75,” The American Historical Review, vol. 77, no. 3 (June 1972), 651, and Sheridan Gilley, “The Garibaldi Riots of 1862,” The Historical Journal, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1973), 724. William Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913, 129.

140

Chapter 3

as the Moravian Brethren. We meet the former occasionally over the course of the 20th century in English,25 French26 and German27, until a 1979 article by the historian Philippe Joutard popularised it and led to more frequent such uses.28 However, it still remained somewhat less common than the latter use, whereby “Protestant diaspora” designated the dispersion of the Protestant faithful29 and their status as a religious minority enclaved within a different religious environment – this was also possible for the “Catholic diaspora,” as used by the sociologist Everett Hughes.30 For Charles Sarolea, specialist in French literature, the Protestant exile following the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was inscribed within a long series of dispersions subsequent to persecutions, of which the last was the post-1917 Russian emigration. If he was not the first to use diaspora for the Russians,31 in 1924 he was almost certainly the first to propose an analysis of “diasporas” in the plural: There have been many diasporas or dispersions in the world’s history. Again and again, whole nations or classes have had to take to the high road as the result either of religious persecution or of some political upheaval. Students of the early Christian Church, and especially of St. Paul’s 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

See D. C. Coleman, “An Innovation and Its Diffusion: The ‘New Draperies’,” The Economic History Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (December 1969), 426; G. R. Hawke, “D. C. Coleman on the Counterfactual History of the New Draperies,” The Economic History Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (May 1971), 258; D. C. Coleman, “G. R. Hawke on What?,” in ibid., 260-261. As well as the “Protestant diaspora” we also find the expression “Huguenot diaspora”. For the former, see, for example, Jean Bouvier et Henry Germain-Martin, Finances et financiers de l’Ancien Régime. Paris: PUF, 1964, 115; for the latter, with diaspora in italics, see Jean Delumeau, Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme. Paris: PUF, 1965, 354; as well as Pierre Chaunu, La Civilisation de l’Europe des Lumières. Paris: Arthaud, 1971, 150. As hugenottische Diaspora and not evangelische Diaspora, which remained part of Protestant terminology. Philippe Joutard, “La Diaspora des Huguenots,” Le Monde Dimanche, 28 October 1979, xvi, reproduced in Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés, special issue “Terres promises, terres rêvées”, vol. 1, no. 1 (2nd semester 2002), 115-121. For an example of this durable usage, see Eckart Birnstiel ed., La Diaspora des Huguenots: les réfugiés protestants de France et leur dispersion dans le monde (xvie-xviiie siècles). (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). See Karl Bornhausen, “The Present Status of the Protestant Church in Germany,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 3, no. 5 (September 1923), 506. Everett C. Hughes, “The Industrial Revolution and the Catholic Movement in Germany,” Social Forces, vol. 14, no. 2 (December 1935), 287. Leo Wiener, An Interpretation of the Russian People. New York: McBride, Nast & Company, 1915, 10 (“Russians in diaspora”).

Towards a Secular Concept

141

missionary travels, are familiar with the Jewish Diaspora which, long before Christ, had established colonies in every part of the Mediterranean shores and which contributed so much to facilitate the spread of the Christian religion. In modern times the repeal of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of the Huguenots sent a hundred thousand Frenchmen to England, Holland, Prussia and even to South Africa […] But none of those previous dispersions have been quite on the same gigantic scale as the present Russian Diaspora.32 Despite the fact that Sarolea did not successfully conceptualise diaspora, which he initially founded upon a dispersion caused by religious persecutions or a political uprising before immediately “sabotaging” it through the introduction of a Jewish colonising diaspora, he developed an idea which only really became widespread much later: that of the innovative role of refugees, of their capacity to create, just as seeds carried on the wind germinate further away on other lands. If the innovative role of the Russians was not yet apparent when Sarolea was writing, he nevertheless included them in a lengthy genealogy inspired by the metaphor of fertilisation: It is a universal law of history that the part which is played by refugees is entirely out of proportion to their numbers. Even as the pollen seed of flowers which is scattered by the wind or carried on the wings of bees fertilises other species of flowers, even so emigrants invariably tend to fertilise the genius of other nations, and are a very notable factor in human progress. Such was the case of the Jews who, for thousands of years, were the middlemen of civilisation. Such was the case of the Huguenots, who brought the weaving industry to England, who introduced improved methods of agriculture in South Africa, who spread French culture all over Europe. Such was the case of the French refugees of the Revolution who we generally supporters of the old régime.33 The political upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s confirmed this interpretation. In 1938, Emil Lengyel used diaspora to refer to the exile of German writers in the 1930s.34 The same year, Robert Seton-Watson, recalling the “unexampled persecution” which was occurring in Germany, wrote that it “has led to the 32 33 34

Charles Sarolea, “The Tragedy of the Russian Diaspora,” Contemporary Review, no. 126 (July-December 1924), 301. Ibid., 305-306. Emil Lengyel, “German Emigré Literature,” Books Abroad, vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1938), 6.

142

Chapter 3

creation of an intellectual Diaspora – not solely Jewish – to which the Universities of the entire world have endeavoured to lend a helping hand.”35 Diaspora here is a term that comes to mind not because it concerns the Jews but because it concerned persecutions that led to exile. The Russian case seems to synthesise the definitions already mentioned: diaspora can refer to the migration itself;36 collectively, Russians living abroad;37 or even – and this is new – political opposition to the regime, active abroad, in the context of civil war and conflict over the legitimacy of the authorities in power in the country of origin. In this context, writers used the expression “Russian diaspora”38 or “diaspora literature”.39 Although rare, this usage relative to the defence of political principles by a group of exiles was applied to other populations, such as the Free French.40 Some of these analyses, in particular that of Charles Sarolea, tend towards a transformation of usage of diaspora, shaping it and defining it in an attempt to apply it to contexts or cases hitherto distinct by gathering them together under a single term. However, it would seem that none of these attempts survived, nor did they contribute to other perspectives. However, over the course of the first half of the 20th century, there were at least two writers, historians, whose thoughts were indeed to have such an effect: Simon Dubnow and Arnold Toynbee.

Two Trailblazers: Simon Dubnow and Arnold Toynbee Already mentioned for the equivalence that it established between galuth and diaspora, as well as for its remarkable interpretation of the cultural destiny 35 36 37 38

39 40

Robert Seton-Watson, Britain and the Dictators: A Survey of Post-War British Policy. New York: Macmillan, 1938, 290. Marc Ferro, “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary,” Slavic Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (September 1971), 511. Robert H. Johnston, “The Great Patriotic War and the Russian Exiles in France,” Russian Review, vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1976), 313. See for example George Stewart, The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle of CounterRevolution and Allied Intervention. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933, 420; or Donald K. Kitchin, John Lewis, and Karl Polanyi eds., Christianity and the Social Revolution. New York: Scribner, 1936, 314. Ivar Spector, “Contemporary Russian Literature: Katayev, Tolstoy, Sholokhov,” The English Journal, vol. 32, no. 6 (June 1943), 302. However, this usage is rare. See Hélène Bokanowsky, “French Literature in Algiers,” Books Abroad, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1945), 130.

Towards a Secular Concept

143

of the Jewish people, Simon Dubnow’s entry “Diaspora” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, written in the 1930s, is a fundamental milestone in the opening up of the term to other populations and to the academic world. The article begins thus: Diaspora is a Greek term for a nation or part of a nation separated from its own state or territory and dispersed among other nations but preserving its own national culture. In a sense Magna Graecia constituted a Greek diaspora in the ancient Roman Empire, and a typical case of diaspora is presented by the Armenians, many of whom have voluntarily lived outside their small national territory for centuries. Generally, however, the term is used with reference to those parts of the Jewish people residing outside Palestine. It was first used to describe the sections of Jewry scattered in the ancient Greco-Roman world and later to designate Jewish dispersion throughout the world in the 2500 years since the Babylonian captivity.41 In this text Dubnow, a specialist in Jewish history, presents us with nothing short of an entirely particular vision of “diaspora” insofar as he gives the word, through this text, not only potential, but closures, of which we still feel the effects today. First, in the opening paragraphs, he sketches out a space for the extension of the term to Greek and Armenian examples. From this simple observation, the Armenian example here being read in reference not to the flight from the Turkish genocide but to the Armenian merchant tradition, diaspora finds itself dissociated from the forced and traumatic character of migration. Furthermore, in a observation that since has often been forgotten, Dubnow remarked on the fact that, if there existed a Jewish specificity with respect to the term diaspora, it was not a result of the character of the Jewish case but rather of its rare longevity. In this sense, it does not constitute a conceptual archetype, but a political and cultural model. In common with the other texts mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, what matters for the analysis is less the contents of the text as such than the dissemination of those contents. A book or an article that proposes a transformation of usage or an innovative comparison remains but a singularity, an anecdote without sequel, if the proposition is not taken up by others. This in no way detracts from its importance: the text does not become superfluous or negligible by virtue of such neglect. Nevertheless, it would thenceforth only constitute an outlier, an isolated vestige of lost potential. This was the case for 41

Dubnow, “Diaspora,” 126-127.

144

Chapter 3

Sarolea’s article on the Russian diaspora. Dubnow’s article however, is marked by both innovation and diffusion. Its publication in a large reference encyclopaedia for the social sciences is not without implications for the diffusion of the term itself, for its gradual secularisation in general and its progressive detachment from the historical experience of the Jewish people in particular. Indeed, Dubnow’s article may be read either as an exposition of the Jewish example, which takes up most of the text, or with an eye to the first paragraph, which encourages the reader not to restrict diaspora to the Jewish case. The Chicago school of American sociology, the one most concerned with the question of minorities,42 seems to have been the only school to have attempted in any sustained fashion to develop the notion of diaspora on the basis of Dubnow’s entry, and the two possibilities on offer – opening and restriction – are there side by side. Robert Park, whose prior works, and particularly those on “the marginal man”,43 taking up the question of the foreigner so dear to Georg Simmel, had made the figure of the “emancipated Jew” a sort of model of the man between two cultures, synthesised Dubnow’s definition of diaspora, but he used it to move even further. Not only did he apply it to the members of different Asian groups living far from their countries, but instead of emphasising the human and cultural dimension of the condition, he added a geographical dimension: “There are, at the present time, between 16,000,000 and 17,000,000 people of Asiatic origin living in the diaspora, if I may use that term to designate not merely the condition but the place of dispersion of peoples.”44 This perspective does not presuppose any cultural unity, simply a certain form of unity based on origins, be they Chinese, Indian or Japanese.45 A few pages further on, a footnote offers an even more interesting sociological hypothesis. Questioning the relationships between the races and reflecting on the place of “mulattoes” in the United States, SouthAfrica, India, Brazil and Java, he believes that “If we add to the numbers of those who are recognized as of mixed racial origin those who have been or could properly he classed as ‘racial and cultural minorities,’ that is, those who, because of racial or language differences, have 42 43 44

45

On this point, see particularly Jean-Michel Chapoulie, La Tradition sociologique de Chicago. Paris: Seuil, 2001, Chapter viii, 290-368. Robert E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 33, no. 6 (May 1928), 881-893. Robert E. Park, “The Nature of Race Relations,” in Race Relations and the Race Problem: A Definition and an Analysis, ed. Edgar T. Thompson et al., Durham: Duke University Press, 1939, 28. In note 1, page 28, Park cites the first paragraph of Dubnow’s entry. Ibid., 29.

Towards a Secular Concept

145

not been wholly assimilated or regard themselves in any sense as alien in the country in which they lives we should know how extensive the diaspora – that is to say, the region in which peoples live more or less as strangers, the region in which race relations may be said to exist – actually is”.46 The diaspora is therefore envisaged less as a condition within which a cultural identity is maintained or relations with origins are developed, than an indissociably geographic and sociological situation within which the question that arises concerns relations between a minority group characterised by cultural or racial differences and the dominant group. If the specificity of Park’s usage of diaspora, as expressed in this particular text, has not persisted, the development of the reading of Dubnow that he proposed would progressively eclipse the very existence of Dubnow’s text,47 to the point that the paternity of this more extensive definition of the term is sometimes attributed to Park himself, omitting the source on which Park drew.48 In contrast, in 1949, the American sociologist Rose Hum Lee, trained in the sociological tradition of Chicago and whose doctoral thesis was devoted to the Chinatowns of the Rocky Mountains, presented a conceptualisation of diaspora that drew on Dubnow but which she limited to the Jewish case: “Chinatowns are a type of segregated communities of people separated from their homeland but whose dispersion differs from the historical “Diaspora” of the Jewish people scattered throughout the Graeco-Roman world”.49 A few years later she reiterated this affirmation, again citing Dubnow, but adding to the definition a new element, namely, the use of diaspora to describe those who would today be called refugees: “While originally the word “Diaspora” was mainly used to refer to the repeated mass deportation or exile of Jews, it has come to be applied to nationals who have emigrated from their homelands and are politically unprotected by their own governments.”50 Innovative as 46 47

48 49

50

Ibid., 39 note 34. There is no entry for diaspora in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences edited by David Sills and Robert K. Merton in 1968. It was not until 2001 that an entry reappeared, from the pen of Robin Cohen, in a similar publication. Robin Cohen, “Diaspora,” International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, 3642-3645. See for example Marvin Harris and Charles Wagley, Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 250. Rose Hum Lee, “The Decline of Chinatowns in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 5 (March 1949), 422. She only cites the first part of Dubnow’s paragraph, omitting the reference to Greeks and Armenians. Rose Hum Lee, The City: Urbanism and Urbanization in Major World Regions. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955, 287.

146

Chapter 3

this codicil might seem, it does not reappear in the sociologist’s work. In her 1960 book on the Chinese of the United States, Rose Hum Lee uses diaspora a number of times, always in the context of the Chinatowns and the idea of the ghetto.51 This time, an incorporation of Jewish and Chinese urban experiences under the same name seems possible52 and she again cites Dubnow, this time including the sentence referring to Greeks and Armenians.53 This somewhat ambiguous usage of diaspora does not appear to have inspired other scholars. S. W. Kung’s work on the Chinese in the United States, which appeared in 1962, cites Rose Hum Lee but never uses diaspora.54 Nevertheless, the idea of a “Chinese diaspora” is not recent: we find it in Gregory Bienstock’s work in 1937 with the meaning of “China outside China”55 and in the work of the economist E. Stuart Kirby in 1949 who associated it with “the overseas Chinese”.56 However, in the context of the Chinese, we owe the most sustained reflection on a possible conceptual usage of diaspora to the anthropologist Maurice Freedman. Carrying out research among the Jewish community of Great Britain, he established interesting parallels with other communities, believing that the supposedly unique character of the Jews was a fallacy and that an inclusion of the analysis of the relationships that they maintained with their social environment was required within a sociology of race relations.57 Even though his study was focused on Jews, Freedman proposed a conceptual definition of a “diaspora” based on the existence, outwith the borders 51

52

53 54 55 56 57

Thus Chapter iv is entitled “Chinatowns: Communities in Diaspora”. In focusing on the question of the ghetto, Rose Hum Lee advances the idea, as Louis Wirth had previously done in his comparison of Jews and Blacks, that the Blacks, like the Chinese, lived in a “racial ghetto”. Rose Hum Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960, 56. This time Dubnow was extensively cited. Ibid., 53. However, diaspora is never used to describe the Chinese community abroad, whom Lee generally describes as “Overseas Chinese” or “Chinese Abroad”, even if she refers to “geographic distribution of the overseas population scattered throughout the world”. Rose Hum Lee, “The Chinese Abroad,” Phylon, vol. 17, no. 3 (3rd trimester 1956), 258. Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America, 53. S. W. Kung, Chinese in American Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems and Contributions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Gregory Bienstock, The Struggle for the Pacific. London: Allen & Unwin, 1937, 51. E. Stuart Kirby, “The Anatomy of Hong Kong,” Far Eastern Survey, vol. 18, no. 10 (May 1949), 114. Maurice Freedman, “Jews in the Society of Britain,” in A Minority in Britain: Social Studies of the Anglo-Jewish Community, ed. Maurice Freedman (London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co, 1955), 202.

Towards a Secular Concept

147

of the countries to which they claimed belonging, of communities working to maintain their specificity, notable cultural, on the territory of the countries within which the found themselves: “There are other ‘diasporas’, notably those of the Chinese and the Indians, in which it is common to find the overseas sojourners accused of trying to maintain an imperium in imperio, of fostering a separatist educational system, of breaking the loyalty of citizens to the land of their birth by stimulating the use of a foreign language and by inculcating the political and cultural values of a nation across the seas.”58 In 1959, reviewing three books for the British Journal of Sociology dealing respectively with the Jews of the United States, the Chinese in Thailand and the coloured minorities in Great Britain, he established connections between these three texts, and these three cases, that were particularly fruitful for the study of the usage of diaspora.59 Skinner’s monograph on the Chinese of Thailand was immediately described as “a study of a diaspora” and its evolution.60 Emphasising the fact that in Thailand an antisemitic terminology is employed towards Chinese living in the country, Freedman noted that “it is not accidental that a book on the diaspora has been reviewed together with one about another diaspora. What things are common and not common to Jews outside Israel and overseas Chinese would make an interesting and instructive study if there is a scholar who commands the literature on both”.61 Freedman did not dwell on these commonalities and seemed to consider that logically these were two diasporas, given their distance from their territory of reference and their status as minorities, but the italics in “the diaspora”, clearly referring to the Jews, makes it clear – without further explanation – that the use of this appellation in the Chinese context to was more by analogy with the Jewish diasporic model than by virtue of a conscious effort of conceptualisation. In his work on Chinese family structures and Chinese associations Freedman subsequently applied the concept, in a similarly supple and non-reflexive form, to describe the collective Chinese

58 59

60 61

Ibid., 236. Maurice Freedman, “Jews, Chinese, and Some Others,” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1959), 61-70. The three books reviewed were: Marshall Sklare ed., The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group. Glencoe-New York: Free Press, 1958; G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957; Sydney Collins, Coloured Minorities in Britain: Studies in British Race Relations Based on African, West Indian and Asiatic Immigrants. London: Lutterworth Press, 1957. Ibid., 66. Ibid.

148

Chapter 3

communities outside China,62 but it would always remain interchangeable with expressions such as “overseas Chinese”.63 This synonymy would seem to explain the appearance of the expression towards the end of the 1960s in the vocabulary of anthropologists and sociologists working on China and the Chinese, and, without quotation marks and without explanation, in the specialist journals.64 The second thread is cast in a slightly different mould. In contrast to Dubnow, the most interesting aspect of British historian Arnold Toynbee’s work is not the dissemination of his work but the fact that within it diaspora changed its meaning radically over the decades. In 1936 he raised the issue in connection with a spatial dispersion, affirming that Japanese living outside the borders of Japan constituted a “mere diaspora”.65 The word appears more than once, in a more or less sustained manner, in Toynbee’s twelfth-volume A Study of History66. In the second volume, he presents diaspora – usually written with 62 63 64

65 66

This is notably the case in Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. London: Athlone Press, 1966, 165-166. See, for example, Maurice Freedman, “Sociology in and of China,” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 1962), 113. See, for example, the studies by William Willmott et Stanford Lyman: William E. Willmott, “Congregations and Associations: The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 11, no. 3 (June 1969), 287 and 297; by the same author, “The Overseas Chinese Today and Tomorrow: A Review Article,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer 1969), 206; Stanford Lyman, The Asian in the West. Reno: University of Nevada System, 1970, particularly on pages 9, 39, 58 and 134-135 note 96; Stanford Lyman, “The Chinese Diaspora in America, 1850-1943,” in The Life, Influence and the Role of the Chinese in the United States, 1776-1960. Proceedings of the National Conference held at The University of San Francisco ( July 10-12, 1975), San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1976, 128-146. Arnold Toynbee, “Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,” International Affairs, vol. 15, no. 1 (January-February 1936), 39. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1934-1961. A Study of History is a magisterial work offering a general history of humanity and civilisations. Comprising twelve substantial volumes, it was published in four instalments between 1934 and 1961 by Oxford University Press: volumes i to iii appeared in 1934, iv to vi in 1939 and vii to x in 1954. The last two volumes occupy a particular place in the series: the eleventh (1959) was a historical atlas, while the twelfth, which appeared in 1961 and was titled Reconsiderations, and is at attempt at responding to the numerous critiques that had been levelled at the historian since the appearance of the first volumes some twenty-five years earlier. In view of the importance of the work, several abridged versions have been offered to the reading public by D.C. Somervell. The first, which appeared in 1947, included the first six volumes. The second, which appeared in 1960, covered volumes i to x. These versions are abridgments of the original text.

Towards a Secular Concept

149

the Greek accent on the final -a – as “an ancient Greek word meaning ‘dispersion’ which was adopted by the Jews as a name for that section of Jewry which came to be dispersed abroad among the Gentiles of the Hellenic world after the intrusion of Hellenism upon the Syriac world through the destruction of the Achaemenian Empire by the action of Alexander the Great”67 and he uses it almost systematically in association with the word fossil. The latter word is also part of the expression “fossils in dispersion” that occurs several times in A Study of History, particularly in the second volume.68 In the fifth volume, Toynbee writes that “at the present day, the Parsees, like the Jews, survive as a mere ‘diaspora’; and the petrified religion which still so potently holds the scattered members of either community together has lost its message for Mankind and has hardened into a ‘fossil’ (…)”.69 In A study of History, the term diaspora is used to refer to different populations who for Toynbee represent so many civilisations: Nestorians, Copts, Jacobites, Ismailis70, Armenians,71 Vlachs,72 Christians,73 Muslims, Greeks, Buddhists.74 If the publication of the first volumes does not really appear to have provoked hostile reactions from within Jewish circles, this is not so for the publication of volumes vii to x in 1954. These criticisms concerned three major points: Toynbee’s analogy between the Jewish discourse of the “chosen people” and the Nazi discourse of the “master race”; the condemnation of the expulsion of the Palestinians by Israel, equated to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain or their extermination by the Nazis; and finally, Toynbee’s use of the idea of “diaspora”. On this latter point, criticism was essentially directed at the use of the adjective fossil. The most systematic attack on Toynbee was undoubtedly Maurice Samuel’s in his book The Professor and the Fossil75 that appeared in 1956, but other reactions were published and encounters were organised with the particular aim of demonstrating that the history of the Jewish diaspora is not a history of fossilisation but rather one of an extraordinary cre-

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., vol. ii, 257 note 1. Ibid., vol. ii, 272 and 402: “The most familiar example of a fossil in dispersion is the Jewish ‘Diasporá’.” Ibid., vol. v, 126. Ibid., vol. ii, respectively 123 and 258. Ibid., vol. ii, 258 and vol. iv, 75. Ibid., vol. iv, 399. Ibid., vol. vi, 205 note 8. Ibid., vol. vii, respectively 24, 30 and 32. Maurice Samuel, The Professor and the Fossil: Some Observations of Arnold Toynbee’s “A Study of History”. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956.

150

Chapter 3

ativity.76 This was expressed particularly clearly in a seminar given by Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, at Yeshiva University in New York on 18 January 1955.77 Eban’s arguments against the use of the adjective fossil but equally against the analogies between Zionism and Nazi Germany strongly shaped subsequent exchanges, notably the confrontation between Jacob Herzog and Arnold Toynbee himself during a public debate organised at McGill University in Montreal in January 1961. From the mid-1960s onwards, Jewish or Israeli criticisms of Toynbee focused instead on his reading of the Palestinian question.78 Readings of Toynbee certainly deeply influenced the possibilities of extracting diaspora from its original and religious definition in order to rework it as a concept apt to describe various populations. However, that was not the most original feature of Toynbee’s usage. Perhaps due to the criticisms levelled at him by Jewish commentators who challenged the label “fossil”, but more likely under the influence of worldwide transformations after the Second World War, Toynbee radically modified his perspective on the “diaspora” after 1960. Rather significantly, the first phase of this shift was an article published in Issues, the journal of the American Council for Judaism, in which he foresaw a united world in which contemporary states would give way to dispersed communities, akin to the Jewish diaspora, in new era: “the age of diasporas”.79 A year later, in the twelfth volume of A Study of History, he twice returns at some length to the uses of the word diaspora. In the third part, whose first section is devoted to the usage of terms, he explains his use of the word “fossil” to define certain people, such as the Jews and the Parsis, but also the Nestorians or the Monophysites. Questioning the “offensive” character of fossil, and the fact that all the criticisms levelled at him came from Jewish authors, he claimed that he had “neither intended it to be offensive nor foresaw that anyone would take it as being so.”80 He admitted that fossil doubtless only accounted for a part of what the Jewish religion represented – the local religion of a particular community – but not the fact that it was also a universal religion. The real interest lies in his clarification of the process of ossification of the religious practices of the Jews and the Parsis: although that process failed for most of the commu76 77 78 79 80

Micheline Larès, “Arnold J. Toynbee et la religion de l’Ancien Testament,” Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. 184, no. 2 (1973), 199-207. Abba Eban, “The Toynbee Heresy,” Israel Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2006), 91-107. See particularly Hedva Ben-Israel, “Debates with Toynbee: Herzog, Talmon, Friedman,” Israel Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2006), 79-82. Arnold J. Toynbee, “Pioneer Destiny of Judaism,” Issues, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1960), 1-14. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. xii, Reconsiderations, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, 295.

Towards a Secular Concept

151

nities confronted with that situation, it served as a “social cement”, enabling “the participants in each of them to keep their communities in existence, and this for many centuries running, without having a state of their own or even a country in which they were at home and in a majority.”81 In another section, given that the Jews were not unique, Toynbee suggested that the Jewish diaspora was not exceptional either, and that its characteristics were to be found amongst other populations.82 Over the following years, Toynbee repeatedly referred to this new vision of the future. In the mid-1960s, he placed his hopes in a return to a lost global unity, feeling that “the most promising of all the portents of reunification is the emergence of a new type of community, the diasporá, which looks as if it may be ‘the future’”.83 Considering the production of diasporas to be linked to three causes, commerce, war and religion, he included within this term Assyrians, Jews, Armenians, Lebanese, Chinese, Gujeratis, Hadramis, Homsis, Parsis, Marwaris, Sikhs, Greeks, Nestorians, Huguenots – considered “the outstanding example of a diasporá created by eviction” –, the “displaced persons” of the Second World War, Christians and Muslims – “Islamic diasporá”.84 A product of the past, diaspora as a social form is thought to be particularly adapted to the times and thus likely to be the most feasible “oecumenical [kind] of society”. Toynbee described it as a “splinter of mankind” characterised by the fact of being “a minority locally, wherever it may be” but also, unlike local communities, “ubiquitous” and thus “potentially world-wide”. “A relatively recent kind,” diasporas are “the product of a wish for unity that has translated itself into accomplished facts in so far as it has had the requisite material means of communication at its command,” that is, technology capable of attenuating the effects of distance. He hoped “to see the number, size and importance of the World’s diasporás increase in size as never before,” in an inverse relationship with the local state, whose influence he hoped to see reduced, because for him local nationalism and diaspora were antinomic – the growth of the latter, synonymous of union, could only happen to the detriment of the former, synonymous with division.85 Toynbee therefore envisaged a future of alliances according to a system organised on three levels in which 81 82 83 84 85

Ibid., 297. Ibid., 211-217. See also “Comments by Rabbi J. B. Agus on the Notion of Uniqueness,” in ibid., 666. Arnold J. Toynbee, Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time. London: Oxford University Press, 1965, 81. The volume is a collection of lectures given in 1964-1965. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 81-82.

152

Chapter 3

diasporas occupied an intermediate position: the first level, loyalty of the human being, concerned humanity as a whole and the world state within which it would be reunited; the second relates to “world diasporas”, which could include a “world-wide religious communion” as much as a “world-wide professional association”, such as a world society of undertakers or of tailors.86 Finally the last stage, the lowest, is that of allegiance to a local community, the repository of local duties that Toynbee predicted would become increasingly constrained and increasingly insignificant.87 This radical revision of the meaning, and of the modernity, of diaspora conceived as a social form appeared in the revised edition of A Study of History that Toynbee published in 1972. Drawing extensively on the text of the twelfth volume, in the first part he completely revised his conclusions regarding the Jews in the first volume of 1934, to propose the “Jewish model” as an alternative for an understanding of the history civilisations. The Jews represented a “diasporan model” in which “societies have been geographically dispersed and partly merged in the life of alien societies, but which maintain their own spiritual unity and distinctiveness through adherence to a common cultural tradition.”88 If the model was old, it was none the less contemporary, “futuristic” even, because Toynbee, in three paragraphs of an almost troubling prescience, developed further the perceptible elective affinity between this form of diaspora, thenceforth considered in a sense that went beyond an exclusively ethnic-religious dimension, and the world such as it is becoming, a world in which distance counts less than the link, and the centre less than the network.89 Spectacular as Toynbee’s about turn may have been, it elicited far less comment than his earlier “fossilised” version of the diaspora. Furthermore, at its publication, volume xii prompted criticisms from within American Jewish circles who considered that the two other points that had been criticised in the earlier work – the comparison between the idea of the Jews as the chosen people and that of the Nazis as the master race, as well as his attack on Zionism, assimilating the expulsion of the Arabs of Palestine to the crimes of Nazi Germany – had not been revised.90 86 87 88 89 90

It is notable that as he describes levels of loyalties, Toynbee no longer mentions world allegiances founded on origins or ethnicity. Ibid., 87. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, 25. This version was an abridgement by Toynbee himself. Ibid., 65-69. This is very close to what he earlier written in Reconsiderations in 1961. See, for example, the letter to the editor of the New York Times from Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, 28 May 1961, BR24.

Towards a Secular Concept

153

Whether they were adopted or criticised, Dubnow’s and Toynbee’s suggestions regarding a possible generalisation of term diaspora did not lead to any significant evolution in the use of the term. It seems that until the mid-1930s, no single text served as a unique point of reference for the enlargement of its semantic horizon. All that appeared to happen for much of the second half of the 20th century was the gradual development of localised traditions of usage of the term in the different disciplines in the human and social sciences, developing parallel to but largely independent of one another.

The Construction of Parallel Disciplinary Sequences Perhaps surprisingly, the idea of a “diasporic” type of migration did not first appear in studies of human populations but in those which dealt with animals. In 1952 the British biologist D. H. Wilkinson proposed distinguishing two forms of avian migration: the anastrophic migration, based on a return journey – the Greek verb anastréphein means “to make a return journey”, “retrace one’s path”– between wintering grounds and a summer home, and the diasporic migration based on the absence of specific wintering grounds in favour of a lengthy “wandering” above the waves before the birds returned to their breeding grounds.91 This idea was subsequently taken up by specialists of fish behaviour, particularly Raymond Beverton and Sidney Holt in 1957,92 followed by Saul B. Saila in 1961.93 Diaspora here refers to a migratory form judged to be particular in the sense that it associates specific localisation and dispersed territorialisation according to the time of the year. The term is certainly not negative and is inscribed within an instinctive cycle of management of space: dispersion is a periodic moment, neither fatality, nor catastrophe. Leaving aside the matter of instinct, we find this use of diaspora in texts that seek to understand human evolution through a consideration of the dispersion of man across the surface of the globe. Here a largely neutral usage generally comes up against the historical baggage of the term. In the 1960s, when the anthropologists Charles Hockett and Robert Ascher published an article on the “human revolution” – charac91 92 93

D. H. Wilkinson, “The Random Element in Bird ‘Navigation’,” Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 29, no. 4 (December 1952), 550-551. Raymond J. H. Beverton and Sidney Holt, On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1993 (first edition 1957), 159. Saul B. Saila, “A Study of Winter Flounder Movements,” Limnology and Oceanography, vol. 6, no. 3 (July 1961), 292-298.

154

Chapter 3

terised by bipedalism, the use of the hands for manipulation, and the production and transportation of objects as well as the acquisition of language –, in which they claimed that it occurred in East Africa before the “human diaspora”94 began, they were met with incomprehension on the part of their colleagues, who wondered if the use of the word “diaspora” – a term placed in quotation marks in the discussions although it was not in Hockett and Ascher’s book – was not “misplaced humour”.95 This perspective upon the migration of the human species as dispersion-diffusion from a centre has been used subsequently and frequently, notably by the French sociologist Edgar Morin in the 1970s.96 It is today integral to numerous works of genetic anthropology.97 Given the historical link between diaspora and the two dimensions of space and of migration in its widest sense, it appears logical that one of the scientific fields within which the idea seemed to acquire first rights to the concept – secularised, formalisable and generalisable – would be geography. If the French geographer Michel Bruneau rightly notes that it only became widespread in the Francophone world in the 1980s,98 it was not among English-language geographers, but indeed from the pen of French geographers that we find occasional references of diaspora prior to the 1980s, often to refer to French regional migrations. In his 1932 book on the Auvergne, Philippe Arbos devotes several pages to Auvergnat emigration within France, but also beyond its borders, considering that “there was therefore a true worldwide Auvergnat diaspora.”99 Auvergnats, Bretons and Corsicans are apparently the most represented.100 We could cite more cases, including the “Limousin diaspora” which 94 95 96

97

98 99 100

Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher, “The Human Revolution,” Current Anthropology, vol. 5, no. 3 (June 1964), 146. G. G. Simpson, “Comment,” in ibid., 151. Edgar Morin, Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1973, a text in which he explicitly cites Hockett and Acher (169) and refers several times to the “human diaspora” (“la diaspora humaine”): 168, 185 and 186. See Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. The fourth part of Michael Crawford’s manual of genetic anthropology is entirely devoted to the question of the “human diaspora”. Michael Crawford ed., Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Michel Bruneau, Diasporas et espaces transnationaux. Paris: Anthropos, 2004, 13. Philippe Arbos, L’Auvergne. Paris: Armand Colin, 1932, 85. Jean Anglade, Histoire de l’Auvergne. Paris: Hachette, 1974, 372. Gaoud Planson and Erwan Koshaneg, Histoire de la nation bretonne. Paris: La Table ronde, 1977, 76. See also Olivier Vincent Lossouarn, Les Bretons dans le monde. Paris: John Didier, 1969, 9; and Antoine Albitreccia, Histoire de la Corse. Paris: PUF, 1947, 5.

Towards a Secular Concept

155

appeared in the work of the French historian Alain Corbin.101 However, in all these cases, if the term appears to be undergoing a syntactical shift from proper noun to semi-proper noun, this appears to be more by analogy than through any real construction of a concept. The first author who was bold enough to pursue this transformation was the French geographer Maximilien Sorre who used the term regularly, although in a supple and non-conceptualised manner, from the end of the 1940s and gradually transformed it into a geographical concept. In Les Fondements de la géographie humaine, written in 1947, he uses it in a sense close to “number of emigrants” for three populations who had hitherto not been referred to in such terms: “The Japanese diaspora was smaller than the Chinese diaspora. Likewise the Hindu diaspora.”102 He used it in the same sense eight years later in a surprising and innovative essay on geographical mobility, Les Migrations des peuples, in which diaspora occurs six times, including once in the context of the Jews, referring to the Babylonian captivity.103 The five other occurrences include the Greeks (twice), the Armenians, the Levantines and the Chinese. Generally speaking, his uses of diaspora can be grouped according to three distinct definitions: geographical, referring to a space of dispersion;104 ethnicnational, referring to a community considered in its dispersed globality – the Armenians or the “Chinese diaspora”, whose numbers cannot be stated with any accuracy105 –; or a synthesis of the two, describing a portion of an ethnicnational community on a specific territory.106 In 1957, he conceptualised the term to give it a generic definition: diaspora would thenceforth be the name of a particular space, occupied by “national minorities in a foreign land”, who enlarge the national space “as long as they maintain their original links with the mother country.”107 In his index, he defines diaspora as “collectively, groups who have spread beyond their national 101

102

103 104 105 106 107

Alain Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au xixe siècle, 1845-1880. Limoges: Presses universitaires de Limoges, 1999 (first edition 1975), notably 205, but also 728 and 998. Maximilien Sorre, Les Fondements de la géographie humaine: essai d’une écologie de l’homme. Paris: Armand Colin, 1947, 279. The “Chinese diaspora” is mentioned again on page 460. Maximilien Sorre, Les Migrations des peuples: essai sur la mobilité géographique. Paris: Flammarion, 1955, 225-226. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 173 and 200. Maximilien Sorre, Rencontres de la géographie et de la sociologie. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1957, 95.

156

Chapter 3

borders”.108 Sorre was apparently the first geographer to proceed in this fashion. Indeed, the idea is absent from textbooks or dictionaries of geography prior to the 1980s109 except possibly in its Jewish incarnation: in 1970, Pierre George’s Dictionnaire de géographie refers to it as designating “collectively, all Jews dispersed around the world.”110 However, together with Maximilien Sorre, Pierre George is doubtless one of the geographers most attentive to the geographical aspect of migrations as well as being one of those who used diaspora in a precocious manner. As early as 1951, in his Introduction à l’étude géographique de la population du monde, he refers to the “diaspora of nomads” as well as the “German diaspora” in the countries of central Europe.111 We regularly find the idea in his writings, be it the “European “diaspora” dispersed throughout the entire world”112 or the “Chinese diaspora”.113 However, it is not until 1984 and the third edition of the Dictionnaire de géographie, which he edited, that the definition of diaspora becomes richer: “The term originally applied to the entire Jewish community dispersed in the world. By extension, it is used to designate any ethno-cultural community that has spread beyond its place of origin (the Armenian, Chinese, Lebanese diasporas, etc.).”114 in the same year, in Géopolitique des minorités, he formally proposed a first definition. Characterised by dispersion, by renewal through successive migrations, forced or voluntary, by ethno-cultural segregation and the preservation of cultural identity, the diaspora became a particular mode of existence at a distance: “As long as there is preservation of signs symbolising belonging to a community and relationships between the cores of the diaspora and between these cores and the point of departure, the reference is valid.”115 From this perspective, it is the commonality of history, of belief, of a territory of reference, and of language between the dispersed cores which are the distinctive criteria and thus the points in common between the Jewish, Armenian, Chinese and other cases. If the development of an increasingly conceptual usage of diaspora in geography seemed to be a predominantly French endeavour, this was far from

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

Ibid., 206. Bruneau, Diasporas et espaces transnationaux, 13. Pierre George, Dictionnaire de la géographie. Paris: PUF, 1970, 131. Pierre George, Introduction à l’étude géographique de la population du monde. Paris: PUF, 1951, respectively on page 45 and 264. Pierre George, Géographie de la population. Paris: PUF, 1965, 43. Pierre George, Les Migrations internationales. Paris: PUF, 1976, 46. Pierre George ed., Dictionnaire de la géographie. Paris: PUF, 1984 (3rd edition), 136. Pierre George, Géopolitique des minorités. Paris: PUF, 1984, 74.

Towards a Secular Concept

157

true in other disciplines, such as anthropology, history or sociology, which also developed their parallel traditions of scientific usage of the term between the 1950s and the late 1970s. In African history, the term is very rare before the end of the 1960s. We find it used to describe the eastward migration of the Boers after the economic crisis that struck Cape Town in the 1760s,116 the flight of European prisoners or deserters to the Angolan kingdoms with whom they traded117 or, again, the forced migration of the Egba in the mid-19th century in West Africa.118 In the late 1960s, Abner Cohen, an historian of West Africa, proposed using the concept of “trade diasporas” or “commercial diasporas” to refer to the spatial organisation of the trading peoples of West Africa, such as the Hausa, the Mandé or the Dyula. He was not the only one interested in this particular form of spatial structuration, as demonstrated, for example, by the work of Ivor Wilks on the Dyula during the same period.119 Describing the qualities of the Hausa trader, Cohen refers to the existence of a network of trading communities over long distances: [The Hausa trader’s] high degree of mobility, skill and shrewdness in business are widely acknowledged and have earned him the reputation of having a special ‘genius’ for trade. On a closer analysis, much of this ‘genius’ turns out to be associated, not with a basic personality trait, but with a highly developed economico-political organization which has been evolved over a long period of time. This economic organisation is at the basis of a far-flung diaspora, which consists of a network of localized Hausa communities, where each community usually occupies a special quarter within the foreign town, and is headed by a Hausa chief, the Sarkin Hausawa, who is recognised as such by the local authorities.120 116

117 118 119

120

Eric A. Walker, A History of South Africa. London-New York-Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co, 1935 (first edition 1928), Chapter iv, “The Diaspora”, 80-104. The term appears on pages 80, 96 and 99. Jan Vansina, “Long-Distance Trade-Routes in Central Africa,” The Journal of African History, vol. 3, no. 3 (1962), 383. The word is italicised. Earl Phillips, “The Egba at Abeokuta: Acculturation and Political Change, 1830-1870,” The Journal of African History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1969), 117-131. Ivor Wilks, « The Transmission of Islamic Learning in the Western Sudan », in Goody (Jack R.), dir., Literacy in Traditional Societies, London, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 162-197. Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, 9.

158

Chapter 3

At an international seminar on the development of African trade since the 19th century in West Africa in December 1969, Cohen gave a paper in which he developed his idea of “commercial diasporas” to describe “a nation of socially independent, but spatially dispersed communities.”121 It seems that a number of those present at this conference had severely criticised his use of diaspora, holding that the term could only be used in connection with the specific historical experience of the Jews.122 In the article that emerged from his paper, published two years later, Cohen felt the need to justify himself: “The use of the term ‘diaspora’ in this context has been criticised on the ground [sic] that it is applicable only to a specific historical case. This issue is similar to the controversy about the applicability of the term ‘caste’ to systems of stratification outside India. The term ‘network’, which has been suggested as a substituted for ‘diaspora’ has in recent years been used to cover different sociological phenomena and its use in this context is likely to be confusing. I think that the term ‘diaspora’ can be relatively more easily understood to be referring to ‘an ethnic group in dispersal’ than the term ‘network’.”123 The publication of the conference proceedings in 1971, edited by Claude Meillassoux, was considered to be an important advance in the economic history of Africa124 and the concept developed by Cohen was rapidly adopted in the field of West African economic history. In 1973, Paul Lovejoy had already noted that “most economic historians now accept [it] as an appropriate one to describe the dispersed commercial settlements along trade routes which catered for itinerant merchants.”125 Lovejoy himself (and he was not the only one) employed the term frequently in the 1907s, thus gradually opening up the way for new “diasporas” conforming to the initial model based on the

121

122 123 124 125

Abner Cohen, “Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas,” in L’évolution du commerce africain depuis le xixe siècle en Afrique de l’Ouest, ed. Claude Meillassoux (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971), 267. The conference was held at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, 14-22 December 1969 in the presence of a number of specialists, international (Ivor Wilks, Philip Curtin) or French (Marc Augé, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Jean-Loup Amselle, Emmanuel Terray). In response to a question during a seminar he gave at the EHESS in the spring of 2005, Jean-Loup Amselle confirmed to me that Cohen’s paper had prompted a lively debate. Cohen, “Cultural Strategies,” 267 note 1. See, for example, Patrick Manning’s review in The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (1973), 139-141. Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Kambarin Beriberi: The Formation of a Specialized Group of Hausa Kola Traders in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of African History, vol. 14, no. 4 (1973), 633. Lovejoy’s thesis on the kola trade dates from 1973.

Towards a Secular Concept

159

Hausa and the Mandé: the “Malinke diaspora”,126 “Touareg diaspora”,127 “Wangara diaspora”.128 The idea was widely used but little popularised outside the circle of historians or anthropologists of West Africa prior to the 1980s, which saw the publication of Paul Lovejoy’s book on the kola trade129 and above all Philip Curtin’s masterly overview of trans-cultural trade in the history of the world, in which the idea of a “trading diaspora” played an essential role.130 Recognised for its utility,131 it swiftly took its place in the conceptual toolbox of historians, such that in a 1982 review of Caravans of Kola Marion Johnson could reproach Paul Lovejoy for not having published earlier a work that had been begun before the publication of Cohen’s article: “trading diasporas are now commonplace, and the very fruitful concept has been expanded until it has tended to lose much of its original meaning. Lovejoy’s kola traders would have been exciting news in the early 1970s; now they are only another example of an accepted phenomenon.”132 “Trading diaspora” remains today a current concept.133

126

127 128

129 130 131

132 133

René Lemarchand, “Political Clientelism and ethnicity in Tropical Africa: Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building,” The American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1972), 68-90. Paul E. Lovejoy and Stephen Baier, “The Desert-Side Economy of the Central Sudan,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 8, no. 4 (1975), 551-581. Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Role of the Wangara in the Economic Transformation of the Central Sudan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” The Journal of African History, vol. 19, no. 2 (1978), 173-193. Paul E. Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700-1900. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980. Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. For example George Dalton, “Comment: What Kinds of Trade and Markets?” African Economic History, no. 6 (Fall 1978), 135. French and French language academia does not seem to have been particularly receptive to the term. See, for example, Jean-Louis Triaud, “Les Agents religieux islamiques en Afrique tropicale: réflexions autour d’un theme,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (1985), 273. Marion Johnson, “Review of Caravans of Kola,” African Economic History, no. 11 (1982), 203. The elective affinity between migration and the occupation of professional niches linked to trade gave rise to other concepts which had more success than “trading diaspora”, even if diaspora was more or less associated with the concept. Hence the notion of the “intermediary minority” in sociology. See Howard Becker, “Constructive Typology in the Social Sciences,” American Sociological Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1940), 47; Sheldon Stryker,

160

Chapter 3

Thus, a non-conceptualised usage, open and often without perennity, existed between the 1940s and the 1970s, in fact contributed to the opening up of the space of usage, but without leading to an accumulation of references. What should we make of the Buddhist diaspora,134 the Italian diaspora,135 unique occurrences of the “Scottish diaspora”136 or that of the British, which – and this is the only example of his attempt at theorisation – the historian Charles Carrington believed could not be compared to the Jewish one?137 It is certainly possible to identify patterns, and to observe the transformation of a growing number of populations into “diasporas” since the end of the 1960s. Some of these cases would gradually grow in importance, to the point of being considered as “classic diasporas”, or at least as indisputable cases of a category under construction. Somewhat paradoxically, it is difficult to find a precise point of departure for this assembly of typical cases. Indeed, if this core of case studies would take a more definitive shape in the academic world of the 1990s,138 there are earlier, if often less solid versions, in Dubnow, Toynbee and Freedman. At the end of the 1970s, usage of diaspora appeared to be well-established – which does not mean theorised or justified – in the context of the following populations: Irish, Chinese, Indians, Armenians, Greeks. Indeed, apart from the Irish and the Chinese, who we have already discussed, and beyond the works of Dubnow, Toynbee, Freedman or Sorre who, as I have shown, envisaged a more encompassing diversity of usage, we can identify scattered uses, in English but also often in French,

134 135

136

137 138

“Social Structure and Prejudice,” Social Problems, vol. 6, no. 4 (Spring 1959), 345-346; Hubert Jr Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations. New York: John Wiley, 1967; and Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 5 (October 1973), 588. Walter Liebenthal, “Chinese Buddhism During the 4th and 5th Centuries,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 11, no. 1 (1955), 59. Donna Gabaccia has identified a first usage in a 1949 article: Carlo Morandi, “Per una storia degli itaniani fuori d’Italia (A proposito di alcune note di A. Gramsci),” Rivista storica italiana, no. 3 (1949), 379-384, cited in Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press, 2000, 193. Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism. London: Collins, 1954, cited in Lyon, “On Diasporas,” 73-74. One section is entitled “The Scottish diaspora”, but the term does not appear again in the text. Charles Carrington, The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, cited in Lyon, “On Diasporas,” 73. See infra.

Towards a Secular Concept

161

from the 1930s in the case of the Armenians,139 and since the late 1950s for the Indians.140 A special case is that of the Palestinians, for the description of their “dispersion”, of their “catastrophe”,141 since 1948, necessarily encounters that of the Jewish diaspora and the founding of the State of Israel. The first identified occurrences, in the 1960s, still maintain a distance from the term, using quotation marks: “Soon a whole new generation of Palestinians will have grown up in the Arab “diaspora” without having had anything more than a second-hand knowledge of Palestine.”142 We note that in the 1960s the expression is as much as part of the lexicon of international organisations such as the UN, whose UNRWA – the agency concerned with Palestinian refugees – CommissionerGeneral referred in a report to the “diaspora of the refugees”,143 as it is of that of the actors themselves. For example, in 1965, Jamal Sourani, the Secretary General of the PLO in Jerusalem, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times to report that “representatives of all Palestine Arabs, after 17 years of “diaspora,” met in May, 1964, in Jerusalem and established the Palestine Liberation Organization.”144 After 1967, and even more so after 1973, the Palestinians were more and more frequently presented as a diaspora, and even, as L. M. Kenny wrote in 1973, as the “new diaspora”,145 estimating that “the 139

140

141

142 143 144 145

In French, see Nicolae Iorga, Brève histoire de la petite Arménie: l’Arménie cilicienne. Paris: Gamber, 1930, 87, and Jean-Pierre Callot, L’Arménie. Paris: PUF, 1959, 5, 105, and 106. In English, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, General Anthropology. D.C Heath & Co, 1938, 106, as well as Yann Morvran Goblet, Political Geography and the World Map. New York: Praeger, 1955, 228. It seems that the French were the pioneers here: Jean-Paul Roux, L’Islam en Asie. Paris: Payot, 1958, 266, and Jean Chesneaux, L’Asie orientale aux xixe et xxe siècles: Chine, Japon, Inde, Sud-Est asiatique. Paris: PUF, 1966, particularly p. 285 where he refers to the “Chinese diaspora” and the “Indian diaspora”. See also Eric Meyer, “La Diaspora indienne à Ceylan, xixe-xxe siècles,” L’Histoire, no. 18 (1979), 6-14. In English, Pierre Van den Berghe, “Asians in East and South Africa,” in Pierre Van den Berghe, Race and Ethnicity. New York: Basic Books, 1970, 276. The Arabic word nakba, catastrophe, is generally used to refer to the 1948 expulsion. See Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer, The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. London: Routledge, 2003, 1-2. Don Peretz, “Arab Refugees: A Changing Problem,” Foreign Affairs, no. 41 (1962-1963), 559-560. “Reports to the Nineteenth Session,” International Organization, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1965), 273. Jamal Sourani, “Palestine Refugees,” The New York Times, 29 September 1965, 4. L. M. Kenny, “The United Nations and the Palestine Question: Efforts at Peacemaking,” International Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (1973), 780.

162

Chapter 3

wars of 1948 and 1967 have created an Arab diaspora totalling some million and a half people and representing a large part of the original population of Palestine”.146 The Palestinians “[adapted] the term used by the Jews to refer to their own dispersal outside of the Holy Land”;147 we frequently find this double confrontation, between terminology and situations which appear to position themselves in opposition to one another: the old diaspora, having obtained a state, finds itself faced with the dispersion resulting from its very foundation. As Éric Rouleau wrote in 1975, “it is neither by chance nor the result of clever propaganda (as some people believe) that the Palestinians of the diaspora, as the Zionists have done for centuries, cry out “Nahnu a’aydun” (“We shall return!”). Their will to find a “national home” and to found a state has continued to assert itself since their dispersion in 1948.”148 The analogy is presented as perfect, as much in the dispersion as in the present or future state support for its members outside the state: “Just as all Jews in their Diaspora would not or could not live in Israel, not all Palestinians in their Diaspora could or would live in the Palestinian state. But just as Israel works its magic on the Jews of the Diaspora, the sovereign state of Palestine […] will work its magic on the Palestinian Diaspora”.149 In the mid-1960s diaspora appears with increasing frequency to describe populations whose migratory history is much more recent than that of Jews, Chinese, Indians or Armenians. In the context of Ukrainian migrations the term appears several times in an encyclopedia of Ukraine published in Canada in the early 1960s,150 used in a geographical sense, where diaspora designates, collectively, spaces outside the “Ukrainian ethnic territory.”151 At the end of the 1960s a growing number of works devoted to recent migrant communities of 146

147 148 149 150

151

Ibid., 766. The same year, Halim Barakat states that “The Palestinians have been living in a state of diaspora.” Halim I. Barakat, “The Palestinian Refugees: An Uprooted Community Seeking Repatriation,” International Migration Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 1973), 160. Seth Tillman, “Israel and Palestinian Nationalism,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 1979), 47. Eric Rouleau, “The Palestinian Quest,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 53, no. 2 (January 1975), 270. The expression “Palestinian diaspora” is also used twice, p. 274 and p. 283. Walid Khalidi, “A Palestinian Perspective on the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1985), 44. In his book on the Ukrainian diaspora, Vic Satzewich wrote that the term had rarely been used prior to the end of the 1980, except by the Soviet authorities, for who it had negative connotations. Ukrainians abroad took up the term and gave it a more positive tone. Vic Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002, 8. Volodymyr E. Kubijovyč and Ernest J. Simmons, Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, vol. i, Toronto: Ukrainian National Association, 1963, 244, italics in the original.

Towards a Secular Concept

163

Caribbean or Central American origin, such as the Puerto Ricans or the Dominicans, began to appear in North America, and particularly in the United States. In 1968, J. Hernández-Alvarez published a study of Puerto Rican migration in the United States. In the article’s abstract, he refers to the object of his study, “the different patterns of settlement outside New York City and the present evolution of the migrant colonias and […] the diaspora of a small portion of the Puerto Rican population throughout the US.”152 The distinction he developed between the colonia and the diaspora referred to the difference between settlement in the large cities or their vicinity, and a dissemination across the American territory: “A small but widely scattered portion of the Puerto Rican population of the United States (possibly 10 to 15 per cent, in 1960) does not live in the residential pattern called colonia. This segment could be called the diaspora and includes individuals living in about 38 states and 168 metropolitan areas where the total Puerto Rican population may not reach the number found in daytime on a central street corner in New York City or in a neighborhood block at night or at the international airport on a Sunday afternoon.”153 Thus, the diaspora is opposed to the colony as dissemination to concentration and small numbers to large ones. If, for this author, diaspora was less the name of a community than a spatial morphological denomination to characterise migration, from the early 1970s Puerto Ricans nevertheless rapidly became one of the first populations to whom the name of diaspora was regularly attached, by Adalberto Lopez or Clifford Hauberg for example,154 and not to be subsequently detached.155 According to John Miller, “The application of the term “diaspora” [by Adalberto Lopez] to yet another ethnic minority was appropriate in view of the extraordinary increase in the Puerto Rican population on the Mainland.”156 Whether applied to peoples historically considered as migrants or to communities that were the product of more recent migrations, in the 1970s di152

153 154

155 156

J. Hernandez-Alvarez, “The Movement and Settlement of Puerto Rican Migrants within the United States, 1950-1960,” International Migration Review, special issue “The Puerto Rican Experience on the United States Mainland”, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1968), 40. Ibid., 51. Adalberto López, “Literature for the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” Caribbean Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973), 5-11 (the second part was published in vol. 6, no. 4 (1973), 41-46), as well as Clifford A. Hauberg, Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974, of which Chapter ix is entitled “Mainland Puerto Ricans and the Diaspora,” 109. See Carmen Theresa Whalen and Victor Vázquez-Hernández eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. John C. Miller, “The Emigrant and New York City: A Consideration of Four Puerto Rican Writers,” MELUS, vol. 5, no. 3 (Fall 1978), 82.

164

Chapter 3

aspora appeared in texts and studies of populations as diverse as the Chinese,157 the Dominicans,158 the Irish,159 the Koreans,160, the Hungarians,161 the Finns,162 the Ukrainians, the Québécois,163 the Croats,164 or the Polish.165 However, there was frequently no dialogue between these different case studies. This increase in usage, characterised by a multiplication both of uses and of populations to whom the term was applied, without it being associated with any specific discipline, and without it being effectively theorised, was also evident in university theses. If we consider the emergence of the term in the titles of theses in France, it becomes apparent, on the one hand, that there exist none, even today, that deal with the concept itself, and on the other, that diaspora only really becomes widespread in the second half of the 1980s. Only eight theses with diaspora or diasporas in their titles were defended in France before 1987,166 all from the late 1970s onwards: two in 1978, two in 1979, three in 1981, and the last one in 1986. The term is not restricted to the study of the Jewish people, however, who are the subject of only two of these theses. Indeed, there is an overrepresentation (five of the eight) of cases dealing with the peoples of Africa or with the consequences of slavery. Moreover, diaspora is not the domain of a single discipline but is found in sociology (2),

157

158

159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166

Joseph Harry Haines, Chinese of the Diaspora. London: Edinburgh House Press for the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission & Evangelism, 1965; François Debré, Les Chinois de la diaspora. Paris: Olivier Orban, 1976. Glenn Hendricks, The Dominican Diaspora: From the Dominican Republic to New York City, Villagers in Transition. New York-London: Teachers College Press for the Center for Education in Latin America, 1974. Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Kim Hyung-chan ed., The Korean Diaspora: Historical and Sociological Studies of Korean Immigration and Assimilation in North America. Santa Barbara-Oxford: Clio Press, 1977. Constantin Michael-Titus, In Search of a Hungarian Diaspora. Upminster: Panopticum Press, 1979. Michael Karni ed., Finnish Diaspora. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981. Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard eds., The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1982. J. Bowyer Bell, A Time of Terror: How Democratic Societies Respond to Revolutionary Violence. New York: Basic Books, 1978, 17. M. K. Dziewanowski, Poland in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, 61. Searches were carried out in Docthèses (which lists theses defended in France since 1972) as well as the SUDOC database.

Towards a Secular Concept

165

geography (1), North American Studies (2), African Studies (1), history (1), and economics (1), which accords well with the hypothesis of the constitution of parallel disciplinary series. Finally, there are indications that usage is still pretheoretical, based on previous usage but not on a definition. Thus Huguette Ly Tio Fane Pinéo’s 1978 these, published in 1981, frequently uses, beyond the title, the phrase “Chinese diaspora” but without ever explaining the choice by which it is linked to a prior usage.167 Taking into consideration the incidence of diaspora in the abstracts of theses – which is important because the abstracts are written by the authors themselves – only adds five more works to our list, in sociology (3) and in ethnology (2). In addition to another thesis on the Jewish minority, diaspora is attached to other populations: the Swahili, the Lao, and the Yao of Thailand. Only once is it used in what appears to be a theoretical sense, unrelated to any particular population, that of “migrations of diasporas.” Finally, the Fichier Central des Thèses (Central Register of Theses), which includes both doctoral theses and thèses d’État, only lists two pre-1987 theses, both on Armenians. An inspection of similar databases for other countries give similar results. In the North American case only 23 dissertations or theses with diaspora or diasporas in the title were defended before 1988.168 The two theses and the MA dissertation submitted between 1948 and 1969 are concerned only with the religious use of the term and only deal with its usage by the Protestants, notably the Moravian Brethen. Between 1970 and 1979, the number rises to ten (eight doctoral theses, a D. Mis and an STD169), with a further ten between 1980 and 1987. The years 1986 and 1987 alone account for three titles each and represent the beginning of a process of multiplication of titles. The distribution of disciplines and subjects indicate a predominance in literature and history, which represent more than half of the twenty theses defended between 1970 and 1987 – six for literature, five for history.170 Most concern either the Caribbean, Black or African “diasporas” – nine out of twenty, of which six between 1970 and 1979 – or the Jewish diaspora, pre- or post-Israel, the subject

167

168 169 170

Huguette Ly Tio Fane Pineo, La Diaspora chinoise dans l’Océan indien occidental. Aix-enProvence: Greco-Océan indien, 1981. The first part is entitled “Le Cadre de la diaspora”, the second “Les étapes de la diaspora” and the third “Les Femmes de la diaspora”. The works of Maurice Freedman appear in the bibliography, but are not cited in the footnotes. Source: ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. These two latter are diplomas in theology, a Doctorate in Missions and Doctorate in Sacred Theology (Sacrae Theologiae Doctor). There were three in theology (all between 1970 and 1979); sociology, anthropology, drama, international relations, social work and education account for one each.

166

Chapter 3

of five of them.171 In the British case, before 1987, only two theses (one MA and one PhD) contained diaspora or diasporas in the title, one submitted in 1938, the other in 1946 and both concerning Jewish history; five others, all submitted between 1976 and 1986, included one or other of the terms in their abstracts. Among these latter, three are theology theses, although the two submitted in 1986 were not strictly theology, but religious history.172 Diaspora, in the singular or in the plural, does not therefore appear to be uncommon in the 1960s and 1970s in disciplines such as geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, even history. Somewhat abruptly, the populations to whom the term is applied multiply. This multiplication seems to be characterised by several features. First, it seems to arise in a somewhat anarchic, or at least non cumulative, fashion, with the exception of a handful of sub-disciplines – Sinology, African economic history – within which restricted traditions of usage of the term or of the concept developed. Nevertheless, the term becomes sufficiently well recognised and “communicative” to be used in a variety of very different cases – which does not necessarily mean that it has been accepted or considered legitimate. In 1980, Donald Clark still speaks of “enigma” regarding the usage of diaspora in the title of a work about the Korean community of North America.173 By the end of the 1970s, diaspora was a term whose usage in the human and social sciences began to bear the traces of two processes engaged at the beginning of the 20th century: that of secularisation, which excludes – or makes possible the exclusion – of a strict religious interpretation, and that of banalisation, which permits its application to a growing number of populations. Conversely, not only are the global visions of Dubnow or Toynbee quite rare but we find practically no further traces of a process of formalisation aimed at defining what a diaspora is before considering whether a given population or social form belongs to the category. Everything happens as if the existence of numerous diasporas is a given, but a definition of the term is not judged useful, doubtless because it goes without saying. This coexistence of a multiplicity of cases and the absence of a definition appears in a fairly exemplary manner in a text written in 1969 or 1970 by the Soviet dissident Gregory Pomerantz, a text

171

172 173

The others were Lithuanians, Tunisians, Protestants, Indians, Dominicans and Palestinians (the latter in a 1974 international relations thesis comparing the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas). In one case, diaspora is considered as a Christian concept. Source: British Theses (http://www.theses.com). Review by Donald N. Clark of the pre-cited text by Kim Hyung-chan, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (November 1980), 147.

Towards a Secular Concept

167

that was smuggled to the West and subsequently published in several journals in different forms: We live in an era of universal diaspora. It is true that in this same era the Jewish diaspora has restored its nucleus, toppling over several theories according to which this should not have happened. But in the outcome the diaspora has not vanished. The Jewish nation simply became equal with the other nations in the diaspora: Armenian, Lebanese, Tatar, Irish… The diaspora has long ceased to be purely Jewish; it has become universal. In our epoch almost every nation has emitted a cloud of diaspora. There exist a Chinese diaspora in South- east Asia, an Indian diaspora in Asia and Africa, even a Dahomian diaspora in Western Africa, and there already have been Dahomian pogroms.174

The Moment of First Definitions If it was not until the 1970s, in political science, that the first efforts at theorisation developed, we can nevertheless identify several earlier attempts aimed at extracting diaspora from its vulgar usage in order to give it a greater scientific force. In 1949, in the editorial of a special issue of the journal Social Forces devoted to the Jews of the United States the philosopher Louis Kattsoff, distinguishing between “political diaspora” and “religious diaspora”, thought that “it is perhaps time to re-interpret the very notion of Diaspora”.175 The first usage denotes “to be away from a political area, say a state,” while the second refers to “a separation from God – a falling away from the religion”. This distinction allows him to propose the term’s extension beyond the Jewish case: So the populations of Europe uprooted by order of Hitler and moved about could be said to have been in political diaspora. So, too, the Jews uprooted and sent away by the legions of Caesar went into political diaspora. Many people so uprooted yearn all their lives for the chance to return to their native land and to be ruled once again by their own rulers. Many Jews not only yearned in their own lifetime but were able to pass

174 175

Gregory Pomerantz and Alexis Koriakov, “Man without an Adjective,” Russian Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (July 1971), 224. Louis O. Kattsoff, “The Definition of a Situation: The Jew in America,” Social Forces, vol. 27, no. 4 (May 1949), 464.

168

Chapter 3 on that yearning to their offspring, in the form of a religious notion. In the days of Rome, Palestine was essentially theocratic. So there grew up a false relation of State to religion. Political diaspora could have ended Judaism if the Rabbis had not managed to separate the two again.176

It does not appear that the dichotomy established by Kattsoff found an audience. The discipline which most influenced the evolution of the usage of diaspora was political science and particularly two of its sub-fields, international relations and nationalism studies. In the first case, the decisive factor was the emergence of the idea of the transnational. If it had already been already present here and there since the beginning of the 20th century, including in the context of affiliations going beyond the national context,177 it only began to instil itself into political science in any durable fashion in the early 1970s178 with the organisation of a conference on “transnational relations” by the American political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye.179 However, it was in the field of nationalism studies that attention turned to theorising “diasporas”, since “diaspora nationalism” was regarded as another form of nationalism, either because “diasporas” intervened in nationalist-type conflicts in the territory to which they felt close, or because they called for the establishment of a nation-state. In 1936, without using diaspora, the sociologist Louis Wirth forged the notion of “minority nationality” to describe a nationality existing beyond state borders, a category in which he placed American Blacks and Jews.180 As we have already seen in a number of cases, the link between diaspora and minority is frequent. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the development of sustained theories of nationalism in which diaspora 176 177

178

179

180

Ibid. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 118 (July 1916), p. 86-97. The first occurrence of transnational found by Pierre-Yves Saunier was in German and appeared in the first class given by the linguist Georg Curtius at Leipzig University in 1862. Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Transnational,” in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 1047-1055. In 1959 Arnold Wolfers used it to describe the role of non-state actors in global politics. We find it in Raymond Aron’s work in 1962 with a similar meaning. Saunier, “Transnational,” 1051. Papers published in International Organization, special issue “Transnational Relations and World Politics”, vol. 25, no. 3 (Summer 1971). In this issue, James A. Field’s article “Transnationalism and the New Tribe,” uses diaspora once, p. 369. Louis Wirth, “Types of Nationalism,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 41, no. 6 (May 1936), 723-737.

Towards a Secular Concept

169

nevertheless remains little more than a useful term to designate a minority. In one of his first books, the British sociologist Anthony D. Smith returns to the usage of diaspora employed four years earlier by Kenneth Minogue in his study of nationalism.181 Minogue defined diaspora as the dispersed members of a particular ethnic group wishing to return to their historical or claimed homeland. In Smith’s typology, which distinguished between three forms of nationalism – territorial, mixed and ethnic – the “diaspora” is a rare subcategory of the ethnic type characterised by the search for greater cultural autonomy: “The only mode of ensuring the survival of the culture and its bearers is through evacuation of communities to a territory outside the hostile areas.”182 Smith lists the classic cases: Garveyism,183 Zionism, the Lebanese, the Liberians, the Greeks and the Armenians. He subsequently returns to this triple distinction and the sub-category diaspora in several of his books.184 He was not alone. In 1981, Ernest Gellner used the expression “diaspora nationalism” in a contribution to John Plamenatz’s theory distinguishing Western nationalism and Eastern nationalism.185 According to Gellner, this new category allowed for a consideration of the existence of two distinct cultures on any given territory, one of which dominates the other politically while the second is better equipped educationally or economically.186 The minorities included in this category were Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians overseas and Ibos. These theoretical conceptualisations of nationalism all have thing in common: they never establish diaspora as a concept endowed with a definition that is at once functional and limited, that is, susceptible to being applied to

181 182 183 184 185 186

Kenneth Minogue, Nationalism. London: Batsford, 1967. Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth, 1971, 219-222, quotation p. 222. Garveyism was the movements in favour of a return to African established by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey in the 1910s. See infra, Chapter iv. See, for example, Anthony D. Smith ed., Nationalist Movements. London: Macmillan, 1976; or by the same author National Identity. London: Penguin Books, 1991, 82. John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of An Idea, ed. Eugène Kamenka (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 23-36. Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism,” Theory and Society, vol. 10, no. 6 (November 1981), 774-775. Gellner’s thinking on nationalism seems to date from the late 1960s, since Anthony Smith includes one of Gellner’s seminars at the London School of Economics in 1967 in the bibliography of Theories of Nationalism. Gellner had already used diaspora in 1969 in connection with the saints of the Atlas and the dispersion of Ahansal centres. Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, 141 and 260.

170

Chapter 3

some populations but not to all. Moreover, these different propositions concerning “diaspora nationalism” display no real consolidation, in that successive authors have not drawn on each other’s works to justify their theorisation. The first sustained refinement of diaspora as a definition holding out the promise of being academically operational finally appears in the work of another specialist of nationalism – one who moreover is largely absent from theoretical discussion of nationalism before the second half of the 1980s187 – the political scientist John Armstrong. In 1976 he published an article entitled “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas” in the American Political Science Review, which, since the 1990s, has enjoyed the status of a pioneering article, and in which he proposed a generic definition of diaspora as well as a distinction between two forms of diasporas, a mobilised form and a proletarian form.188 He defined a diaspora as “any ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity, i.e., is a relatively small minority throughout all portions of the polity,” a definition that included hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads as well as Gypsies.189 Although Armstrong subsequently used this theoretical framework in the historical text that he published in 1982, Nations before Nationalism,190 the 1976 article was the more influential and rapidly gave rise to attempts at appli-

187 188

189

190

For example, Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, who repeatedly cites Armstrong, both the 1976 article and the 1982 monograph. John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” American Political Science Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1976), 393-408. Armstrong was already using “diaspora” in the mid-1960, in his work on ethnic minorities in the USSR, to describe certain non-Russian nationalities who occupied privileged positions by virtue of their roles as intermediaries, particularly economic, that their linguistic capacities and their trans-national links enabled them to play. They are mentioned in the second edition, published in 1967, of his 1962 work, Ideology, Politics and Government in the Soviet Union: An Introduction. New York: Praeger, 131-137. See also John A. Armstrong, “The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union: the View of the Dictatorship,” in Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union, ed. Erich Goldhagen (New York: Praeger, 1968), 3-49, particularly p. 8-9. The papers published in this volume had been presented at a symposium held in 1965 at Brandeis University. However, this theorisation does not seem to have moved beyond the circles of specialists of the Soviet Union, who nevertheless used it widely during the 1970s. In his article Armstrong lists ten propositions describing the attributes of mobilised and proletarian diasporas. Unlike the former, who manage to organise themselves economically and culturally, the latter are generally constituted by a relatively undifferentiated mass of unskilled labourers. John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Towards a Secular Concept

171

cation, in the field of specialised studies of nationalism and minorities191 or, more frequently, in migration studies.192 It was (briefly) cited by Hugh SetonWatson in his attempt at a description of this “interesting phenomenon” which is how he referred to “diaspora nations”, the subject of a whole chapter in his 1977 book on nationalism.193 These “diaspora nations”, which he also called “diaspora communities”194 and whose essential characteristic was to be “scattered over a wide part of the earth’s surface: hence the use of the Greek word diaspora,” classified according to five “models”. The first model unites dispersion and the maintenance of an intact cultural identity over a substantial period of time. It particularly includes the Jews, “the only people beside the Chinese who possess a cultural identity unbroken for more than three thousand years […] and had for over 1,800 years no territory.”195 The second model is that of the migration of a significant number of individuals from an immense continental population and who become a majority in the countries in which they settle. This model includes Chinese and Indians. The third model is that of individuals leaving a country to make their life elsewhere and who constitute a significant percentage of the population who remained in the home country. Seton-Watson places Greeks, Armenians, Lebanese and Volga Tatars in this category. The fourth model includes European traders who settled in Africa or Asia. Finally, the fifth category is constituted by the Muslim trading communities of East Africa and the southern coasts of Asia. As we can see, these five models exhibit significant differences and include numerous populations. 191

192

193

194 195

For example, Ekkart Zimmermann, Political Violence, Crises and Revolutions: Theories and Research. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983, 107, or Ronald de McLaurin, The Political Role of Minority Group in the Middle East. New York: Praeger, 1979, 219. Particularly in the special issue of the International Migration Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1979), devoted to international migration in Latin America: see Elsa M. Chaney, “Foreword: The World Economy and Contemporary Migration,” 204-212, particularly p. 209-210, as well as, in the same issue, Saskia Sassen Koob, “Formal and Informal Associations: Dominicans and Colombians in New York,” 314-332, p. 332. See also Wayne A. Cornelius, Mexican Migration to the United States (with Comparative Reference to Caribbean-basin Migration): The State of Current Knowledge and Recommendations for Future Research. San Diego: Center for United States-Mexican Studies, 1979, 258; Elsa M. Chaney, “Migrant Workers and National Boundaries: The Basis for Rights and Protections,” in Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits, ed. Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (Totowa: Rowman et Littlefield, 1981, 74, notes 23 et 24. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1977, chap. x, “Diaspora Nations,” 383-416. The expression “interesting phenomenon” appears on the back cover. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 383 for the last two quotations.

172

Chapter 3

In the 1980s, and almost certainly as a result of responses to both Armstrong’s article and Seton-Watson’s book, reflections on diaspora started to accumulate and increasingly began to identify previous texts upon which to draw, either to move forward or to note the lack of interest in the concept. Three examples are significant. The first is a conference held at Rutherford College at the University of Kent, 6-8 July 1981. Its aim was to “explore common themes in the British expansion into the great colonies of settlement,”196 that is, to ask if a diaspora could be a dominant group, a majority, in opposition to Armstrong’s proposition. The tone was immediately set by the introduction: “The Conference came to no clear consensus as to whether its subject matter was a loosely related set of ‘dispersals’ or a ‘diaspora’ properly integrated in cultural, economic or political ways.”197 In this case, diaspora was in fact more of an excuse for gathering scholars around a given theme, such as that of British expansion, than a true structuring concept. This was evident in the use of the word: it appeared on several occasions in the various papers that emerged from the conference, in titles as much as in the texts themselves, but generally without any precise definition. However, at least one paper, that of Peter Lyon, undertook, in a few dense pages, to review the growing use of diaspora in the social sciences.198 Analysing the pre-cited texts of John Armstrong and Hugh Seton-Watson – and declaring that the latter’s chapter was “the most wide-ranging single study of diasporas yet available,”199 he expresses his reservations as to the usefulness of the concept while nevertheless maintaining that “the Jewish diaspora is the archetypal example archetypal in terms of which all other diasporas can be contrasted and compared.”200 This collection of roneotyped texts was never formally published, undoubtedly the reason why it had little impact. However, it nevertheless bears witness to the growing interest in the theoretical potential of the term at the beginning of the 1980s.201 The second example is a text written by the French scholar Richard Marienstras on the “notion of diaspora”, published in 1985 in an edited volume on minorities.202 This chapter has neither references nor footnotes, but it traces 196 197 198 199 200 201 202

“Introduction,” in The Diaspora of the British, unpaginated. Ibid. Lyon, “On Diasporas,” 72-80. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 73. Robin Cohen is one of the few scholars working on the concept who cites this collection, but he never cites Peter Lyon’s contribution. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 209. Marienstras, “On the notion of Diaspora,” 119-125. This chapter was the only article by a French author to have been included in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen’s anthology, Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham: Elgar, 1999, 357-363.

Towards a Secular Concept

173

the transformations in usage of the term. Ten years earlier, Marienstras had published an important work on the Jewish diaspora which offered little to those seeking to extend the use of the term to other diasporas,203 but here he no longer limited himself to the Jewish case, for “recently […] this term has come to describe minority groups whose awareness of their identity is defined by a relationship, territorially discontinuous, with a group settled ‘elsewhere’ (for example, the Chinese diaspora, the Corsican diaspora in mainland France, etc.).”204 For Marienstras, “diasporas” are thus minorities endowed with a history and a common culture, but whose existence as a minority is not the least eternal: they disappear into the host society or societies, or they renew themselves in a “return” to the territory of origin. In addition to the Jews, the principal example given is that of the Armenians, but other cases are relevant, such as the Chinese or the Gypsies.205 Marienstras introduced an important further distinction in this text: beyond the current usage of diaspora, there existed a criterion that permitted to distinguish between true diasporas and others, that of perennity: “Certainly, the word diaspora is used today to describe any community that has emigrated who numbers make it visible in the host community. but in order to know if it is really a diaspora, time has to pass.206 This distinction between true diasporas, articulated about a theoretical conceptualisation, and false diasporas that relied only on autodenomination or on lax usage – necessarily too lax – of the term, marked a new stage in the development of the term’s usage, based on the relationship between the vernacular and academic language. The third example is the publication in 1986, of Modern Diasporas in International Politics, edited by the Israeli political scientist Gabriel Sheffer, a book with which diaspora takes its place in the vocabulary of political science and provides an analytical framework for an entire work.207 The production of this work unfolded in several stages. A first workshop was held at the Leonard Davis Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June 1982, bringing together – in addition to Sheffer himself – the political scientists Walker Conner, Milton Esman and Myron Weiner from the American side, and Emmanuel Guttman, Dan Horowitz and Jacob Landau from the Israeli side. Following this meeting texts were requested from a number of scholars. These texts were subsequently presented at a conference that was held at the MIT 203 204 205 206 207

Richard Marienstras, Être un peuple en diaspora. Paris: Maspero, 1975. Marienstras, “On the notion of Diaspora,” 120. Ibid., 125. Ibid. Gabriel Sheffer ed., Modern Diasporas in International Politics. London: Croom Helm, 1986.

174

Chapter 3

(Cambridge, Mass.) in March 1983. As Sheffer noted, the manuscript was ready by 1984. The bibliographical references in Sheffer’s introduction were few – seven in all. They concerned irredentism as well as the influence that ethnic minorities could attempt to exercise on the foreign policy of their host countries, but he insists on the fact that these case studies “do not deal systematically with the activities of diasporas on the trans-state level.”208 Despite his assertion that “some of the existing definitions of ethnic diasporas are inadequate for our purposes since their underlying assumption is that diasporas are transitory and that they are destined to disappear through acculturation and assimilation,”209 he cites no study other than that of Armstrong.210 To alleviate what he felt were their shortcomings, he proposed a model that was both broader and more inclusive: “Modern diasporas are ethnic minority groups of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin – their homelands.”211 As Sudesh Mishra quite aptly observes, this perspective rests on an interpretation of diasporas as being constitutive of a third irreducible pole in addition to those of homeland and host country.212 The object of study was thus transformed into a triangle whose corners were homeland, host country and diaspora, each of these poles being conceptualised as an actor in itself, characterised by stability and unity. Even if the bibliography upon which Sheffer drew was rather meagre, it is clear that the development of the concept of diaspora represents an extension of thinking on transnationalism, and the particular form that diaspora nationalism takes, since the 1960s. The emphasis is now placed on the intermediary role played by ethnic diasporas at the domestic or international level. Sheffer’s first definition of diasporas is completed a few pages further on by a paragraph in which the principal properties – nothing indicates that they are

208 209 210

211 212

Gabriel Sheffer, “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics,” in ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid. According to Sudesh Mishra, “Sheffer is attentive to the handful of previous studies on historical diasporas”. Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006, 25. The exiguity of the bibliography in Sheffer’s introduction rather gives lie to this statement. Sheffer, “A New Field of Study,” 3. Mishra, Diaspora Criticism, 24-36. The author goes so far as to consider that there was a “school of 1986” which was carried forward by William Safran and Robin Cohen (p. 37-49) to constitute what he called the “first scene” of the “diaspora criticism” genre, that of “dual territoriality”.

Towards a Secular Concept

175

exclusive criteria – of ethnic diasporas are enumerated. These latter, products of migrations, voluntary or involuntary, to one or more countries, are minority groups in these countries, and remain so. They maintain an identity and an ethnic or ethno-religious solidarity. They are characterised by constant contacts between their active members. These contacts play an important role in the triad “host country – homeland – diaspora”, notably with the aim of maintaining or developing political, cultural or economic links with the homeland, which necessarily implies the development of “dual loyalties” that are potentially creators of conflicts with the dominant group in the host country. Finally, a capacity for the mobilisation of diasporas leads to the formation of “triadic networks” which may rest either on cooperation or on conflict.213 This enlarged definition served as the basis for the book, which had eleven chapters. Seven of them were devoted to one or two specific populations: Indians214, the Chinese of South-east Asia,215, Jews, Palestinians and Black Americans216 – while the last four developed more general themes such as the impact of homelands on diasporas,217 the question of labour migration,218 the links between diaspora and language,219 and links between diaspora and international relations.220 The triadic schema as well as the definition of diaspora proposed by Sheffer in the introduction, are explicitly referred to in most of the chapters of the book.221 The authors generally accord little importance to prior works using diaspora,222 with the exception of one chapter, that of the American political scientist Locksley Edmondson on the “African diaspora.”223

213 214 215 216

217 218 219 220 221

222 223

These characteristics have a long paragraph devoted just to them, p. 9-10. Arthur W. Helweg, “The Indian Diaspora: Influence on International Relations,” in Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, 103-129. Milton J. Esman, “The Chinese Diaspora in South-East Asia,” in ibid., 130-163. Three chapters are more or less exclusively devoted to Israel or to Jews: one on the Jewish diaspora as a “classic diaspora”, another on fundraising by Jews on behalf of Israel and a third, by Dan Horowitz, on diasporas and the Palestinian question during the British mandate. Walker Conner, “The Impact of Homelands upon Diasporas,” in ibid., 16-45. Myron Weiner, “Labour Migrations as Incipient Diasporas,” in ibid., 47-74. Jacob M. Landau, “Diaspora and Language,” in ibid., 75-102. Milton Esman, “Diasporas and International Relations,” in ibid., 333-349. Helweg, “The Indian Diaspora,” 123; Esman, “The Chinese Diaspora in South-East Asia,” 132; Esman, “Diasporas and International Relations,” 333; Landau, “Diaspora and Language,” 75-76. Esman’s chapter on the Chinese never mentions Maurice Freedman; similarly, Arthur Helweg does not mention Pierre van den Berghe. Locksley Edmondson, “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora: Some International Implications,” in Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, 164-210.

176

Chapter 3

This chapter occupies a special place in this book for three reasons. First, Edmondson is the only author who did not participate in the preparatory meetings: Sheffer met him at Cornell University and suggested that he contribute to the edited volume.224 Then, the example in question, that of the emergence of “Black consciousness” is distinguished from the other cases studies in Modern Diasporas in that it did not concern a people or an ethnonational entity whose native land could easily be identified. In his introduction, Sheffer even considers the question of the categorisation of the Black community in the United States and its relationships with Africa as one of the problems linked to the operatory character of his definition of a diaspora.225 Finally, until quite recently, Sheffer has never really considered that the “African” or “Black diaspora” could legitimately be considered as a diaspora in the sense in which he understood it, that is, “ethno-national.”226 Edmondson’s chapter is a lengthy presentation of the “Black American diaspora” as part of the “African diaspora”, and of the role that it played internationally in support of Pan-Africanism and towards Africa. He is particularly attentive to the interactions between diaspora, host country and homeland. Edmondson wrote that “whenever we posit the idea of a ‘diaspora’ as a unit of analysis, this involves not simply matters of internal relevance to a given diasporic group but also necessarily embraces the dynamics of that group’s external relationships, especially with its ‘homeland’.”227 At first glance, it might appear, to us as it did to Sudesh Mishra, that this perspective was wholly inscribed within that of dual territoriality – the triangular relationship – proposed by Sheffer, in the context of which diaspora must be understood as being situated, simultaneously, between and in the homeland and the host country.228 However, this is not so, not because Locksley Edmondson was not among the participants at the first workshops but because his usage of diaspora belonged to an older tradition.229 Of all the chapters, his was the one 224 225 226

227 228 229

Email from Gabriel Sheffer to the author, 9 September, 2008. Sheffer, “A New Field of Study,” 11. Thus “Black diaspora” or “African diaspora” is either not considered among the “ethnonational diasporas”, or only merits a brief mention. However, in Diaspora Politics, he returns at greater length to the “African diaspora”, and finally decides that it meets his definition. See Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 6-87. Edmondson, “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora,” 166-167. Mishra, Diaspora Criticism, 31-32. The lack of historical depth is one of the weaknesses of Mishra’s work, as I have already shown in “Le Champ de l’épars: naissance et histoire du ‘genre diasporique’,” La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, no. 7 (September-October 2008), 39-44. Also see infra, chap. vii.

Towards a Secular Concept

177

which drew most extensively on prior academic literature, notably on a body of literature that the rest of the text, and Sheffer’s introduction in particular, never took into consideration – the academic output concerning the “Black diaspora”. His emphasis on the role of the “Black diaspora” at the international level was not particularly innovative, indeed, it differed little from a hypothesis that he had been developing over the previous twenty years.230 It follows that, despite his inclusion in this collection, Edmondson was not part of the “school of 1986” but rather part of a parallel history of the usage of diaspora, that of the “African diaspora” or of the “Black diaspora”, which it is now time to look at more closely. 230

See particularly Locksley Edmondson, “The Internationalization of Black Power: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” Mawazo, no. 1 (December 1968), 16-30; by the same author, “Africa and the African Diaspora: Interactions, Linkages and Racial Challenges in the Future World Order,” in Africa: The Next Thirty Years, ed. Ali A. Mazrui and Hasu H. Patel (Lewes: Julian Friedmann Publishers, 1974), 1-21; and “Black Roots and Identity: Comparative and International Perspectives,” International Journal, no. 34 (Summer 1979), 408-429, particularly p. 424-429.

Part 2 Cham Dispersed: From the Jewish Model to the Reversal

∵

Introduction to Part 2 Old Glory, when you come back won’t you cry aloud and recognize Palestine for the Hews Officially, Ireland for the Irish officially, and Africa for the African officially?1 In the classical prototype [of diaspora], the Jewish people were forced away from the Homeland. Though dispersed, a ‘remnant’ never lost its nostalgia for the Homeland and kept alive the concept of ‘The ingathering of the exiles’, of an eventual ‘Return’. Some similarities to the black experience are obvious, including, at times, trends that can be called ‘Black Zionist’. But the diaspora analogy […] needs constant critical analysis if it is to be a useful guide to research as well as a striking metaphor.2 The comparison between Jews and Blacks has today become one of the most widespread commonplaces of what Jean-Michel Chaumont has called “victim rivalry” (“concurrence des victimes”)3 and has particularly crystallised around the question of the holocaust: is it possible and is it legitimate to use this expression for peoples other than the Jews without divesting the term holocaust and the acts to which it refers of its frightening uniqueness and its horrifying singularity? The expression “Holocaust of African Enslavement”, sometimes referred to by its acronym HAE, is thus particularly present in Afrocentric academic circles where it functions as proof of the debt owed by Western powers to “dispersed Africans”.4 Most of the time, this claim to the term holocaust does not rest on 1 Extract from a speech given by the Révérend J. W. H. Eason to the first convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association at Madison Square Garden, New York, August 1920, reprinted in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. ii, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983), 506, quoted in Robert A. Hill, “Black Zionism: Marcus Garvey and the Jewish Question,” in African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, ed. Vincent P. Franklin et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 41. It would appear that the reference to “Old Glory” is not a reference to the American flag but rather a religious reference. 2 John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, “The Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective,” The Black Scholar, vol. 7, no. 1, (September 1975), 2. 3 Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victimes. Paris: La Découverte, 1997. 4 See particularly Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2002 (first edition 1982); Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama eds., Encyclopedia of Black Studies. London: Sage, 2005, particularly the article “Imperialism”, p. 269.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_007

182

Introduction to Part 2

antisemitic attacks or on a concomitant denigration of the Shoah. Sometimes, however, this aspect of denunciation and hatred prevails in the appropriation of the term, which had until then functioned almost as a hapax. This perspective has reached its fullest expression in a number of texts and speeches by the leaders of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the proclamation of the Black holocaust coming to substitute its own legitimacy for that of the Shoah in denying any commonality between the two catastrophes. At a meeting called the “Black Holocaust Nationhood Conference”, held in Washington, 15 October 1995, one week before the famous One Million March, the New York lawyer Alton Maddox declared that “Jews do not have a monopoly on suffering. Twelve years of suffering or 400 years of suffering? You can’t match that.”5 This type of comparison found its culmination during the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban in August and September 2001. Still, comparative discourses dealing with the Jewish and Black/African historical experiences are not new, indeed, can be traced back several centuries, to their foundations in the text of the Old Testament whose description of the enslavement and the liberation of the Jewish people had imbued the evangelisation of the slave populations transported across the Atlantic to the Americas. These rhetorics admit of an analogy, recognised by the actors themselves, between certain Jewish historical experiences and certain Black or African historical experiences6. The resemblance of pasts and presents is thus considered prone to construct similar futures. The desire to study this Jewish model is in no sense a novelty. Innumerable books and articles, in English as in French, deal with one aspect or another of this subject: the comparability of the two experiences,7 the history of Jewish and Black imaginaries,8 the historical and 5 Cited in Bill Miller and Marcia Davis, “Nationalist Rally in D.C. Draws 1,200; Racial Rhetoric Tinges Event on Eve of March,” The Washington Post, 16 October 1995, A10. On the BlackJewish comparison, see also Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 193-194. 6 I use the couple “Black/African” not to suggest any sort of fundamental interchangeability between the two adjectives but on the contrary to indicate the existence of a historical tension between these two terms within discourses aimed at defining the identity of the descendants of slaves as much as the problematic unity of the African continent: does being “Black” mean being “African”? Is to be “African”, to be “Black”? The different responses to these questions are integral to the development of Black/African militancy from the late 18th century onwards. For a discussion of these tensions between “African” and “Black”, see Christine Chivallon, “Diaspora noire des Amériques: une réflexion conduite à partir de la notion de ‘lien trans-étatique’,” Autrepart, no. 38 (2006), in particular p. 48-54. 7 Michael Williams, “Pan-Africanism and Zionism: The Delusion of Comparability,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (March 1991), 348-371. 8 Maurice Dorès, La Beauté de Cham: mondes juifs, mondes noirs. Paris: Balland, 1992.

Introduction to Part 2

183

moral forms of their reciprocal identifications,9 links found in the idea and the notion of diaspora,10 the place occupied by the Jews or by Israel in the Black or Black American imaginary,11 and the evolution of the relationship between Blacks and Jews in the United States,12 to cite but a few. My ambition here is somewhat different, even if it is quite clearly inscribed within Christine Chivallon’s theoretical history project. I wish to demonstrate that the “Black moment” is capital in any discussion of the usage of diaspora,. In fact, it would be more accurate to speak of “Black moments”, for the importance of the semantic evolution of expressions such as Black diaspora, Negro diaspora or African diaspora is inextricably linked not only to the manner in which the valorisation of Black or African identity has more or less “displaced” the resemblance with Jewish identity, but also to the ways in which usage of expressions that include diaspora have, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, “displaced” the Jewish origins of diaspora. According to those who employ the term, a usage of diaspora does not represent the same relationship to the Jewish experience of dispersion. Three very different perspectives are particularly identifiable in relationships between Blacks and Jews: a logic of analogy (Blacks are like Jews), a logic of substitution (Blacks are the true Jews) and finally a logic of inversion (Blacks are the opposite of Jews). Far from necessarily succeeding one another, they have sometimes coexisted within different groups. If I do not intend to retrace here the history of these movements, mobilisations and representations in detail, it is nevertheless important to dwell on them a moment, since the evolution of Black imaginaries of the dispersion, at least since the 18th century, parallels the historical trajectory of the Jewish peo9 10

11 12

Annie Kriegel, Les Juifs et le monde moderne: essai sur les logiques d’émancipation. Paris: Seuil, 1977. In French the key text is Christine Chivallon, The Black Diaspora of the Americas: Experiences and Theories out of the Caribbean. Kingston-Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011 (first French edition 2004), unquestionably the best in introduction to the complexity of the Black experience in the New World. In English the sources are more varied. We cite here but one, from the pen of the well-known Black American anthropologist and sociologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, “African Diaspora and Jewish Diaspora: Convergence and Divergence,” in Jews in Black Perspectives: A Dialogue, ed. Joseph R. Washington (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1984), 19-41. Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives; Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian Jr., Israel in the Black American Perspective. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. Jack Salzman, Adina Back, and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin eds., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews (New York: Jewish Museum and Braziller, 1992); Cornel West and Jack Salzman eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

184

Introduction to Part 2

ple and uses of diaspora. Most Black authors advocating a more enlightened recognition of their existence as a group, or accession to a form of national political existence, have compared the two experiences, with or without using the term diaspora. Structurally organised about three axes, with complex, even overlapping relationships, the space of the Black cause is transnational. It is always inscribed within a recognition of existing links between Blacks, wherever they are in the world, whatever their objectives: complete integration in the country of residence, separation from the dominant population of the country of residence to form either their own nation or a separate Black community without leaving the land, or finally the project of setting sail for Africa – or any other land where they might be assimilated – and creating there one or several independent states. Whether it takes place around the notions of worldwide dispersion, of persecution, or of a desire for a political or eschatological return, that is, be it sought in the past, the present or in the future, the encounter between diaspora and the Black cause is accomplished, in resemblance or in opposition.

Chapter 4

Next Year in Ethiopia: Blacks at the Jewish Mirror We need to collect the scattered forces of the race and there is no rallyingground more favorable than Africa. There “No pent-up Utica contracts our powers; The whole boundless continent is ours”. Ours as a gift from the Almighty when he drove asunder the nations and assigned them to their boundaries; and ours by peculiar physical adaptation.1 Get this then, Rowland, and get it straight even if it pierces your soul: a Negro by any other name would be just as black and just as white; just as ashamed of himself and just as shamed by others, as today. It is not the name – it’s the Thing that counts. Come on, Kid, let’s go get the Thing!2 In the Old Testament, in the ninth chapter of the Book of Genesis, occurs the following episode: 20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: 21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. 22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. 23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. 24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. 1 Edward Wilmot Blyden, “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in America,” (1862), reproduced in Howard Brotz ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999 (first edition 1966), 117. 2 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Name Negro,” The Crisis, no. 34 (March 1928), reproduced in Eric Sundquist ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 72. This was a reply to a Black student who had asked that the word Negro no longer appear in the columns of The Crisis.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_008

186

Chapter 4 26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. 27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.3

Known as the curse of Ham, this episode was one of the Christian justifications for the enslavement of Blacks. The history of interpretations of this biblical episode is complex, notably because the episode itself is ambiguous: why was Canaan punished, although he was only one of the sons of Ham? Furthermore, the “blackening” of Ham, making of him an ancestor of black populations, is the product of a lengthy process since nothing in the biblical text suggests that either Ham or his descendants have a particular complexion.4 However, almost certainly for reasons linked to the orthography of Ham and its transcription,5 the equivalence between the name of Ham, or Cham,6 the blackness of skin, the cursed character, and enslavement became a truism, including among militants for the Black cause in the 18th and 19th centuries.7 As the former slave Ottobah Cugoano wrote in 1787, “all the present inhabitants of the world sprang from the family of Noah, and were then all of one complexion, there is no doubt, but the difference that we now find, took its rise very rapidly after they became dispersed and settled on the different parts of the globe.”8 He was careful to re-establish the truth of the biblical text, insisting particularly that the curse only concerned the Canaanites and not the descendants of Cush, the latter generally being considered the son of Ham 3 King James Bible, Genesis 9: 20-27. 4 See particularly David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, particularly chapter x “Was Ham Black?”, 141-156; also Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004. Benjamin Braude has studied the dissemination of this curse and the representations attached to it with the three religions of the Book. Benjamin Braude, “Cham et Noé: Race, esclavage et exégèse entre islam, judaïsme et christianisme,” Annales HSS, vol. 57, no. 1 (January-February 2002), 93-125. See also the study, drawing partly on the works of Goldenberg, of Shmuel Trigano on Ham. Shmuel Trigano, “La Figure biblique de Ham,” Pardès, no. 44 (2008), 9-16. 5 The word may also mean “burnt” or “hot”. 6 Depending on how the Hebrew consonant het, the first letter of the name Ham, is transcribed (h or ch). 7 Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 142-143. 8 Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. London: n.p., 1787, 31.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

187

whose lineage gave birth to the Blacks9. An examination of these two facts, the origins of the Black race and the victim of the curse uttered by Noah, features among most arguments for an end to slavery or for a more positive appreciation of Black history by Black authors of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Reverend H. Easton, who founded the Colored Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1836, wrote the following year that Ham was indeed the founder of the Black race,10 a proposition that was supported by former slave turned pastor W.C. Pennington in 1841. The latter added that the curse of Ham could not apply to Blacks since the latter were descended from Ham’s eldest son, Cush, and not from his other son, Canaan.11 In a speech delivered in 1848 Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet declared that “Ham was the first African”. According to Garnet, “Egypt was settled by an immediate descendant of Ham, who, in sacred history, is called Mesraim,” before adding that, according to Herodotus, “the ancient Egyptians were black, and had woolly hair.”12 In 1869, the Liberian Edward Blyden wrote that “Ham […] was of a complexion darker than that of his brothers”.13 Claims to descent from Ham or Cush, and thus African identity, are accompanied by a refusal of the curse of slavery associated with Canaan. Since the Christian religion and the Old Testament furnished the basis upon which the inferiority of Blacks and, through that, slavery, was justified, and since the Old Testament was also the only text available to slaves, even if only in oral form, it is unsurprising that certain Biblical episodes would also underpin attempts to escape from slavery, understood here as an escape from the flesh-bruising metal as much as a liberation from the mental chains that imprisoned Blacks in a state of inferiority, of a negation of self and of history.

9 10

11 12

13

Ibid., 37. Hosea Easton, A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Conditions of the Colored People of the United States, and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them. Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837, 8. See also Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974 (first German edition 1968), 100, as well as Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African-American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 59. James W.C. Pennington, A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People. Hartford: L. Skinner, 1841, 9-13. See Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 101-102. Henry Higland Garnet, The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race: A Discourse Delivered at the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, NY, Feb. 14 1848. Troy: Steam Press of J. C. Kneeland and Co, 1848, 7. Edward Blyden, The Negro in Ancient History. Washington: McGill & Witherow, 1869, cited in Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 142.

188

Chapter 4 The Exodus from Egypt

The Old Testament is the terrain upon which analogies unfold. The Bible and the history of the Hebrew people have occupied a preponderant place in the Black imagination because they furnished a framework both narrative and spiritual that gave sense to the wretched Blacks transported in slavery out of Africa, to the New World. However, two distinctions should be borne in mind in order to grasp the variations between the different modalities of appropriation of biblical references. First, the ethnic and religious awareness of the slaves differed according to the Christian doctrine of their masters, and thus according to their geographical localisation in the Americas. In Catholic lands, Spanish or Portuguese, “ethnic” or religious differences between slaves were respected: those who spoke the same language, shared the same origins or followed similar religious rites were generally kept together. Conversion did not imply a complete abandonment of the “African” religions practiced by the slaves: they were incorporated into the general framework of Catholicism. In Protestant territories, however, British or American, no traces of prior religious convictions were tolerated and slaves were generally not distinguished according to their origins.14 The distinction is important, for it allows us to understand why movements aimed at reappropriating African history through the intermediary of the construction of an analogy with the Jewish biblical people emerged in the Caribbean and in North America. Moreover, it was not “classic” Protestantism that evangelised the slaves. Indeed, efforts undertaken in this direction by the Anglican clergy from the end of the 17th century onwards encountered the reticence of the plantations owners who took a dim view of their forced labour force being introduced to concepts such as liberty. It was therefore the different Protestant sects, Baptists, Moravians or Presbyterians, who assumed the task and engaged in this evangelisation in a more systematic fashion as of the middle of the 18th century in the southern United States and the British Caribbean.15 As discussed by Frey and Wood, a number of factors explain why the evangelical groups had greater success than the Anglican Church: the insistence on the equality of men, which could but appeal to slaves and former slaves, but also, among other things, the orality of 14 15

See, for example, the remarkable synthesis by John G. St. Clair Drake, “African Diaspora and Jewish Diaspora,” 29-37. On all these points, which we do not have the space to explore here, see particularly Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, in particular p. 64.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

189

the evangelical message which, compared to the written character of Anglican Protestantism, rendered its transmission and its communication easier.16 The slaves’ discovery of the Old Testament revealed a history which lent itself easily to self-identification, a history of unhappiness and hope, malediction and redemption. If numerous episodes, such as the encounter between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, or the exile of the Hebrews to Babylon, easily found a place in the construction of this Christian imaginary, it was the stories of Exodus, the end of slavery, the escape from Egypt of the Hebrew people under the leadership of Moses and the discovery of the Promised Land that had a greater resonance with their plight. Egypt became the name of the land where they now found themselves: their slavery was identical to that suffered by the Hebrews but a Moses would be born who would lead them out of Egypt and to the Promised Land of Canaan. The geography of liberty thus took on Hebrew resonances. Numerous negro spirituals, including of course the famous “Let My People Go”, bear witness to this history that was at once foreign and familiar, imported from the Bible and appropriated by the former slaves.17 Blacks thus appeared as the Jews of the New World and their relationships with Jews were not necessarily entirely metaphorical. Former slave Olaudah Equiano, who became an active militant for the abolitionist cause, suggested in his autobiography, published in 1789, that Blacks must be the descendants of ancient Hebrews whose skin had been burnt by the sun.18 This conclusion was prompted by his observation of very strong moral similarities between the customs of the two peoples: “I cannot forbear suggesting what has long struck me very forcibly, namely, the strong analogy which even by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appear to prevail in the manners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise… an analogy which alone would induce me to think that the one people had sprung from the other.”19 Similarly, in 1774, the Black English preacher

16 17 18

19

Ibid., 82-83. See notably Robert Philipson, “Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, vol. 50, no. 1 (Winter 2001), 17. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, vol. i, London: n.p., 1789, 40-41. For an analysis of Equiano’s comparison of Jews and Blacks, see Arlette Frund, Écritures d’esclaves. Phillis Wheatley & Olaudah Equiano, figures pionnières de la diaspora africaine américaine. Paris: Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2007, p. 37, and James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 64. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 38.

190

Chapter 4

David Margate had incited the slaves in revolt, presenting himself as a Black Moses.20 However, analogy is not synonymous with a confusion of the two histories. The development of Black Christianity favoured the development of a less Judaising discourse. The “spiritual awakening” that manifested itself in the United States during the second half of the 18th century through the diffusion of eschatological ideas led to the creation of Black Christian groups, then Black Christian churches,21 within which references to Zion are indisputably biblical but resolutely Christian and not Jewish.22 Zion was thus part of a collection of names that functioned as a transcoding permitting an anticipation of the future and the unknown through according it the form of a prophetic text: the New World was Egypt, the Atlantic was the Jordan, while Africa took on the attributes of Jerusalem, of Paradise, or of Zion. According to a popular belief among the slaves, the migration of the soul had Africa as its destination.23 In May 1787 Richard Allen and Absolom Jones founded the first Black church, the Free African Society, of the Methodist persuasion. This institutionalisation continued in 1816 with the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), whose first bishop was Richard Allen. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ) was created in New York at much the same time. 1787 was also the year of the creation in Boston of the first Black masonic lodge – the Free African Lodge – under the leadership of Prince Hall. Among the late 18th century Black American preachers studied by Joanna Brooks and John Saillant, the New Testament occupied a more important place than an Old Testament judged pro-slavery, and the Black evangelists John Marrant and Prince Hall developed a specifically Black vision of history within which Egypt and above all Ethiopia represented the Africa chosen by God.24 This “Ethiopianism” was the Africanised version of the chosen land of Israel.

20 21 22

23 24

Joanna Brooks and John Saillant eds., Face Zion Forward: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002, 25. For a detailed analysis of the history of these churches, see the previously cited works of Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, as well as James Campbell. Perhaps we can see in this traces of a process referred to by Israël Yuval, the substitution of Mont Zion for the Temple Mount by the fathers of the Christian church. See Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 23-24. Miles M. Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States. New York: Ithaca, 1953, cited in Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 28. Brooks and Saillant, Face Zion Forward. On Prince Hall in particular and the links between Black freemasonry, Black evangelism and the “return” to Africa, see Joanna Brooks, “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy,” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000), 197-216.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

191

Ethiopia then possessed a generic religious value associated with certain passages of the Old Testament. It did not necessarily correspond to a real, localised land.25 This appellation was valid for Africa generally, paralleling antique usage, in Herodotus, for example, where Ethiopia, from the Greek term αἰθίοψ (aithíops) meaning “who has a burned head”, “black of skin”, referred to all the lands where populations with black skin lived.26 In his 1829 Ethiopian Manifesto Robert Young wrote: “So at this time, we particularly recommend to you, degraded sons of Africa, to submit with fortitude to your present state of suffering, relying in yourselves, from the justice of a God, that the time is at hand, when, with but the power of words and the divine will of our God, the vile shackles of slavery shall be broken asunder from you, and no man known who shall dare to own or proclaim you as his bondsman. We say it, and assert it as though by an oracle given and delivered to you from on high”.27 In the case in question, the exile of the Blacks in a foreign land would not end until the end of time, and this depended on divine will. The eschatology evident in Young’s text is a fundamental aspect of references to Ethiopia in the Black discourse of the 19th century. In 1848, Henry Highland Garnet wrote that “Ethiopia is one of the few nations whose destiny is spoken of in prophecy”: in particular the meaning of Psalm 68, verse 31 – “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” – is quite clear.28 The reference to Ethiopia contained in this psalm can thus operate as a promise of redemption for all of Africa. Some also see in it an eschatological promise in which Africa is chosen by God.29 Thus references to Ethiopia or to Africa do not represent a destination as such, an easily identifiable land. The “return” is as much a transmigration of the soul as a gathering to God at the end of time. However this eschatological

25

26 27

28 29

Nevertheless, in 1841, James W. C. Pennington had already observed the distinction between Ethiopia and Africa. Pennington, A Text Book, 27. For him, Ethiopia “is a name derived from the complexion of the inhabitants”, while Africa referred to a land “inhabited by nations of various complexions”. Herodotus, Histories, II, 22. Robert Young, Ethiopian Manifesto, 1829, reproduced in Wilson J. Moses, Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey. New York: New York University Press, 1996, 66. Garnet, The Past and the Present Condition, 10. Geiss believes Garnet was certainly the first to cite Psalm 68 in support of the Black cause. Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 133. On the eschatological aspects of Ethiopia during the first half of the 19th century, see particularly Thomas G. Poole, “What Country Have I?: Nineteenth-Century AfricanAmerican Theological Critiques of the Nation’s Birth and Destiny,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 72, no. 4 (October 1992), 533-548.

192

Chapter 4

dimension is not found in all Black Christian churches.30 Indeed, the physical “return”, the setting out for the Promised Land firmly belongs to this world, and projects of emigration towards Africa, real or symbolic, undertaken at the end of the 18th century and which were periodically renewed during the 19th century, are human undertakings, even if undertaken in the name of God and the redemption of the Black people. The land of return was initially British Sierra Leone. However, it was hardly a chosen promised land, for the 459 Blacks who made the journey from England in 1787 were the Black Poor, whose journey was organised by English philanthropists. A few years later, in January 1792, it was from Nova Scotia that 1196 Blacks set off for Sierra Leone, having fought with the British armies in America, and whose return was the price of loyalty.31 It was also to Sierra Leone that, from 1788 onwards, the American Quaker Paul Cuffee undertook the transportation of former slaves.32 We could also add the migration from Bahia to the Bight of Benin of former rebellious slaves in the 1820s.33 Unlike the Jewish case, in which undertakings to return are often obstructed in the name of the indispensable expectation of divine will, the two aspects, human and divine, are here mutually reinforcing, the human endeavour advancing towards redemption and thus in the direction of the divine plan. The return is of this world, it is in history. This appears very clearly in the Appeal issued in 1830 by David Walker: It is expected that all coloured men, women and children […] of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them. Let them remember, that though our cruel oppressors and murderers, may (if possible) treat us more cruel, as Pharaoh did the children of Israel, yet the God of the Etheopeans, has been pleased to hear our moans in consequence of oppression; and the

30

31

32 33

They are, however, almost all messianic. George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 61-80. Monday B. Abasiattai, “The Search for Independence: New World Blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1787-1847,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. xxiii, no. 1 (September 1992), 107-116. On the creation of Sierra Leone, see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. After a first voyage in 1810, only 38 people joined the second in 1816. Cuffee died the following year. On this movement, see Bonacci, Exodus!, 56-57.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

193

day of our redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near, when we shall be enabled, in the most extended sense of the word, to stretch forth our hands to the LORD our GOD, but there must be a willingness on our part, for GOD to do these things for us, for we may be assured that he will not take us by the hairs of our head against our will and desire, and drag us from our very, mean, low and abject condition.34 The question of emigration of the descendants of slaves became more persistent following the foundation in December 1816 of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color (often abbreviated to American Colonization Society, ACS), whose objective was to finance and organise the “return” to Africa of former slaves. The emigration of the Blacks of the New World to a real or symbolic Africa, defended by personalities as important in the history of the Black cause as the American Martin Delany and the Liberian Edward Blyden, remained the key debate of the Black cause until the 1860s. It is important to recognise that the movement in favour of emigration was structured in a complex manner. Not only did it prompt conflicts with advocates of the preservation of Black populations in the United States, and thus the struggle for the abolition of slavery and for the equality of rights, but it also opposed supporters of repatriation initiatives organised by the American authorities and defenders of autonomous emigration. Moreover, the emigrationist camp was further divided according to the preferred destination, be it the most practical, the most feasible or the most symbolically imbued.35 Following Sierra Leona, Liberia became the object of a programme established by the ACS, and whose repatriations began in 1820. If crossings to Africa were rare – there were only four between 1820 and 1823 for a total of fewer than 300 Black settlers – they were anticipated patiently by some who saw in them their “escape from Egypt”, as one of the songs collected by Miles Mark Fisher bears witness: “O brothers, don’t get weary / We’re waiting for the Lord / We’ll land on Canaan’s shore”.36 Throughout the first half of the 19th century,

34 35

36

David Walker, An Appeal in Four Articles (1830), reproduced in Moses, Classical Black Nationalism, 70. See particularly Howard H. Bell, “The Negro Emigration Movement, 1849-1854: A Phase of Negro Nationalism,” The Phylon Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1959), 132-142, as well as, from the same author, “Negro Nationalism: A Factor in Emigration Projects, 1858-1861,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 47, no. 1 (January 1962), 42-53. Miles Mark Fisher, “The Search for a Homeland,” in Okon Edet Uya ed., Black Brotherhood: Afro-Americans and Africa. Lexington: Heath, 1970, 5.

194

Chapter 4

however, ACS policy was nevertheless opposed by most Black organisations.37 Opponents included those who felt that free Blacks were American like any other and not African, and those who, while seeing no alternative solution for the Black people – for the descendants of slaves – to their settlement in another country, nevertheless opposed the Liberian project, which they saw as little more than a ploy of the plantation owners to rid themselves of free Blacks. However, these two opposing policies – integration and emigration, which would themselves confront one another for more than a century – did not emerge at the same time. Integration was the earlier of the two, and its proponents opposed the ACS and its plans for repatriation with their own deep “Americanism”,38 expressed particularly eloquently in a speech that Thomas L. Jennings gave to the New York Society for Mutual Relief in 1828: Our claims are on America; it is the land that gave us birth. We know no other country. It is a land in which our fathers have suffered and toiled. They have watered it with their tears and fanned it with their sighs. Our relation with Africa is the same as the white man’s is with Europe, only with this difference, the one emigrated voluntarily, the other was forced from home and all its pleasures. We have passed through several generations in this country and consequently we have become naturalized; our habits, our manners, our passions, our dispositions have become the same […] I might as well tell the white man about England, France or Spain, the country from whence his forefathers emigrated, and call him a European, as for him to call us Africans; the argument will hold

37

38

Some would change their minds regarding Liberia after independence in 1847. This was true of Henry Highland Garnet, who henceforth felt that Liberia could be beneficial and that in any case, “in a word, we ought to go anywhere, where we can better our condition”. Henry Highland Garnet, “Colonization and Emigration,” The North Star, March 2, 1849. Liberian independence led to a growth in annual emigrant numbers – some 450 during the following decade. Hollis R. Lynch, “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World, Before 1862,” in Uya, Black Brotherhood, 48. Even before the Negro Convention Movement was founded, the Jamaican John B. Russwurm, founder and editor of Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and longtime adversary of the ACS, and therefore of emigration to Liberia, in 1829 finally became an advocate and began to support emigration to Liberia. He himself emigrated shortly thereafter and founded the Liberia Herald, which was taken over by Edward Blyden after Russwurm’s death. On the idea that Black were at home in America, see Robert Ernst, “Negro Concepts of Americanism,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 1954), 206-219. David Walker even stated in his Appeal that the world belonged to Blacks more than to Whites.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

195

as good in the one case as the other. Africa is as foreign to us as Europe to them.39 However, their ascendancy in the battle for rights would not last long. In the 1830s opposition to the ACS’s projects began to appear within the Negro Convention Movement.40 This was not an organisation as such, but a grouping of national meetings bringing together delegates from a number of different associations. For better or for worse, the two principal tendencies of the Black cause during the first half of the 19th century cohabited within it, those who argued for integration and those who supported emigration. The latter were increasingly vocal in the conventions, notably under the leadership of the principal figure of the emigrationist camp, Martin Delany. In his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, published in 1852, Delany expressed the idea that although Blacks constituted a specific class within the nation, considered to be inferior – in the image of “the Israelites in Egypt, the Gladiators in Rome, and similar classes in Greece; and in the present age, the Gipsies in Italy and Greece, the Cossacs in Russia and Turkey, the Sclaves and Croats in the Germanic States, and the Welsh and Irish among the British […]”41 – they also, like the Jews and other nations (the Polish in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh in the United Kingdom), formed a “nation within a nation”:42 “That there have in all ages, in almost every nation, existed a nation within a nation – a people who although forming a part and parcel of the population, yet were from force of circumstances, known by the peculiar position they occupied, forming in fact, by the deprivation of political equality with others, no part, and if any, but a restricted part of the body politic of such nations, is also true.”43 However, these national minorities did not all face the same predicament as the Blacks: “however unfavorable their condition, there is none more so than

39 40

41 42

43

Freedom’s Journal, April 4, 1828. The issues of Freedoms’s Journal from 1827 to 1829 are available online at www.wisconsinhistory.org. William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, “The Negro Convention Movement,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. i: To 1877, ed. Nathan J. Huggins, Martin Kilson and Daniel M. Fox (New York: Harcourt Brave Jovanovitch, 1971), 191-205. Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993 (first edition 1852), 11-12. This idea of a “nation within a nation” recurs frequently, particularly (for example p. 209: “We are a nation within a nation”) to characterise the situation of Blacks in the United States as well as for the purposes of comparison with other peoples. Ibid., 12.

196

Chapter 4

that of the colored people of the United States.”44 He encouraged his readers with a rallying cry: “Let us go on and possess the land, and the God of Israel will be our God”.45 But which land to possess? Delany’s book was ambiguous on this point. He considered numerous possibilities (Liberia, Canada, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Nicaragua, New Grenada), but finally decided that only Central America, South America or possibly the Caribbean were viable options, notably because a large proportion of their population was already of African origin. Liberia was rejected because of the influence that slave owners still exerted in the ACS. However, in an appendix, Delany noted the resources that certain eastern parts of Africa could offer, for it was indeed there that the land offered to the Blacks was located: The black race may be found, inhabiting in healthful improvement, every part of the globe where the white race reside; while there are parts of the globe where the black race reside, that the white race cannot live in health. What part of mankind is the “denizen of every soil, and the lord of terrestrial creation,” if it be not the black race? The Creator has indisputably adapted us for the “denizens of every soil,” all that is left for us to do, is to make ourselves the “lords of terrestrial creation.” The land is ours – there it lies with inexhaustible resources; let us go and possess it. In Eastern Africa must rise up a nation, to whom all the world must pay commercial tribute.46. Delany’s principal adversary was Frederick Douglass, a former slave whose main objective was the abolition of slavery and the struggle for full civil rights for former slaves. Claiming belonging for Blacks to the American nation, in 1853 he assumed the leadership of the anti-emigration movement during the Colored National Convention in Rochester where the question was officially discussed. Finding himself in a minority, Delany and his supporters established a rival organisation, the National Emigration Convention of Colored Men, whose first meeting was held in Cleveland in 1854.47 At the end of this 44 45 46 47

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 214. Robert M. Kahn, “The Political Ideology of Martin Delany,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (June 1984), 415-440. See also Tommy Shelbie, “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black Political Solidarity,” Political Theory, vol. 31, no. 5 (October 2003), 664-692.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

197

convention, several options for emigration were put forth. If Sierra Leone and then Liberia had been the focus of discussions since the end of the 18th century, it would be Haiti that subsequently became one of the principal options for Black emigration. In 1804, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue had achieved its independence under the name of Haiti, thereby becoming the first Black republic in the New World and an important symbol for populations of African origin. In 1818, the Black militant and freemason Prince Saunders declared himself in favour of the possibility of emigration to Haiti.48 In 1824, the ACS contacted Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer to explore the possibility of it becoming a destination for the “Free Blacks”.49 In 1854, the Black Episcopalian minister James T. Holly undertook a comprehensive study of the possibilities offered by the Haitian republic.50 The project saw a decisive impetus in the early 1860s, when President Lincoln declared himself in favour of the emigration of former slaves, either to Africa or to Haiti. In 1861 a Haytian – at the time, Haiti was generally written Hayti – Emigration Society was created in Ohio, which developed links with both James Holly and Henry Highland Garnet. Between December 1860 and October 1861, 2,000 colonists settled in Haiti,51 but the living condition on the island prompted a significant number of them to return to the United States. The project ceased in 1862 due to the Civil War in the United States. If Haiti or Africa – west or east – occupied an important place in the imaginary of the Black American emigrationist leaders, these latter left no possible opportunity unexplored. In 1854, James Monroe Whitfield, one of Delany’s close supporters, opted for Central America while Henry Bibb drew up proposals for emigration to Canada.52 For a long time, until the second conference of the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland in 1856, Delany thought that 48

49

50

51 52

Bruce Dain, “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Racial Discourse in the United States,” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 14, no. 3 (December 1993), 139-161. See also Ernst, “Negro Concepts of Americanism,” 211. See Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti, of the Free People of Colour in the United States: Together with the Instructions to the Agent Sent Out by President Boyer (documents collected by Loring D. Dewey, agent for the American Colonization Society). New York: Mahlon Day, 1824. James Holly also drew on the analogy between Jews and Blacks. See Chris Dixon, African Americans and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000, 145. See also Léon D. Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans: A Heritage of Tragedy and Hope. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 92. Roger W. Hite, “Voice of a Fugitive: Henry Bibb and Antebellum Black Separatism,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1974), 269-284.

198

Chapter 4

South America might be an option. On this he was opposed by another important figure in the Black world, the Liberian Edward Wilmot Blyden. In 1856, from Monrovia, Liberia, whence he had emigrated in 1851 from the United States,53 he sent a message entitled “A Voice from Bleeding Africa” in which, in addition to calling for a swift end to slavery in order to accelerate the redemption of the African race, he invited the Blacks of the United States not to reject the ACS, whatever their intentions, for the most important thing was emigration to Liberia.54 His entire struggle was oriented towards this goal, which he considered to be the sole path to redemption and the regeneration of the Black, for whom Africa was the “appropriate home”.55 However, the emigrationist fever of the early 1860s ran up against the outbreak of the Civil War. Upon his return from a journey in search of colony that he made to West Africa with Robert Campbell in 1859-1860, Delany became increasingly convinced that West Africa was the ideal destination,56 even as the campaign for emigration to Haiti was in full swing. However, when Blyden and Crummell returned to the United States in the summer of 1862, advocating the efforts of the Liberian government in favour of greater immigration from the United States, the emigrationist fervour had died away. If the struggle between the defenders and the adversaries of emigration was a structuring element of the Black cause between 1816 and the beginning of the 1860s, the two positions were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Thus Richard Allen, although favourable to the idea that Blacks remained in the United States, supported the emigration project to Haiti launched by the Haitian president in 1824.57 Even Frederick Douglass, despite being one of the most vociferous opponents of Delany’s projects, and of emigration in general, felt that Haiti was doubtless the best possible destination for those who wanted to leave the United States.58 53 54

55

56

57 58

He was born in the Danish Virgin islands. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “A Voice from Bleeding Africa,” (1856), reproduced in Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. Hollis R. Lynch (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 10. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “An Address before the Maine State Colonization Society, Portland, Maine, June 26th, 1862,” New York Colonization Journal, July 1862, reproduced in ibid., 18. Blyden attributed responsibility for the refusal to emigrate to the mulattoes who, by virtue of their mixed complexion, had no confidence in the future of the Black, hated him, and were uninterested in Africa. Ibid., 15-18. On this point see Richard Blackett, “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 62, no. 1 (January 1977), 1-25. Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 86. Bell, “Negro Nationalism,” 43. Douglass subsequently became US ambassador to Haiti.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

199

Henry McNeal Turner – known as Bishop Turner for his position in the American Methodist Episcopal Church – was one of the last to promote the dream of Black emigration in the 19th century.59 In the early 1870s, he encouraged a return to Africa, but without much success. In 1892, his project took the form of a shipping company, the Afro-American Steamship Company, which was obliged to cease business a year later through lack both of ships and of passengers to transport. After the Civil War, the failed promises of the abolition of slavery in the southern United States and the introduction of Jim Crow laws of segregation were resisted by other means, such as through the struggle for civil rights or the promise of social separatism. However, if the project of the escape from Egypt had been founded on the biblical past and the analogy that it allowed between the Black people and the Jewish people, it was henceforth to be the Jewish present, incarnated by the establishment of the Zionist movement, which would give new meaning to the analogy.

1896 and 1917: Two Moments between Zionism and Discrimination The 1st of March 1896, at Adwa, the Ethiopian troops of King Menelik II repulsed the Italian invasion: in so doing the Ethiopian kingdom made a sensational entry into the African imagination as a contemporary kingdom become repository of biblical promises, and a real African power.60 From that moment on, in the Black symbolic universe, Ethiopia was not only a generic denomination for the whole of the continent but also a nation capable of resisting the West. The signifier Ethiopia would henceforth permit a line of continuity to be traced though a reconciliation of past and present. This Ethiopianism would combine a strong biblical messianic dimension with an earthly anchoring capable of demonstrating the power of the Black world. If Ethiopia had become a place towards which a return could be imagined, physically or symbolically, or with which it was possible to identify, there nevertheless existed no real movement towards an organised return. 1896 was also the year of publication of Theodor Herzl’s book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), in which he laid the foundations for the construction of a state. Another chronological coincidence was that the First Zionist 59

60

Edwin Redkey, “Bishop Turner’s African Dream,” The Journal of American History, vol. 54, no. 2 (September 1967), 271-290, as well as, by the same author, “The Flowering of Black Nationalism: Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey,” in Huggins, Kilson and Fox, Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. ii, Since 1865, 109-115. Paulos Milkias and Getachew Metaferia eds., The Battle of Adwa: Reflections on Ethiopia’s Historic Victory Against European Colonialism. New York: Algora, 2005.

200

Chapter 4

Congress, which was held in Basel from 29-31 August 1897, was followed barely two weeks later, 14 September, by the creation of the African Association by the young Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams in London. Open only to Blacks, this association had for objective the holding of a conference bringing together Blacks from across the world: it was held in London, 23-25 July 1900, and given the name Pan-African Conference, thus proclaiming for the first time the term Pan-African.61 According to Hollis Lynch, “it is thus not an unreasonable speculation that Herzl’s Zionist movement was one of the stimuli that led to organized Pan-Africanism”.62 From this moment on, it was less the biblical reference to the exodus than the Zionist movement, or more exactly, the biblical reference to the exodus actualised by Zionism, which became an important reference within the Black/African cause, whatever the orientation. Edward Blyden was one of those who, at the end of the 19th century, would make the most use of the Zionist example, drawing upon it as a possible springboard and template for the establishment of a more organised Black movement. References to the similarities or differences between the two people with respect to their escape from slavery and their setting out for the Promised Land occur in several of his works. If God “has not sent any Moses, with signs and wonders, to cause an exodus of the descendants of Africa to their fatherland”,63 the two peoples resembled one another in other ways: “Africa is distinguished as having served and suffered. In this, her lot is not unlike that of God’s ancient people, the Hebrews.”64 The two escapes from Egypt, the historical one and the one to come, Jewish and Black, presented a number of commonalities. During one of his American tours, in 1887, Blyden wrote that “the Negro leader of the exodus, who will succeed, will be a Negro of the Negroes like Moses was a Hebrew of the Hebrews – even if brought up in Pharaoh’s palace he will be found – No half-Hebrew and half-Egyptian will do the work – he will have brass and as-

61

62 63 64

On the creation of this association, but also on the personality of Henry Sylvester Williams and his role in the Pan-African Conference, see Owen Mathurin, Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976. Hollis R. Lynch, “A Black Nineteenth-Century Response to Jews and Zionism: The Case of Edward Wilmot Blyden, 1832-1912,” in Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, 51. Blyden, “The Call of Providence,” 114-115. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “Ethiopia Stretching Out Her Hands unto God; or; Africa’s Service to the World,” speech to the American Colonization Society, May 1880, reproduced in Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967 (first edition 1887), 120, emphasis in the original. The similarity between the two peoples is also referred to on p. 127.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

201

surance enough – for this work, heart, soul, and faith are needed”.65 However, it is in a text entitled The Jewish Question, which appeared in 1898, two years after the publication of Der Judenstaat by Herzl, that he expressed his greatest enthusiasm for the importance of the Jewish example, in the form of Zionism, for Black redemption: I have taken, and do take, the deepest possible interest in the current history of the Jews – especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism. The question, in some of its aspects, is similar to that which at this moment agitates thousands of the descendants of Africa in America, anxious to return to the land of their fathers. It has been for many years my privilege and my duty to study the question from the African stand point. And as the history of he African race – their enslavement, persecution, proscription, and sufferings – closely resembles that of the Jews, I have been led also by a natural process of thought and by a fellow feeling to study the great question now uppermost in the minds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews.66 However, it would be simplistic to think that Jewish political thought was the only crucible of nationalism. As George Borstein has so competently demonstrated, it is difficult to contemplate the question of the development of nationalism at the end of the 19th century without taking into consideration the extraordinary interweaving of three of them: the Black, the Jewish and the Irish.67 Whether these identifications be collapsed into one another like so many traces of inferiority by the proponents of a so-called “scientific” racism, or whether the principal representatives of the Black, Jewish and Irish causes cite each other or identify with one another, these three “motifs” interpenetrate one another constantly,68 from Frederick Douglass’s visit to an Ireland ravaged by famine in 1845-1846 to Irishman John F. Taylor’s 1901 speech on

65

66 67 68

Letter from Blyden to Coppinger, 3 October 1887, quoted in Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912. London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, 121. Edward Wilmot Blyden, The Jewish Question. Liverpool: Lionel Hart, 1898, partially reproduced in Lynch, Black Spokesman, 210-211. George Borstein, “The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalisms at the Turn of the Century,” Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005), 369-384. Biman Basu has shown that the Indian example also played an important role, particularly for Du Bois. See Biman Basu, “Figuration of ‘India’ and the Transnational in W.E.B. Du Bois,” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 2 (2001), 221-241.

202

Chapter 4

the analogy between Irish movements and the flight from Egypt. We also find this motif in Theodor Herzl, in particular when he wrote in his journal in 1895: “I shall be the Parnell of the Jews”.69 The references to Jewish and Irish historical cases are numerous in the texts dealing with the situation of the Blacks, highlighting the resemblance of the pasts and the indispensable resemblance of the presents and of the futures to come. Thus Timothy Thomas Fortune, a Black American militant and co-founder in 1890 of the National Afro-American League, also sketched out the parallel between Blacks, Jews and Irish in 1903, but noting the difference between the Blacks on the one hand and the Jews and the Irish on the other: “It is not because they are poor and ignorant and oppressed, as a mass, that there is no such sympathy of thought and unity of effort among them as among Irishmen and Jews the world over, but because the vitiation of blood, beyond the honorable restrictions of law, has destroyed, in large measure, that pride of ancestry upon which pride of race must be builded”.70 As we see, the logic is generally that of a past, present and future analogy, whatever the direction envisaged, whether or not it contemplates a return. We thus find suggestions of Black-Jew parallels in which the very possibility, or impossibility, of the return is at the heart of the analogy. In American Civilization and the Negro, published in 1916, the Black American doctor and scholar Charles Victor Roman raised the question of the future of the Blacks in Africa and in the south of the United States in the following terms: The Negro is not going to leave here for two reasons: In the first place this is his home, and in the second place there is nowhere to go. He is not going back to Africa any more than the white man is going back to Europe or the Jew is going back to Palestine. Palestine may be rehabilitated and Europe be Americanized, but the Jew will not lose his world-wide citizenship, nor America fail of her geographical destination as the garden-spot of the world. The Negro will do his part to carry the light of civilization

69

70

Amos Elon, Herzl. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975, 130, cited in Borstein, “The Colors of Zion,” 376. He was of course referring to Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish nationalists at the end of the 19th century. Timothy Thomas Fortune, “The Negro’s Place in American Life at the Present Day,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day. New York: James Pott and Company, 1903, 215. For another perspective on the comparison between the Black and Irish examples, as well as the Poles, see Oswald Garrison Villard, “The Need of Organization,” in Proceedings of the National Negro Conference 1909: New York, May 31 and June 1. New York: National Negro Conference, 1909, 202.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

203

to the dark corners of the world especially to Africa; dark, mysterious, inscrutable Africa; the puzzle of the past and the riddle of the future; the imperturbable mother of civilizations and peoples. The slave-trade was the diaspora of the African, and the children of this alienation have become a permanent part of the citizenry of the American republic.71 “The slave-trade was the diaspora of the African”. This is certainly one of the very first – if not the first – associations between the Black experience in the New World and the term diaspora, even if it in no way underpins a desire to return but, on the contrary, emphasises the American character of the Black population. In that respect Roman’s position is largely in line with the general tendency identifiable within the Black American movement at the end of the 19th century: the Blacks are Americans, they will not emigrate, and they must make their place in the United States. In this context, the Jewish example is useful and it recurs frequently in the speeches and writings of Black American leaders at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th. This is true of the two principal figures of the period, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. According to the former, the growing influence of the Jews, who he considered to be the race who had suffered the most, in the United States as in a number of European countries, was derived from their capacity to cling together and to maintain their “unity, pride, and love of race”: “the Jewish race has had faith itself. Unless the Negro learns more and more to imitate the Jews in these matters, to have faith in himself, he cannot expect to have any high degree of success”.72 In 1893, while in Germany on a study visit, W.E.B. Du Bois highlighted in a letter to Daniel Coit Gilman, president of the Slater Fund who financed his trip, the growing influence of antisemitism in the country and emphasised to what point this situation presented similarities with the question of the Black race in the United States.73

71

72

73

Charles Victor Roman, American Civilization and the Negro: The Afro-American in Relation to National Progress. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1921, 194-95 (first edition 1916), emphasis in the original. Booker T. Washington, The Future of the American Negro. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1899, 183. See also p. 217. In 1901, in a draft for an article, Washington wrote that the “Negro has much to learn from the Jew”. Louis Harlan ed., Booker T. Washington’s Papers, vol. ii, Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972, 397, cited in Weisbord and Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Perspective, 12. Cited in Benjamin Sevitch, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Jews: A Lifetime of Opposing AntiSemitism,” The Journal of African American History, no. 87 (Summer 2002), 325.

204

Chapter 4

At the time, emigration was no longer the flavour of the day; the Black movement was largely structured around two opposing positions, “integrationism” and “separatism”. Until his death in 1895, the first was largely represented by Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) while the second was represented by Alexander Crummell, one of Blyden’s collaborators in the programme of emigration to African, and who emigrated to Liberia himself in 1853.74 Returning to the United States, Crummell then defended the idea that Blacks should as far as possible avoid mixing with Whites and thus form a nation within a nation. Following the death of Douglass, a new leader emerged in the person of Booker T. Washington. Founder in 1881 of the Tuskegee Institute, whose mission was to ensure, in a separate context, the intellectual development of Black Americans, he gave an important speech in Atlanta in 1895, known as the “Compromise Speech”, in which he emphasised the necessity of postponing for the moment claims to Black equality and that Blacks should, in their manner, contribute as much as possible to the needs of American society. He thus believed that Whites and Blacks, “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers yet one as the hand in all that pertains to our mutual interests”75. Washington was particularly sensitive to the question of discrimination and the colour of one’s skin, which he held to be more important than race, for it was that which created the link between the Blacks of American and the Blacks of Africa. In 1909, in The Story of the Negro, after noting all the differences separating the former from the latter, and in particular the extreme diversity of Africa, he remarked upon the strength of the link between all Black men, wherever they were: There is, however, a tie which few white men can understand, which binds the American Negro to the African Negro; which unites the black man of Brazil and the black man of Liberia; which is constantly drawing into closer relations all the scattered African peoples whether they are in the old world or the new. There is not only the tie of race, which is strong in any case, but there is the bond of colour, which is specially important in the case of the black 74

75

See Alexander Crummell, The Relation and Duties of the Free Colored Men in America to Africa: A Letter to Charles B. Dunbar. Hartford: Press of Case, Lockwood and Company, 1861. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” September 18, 1895, reproduced in Harlan, The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. iii, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, 580. Washington’s position in this speech was often charged with “accomodationnism” by his adversaries.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

205

man. It is this common badge of colour, for instance, which is responsible for the fact that whatever contributes, in any degree to the progress of the American Negro, contributes to the progress of the African Negro, and to the Negro in South America and the West Indies […] I have rarely met in America any one of my race who did not, in one way or another, show a deep interest in everything connected with Africa.76 It was partially on this question of the links between Blacks – as well as the struggle for civil rights and the expectation of the acceptance of these rights by Whites – that differences emerged at the very heart of this separatist programme. These debates and these texts unfolded within a Black nationalist space that brought together, willingly or not, men, institutions, journals and ideas characterised by strategies of demarcation. Crummell thought that the defence of the Blacks not only required the education of individuals, but also the development of a collective force, a community of pride. He was joined in that by Du Bois, who met Crummell during his brief stint as a lecturer at Wilberforce University between 1894 and 1896. A brilliant student trained at Fisk University, a Black university in Nashville, Du Bois was accepted at Harvard in 1888 to study history. In 1897 he became professor of history and economics at Atlanta University and together with Alexander Crummell he founded the American Negro Academy, a competitor of Tuskegee insofar as it defended the existence of a specifically Black identity. Still in 1897, he gave a speech entitled “The Conservation of Races” in which he presented the history of the world as being the history of groups, that is, the history of races. It was as a race, and not as individuals, that the “Negroes” had a message to deliver.77 Du Bois’s concept of race seemed not only to emerge quite explicitly from a socio-historical reality, rather than from a distinct essence, but above all from a specific mission, that of a precise message to be delivered to humanity, the most important being that “the full, complete Negro message of the whole Negro race has not as yet been given to the world”78. If the tenor of the text is that biological reality – the colour of one’s skin – lies at the heart of the definition of race, Du Bois broke with a hierarchical vision to introduce the idea that all the races collaborate, each in their own way, in the progress of civilisation. But 76 77 78

Booker T. Washington, The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery, vol. i, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909, 33-34. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” (1897), in Sundquist, The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, 38-47. Ibid., 42.

206

Chapter 4

the innovative principle lay elsewhere. Du Bois distanced himself from both Crummell and Washington as much as from Douglass by developing a quite original perspective within the space of Black nationalism, based on the idea of the dual identity of the Africans of America, a middle position that simultaneously integrated themes both of separatism and of integrationism. He thus described the Blacks of America as being undeniably American, by religion, language, nationality, all the while being “negroes” through belonging to a historical race: Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these crossroads; has failed to ask himself at some time: what, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would79? This duplication – moreover, like the definition of the Black as the “seventh son” of humanity – reappeared in another text, “Strivings of the Negro People”,80 published by Du Bois the same year, but it was in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that he most effectively synthesised his reflections on this theme: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,– a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring

79 80

Ibid., 43. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 80 (August 1897), 194-198.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

207

ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.81 The development of this concept of a dual identity, to which Du Bois gave the famous name of “double consciousness” in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk82 allows us to follow the evolution of his thinking. In 1903, he engaged in a fierce critique of Washington’s theses and pronounced himself against both separatism and segregation. In 1910 Du Bois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which devoted itself to denouncing discrimination against American Blacks, and founded a monthly journal, The Crisis, of which Du Bois became editor. So, the double identity which lay at the heart of “The Conservation of Races” was in a relationship of elective affinity with Du Bois’s formulation of an original position in tension between a growing insistence on the imperatives of access to civil rights, while remaining focused on the idea of racial pride, and on the importance of education for Black children, an education which, for practical reasons, would be provided by Blacks.83 Between Crummell’s death in 1898 and Washington’s in 1915, the defence of the place of Black populations in the United States was essentially organised along the lines of cleavage between Washington and Du Bois. Pan-Africanism and the defence of civil rights claimed by Du Bois took the upper hand. It was then that the second chronological coincidence I referred to above occurred, in 1917. On 2 November 1917, a letter was given to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild in which the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour announced his

81 82

83

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 8-9. On the posterity of the idea of “double consciousness” in American political thought, see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 93-125. This is the idea of the “Talented Tenth”, so dear to Du Bois: according to him, if 10 % of Blacks went to university, they would constitute an elite capable of lifting Black people out of their misery. As Du Bois realised that this would not be possible within the framework of the “White” educational system, it would be necessary to undertake this education separately. Note that the expression “Talented Tenth” is not Du Bois’s: the Reverend Henry Morehouse first used it in 1896. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem, 31-75.

208

Chapter 4

government’s commitment to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. There again, as in 1897, events occurred as if one prompted another. A week later, on November 10th, Du Bois published an article in Survey called “The Negro’s Fatherland” in which he pleads for the creation of a great free state of the Congo, a Black state in central Africa.84 Was this simply chance?85 Du Bois himself, even though sometimes accused of antisemitism in view of certain passages of The Souls of Black Folk,86 gradually revealed himself to be an admirer of the Zionist movement and the perspectives which opened up before it. In any case, in an editorial in The Crisis published in February 1919, Du Bois did not conceal the analogy: “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount.”87 Du Bois wrote these lines in Paris, where he had been since December 1918 trying to organise a Pan-African congress on the sidelines of the Peace Conference. His particular intention, and he was clearly influenced by the Zionist movement on this point, was to have the creation of a Black state included in the list of claims of the Conference. In November 1918 he presented a memorandum to the Board of the NAACP in which he imagined the formation of a Black central African state formed from the old German colonies and the Belgian Congo.88 Both the American and the French delegations were reticent about the possibility of such a gathering and Du Bois appealed to the mediation of the Senegal French député, Blaise Diagne. He was successful, and the congress was held in Paris,

84 85 86

87

88

Robert A. Hill, “Jews and the Enigma of the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” in Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, 56. The chronology is important here, for it Balfour’s letter was given to Rotschild on 2 November, it was not made public until the 9th, the day before Du Bois’s article appeared. For a refutation of accusations of anti-semitism levelled at Du Bois, see in particular Sevitch, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Jews,” as well as Harold David Brackman, “‘A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension’: Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois,” American Jewish History, no. 88 (2000), 53-93. On the somewhat complex relationship between Du Bois and the Jews, as well as on the role that the “Jewish question” played in Du Bois’s approach to the racial problem, see Nicole Lapierre, “W.E.B. Du Bois, le ‘problème’ noir et la ‘question’ juive,” Revue des sciences sociales, no. 42 (2009), 104-110. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Not Separatism,” The Crisis, no. 17 (February 1919), 166, quoted in Amy Kirschke, “Du Bois, The Crisis, and Images of Africa and the Diaspora,” in African Diasporas in the New and Old World: Conscioussness and Imagination, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Klaus Benesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 244. Clarence G. Contee, “Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 57, no. 1 (January 1972), 15-16.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

209

19-21 February 1919;89 but, historical irony, French agreement was conditional upon the claim to a state being renounced. In fact, the Congress was satisfied with tabling a request for the protection of indigenous people in the colonial possessions. According to Robert Hill, Du Bois’s about turn was also linked to conversations that he had had with the small circle of Parisian Jews – and anti-Zionists – grouped around Mme Calmann-Lévy, who persuaded him of the pointlessness of the quest for a state and the merits of assimilation.90 If the evolution of the Jewish question prompted action and reaction from Black American intellectuals, the evolution of the Black American question also prompted reactions in the Jewish newspapers in 1917. The American historian Hasia Diner has shown that at the beginning of the 20th century the American Jewish press, and notably the Jewish Daily Forward, felt there was a strong analogy between the sufferings endured by the Jews and by the Blacks. While the suffering was clearly the product of entrenched racism in the United States, it was also more generally historical in character. This press used the term “pogrom” to describe the racial riots and “autodafé” to describe lynchings. It was in 1917, after the repression of the racial riot in East Saint Louis at the beginning of July, that the alignment of the two causes is the most striking, the Jewish Daily Forward comparing it to the pogrom of Kishinev in 1903, during which more than fifty Jews were killed. Kishinev and St. Louis – the same soil, the same people. It is a distance of four and a half thousand miles between these two cities and yet they are so close and so similar to each other… Actually twin sisters, which could easily be mistaken for each other. Four and a half thousand miles apart, but the same events in both… The same brutality, the same wildness, the same human beasts. There in Kishinev they ripped open people’s bellies and stuffed them with feathers; here in St. Louis, houses were set on fire and women and children were allowed to burn alive. Which is better?91 And the journalist went on: “The situation of the Negroes in America is very comparable to the situation of the Jews… in Russia. The Negro diaspora, the 89

90 91

On the First Pan-African Congress, see Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 229-240, and W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Movement,” (1945), in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, vol. ii 1920-1963, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 162-167. This latter is the text of a speech given by Du Bois during the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in October 1945. Hill, “Jews and the Enigma of the Pan-African Congress of 1919”. Jewish Daily Forward, July 28, 1917, quoted in Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977, 75.

210

Chapter 4

special laws, the decrees, the pogroms and also the Negro complaints, the Negro hopes, are very similar to those which we Jews… lived through”.92 The logic of analogy and identification referred to above is therefore not unilinear: it is also constructed and felt by the Jews, although rarely quite so explicitly. The analogy between Blacks and Jews is founded not only upon the history of their dispersion or their respective adaptations to American society, but also on the discrimination they have been subjected to in the countries in which they live: as Kelly Miller, the Dean of Howard University, summarised it a few years later, Blacks and Jews were “partners in distress.”93 We find traces of this similitude in the significant Jewish presence in the struggle for civil rights in the United States between the beginning of the 20th century and the mid-1960s.94 This presence might be explained by numerous factors, including the valorisation of philanthropy in Jewish circles, as well as Jewish recognition of a fundamental resemblance between Jews and Blacks, that is, their common status as a minority within American society, and, furthermore, a minority still having to fight to obtain or to be guaranteed their rights. American Jews participated as such by assuming responsibilities within the civil rights movement – for example, Joël Spingarn became president of the Board of the NAACP in 1914 – as well as through financing their activities. Among the principal financial supporters of the NAACP, were the bankers Jacob Schiff and his son in law Félix Warburg; the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald; the industrialist Samuel Fels; and even Herbert H. Lehman, a partner in Lehman Brothers.95 This influence and this presence was not limited to the NAACP: they were also present in the National Urban League; in the 1920s, out of the twenty-eight members of the Board whose religious affiliations are known, ten were Jewish. Here again, they were active in financing projects. In the 1910s, Julius Rosenwald was the

92

93

94

95

Ibid., 76. Note that Roman’s 1916 text and the Jewish Daily Forward editorial both use diaspora to describe the situation of Blacks/Africans. These are currently the first known written occurrences. This is not to suggest, however, that these occurrences represent the birth of the expression “Black diaspora” or “African diaspora”. See infra. New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1930, cited in Steven Bloom, Interactions between Blacks and Jews in New York City, 1900-1930, as Reflected in the Black Press, thesis, New York University, 1973, 229, quoted in Nancy J. Weiss, “Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement: The Contribution of Jews to the NAACP and the National Urban League in the Early Twentieth Century,” in West and Salzman, Struggles in the Promised Land, 126. In addition to the above-mentioned article by Weiss, see also Claybourne Carson Jr., “Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, 113-131. Weiss, “Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement,” 136.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

211

second largest contributor the budget of the Urban League, only second to John D. Rockefeller.96 This collaboration and this overlapping may also be seen in the place occupied by the Black question in the work of early 20th century Jewish anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and his student Melville J. Herskovits.97 As Gelya Frank observed with respect to Boas, while his writings in cultural anthropology have no political agenda, this is in distinct contrast to his militant involvement against segregation, and notably against the segregation of Blacks.98 This involvement notably included meetings between Du Bois and Boas: the former invited the latter to give a seminar at Atlanta University in 1906, and the two scholars also participated together at the First Universal Races Congress which was held in 1911.99 They both sought to question an understanding of racial issues that did not rely simply upon physical anthropology, as well as to promote identifications previously stigmatised, specifically Black identity in the United States. If this had been Du Bois’s struggle since 1897, it was also the tenor of a paper given by Boas at Atlanta in 1906: he encouraged his listeners to discover the history of the African kingdoms and to feel a pride in the land of their ancestors.100

96 97 98 99

100

Ibid., 137-139. See also Leonard B. Glick, “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation,” American Anthropologist, vol. 84, no. 3 (1982), 545-565. Gelya Frank, “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, vol. 99, no. 4 (1997), particularly p. 734-735. The proceedings of the Congress have been published: Gustav Spiller ed., Papers on InterRacial Problems, Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26-29, 1911. London: P. S. King and Son, 1911: Franz Boas, “Instability of Human Types,” 99-103; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro Race in the United States of America,” 348-364. The sociologists Alfred Fouillée and Ferdinand Tönnies and the writer Israël Zangwill, among others, also participated in the Congress. On the congress itself and its implications, see Susan D. Pennybacker, “The Universal Races Congress, London Political Culture, and Imperial Dissent, 1900-1939,” Radical History Review, no. 92 (Spring 2005), 103-117. Franz Boas, “The Outlook for the American Negro,” (1906), in A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology 1883-1911, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 310-316, cited in Julia E. Liss, “Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politic of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1894-1919,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 2 (May 1998), 137. Du Bois wrote that upon hearing Boas speak of Africa, he had been “too astonished to speak”. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Folk: Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1939, vii, quoted in ibid., 137.

212

Chapter 4

This struggle for discovery of the African past was also one of the principal themes of one of Boas’s Jewish students, Melville Herskovits. Herskovits obtained his degree in 1923 and his position on the Black population of the United States was of a fairly clear assimilationist line, close to that of Boas. His position began to shift during fieldwork in Harlem, whose results were published in 1928,101 but particularly during two field visits that he made with his wife Frances to the Saramaka, a people descended from runaway slaves in Dutch Guiana, between 1928 and 1929.102 The first results of this fieldwork were published in 1930,103 a precursor to the publication of his book devoted to the “myth of the Negro past”:104 not an affirmation of the mythical aspect of this past, but on the contrary, a denunciation of the myth of absence of a past. Unlike Boas, who was not religious, Herskovits had begun to study to become a rabbi of reformed Judaism.105 It might seem surprising that a Jewish anthropologist is generally considered to be the founder of African-American Studies.106 But, as the American anthropologist Gelya Frank has demonstrated, this is precisely the point: Herskovits’ Jewishness was not in the least irrelevant to his work on what he would call “Africanisms”, that is, the persistence of African cultural features among the descendants of slaves in the New World. It was as a Jew, convinced of the possibilities of assimilation for his congeners on American soil, that he realised the impossibility of a similar process for the Blacks, and thus both the importance that an understanding of their past and their cultural practises must necessarily assume for them, and the construction of

101 102

103 104 105 106

Melville J. Herskovits, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928. On these trips, see Richard Price and Sally Price, The Roots of Roots or How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Richard and Sally Price are, together with Sidney Mintz, the principal proponents of the so-called theory of “creolisation”, which served as a continuation and a refinement of Herskovits’s thesis. Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem,” American Anthropologist, vol. 32, no. 1 (January-March 1930), 145-155. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941. Frank, “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” 736. Herskovits was not the first to establish a connection between Africa and the New World, as well as the survival of African traits despite the ruptures of the Middle Passage. Studies of Haiti had occupied a particularly prominent place in a number of works that highlighted this importance, notably those of Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars. Gérarde Magloire-Danton, “Anténor Firmin and Jean Price‐Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism,” Small Axe, no. 18 (September 2005), 150–170. Another example is the Cuban Fernando Ortiz. See Martha Moreno Vega, “Interlocking African Diaspora Cultures in the Work of Fernando Ortiz,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 1 (September 2000), 39-50.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

213

a narrative of the link with Africa.107 He therefore develops for the Blacks a “tree-like model”, to use Gelya Frank’s expression, according to which it is possible to return in time and identify a common origin, West African, for all slave descendants. This explains his strong involvement in civil rights organisation in the 1920s and his close relationship with the philosopher Alain Locke, an ardent defender of the development of the Black people (see infra, Chapter v), as well as his speech at the Pan-African Congress of 1927.108 Herskovits’s perspectives on the possibilities of assimilation for the Black American population was far from finding universal support. Differences were particularly animated with the Black American sociologist Edward Franklin Frazier, for whom the question of survival of cultural practices did not arise. In 1930, the year of publication of Herskovits’s first text on the question, Frazier wrote that “the manner in which Negro slaves were collected in Africa and disposed of after their arrival in this country would make it improbable that their African traditions were preserved.”109 Still, even if Frazier was probably the most committed opponent of Herskovits’ proposals – which, we must remember, insisted less on the pure continuity between Africa and the New World than on the creativity at work on the basis of the conservation of cultural heritage –, that does not mean that he denied altogether the existence of survivals. The slave trade did not entirely destroy African heritage and “individual slaves brought to America memories of their homeland and certain patterns of behavior and attitude toward their fellow men and the physical world”.110 It was precisely the environment that privileged assimilation and the disappearance of African features: if isolation favoured persistence,111 the new conditions of American life contributed to their disappearance. Frazier’s position 107

108

109

110 111

Gelya Frank, “Melville J. Herskovits and the African and Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and Modern Anthropology,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 8, no. 2 (2001), 173-209. On Herskovits’s work on Africa, and particularly on the history of Dahomey, see Eleni Coundouriotis, “Nation, History, and the Idea of Cultural Origin in Melville Herskovits,” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 1 (2001), 29-51. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 146-147. He also taught a course called Racial Differences at the Chicago Hebrew Institute in which he compared the Jewish and African experiences. Edward Franklin Frazier, “The Negro Slave Family,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 15, no. 2 (April 1930), 203, quoted in Pierre Saint-Arnaud, L’Invention de la sociologie noire aux États-Unis d’Amérique: essai en sociologie de la connaissance scientifique. Paris: Syllepse, 2003, 355. Saint-Arnaud devotes his chapter vi to Frazier, p. 341-415. Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957 (first edition 1949), 3. Ibid., 4.

214

Chapter 4

was founded both on his belief in the cycle of racial relations as developed by Park and Burgess, and on a vision shaped by the very structuration of the Black movement. For Frazier, “the Negro minority belongs among the assimilationist rather than the pluralistic, secessionist or militant minorities”.112 However, he also feared the social consequences of the spread of this idea. In a speech that he gave in Harlem in 1941, Frazier affirmed that “if whites came to believe that Negro’s social behaviour was rooted [in] African cultures, they would lose whatever sense of guilt they had for keeping the Negro down. Negro crime, for example, could be explained away as an ‘Africanism’ rather than as due to inadequate police and court protection and to inadequate education.”113 If the contemporary situation is informed by the dominance of the theme of “catastrophe”, of historical trauma, in the establishment of an analogy, the different examples cited reveal a greater complexity. Certainly, we find references to “deportation”, to dispersion, but also to expressions of hostility and hatred, which they face even in the countries where they are citizens, as well as to political projects on the question of return. The analogy is therefore potentially articulated about three temporal dimensions: a past of deportation and exile, a present of discrimination, and a future of hope in a certain form of redemption. It is generally on this latter point that opinions diverge.

The Temptation of Separatism After Booker T. Washington’s death in 1915, Black nationalism in the United States effectively structured itself around Du Bois – who had become more integrationist and, from this new position, led the fight against Booker T. Washington, first with the Niagara movement, later with the NAACP and The Crisis. However, in the second half of the 1910s, Du Bois’s predominance in the Black cause in the United States found itself in competition with the growing influence of another movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica in 1914 by Marcus Mosiah Garvey.114 112 113

114

Ibid., 680. Cited in Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 115. The same extract from Frazier’s speech was also cited by Lee D. Baker and taken up by Gelya Frank. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 179. On Garvey, see the authoritative biography by E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Study of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1955, as well as Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

215

Born in 1887, a syndicalist, journalist and militant, Garvey emigrated to the United States in 1916 and the following year founded the New York section of UNIA. He laid claim to the separatist legacy of Booker T. Washington but pushed it even further, for Garvey drew upon an older tradition of Black American militancy: the emigration solution and the “return” of Blacks to Africa. The stakes in the struggle between Du Bois and Garvey were therefore both political and ideological. If Zionism had reignited the idea of a return to Africa at the end of the 19th century, it hadn’t produced an organised movement. With the exception of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner’s propaganda campaigns in Liberia and in Sierra Leone and the return to the Gold Coast – of only 46 people – organised by Chief Alfred Sam between 1913 and 1915,115 migration to Africa had not been a priority and African soils were no Land of Canaan. When Garvey arrived in the United States, the “Promised Land” was not the other side of the Atlantic but in the north of the country, industrial and not slave-owning; the South was still blighted by Jim Crow segregation laws. For the Blacks of the South, the industrial development of towns such as Chicago symbolised a possible liberation from slavery. Between 1916 and 1930, some one and a half million people, made the “Great Migration”,116 a giant “exodus from Egypt” towards the “Promised Land” of the north, explicitly described as such.117 Marcus Garvey’s movement did not escape this “Judaisation” of the Black cause, a process understood as the inscription of the project of positive recognition of Black identity within the Jewish model, whether through PanAfricanism or by emigration to another land. Still, this vision was also shared by some Jewish circles, in a way that was novel in comparison with the end of the 19th century. The development of UNIA and Garvey’s encouragement of a Black return to Africa through the intermediary of the creation of a shipping 115

116

117

On Chief Sam, see Robert A. Hill, “Before Garvey: Chief Alfred Sam and the African Movement, 1912-1916,” in Pan-African Biography, ed. Robert A. Hill (Los Angeles: African Studies Center, 1987), 57-77. In French, see Bonacci, Exodus!, 68-69. Loïc Wacquant, “De la ‘terre promise’ au ghetto: la Grande Migration noire-américaine, 1916-1930,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 99 (September 1993), 43-51. See also Carole Marks, Farewell – We’re Good and Gone. The Great Black Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970, particularly the chapter “Going into Canaan”, 74-107. The term diaspora was apparently not used as such. Indeed, if Carole Marks cited a headline in the Chicago Defender referring to the “Black diaspora”, she noted that she found the reference in Tuttle’s book. However, the expression “Black diaspora” as it appears on page 90 of Tuttle is not a quote from the Chicago Defender. William Tuttle confirmed this to me in an email dated 8 January 2005. See Marks, Farewell – We’re Good and Gone, 30.

216

Chapter 4

company, the Black Star Line, founded in 1919, were closely followed by the Jewish American press which did not hesitate to describe Garvey as a “Black Moses” or a “Black Messiah”. Thus pro-Zionist newspapers such as Tageblatt or Morgen Journal saw it as a movement that was not only legitimate but which resembled Zionism. The anthem of UNIA was portrayed as the “Black Hatikvah”, the equivalent of the Zionist anthem, and some newspapers went so far as to write that Garvey’s aim was to “take his people out of the Galuth”118. Somewhat logically, the Jewish Daily Forward, opposed to Jewish Zionism, also opposed Black Zionism.119 The description of Garveyism as a “Black Zionism”, and of Garvey himself as a “Black Moses” was widespread. In August 1920, on the occasion of the first UNIA convention held at Madison Square Garden, the New York World gave him the title of “Moses of the Negro race”,120 an appellation that the same journal had previously applied to Booker T. Washington.121 In the 1950s, the Pan-African militant Georges Padmore again used the term “Black Zionism” in connection with Garvey’s movement.122 Garvey himself saw the analogy between UNIA’s agenda and Zionism, but also, and again, with the Irish nationalist movement. He thus declared in 1919: “Therefore, you will realize that the Universal Negro Improvement Association is no joke. It is a serious movement. It is as serious a movement as the movement of the Irish today to have a Free Ireland; as the determination of the Jew to recover Palestine”.123 If, as E. David Cronon has shown, Garvey once described his partisans as “Zionists”, he was apparently not familiar with Herzl’s writings.124 In the same vein, Garvey 118 119 120

121

122

123

124

Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 76. Ibid., 55. New York World, August 22, 1920, cited in Robert Hill and Barbara Bair, “Introduction,” in Marcus Garvey, Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert Hill and Barbara Bair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xxi. New York World, November 5, 1895, reproduced in Harlan, The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. iv, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975, 73. We also find the mention of this name used for Washington in Guy B. Johnson, “Negro Racial Movements and Leadership in the United States,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 1 (July 1937), 64. It would also appear that this name was sometimes used in a sarcastic manner. See Grant, A Negro with A Hat, 354. George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1972 (first edition 1955), 65. One chapter was entitled “Black Zionism or Garveyism” (p. 65-82). Marcus Garvey, “Address to UNIA Supporters in Philadelphia, October 21, 1919,” in African American Political Thought, 1890-1930. Washington, Du Bois, Garvey and Randolph, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Armonk & London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 203. Cronon, Black Moses, 200-201.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

217

made the temporal link between the two movements during a UNIA meeting in July 1920: “A new spirit, a new courage, has come to us simultaneously as it came to other peoples of the world. It came to us at the same time it came to the Jew. When the Jew said ‘We shall have Palestine!’ the same sentiment came to us when we said ‘We shall have Africa!’”125 But this is not the most important observation we might make: we can also identify in Garvey and his followers the same combination of patterns that I have previously described with respect to the Black evangelists of the late 18th century. There we find analogy and substitution side by side. The resemblance with Zionism and references to contemporary Jewish history were accompanied by a double substitution which was articulated about the racialist dimension of Garveyism. For Garvey, God was not White but Black, and Christ was certainly not Jewish. Moreover, we find groups of “Black Jews” or “Jewish Negroes” among Garvey’s partisans.126 Note that the former, “Black Jews”, existed before Garvey’s movement was established – one of the first such groups was created in 1896, in Lawrence, Kansas. If some of these groups made explicit claims to Judaism,127 others, whether they called themselves Black Jews, Negro Jews or even Black Israelites, generally128 defended the idea that Judaism was of African origin, or that Blacks were the only true Jews, descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the “White” Jews of Europe being impostors.129 Among these “Black Jews”, two figures stand out: that of Rabbi Mordecai Herman, one of the principal organisers of the Moorish Zionist Temple of New York, and 125 126

127

128

129

Cited in Weisbord and Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Perspective, 16. On the “Black Jews” or “Negro Jews”, see Howard Brotz, “Negro Jews in the United States,” Phylon, vol. 13, no. 4 (4th trimester 1952), 324-337; Ruth Schlossberg Landes, “Negro Jews in Harlem,” Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 9, no. 2 (1967), 175-189; as well as Roberta S. Gold, “The Black Jews of Harlem: Representation, Identity and Race, 1920-1939,” American Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2 (June 2003), 179-225. Note that Ruth Landes’s research was carried out in the 1920 but only published 40 years later. This was particularly true of members of the African Hebrew Israelite Community, generally called Black Hebrews. In 1966, a group of 300 Black Hebrews left Chicago for Israel, of whom only a handful arrived in 1969. On the Black Hebrews, see Fran Markowitz, “Ending the Black Diaspora? Soul Citizenship, the Black Hebrews and the State of Israel,” in Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière and Sheffer, Les Diasporas, 311-320. The distinctions between the names adopted by the different groups and their specific links with Judaism, Jews or, post-1948, the State of Israel, are complex. See John L. Jackson Jr., “All Yah’s Children: Emigrationism, Afrocentrism, and the Place of Israel in Africa,” Civilisations, vol. lviii, no. 1 (2009), 93-112. See Merrill Singer, “Symbolic Identity Formation in an African American Religious Sect, The Black Hebrew Israelites,” in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55-72.

218

Chapter 4

that of Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford. The latter, a Jazz musician who was born in Barbados and emigrated to the United States at the end of the First World War, was co-author with Benjamin E. Burrell, of the poem that was to become the official anthem of UNIA under the name of the “Universal Ethiopian Anthem”. In November 1930, he attended the coronation of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and subsequently undertook, until his death in 1934, to buy sufficient land to establish a Black Jewish colony in the region where the Beta Israel lived,130 but nevertheless without succeeding in persuading a sufficient number of people to settle there.131 The return to Zion was envisaged here as a real return to Ethiopia and to the true Jews. For a decade, between 1917 and 1928, Du Bois and Garvey, and their respective movements, were the two principal axes of structuration of the field of the Black cause in the United States. Opposed on possible solutions to the Black predicament – the fight for civil rights and Pan-Africanism on the one hand, Black pride and emigration on the other – both leaders consistently confronted each other in writing. The two following extracts give an idea of the virulence of the stances that they held with respect to one another, but also how they accused one another of betraying their race. On 13 February 1923, Garvey wrote in The Negro World: It is no wonder that Du Bois seeks the company of white people, because he hates black as being ugly… Yet this professor, who sees ugliness in 130

131

The Beta Israel, also known as Falashas, are Ethiopian Jews. Their existence was made public in the West by Joseph Halévy in 1867. Recognised as authentic Jews by the two Chief Rabbis, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, of Israel in 1973-1974, they obtained the right to emigrate to Israel. Their emigration having generally been forbidden by the Ethiopian government, in January 1985 the Israeli government organised Operation Moses, which “repatriated” some 7000 of them. The fall of the communist regime in Ethiopia in 1991 ended any obstacles to their departure. On the history of the Falashas, see particularly Daniel Friedmann and Ulysses Santamaria, Les Enfants de la Reine de Saba: les Juifs d’Éthiopie, histoire, exode, intégration. Paris: Métailié, 1994. On their presence in Israel, see Lisa Anteby-Yemini, Les Juifs éthiopiens en Israël: les paradoxes du paradis. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2004. These two scholars contributed to a special issue of the journal Pardès (no. 44, 2008) on “Juifs & Noirs”: Daniel Friedmann, “Qui étaient les Falachas?” 97-105; Lisa Anteby-Yemini, “Peaux noire, masques blancs: les immigrants éthiopiens en Israël,” 107-118. It would appear that between 1931 and 1932, only sixty or so individuals moved. Yvonne Chireau, “Black Culture and Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, 1790-1930, an Overview,” in Chireau and Deutsch, Black Zion, 26. Also see William Scott, “Rabbi Arnold Ford’s Back-to-Ethiopia Movement: A Study of Black Emigration, 1930-1935,” Pan African Journal, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 1975), 191-202, and Bonacci, Exodus!, 159-162.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

219

being black, essays to be a leader of the Negro people and has been trying for over fourteen years to deceive them through his connection with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Now what does he mean by advancing colored people if he hates black so much? In what direction must we expect his advancement? We can conclude in no other way than that it is in the direction of losing our black identity and becoming, as nearly as possible, the lowest whites by assimilation and miscegenation.132 For his part, Du Bois wrote in an editorial for The Crisis in May 1924: “Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world. He is either a lunatic or a traitor. […] Every man who apologizes for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself down as unworthy of the countenance of decent Americans. As for Garvey himself, this open ally of the Ku Klux Klan should be locked up or sent home [to Jamaica, where Garvey was born].”133 Unwittingly, no doubt, Du Bois’s wish was prescient. After the bankruptcy of the Black Star Line in 1922, Garvey was accused of mail fraud. Found guilty, he spent two years in prison before being deported to Jamaica in 1927. Considered as a hero by the Black population of Jamaica at a time when the importance of Ethiopia in the Black imagination was continually on the increase, first with the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930, then with Italo-Ethiopian conflict of 1935-1936,134 he acquired a prophetic dimension in the context of the development of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica from the early 1930s onward under Leonard Howell, who considered the coronation of Haile Selassie as the fulfilment of the prophecy announced by Garvey.135 However, on a number of points, Du Bois’s and Garvey’s positions resembled one another. Beyond their use of the analogy with the Zionist movement, 132

133

134

135

“Editorial Letter by Marcus Garvey, February 13, 1923,” The Negro World, February 17, 1923, reproduced in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. v, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 233. “Opinion of W.E.B. DuBois,” The Crisis, vol. 28, no. 1 (May 1924), 8-9. In February 1928, Du Bois penned an editorial in The Crisis that was somewhat amicable towards Garvey, in which he wrote: “We have today no enmity against Marcus Garvey. He has a great and worth dream. We wish him well.” Extracts are cited in Cronon, Black Moses, 145. See William A. Shack, “Ethiopia and Afro-Americans: Some Historical Notes, 1920-1970,” Phylon, vol. 35, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1974), 142-155, and William Scott, “Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict 1934-1936,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 63, no. 2 (April 1978), 118-134. The Rastafari movement accords a fundamental importance to Ethiopia. In the early 1950s, Haile Selassie offered land to members of the Ethiopian World Federation who

220

Chapter 4

they shared the same struggle for the defence of Black pride. One of the principal elements of this defence was a transformation of the connotations of the term Negro, from negative to positive.136 Negro, with a capital N, is thereby radically opposed to nigger, the latter being the trace of White contempt whilst the former had come to symbolise the reversal of stigmatisation and the claim to the particular distinction associated with belonging to the Black race. Several decades earlier, Edward Blyden had also been particularly heedful of always writing Negro with a capital N. In the first issue of the weekly paper that he had founded in 1872 he justified his decision to call it The Negro as follows: “It has been called the ‘Negro’ (if any explanation is necessary) because it is intended to represent and defend the interest of that peculiar type of humanity known as the Negro with all its affiliated and collected branches whether on this continent or elsewhere.”137 Charles Alexander, the publisher of Alexander’s Magazine in Boston, affirmed in 1906 that “the proper name by which representatives of this race scattered throughout our country should be designated is Negroes” and that “an attempt to discard this name on the part of members of the race is an evidence of inexcusable weakness”.138 This defence of the name Negro was taken up again in 1920 by Marcus Garvey in his “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” which “deprecate[s]

136

137

138

wished to settle in Ethiopia. On these Rastafari migrations, see Giulia Bonacci, “Le ‘rapatriement’ des Rastafaris en Éthiopie: éthiopianisme et retour en Afrique,” Annales d’Éthiopie, no. 18 (2002), 253-264, as well as her longer study: Bonacci, Exodus! If I dwell at some length on the question of the name, particularly in the United States, this is not to imply that the question was absent in French. Even before Césaire and Senghor’s defence of négritude from the late 1930s onwards (see Chapter v), claims to the name Nègre were inscribed within a programme of the racial justification of certain movements, as demonstrated by this quote from an article published in the journal La Voix des Nègres in 1927: “This name is that of our race. […] This name is ours; we belong to it! It is ours as we are its! […] Yes, sirs, you wanted to use this word as a slogan of discord. But us, we use it as a rallying cry: a torch! We make it a point of honour, a sign of glory to call ourselves Nègres, with a capital N at its head. It is our negro race that we desire to guide along the path of its fullest liberation from the yoke of slavery under which it suffers. “Le Mot ‘nègre’,” La Voix des nègres, 1927, cited in Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985, 144-145. Quoted in Hollis R. Lynch, “The Native Pastorate Controversy and Cultural EthnoCentrism in Sierra Leone 1871-1874,” The Journal of African History, vol. 5, no. 3 (1964), 401-402. Also in Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, 94. Alexander’s Magazine, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 1906), 17-18, cited in Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 (first edition 1978), 201.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

221

the use of the term ‘nigger’ as applied to Negroes, and demand that the word ‘Negro’ be written with a capital ‘N’.”139 Garvey’s posterity was not only felt in Jamaican Rastafarianism. He also inspired the formation of radical movements for the defence of Black identity on American soil. This included the Nation of Islam (NoI), whose teachings drew particularly on the beliefs of Marcus Garvey but also on those of Noble Drew Ali. In 1913, at the age of 27, the latter founded the first Moorish Science Temple of America in the city of Newark, New Jersey. According to Drew, the Blacks of America were the descendants of the Moors and since they were from Morocco they therefore belonged to a Muslim nation. A self-proclaimed prophet, he died in 1929. His successor at the head of the Moorish movement, Wallace D. Fard, presented himself as the reincarnation of Drew Ali. This claim divided the movement and led to the foundation, by Fard in 1930, of a new temple in Detroit, the first temple of the Nation of Islam. After his mysterious disappearance in 1933, the baton was taken up by Elijah Muhammad, born as Robert Poole, who founded the Chicago Temple. Until his death in 1975 he was leader of a movement that continued to grow and created numerous temples: from four in 1945 (Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and Washington), there were 15 in 1955, 30 in March 1959 and apparently 50 by December of the same year.140 This growing audience was doubtless linked to the impact of the ideas expressed by the NoI, but it was also due to the growing popularity of the minister at the head of the New York temple, Malcolm Little, alias Malcolm X. The members of the NoI believed in the racial redemption of the Blacks in the context of a Manichean struggle against the Whites, for their decline was due to their failure to affirm their racial identity. A messianic movement whose leaders were directly inspired by God, the NoI defended the idea that Allah was Black; that he came to deliver his message in 1930, from the holy city of Mecca, under the name of Wallace Fard; and that Elijah Muhammad was his messenger. The mission thus consisted of gathering the Blacks of America, who were the chosen people and to bring them back to their God, with a view to a final battle against their enemies: the enslaving Christians and the Jews who usurped their place as the Chosen People.141 The Nation of Islam thus rebutted the Biblical slavery of the Jews in Egypt, believing that the reference to the “fourth Generation” in Genesis (15:16) referred to the enslavement of 139 140 141

“Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” (1920), reproduced in Wintz, African American Political Thought, 211. E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for Identity in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 70. On all these points, see ibid., 126-129.

222

Chapter 4

the Blacks in America since 1555, intended to come to an end 400 years later, in 1955.142 The last Judgment, yet to come, would achieve the destruction of the Caucasian race and its religion, Christianity. Politically, the NoI defended both the separation between Blacks and Whites and the necessity for Blacks of obtaining a separate territory.143 The prospect of a separate Black state included within the United States was not a new idea.144 In 1890, the Black American – and Republican – politician Edward McCabe had drawn up a project to transform Oklahoma Territory into a state for Blacks.145 In 1916, Arthur Anderson, in his book called Prophetic Liberation of the Colored Race of the United States of America, had called for the cession of a part of the territory of the United States in order to create a state reserved for the Blacks.146 The following year, in September 1917, the journalist Cyril Briggs published an article in Amsterdam News commenting on the race riots in East Saint Louis at the beginning of the summer, in which he defended the idea of Black political self-determination and the creation of a forty-ninth state in the Northwest, a position taken up by the African Blood Brotherhood, the organisation that he had created in September 1919 to organise the selfdefence of Blacks under threat of lynching.147 A few years later, in 1924, the journalist and Black American militant Hubert Harrison, a former Garveyist and editor-in-chief of the UNIA newspaper, The Negro World, founded the International Colored Unity League, one of whose principal objectives was, in 142 143 144

145 146 147

Enslavement is thus part of the divine intended to reveal the divinity of Allah to the Whites. Ibid., 129. Elijah Muhammad expressed this position quite explicitly in a speech in Washington, May 31, 1959. Ibid., 259-262. On Black separatism, see Raymond L. Hall, Black Separatism in the United States. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1978. On the distinction between communitarian nationalism and separatist nationalism, see Robert A. Brown and Todd. C. Shaw, “Separate Nations: Two Attitudinal Dimensions of Black Nationalism,” The Journal of Politics, vol. 64, no. 1 (February 2002), particularly p. 25-27. See also Wilson Record, “The Negro Intellectual and Negro Nationalism,” Social Forces, vol. 33, no. 1 (October 1954), 17-18. Mozell C. Hill, “The All-Negro Communities of Oklahoma: The Natural History of a Social Movement: Part I,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 31, no. 3 (July 1946), 254-268. See Manning Marable, “Black Fundamentalism: Farrakhan and Conservative Black Nationalism,” Race & Class, vol. 39, no. 4 (1998), 6. Cyril Briggs, “Security of Life for Poles and Serbs – Why Not for Colored Americans?” Amsterdam News, September 5, 1917, cited in Harvey Klehr, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010, 92. See also Theodore G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement, San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972, 77-78. Note that three years later, Briggs had changed his mind as he was instead arguing for emigration to South America.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

223

addition to the struggle against the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of a state in the south.148 In Chicago in 1934, the Black lawyer Oscar C. Brown created the National Movement for the Establishment of a Forty-Ninth State, an organisation which called for the constitution of a Black federated state,149 an idea rapidly adopted by Black American communists.150 Finally, in 1940, the prospect of the creation of a national Jewish homeland again led to debates about whether to call for a similar initiative in the guise of a forty-ninth American state. Significantly, the comparison did not bear fruit: in the same year Lewis McMillan voices the opinion that a Black state would be a dangerous solution since it would reinforce the isolation of the Black populations concerned.151 Even Du Bois, in the 1930s, returned to the separatist cause, although in a form less territorial than social. It was partially differences on this issue, as well as the realisation that integration was failing, that led to his departure from the NAACP on 26 June 1934. The following year he wrote that “no more critical situation ever faced the Negroes of America than that of today – not in 1830, nor in 1861, nor in 1867”, adding that the only hope is if “Negroes can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation, able to work through inner cooperation, to found its own institutions, to educate its genius, and at the same time, without mob violence or extremes of race hatred, to keep in helpful touch and cooperate with the mass of the nation”.152 No “return” 148

149

150

151

152

Jeffrey Perry, “Hubert Henry Harrison,” in Harlem Renaissance Lives from the American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 242-244. It seems that this organisation has not been the object of sustained studies. Even Raymond Hall only devoted a few line to it: Hall, Black Separatism in the United States, 86. Sometimes it is only mentioned: see Cronon, Black Moses, 166, and Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism, 50. See particularly the articles collected under the generic title “Which Way Out for the Negro?” in issue 293, May 1935, of The Crisis: Oscar C. Brown, “What Chance Freedom,” 134-137 then 149 and 155; James S. Allen, “The Communist Way Out,” 135-136 then 146 and 154; and George S. Schuyler, “The Separate State Hokum,” 135 then 148-149. Lewis K. McMillan, “The Negro Forty-Ninth State in the Light of the Jewish National Home,” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 9, no. 2 (April 1940), 144-153. A few months later, a contrasting analysis was published in the same journal. See Edward Norman, “Zionism,” Phylon, vol. 1, no. 4 (4th trimester 1940), 337-343. W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within the Nation,” Current History, XLII (June 1935), 265-269, reproduced in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks, 77. It is not impossible that his stance also played a role in his growing alignment with the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the post-war period. Suspected by the FBI of being a communist, he only finally became a member of CPUSA in 1961 at the age of 93, by which time he was living in Ghana, at the invitation of Nkrumah.

224

Chapter 4

was possible to a country that existed on a territory other than one on which Blacks lived. In 1940 he explicitly wrote that “Negroes have no Zion. There is no place where they can go today and not be subject to worse caste and greater disabilities from the dominant white imperialistic world than they suffer here today”.153 After the Second World War, the claims for a Black state within the United States that had been heard in the 1930s were no longer as vocal: it was the struggle for civil rights that had become the priority. A Black American state was no longer an objective, except for the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, who raised it in a speech he gave in Washington, 31 May 1959.154 However, this demand did not draw upon the precedent of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. On the contrary, the principal leaders of the Nation of Islam felt that Israel was an illegitimate state, and it was precisely here that the limits to the analogy between Jews and Blacks became apparent (see infra on the rupture of the Great Alliance between Blacks and Jews).

The Name or the Thing? As we have seen, the “Jewish question”, to use Edward Blyden’s expression, was often at the heart of the preoccupations of those who either fought against the discrimination and the violence of which the Blacks, like the Jews, were victims, or defended the necessity of calling for a return to a native land, in the image of the efforts of the Zionist movement. However, with few exceptions, the analogy did not lead to an appropriation of the term diaspora. Despite the frequent references, beginning in the 18th century, to the dispersion of the Black people, to their return to Africa or to their resettlement, if only partial, in a land that would be their own, the analogy that it might have been possible to draw between them and the Jewish people – whether to emphasise the circumstances of the dispersion, the hostility which both peoples have had to face in the countries where they have lived, the relationships between the dispersed, or even the probability of a return to African soil – it does not appear as an important term of comparison. Neither Blyden’s analogy between the Zionist movement and the movement for the emigration of Blacks, nor Garvey’s “Black Zionism”, nor the substitution of Blacks for Jews as the chosen

153 154

W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of the Race Concept. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 (first edition 1940), 152. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism, 260.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

225

people in the conceptualisation developed by certain groups of Black Jews, nor even Du Bois’s frequent allusions to the parallels between the Zionist project and the Pan-Africanist project provided any sort of basis that might have facilitated the appropriation of the term by the spokesmen of the different movements for the defence of Black identity which developed from the end of the 19th century onwards. However, it is not rare to see the introduction of the notions of “African diaspora” or “Black diaspora” attributed to W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy refers at length to Du Bois’s analysis in The Souls of Black Folk, and notably insists on the fact that the idea of “double consciousness” emerges in Du Bois’s work at the intersection of three modes of thinking, being and seeing: one founded on race and thus on particularism, the second founded on the nationalism of the nation-state, and the third founded on a universalism of a diasporic or hemispheric type.155 Michael Gomez writes of Du Bois that “his prodigious body of work, which includes novels, poetry, plays, essays, and studies of history, sociology, and economics, clearly identifies Du Bois as a leading architect of the construct we now call the African Diaspora.”156 Françoise Clary was even more categorical when she wrote that “it is to W.E.B. Du Bois that we owe the formulation of the double concept of Black Diaspora and Pan-africanism”.157 In the texts that she cites support of her statement, Du Bois uses neither of these expressions.158 We could give other examples from the pens of serious scholars for whom the works of Du Bois, and particularly his usage of the notion of “double consciousness”, naturally establish him as the inventor of the concept of “African diaspora” or “Black diaspora”. It is true that Du Bois’s writings did indeed contain two of the characteristics fundamental to the creation of the expression: an analysis of the reality of the Black/African world as a dispersed reality and the establishment of a fundamental dualism, associating citizenship of a country and belonging to an African and/or Black world, that Du Bois called “double consciousness”. Finally, the Encyclopedia Africana project, which occupied Du Bois for 155 156 157 158

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993, 127. Michael Gomez, “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (November 2004), 177. Françoise Clary, “Du déterminisme moral au pragmatism: les choix ambigus de W. E. B. Du Bois,” Cercles, no. 4 (2002), 177. “Pan-Negroism” appeared in “The Conservation of Races,” 43. The term “Pan-African” did not appear before 1900 and the First Pan-African Conference in London. Certainly, the distinction between the name and the thing is not important in itself, except in the case of a historical socio-semantics.

226

Chapter 4

the greater part of his life post-1909 (the year in which he wrote to Blyden to refer to this idea, so important to him159) and which would undergo numerous vicissitudes before the Ghanaian president invited him to Ghana to finish it in the early 1960s, but which did not survive Du Bois’s death in 1963, was an attempt to assemble the entire Black world in an encyclopaedic space.160 Du Bois did use diaspora once, as far as I know, but that was in the context of the “dispersion of the Jews” in Antiquity.161 Otherwise, despite all the indications, and despite Du Bois’s prominent role in defence of Black identity during the 20th century,162 all the evidence points to Du Bois never using the term diaspora qualified by the adjectives “Black” or “African”.163 Why is this important? Once again, there is no attempt to deny the presence, in the history of thinking about the condition of Black slaves, of references to their spatial dispersion, or of a particular eschatological significance to these references. It is simply to reaffirm that we cannot assume that all is already present and that nothing ever appears, but rather, to the contrary, that there exists a historicity of the emergence of terms, and that we can only study this historicity on the condition that we think the existence of conditions of possibility (social, political, semantic) of these emergences, in the context of what I call a “historical socio-semantics”. In order that the expressions “Black

159 160

161 162

163

Henry Louis Gates Jr., “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-63,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 568 (March 2000), 204. On the Encyclopedia Africana project, see particularly Clarence G. Contee, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana,” The Crisis, vol. 77, no. 9 (November 1970), 375-379. The following year the same author published a more comprehensive study: “The Encyclopedia Africana Project of W.E.B. Du Bois,” African Historical Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1971, 77-91. Du Bois’s project was resumed forty years later by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Jacob and Esau,” (June 5, 1944), reproduced in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks, vol. ii, 139-140. This is the text of a speech given at Talladega College (Alabama). We could write similarly of Edward Blyden, towards whom George Shepperson admitted some astonishment: “Considering Blyden’s knowledge of Hebrew, his interest in Jewish history, and his sympathy with Zionist aspirations, it is surprising that he did not employ the expression ‘the African diaspora’”. George Shepperson, “Introduction,” in The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, ed. Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1976), 3. If we are to believe Michel Fabre’s claim in La Rive noire, Du Bois used the term in The Crisis, without supplying further details. We have not been able to find any occurrences in the magazine. Michel Fabre, La Rive noire: de Harlem à la Seine. Paris: Lieu commun, 1985, 51.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

227

diaspora” or “African diaspora” not only appear, but acquire, in a very short time, a significant potential for diffusion and mobilisation, in short, in order that they “take”, it is necessary that transformations be achieved on three levels: that of the diffusion of the word diaspora, that of its uses, and that of the establishment of a community of intellectuals who can conceptualise this appearance and the link to a transnational collectivity without directly posing the question of nationality. First of all, as we have seen, the word diaspora was little used before the beginning of the 20th century, in Jewish circles as in non-Jewish circles, in Europe as in America. Its inclusion in dictionaries only began, in the best of cases, in the first years of the century, the corresponding idea generally being described through the intermediary of vernacular equivalents (dispersion, scattering, Zerstreuung). This explains the fact that not only did Black nationalists not use diaspora to describe the condition of slaves and their descendants, neither did they use it to speak of the condition of the Jews. We must not forget that, until the end of the 19th century, in the United States as in Germany, diaspora – when it was used – referred more often to Protestants and Catholics than to Jews. When in 1945 the Black American scholars John Gibbs Saint-Clair Drake and Horace Cayton published Black Metropolis, their study of the Black ghetto of Chicago, they devoted the third chapter to the Great Migration from south to north. Significantly, this chapter was subtitled “Black Diaspora (1914-1918)” but, with the exception of the biblical imaginary deployed by the newspapers at the time, no other reference is cited to justify the use of the term.164 It seems however, without my being presently able to explain by what process, that this usage is not as rare as it might seem in the mid-1940s. Still in 1945, in an article about the transformations in the demographic distribution of Blacks in the United States, the Chicago Defender journalist Earl Conrad sketches pathways between various internal Black migrations over several centuries: Today we may look at a migratory movement begun by a handful of slaves back in the seventeenth century, trace it to the great Negro march on freedom northward of the present war period, and discern in it a chapter as significant in the life of mankind as the ancient Hebrew migration out of

164

John Gibbs Saint Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1945, 58. On Drake and Cayton, and on Black Metropolis, see Saint-Arnaud, L’Invention de la sociologie noire aux États-Unis d’Amérique, 280-311.

228

Chapter 4 Egypt. Now the Negro is a network of growing political power throughout the North. A kind of national American “Diaspora,” or dispersal, has occurred. The leavening influence of the black man is everywhere in the land today.165

In 1960, the geographer John Fraser Hart described this episode as the “great northward diaspora”.166 In his book on Robert Abbott, journalist and founder of the Defender and ardent defender of Black migration towards the north, the Black American journalist Roi Ottley wrote that “this spectacular movement, sometimes called the ‘Black Diaspora,’ caused Chicago’s Negro population to jump from roughly 40,000 to nearly 150,000 within the short space of a few years”.167 During the 1940s and 1950s, it seems therefore that it was principally references to internal migrations of the early 20th century that provided a framework for uses of diaspora. To the best of my knowledge, we find no occurrences of the term in the NAACP magazine The Crisis before the beginning of the 1960s. Significantly, one of the first appearances, from the pen of John A. Morsell, deputy executive secretary of the NAACP, conforms perfectly to the schemas identified so far. Morsell recalled that a “distrust of leaders has been characteristic of deprived and oppressed people since the beginnings of time”, and this is true “whether it is Jews in the Diaspora, Irishmen battling for independence from English, or African confronting the challenges of independent national existence”.168 Later, in 1970, on the occasion of the 61st annual convention of the NAACP, its executive director, Roy Wilkins, gave a speech in which he insisted upon the fact that the majority of the Blacks of America had made the choice of integration, rejecting any form of separatism, whether the plans of the American Colonization Society, of Marcus Garvey’s movement, or even the communist project of a separate black state.169 In summary of his position, the Chicago Defender wrote in its columns: “In America, there is no ‘diaspora’ in the old Greek meaning of the term. That is to say there are no attempts at

165 166 167 168 169

Earl Conrad, “Yesterday and Today,” Chicago Defender, April 14, 1945, 13. John F. Hart, “The Changing Distribution of the American Negro,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 50, no. 3 (Septembre 1960), 242. Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955, 161. John A. Morsell, “Status, Problems and Functions of Negro Leadership,” The Crisis, vol. 69, no. 9 (November 1962), 526. Gloster B. Current, “The 61st Annual Convention – Arousing a National Storm,” The Crisis, vol. 77, no. 7 (August-September 1970), 257.

Blacks at the Jewish Mirror

229

preserving a black culture in the midst of deeply incrusted Anglo-Saxon traditions. The Negro outside of Africa is neither a nation nor a nationality”.170 As much as these lines demonstrated the opposition of some to any form separatism which would create a “diaspora of Blacks”, they also proved, by the same occasion, the existence of a transformation of usage of the term, reworking it to become a vehicle for the assertion and preservation of a Black identity. It may appear paradoxical that the association between diaspora and the adjectives Black, Negro or African, occurred at the precise moment when the roles of Black militants and intellectuals outside Africa began to be counterbalanced, then gradually eclipsed by the rise to power of the independentist militants, as witnessed for example, by the evolution of Pan-Africanism. The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in October 1945, eighteen years after the previous one, represented a turning point – largely unremarked upon at the time – for Pan-Africanism.171 After the Manchester congress no further Pan-African congresses would be held outside Africa. Moreover, the leadership of the Pan-African movement had also changed. If Du Bois was present at Manchester, it was only as a private individual, and he was the only “representative” of the United States. The kingpins of the congress would henceforth be the Trinidadian George Padmore, a committed communist and ardent defender of the necessity of political action, and Kwame Nkrumah, from the Gold Coast and one of the most committed activists for the independence of African countries. This became, after Manchester, the principal objective of Pan-Africanism, notably through the mobilisation of the unions and political parties. Forty-five years after the first Pan-African congress, it was Africa who would henceforth be at the heart of the debates and the political events of the subsequent fifteen years, during the decolonisation of the great majority of African countries, amply demonstrating that this was the new theatre of PanAfricanism. In 1958, the first Conference of Independent African States (April) then the All-African Peoples’ Conference (December) were held in Accra, the capital of a newly independent Ghana led by Nkrumah.172 This paradox is only apparent. It was precisely the formation of this new African geopolitical space which would lead to the adoption by Black intellectuals as well as Black militants – and by White scholars –, English and 170 171 172

Chicago Defender, July 11, 1970, cited in ibid., 278. Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, 385-408 It subsequently becomes complicated to decide which of the gatherings of African peoples was a Pan-African congress. A priori, there was one, sometimes described as the sixth, in June 1974 in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The seventh would then have been that held in Kampala, Uganda, in April 1994.

230

Chapter 4

French-speaking, of a term which, according to them, would allow for an understanding of the multiple and complex relations – racial, historical, cultural, sentimental – that existed between Blacks and/or Africans living far from African soil, and Africa itself. Just as the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 prompted a reflection on the relationships between the new state and Jews not wishing to emigrate there, from the mid-1960s onwards the formation of new African states came to act (essentially for a growing proportion of Black Americans and in a specific national context) as a reminder of their origins, and the need to take a stance towards Africa as a Black man or woman not wishing to live on the African continent. That this “diasporic” realisation emerged at the very moment when Jewish Americans were once again turning towards Israel during the Six Days’ War in 1967 (see supra, Chapter ii) is certainly not a coincidence. It was but a new episode in the relationship between Blacks and Jews, one in which the noun diaspora was “liberated” of its Jewish meaning to take on a new one, and where something that could have been the name of a certain form of curse linked to dispersion, even if this latter would be destined to disappear through a return, became the very name of liberation, through which the link was proclaimed once and for all.

Chapter 5

A Name of One’s Own: The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora One of the more vexing problems of recent historical work on black culture and politics in an international sphere is that the term diaspora, so attractive to many of our analyses, does not appear in the literature under consideration until surprisingly late after the Second World War.1 Since the mid-20th century the fight for the proper noun has been at the heart of the struggles of slave descendants. As Richard Moore, a militant for the Black American cause, wrote in 1960, “when all is said and done, slaves and dogs are named by their masters, free men name themselves!2” But which name? “Negro”, “Black”, “African-American”, “African”: all these terms have been contested, some wanted to refuse and condemn them, others preferred to accept or even appropriate them, overturning their previous negative, degrading or stigmatising connotations and establishing them as emblems of one’s capacity to name oneself; this capacity is understood as the first step towards true emancipation, an act of resistance calling into existence the group which is waiting to be named. From this perspective, the expressions “Black diaspora”, “African diaspora” or “Negro diaspora” not only constitute academic descriptors, collectively designating the descendants of slaves living outside Africa; nor do they simply indicate the connective space that one could thereby draw as one maps the relationships between the groups and individuals who give voice to them, in the United States, the Caribbean, Great Britain, France and so on. These are also catchwords through which men and women, often at the intersection of the militant and the academic worlds, wish both to modify representation of the black minority and to conjure into existence a group by collecting its dispersed members under a single and unique name. With the complexity that characterises the relationships between Blacks and Jews since the beginning of the 20th century, the use of diaspora for Blacks outside Africa oscillates between resemblance and specificity, until the emergence,

1 Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text, vol. 19, no. 66 (Spring 2001), 45. 2 Richard B. Moore, The Name “Negro”: Its Origin and Evil Use. Baltimore: Black Press, 1992 (first edition 1960), 73.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_009

232

Chapter 5

in the United States in the mid-1960s, of Black diaspora or African diaspora, with meanings that are primarily political and communitarian in character and through which the foregrounding of the link with the African source is doubled by the renunciation of a return to Africa and the establishment of a Black state in the United States, and by a rupture with American Jews and an increasingly hostile opposition to the State of Israel.

Social Geography of the First Uses Until very recently scholars working on the historical dimensions of the concept of diaspora, or on genealogies of those expressions, traced the first written occurrences of the terms African diaspora or black diaspora to in 1965. Most associated the emergence of the term with the (white) British historian George Shepperson, a specialist on Black Africa, and in particular with a paper he gave in September 1965 at the International Congress of African History in Dar es Salaam entitled “The African Diaspora – or the African Abroad”.3 Again in 1965, the Nigerian scholar Francis Abiola Irele published an article on négritude in which he used the expression black diaspora.4 Nevertheless, many scholars, and even these first users themselves, frequently insist that these occurrences are not in fact “first occurrences”, and that the expressions African diaspora or black diaspora, far from being their inventions, were already current in Anglophone and Francophone intellectual circles between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s.5 3 Shepperson’s contribution to the Congress was first published in 1966 in African Forum : “The African Diaspora – or the African Abroad,” African Forum, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 1966), 76-93. Carlton Wilson writes that “George Shepperson was one of the first scholars to begin a dialogue on the diaspora”. Carlton Wilson, “Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 17, no. 2 (1997), 118. Converging statements can be found in Baumann, “Diaspora,” 321; Alpers (Edward), “Defining the African Diaspora”, paper presented to the Center for Comparative Social Analysis Workshop, UCLA, 25 October 2001, 2; Akenson, “The Historiography of English-Speaking Canada,” 379-380; Chivallon, The Black Diaspora of the Americas, 113-114; Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 2. Brent Hayes Edwards is more cautious: he writes that Shepperson’s paper “is usually credited with introducing the notion of ‘diaspora’ into the study of black cultural politics and history”. Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” 51. Moreover Edwards pays a lot more attention than others to the reasons why Shepperson used the term. See infra. 4 Abiola Irele, “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (October 1965), 325. See Dufoix, Diasporas, 34. 5 As soon as 1968, Shepperson writes that “the expression ‘the African diaspora’ has gained currency”. George Shepperson, “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora,” in Emerging

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

233

Further enquiry not only confirms the truth of these claims, but also reveals that there exist even earlier texts either using these expressions, or using diaspora in the context of discussions about Africa.6 Once again, it is not simply a question of seeking out the first uses, effectively an impossible undertaking given the plethora of possible sources, and equally quite futile if the aim is limited to a search for a point of departure, a primary cause, a first spark. The historical socio-semantic perspective presented here is instead based on a knowledge of the real distribution of the uses of diaspora, including ancient ones, thus equiping it with the means to identify the conditions of possibility of its crystallisation and its generalisation. During the first half of the 20th century, occurrences are very rare and isolated; on the other hand, from the 1950s onwards, and above all from the beginning of the 1960s, they begin not only to multiply but to acquire a cumulative force. It would appear to be necessary to distinguish between uses in the academy and those in the militant cultural world which, in both the Anglophone and the Francophone contexts, seem scarcely to have mixed or cross-fertilised. It follows that, once again, the use of diaspora, here qualified by the adjectives African, black or even Negro, follows two distinct trajectories and that, even within academic discourse, it appears that two parallel subdivisions existed. In the academy, the rise of the sociology of inter-ethnic relations, the anthropology of the New World and the history of Africa prompted a growing interest in the themes developed earlier by Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits – that is, the question of the relevance of African traits in the cultural and religious practices of the descendants of slaves – but also in the dynamics of PanAfricanism in the context of a gradual decolonisation of the African continent. The available evidence suggests that the academic use of diaspora to designate the black peoples of the New World was developed through the intermediary of Robert Park. Indeed, in 1942, when the American sociologist Donald Pierson

Themes of African History, ed. Terence O. Ranger (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968), 152. See also George Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph Harris (Washington, Harvard University Press, 1982), 46. 6 The German Africanist scholar Heinz Sölken uses diaspora in 1939 to describe the migration of the Hausas in Guinea: Heinz Sölken, Afrikanische Dokumente zur Frage der Entstehung der hausanischen Diaspora in Oberguinea. Berlin: Augustin, 1939. On the “Hausa diaspora”, see Matthias Krings, Siedler am Tschadsee. Hausa-Migranten und die Aneignung lokaler Ressourcen in ländlichen Nigeria, Dissertation thesis, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, 2002.

234

Chapter 5

published his thesis (submitted in 1939) on the Blacks in Bahia,7 it was prefaced by a short introductory text by Park in which the latter, in line with his recent discovery of the term diaspora, the possible conceptual possibilities of the word as he had read it in Dubnow, and its application to new populations, did not hesitate to associate it with the “Negro”, while nevertheless recalling the traditional Jewish meaning of the word: “He [Pierson] has, as he puts it, given an account of ‘the career of the Negro in Brazil,’ and he has made this account a chapter in the life-history of the Negro outside of Africa, in what one might, to use a term that has been usually applied to the Jewish people, call the Diaspora.”8 However, a few paragraphs later, Park writes that the diaspora “is no longer what it once was – an area of dispersion merely. It has rather become an area of integration, economic and cultural”,9 thus highlighting the fact that if diaspora cannot be confined to a mere geographic denominator, it does not either describe a space in which original specificties can be maintained, but rather a space in which assimilation has taken place. It is highly likely that it was through the intermediary of Park that the French anthropologist Roger Bastide discovered the possibility of this use of diaspora. If in his early texts he uses expressions such as “double acculturation” or “double heritage”, he starts to use the term diaspora to refer to the Blacks of the Americas10 in his 1967 work African Civilisations in the New World.11 Prior to this, Bastide described Blacks transported across the Atlantic as having been “imported to Brazil”.12 In African Civilisations he explains that if ethnic organisations have gradually disappeared through marriages between members of different ethnic groups, their cultural traditions have survived, “these civilisations became detached from the ethnic group which imported them, and took on a life of their own.”13 This observation led Bastide to develop the idea of 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

Donal Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. Robert E. Park, “The Career of the Africans in Brazil,” in ibid., xx-xxi. The text is reproduced in Robert E. Park, Race and Culture. Glencoe: Free Press, 1950, 196-203. Ibid., xxi. In Sociology of Mental Disorder (New York: David McKay, 1972, first French edition 1965), he mentions the Jewish diaspora. As soon as 1931, he used the term twice to refer to the Armenians. Roger Bastide, “Les Arméniens de Valence,” Revue internationale de sociologie, no. 1-2 (January-February 1931), 18 and 31. Roger Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World. London: Hurst, 1971 (first French edition 1967). Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward A Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 (first French edition 1960), 17 and 33. Bastide, African Civilisations, 10.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

235

the “double diaspora”: “In these conditions it is easy to see how students can speak of a double diaspora: that of African cultural traits, which transcend ethnic groupings, and that of the Negroes themselves, who have lost their original African characteristics through interbreeding, and have been absorbed by their social environment – English, Spanish, French or Portuguese.”14 If Bastide subsequently seems not to have made much use of the term “double diaspora”15 – which has recently been reworked in the context of other groups such as Indians16 and Jews17 –, he also uses the expression “of the diaspora”, thus affirming that the “Negro of the diaspora is torn by conflicting urges; the desire to recapture and revive his lost past, and the need to adapt himself to the demands of a new environment.”18 There is no citation associated with this use in his text. Although in the footnotes we find, for example, mention of St Clair Drake and Cayton’s work Black Metropolis, Bastide’s use of diaspora is not the same, for he continues to call the movement of black Americans from the south to the north in the first decades of the 20th century the “Great Migration”.19 That said, between 1938 and 1954, a period that he spent in Brazil where he taught at the University of Sao Paulo, Bastide met the German anthropologist Emilio Willems, a specialist on German immigration to Brazil, and Donald Pierson who introduced him to the work of sociologists at the University of Chicago: William Thomas, Louis Wirth, Franklin Frazier, Ernest Burgess, and Robert Park, who had supervised Pierson’s thesis. Since Bastide had read Pierson – he cites his thesis in African Civilisations20 – it seems plausible that he had also read Park’s preface.

14 15

16

17

18 19 20

Ibid., 11. In a communication to a conference in Jamaica in 1970, he replaced it by another image, that of discontinuous continuities and continuous discontinuities. Roger Bastide, “Continuité et discontinuité des sociétés et des cultures afro-américaines”, Bastidiana, no. 13-14 (January-June 1996), 77-88. My thanks to Denys Cuche for letting me know about this text. Sharmani Patricia Gabriel, “Interrogating Multiculturalism: Double Diaspora, Nation, and Re-Narration in Rohinton Mistry’s Canadian Tales,” Canadian Literature, no. 181 (2004), 27-41, cited in Christophe Jaffrelot and Ingrid Therwath, “Le Sangh Parivar et la diaspora hindoue en Occident: Royaume-Uni, États-Unis et Canada,” Questions de recherche (CERI), no. 22 (October 2007), 11 note 21. Stephanie Tara Schwartz, “The Concept of Double Diaspora in Sami Michael’s Refuge and Naim Kattan’s Farewell, Babylon,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 30, no. 1 (2010), 92-100, although without any reference to Bastide. Bastide, African Civilizations, 195. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 125 note 10.

236

Chapter 5

Another source for Bastide could well be the work of the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux, with whom he was close.21 Métraux was a specialist of Haiti and of Haitian voodoo; in 1951 he wrote that Africa was not a survival in Haiti, but a living idea, and that this vitality came from the “physical energy” and the “force of the soul” displayed by the slaves and the sons of slaves to resist mistreatment: “The black ‘diaspora’ has been a blessing for the New World, a blessing that we have scarcely begun to recognise as each year we see the list of Blacks grow, who, in a great variety of fields, distinguish themselves through their talents.”22 Two years later, in an article published in the Revue de Paris, Métraux reaffirms his use of the word, this time without quotation marks: “the black diaspora has deeply affected oral ritual and mythology.”23 This reference did not go completely unnoticed, for Daniel Guérin referred to it in 1956 in an article in Temps modernes.24 Métraux’s status in the 1950s was not insignificant. A renowned anthropologist of Haiti, he was also involved in the journal Présence africaine,25 founded in 1947 by the Senegalese intellectual and politician Alioune Diop. It was in a special issue of this journal, devoted to Haiti and guest-edited by Métraux that the article evoking the “black diaspora” in Haiti appeared. Abiola Irele, who was close to the editors of the journal as he wrote his thesis in the 1960s, confirmed that they frequently used the term diaspora.26 The journal was something of a hybrid space within which circulated, either physically or

21

22 23 24 25

26

As a matter of fact, contrary to what Christine Chivallon could write, Bastide is not “the first francophone researcher to have used the term diaspora to refer to the black populations of the New World”. Chivallon, The Black Diaspora of the Americas, 113. On the Métraux-Bastide relationship, see Alfred Métraux and Pierre Verger, Le Pied à l’étrier. Correspondance 1946-1963. Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1993, as well as Denys Cuche (Denys), “Roger Bastide et ‘L’École de Chicago’,” Bastidiana, no. 53-54 (January-June 2006), 39. Alfred Métraux, “L’Afrique vivante en Haïti,” in Haïti: poètes noirs. Paris: Seuil, 1951, 21. Alfred Métraux, “Le Culte vodou en Haïti,” Revue de Paris, vol. 60, no. 8 (August 1953), 120. Daniel Guérin, “Un futur pour les Antilles,” Les Temps modernes, vol. 11, no. 121 (January 1956), 965. On Présence africaine, read the wonderful special issue of Gradhiva published on the occasion of the exhibition organized arounf the journal at the Musée du Quai Branly in 2010. Also see 1947-1997: 50e anniversaire de la Revue Présence africaine (actes du colloque de Dakar, 25-27 novembre 1997). Paris: Présence africaine, 1999; and Valentin Y. Mudimbe ed., The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947-1987. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Email from Francis Abiola Irele to the author, November 20, 2004. Irele defended his dissertation at the Sorbonne in 1966 on the issue of négritude: Les Origines de la Négritude à la Martinique: Sociologie de l’œuvre poétique d’Aimé Césaire.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

237

through their texts, intellectuals, activists and scholars, French and foreigners – Africans or otherwise – alike. In the post-war period it was therefore a fundamental and singular gathering point for the defence of the specificity of the black world. It took its place in an already rich history, which, in the inter-war period, saw journals and cliques develop in France and in the United States, within which there was a veritable enterprise of development of the black cultural experience. In the United States from the 1920s onwards, this undertaking most notably took the form of the Harlem Renaissance movement, within which musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and writers like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Dorothy West were prominent. It also had a manifesto, that of the “New Negro”, written by Alain Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard University, as an introduction to an eponymous anthology that appeared in 1925.27 For Locke the two representative movements of this New York dynamic were an awareness of finding themselves at the avant-garde of the African people and an espousal of a cause that consisted of rehabilitating a race whose prestige had been tarnished. Once again, even without diaspora, the resemblance with the Jews is highlighted: “Harlem, as we shall see, is the center of both these movements; she is the home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism’. The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.”28 In France, this dynamism aimed at the promotion of black interests was articulated around La Dépêche africaine, the Revue du monde noir and even L’Étudiant noir, in which the troubadours of négritude Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor make their first appearances, as do political movements such as the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, founded in 1926 by Lamine Senghor.29 If the development of all these groups was inscribed within a national logic, the constant interaction between the two centres should not be underestimated,30 as witnessed by the presence of numerous black American writers 27 28 29

30

Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. Alain Locke, “The New Negro”, in ibid., 14. On all of these points, see in particular Dewitte, Les Mouvements nègres en France. Pap Ndiaye has recently insisted on the importance of the interwar period, in La Condition noire, 141-148 and 306-327, and in “Présence africaine avant ‘Présence Africaine’. La subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres”, Gradhiva, no. 10 (2009), 64-79. On this trans-atlantic interaction, besides Michel Fabre, see Brent Hayes Edward’s thorough and systematic study of literary and intellectual relationships between Black people living in these two countries. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

238

Chapter 5

in France after the First World War, the voyages of black French writers to the United States, and the migration of ideas, as represented by the salon of the Nardal sisters who spread the theme of the Harlem Renaissance in France. It is not a question here of retracing the history of this cultural effervescence, but to recognise that the emergence of these proclamations of black cultural identity was not associated with the term diaspora as such, even if the vision of Blacks as a dispersed people, analogous to the Jews, was present.31 At the end of the Second World War, as the struggle in the United States was focused on the fight for civil rights, the principal intellectual centre coalesced in France, particularly around Présence africaine. The journal was supported by notable “non-Black” intellectuals, such as Sartre, Gide, Camus and Emmanuel Mounier, and the publication by Senghor, in 1948, of the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française was accompanied by a famous preface by Jean-Paul Sartre entitled “Black Orpheus”.32 However, the word diaspora was absent, absent too from the Discours sur le colonialisme published by Césaire in 1955,33 and also from the debates of both the first and the second Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs organised respectively in Paris in September 1956 and in Rome in March-April 1959 under the mantel of Présence africaine.34 It appears that one of the first black Francophone intellectuals to use diaspora was Frantz Fanon. If in Black Skin, White Masks (written in 1952) he evokes the resemblances between the Black and the Jew on a number of occasions,35 going so far as to affirm that “The truth is that the Negro race has been scattered, that it can no longer claim unity,”36 it is in 1961, in the Wretched of the Earth that, castigating the attitude of the Société Africaine de Culture created in 1957 at the first Congrès International, he predicts an increasingly inclusive future for the diaspora: “The African Society will become the cultural society of the black world and will come to include the

31 32

33 34

35 36

Locke evokes the “scattered peoples of African derivation”. Locke, “The New Negro,” 118. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris, PUF, 2005 (first edition 1948). Sartre (Jean-Paul), Black Orpheus, Paris: Présence africaine, 1976. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 (first French edition 1955). A special issue of Présence africaine, no. 8-9-10 (June-November 1956) gives access to the proceedings of the First Congress. Three years later, the special issue, no. 24-25 (FebruaryMay 1959) does the same for the Second Congress. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986 (first French edition 1952), notably 173 and 183. Ibid., p. 173.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

239

Negro dispersion, that is to say the tens of thousands of black people spread over the American continents.”37 Fanon died in 1961, the year The Wretched of the Earth was published. His use of the term remained egregious. We find it in the mid-1960s in the mouth, or from the pen of the Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Senghor, who declared in 1971 that he regularly read The Crisis, as well as Opportunity38 and the Journal of Negro History, but whose bedside reading was The New Negro,39 opened his newly independent country to international celebrations of black culture. Senghor was the organiser of the first Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, which was held in Dakar in April, 1966,40 and welcomed the participants, claiming that “this festival must allow Africa to confront itself; Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon… and Brazil, and the United States, and the Caribbean… The Negroes of the continent as well as the negroes of the diaspora.”41 Eight years later, during a preparatory conference for the second festival – which was held in Lagos in 1977 – Senghor reiterated his desires: “We are happy to welcome you, once again, on this Cape Verde peninsula, with is the extremity of the black continent, like a hand extended to the entire black diaspora of all the Americas.”42 If he also used this term when addressing smaller audiences, such as when he evoked négritude before the students of the Uni-

37

38

39

40

41

42

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965 (first French edition 1961), 174. Fanon considers négritude as he sees it embedded within the Société africaine de culture as nothing but a form of racialisation, that is a dead end. Diaspora does not appear in the political texts written by Fanon in the 1950. Voir Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove, 1967 (first French edition 1964). Opportunity was the journal of the Urban League, founded in 1911 by some Black activists close to Booker T. Washington. In 1918, the chairman of the Chicago section of the Urban League was Robert Park. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Problématique de la négritude,” communication to the conference on négritude held in Dakar, April 1971, reproduced in Léopold Sédar Senghor et la revue Présence Africaine. Paris: Présence africaine, 1996, 83. On how important this festival was, see Eloi Ficquet and Lorraine Gallimardet, “‘On ne peut nier longtemps l’art nègre’: enjeux du colloque et de l’exposition du Premier Festival mondial des arts nègres de Dakar en 1966”, Gradhiva, no. 10 (2009), 135-155. Quoted in Ibrahima Baba Kaké, Les Noirs de la diaspora. Libreville: Lion, 1978, 166. The welcoming address is not reproduced in the proceedings of the festival: Colloque sur l’art nègre (1er festival mondial des arts nègres, Dakar, 1-24 avril 1966). Paris: Présence africaine, 1967. Diaspora does not appear in the contributions. “Allocution de M. Léopold Sédar Senghor alors Président de la République du Sénégal,” intervention to the pre-conference meeting for the Second Festival des arts nègres, 1974, reproduced in Léopold Sédar Senghor et la revue Présence africaine, 187.

240

Chapter 5

versity of Abidjan in 1971,43 it is evident that the use of diaspora in a forum as well-attended as the first Festival des arts nègres would certainly have encouraged its further spread. In parallel with this development of the uses of diaspora in Francophone circles that were both academic and militant, an interest in the term appeared in the context of a transformation of Anglophone African studies in the face of looming independence. During the fifth conference organised by the journal Past and Present, held in London on July 9, 1962 with the theme of the comparative analysis of nationalism, the second session on African nationalism was notable for a debate between Ernest Gellner, Thomas Hodgkin, Colin Legum and Basil Davidson. The latter insisted on the largely artificial character of panAfricanism “because it was developed by Negroes in the diaspora who had no direct experience of Africa.”44 However, it was the South-African born British journalist Colin Legum who appears to have been the first to use diaspora rather more systematically. In an article on the “roots of Pan-Africanism” included in an volume on Africa that he edited in 1961, he wrote that “there are interesting historical parallels between Zionism and Pan-Africanism, with continental Africa being to Negroes what Palestine was to the Jews of the diaspora. Both were conceived and spawned in foreign lands; both made their first appeal to peoples with a sense of homelessnness, of not belonging anywhere, of not being respected; to people suffering oppression. They called for a massive regeneration in a home of their own.”45 It is on the basis of what Legum himself calls an “analogy”46, as well as of a number of citations, and not on the basis of pre-existent uses in the space of the black cause, that he uses diaspora for the Blacks.47 Shortly thereafter, in 1962, in what constitutes one of the very first attempts at a historical synthesis of the Pan-African movement,48 Legum once again takes up 43

44 45 46 47 48

“Since the late nineteenth century a new ideology was born, that relies on the values of the black world: first among the Negroes of the diaspora, in the West Caribbean, now in Brazil and in Black Africa itself”. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Pourquoi une idéologie négroafricaine?”, speech delivered at the University of Abidjan, Décember 1971, reproduced in ibid., 112-113. “Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa and Europe,” Past and Present, no. 24 (April 1963), 72. Colin Legum, “The Roots of Pan-Africanism,” in Africa: A Handbook to the Continent, ed. Colin Legum (London: Anthony Blond, 1961), 452. Ibid., 453. Ibid., 453 and 454. Philippe Decraene’s book, Le Panafricanisme (Paris: PUF), had been published in 1959, but diaspora is not used.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

241

the principal threads of the comparison.49 Somewhat significantly, the second chapter of his text is entitled “Growth in the diaspora, 1900-1958” in order to highlight the movement’s subsequent evolution, post-1958, that is to say, the Africanisation of Pan-Africanism, whose conferences henceforth take place on African soil: “We have now almost reached the point where Pan-Afrcanism was to be finally transplanted organisationally to Africa’s own soil, and when it ceased to be largely the brainchild of Negro intellectuals and African students in the diaspora.”50 It is undoubtedly through his contacts with Colin Legum, and through a reading of his works, that the British historian Basil Davidson, one of the great pioneers of African history, discovered this use of diaspora. In a 1963 review of Pan-Africanism, he notes Legum’s use of the term, specifying that diaspora here refers to “uprooted ex-slave populations of the Caribbean and North America.”51 Although he did not use diaspora himself in the article that he devoted to the “African personality” in the 1961 edition of the Handbook to the Continent that Legum edited,52 Davidson himself subsequently became a user of the word, both in his reviews53 and in his own works; in the latter, using black diaspora and African diaspora indifferently, he refers to “beyond the Atlantic”54 and the “Negroes of the New World”.55 Academic or intellectual occurrences of diaspora prior to 1965 should therefore be sought out in British Africanist historiography (and in particular Davidson and Legum), and in American and French sociology and anthropology, both of the Black presence in the New World (Park, Métraux, Bastide) and of the defence of the black cause in the Francophone world, even if these different trajectories neither intersected nor prompted a wider diffusion of the use of diaspora in relations with Blacks outside Africa.

49 50 51 52 53

54 55

Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide. London-Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1962, 14. Ibid., 33. Basil Davidson, “Book Review,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 345 (January 1963), 171. Basil Davidson, “The African Personality,” in Legum, Africa, 447-451. Basil Davidson, “Book Review,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (August 1965), 304-306. Davidson reviewed a French book by Claude Wauthier, L’Afrique des Africains, in which diaspora does not appear. Basil Davidson, Which Way Africa? The Search for a New Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 (first edition 1964), 63. Basil Davidson, The African Past: Chronicles from Antiquity to Modern Times. Boston: Little Brown, 1964, 38.

242

Chapter 5

For this, we do indeed need to wait for the publication of the aforementioned article by Abiola Irele,56 and George Shepperson’s paper at the International Congress of African History in Dar es Salaam, both in 1965. If the first of these texts is well-known to specialists of Francophone literature on Africa, or the “African condition,”57 it has never – to the best of my knowledge – been cited as one of the first academic uses of the expression black diaspora. But, as I have already mentioned, this appearance bears signs of the Francophone lineage of the term at the time. Analysing négritude not as an ideology with an African essence, but as “an historical phenomenon, a social and cultural movement closely related to African nationalism,”58 Irele identified its emergence in the popular revolts against that colonial presence. Still, the article was concerned more with the manifestations of this cultural nationalism, the demands made by the African condition, outside Africa, be it in the United States, the Caribbean or in Europe. Irele observed that its most noteworthy efflorescence was in France, thanks to the formulation of the very idea of négritude as well as the creation of the journal Présence africaine and the organisation of the first Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs in 1956. In this long presentation of the ramifications of the African ideal among black intellectuals living outside Africa, the expression black diaspora is only used on two occasions, once as a section title, and then to indicate the analogy between the history of the Jews in the Old Testament and the history of black slaves in the New World: “This analogy survived slavery and has been developed into the idea of a Black Diaspora, both in the popular imagination and in the intellectual movements among black people in the Americas.”59 Shepperson’s paper at the Dar es Salaam conference does not operate with the same logic.60 Indeed, from the first lines the British historian not only evokes the existence of “forces which […] have been similar” that dispersed 56

57

58 59 60

Irele, “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism”. After teaching in several African universities, for instance in Ghana and Nigeria, he joined Ohio State University in 1989. Some of his articles were collected in two books: The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. It has only been translated in French recently. Francis Abiola Irele, “La Négritude ou le nationalisme culturel noir,” in Francis Abiola Irele, Négritude et condition africaine. Paris, Karthala-Sephis: 2008, 17-48. Irele, “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism,” 322. Ibid., 326. The trajectory of Shepperson’s communication is complicated. First published in African Forum in 1966, it is included two years later, slightly augmented and with a subtle inversion of terms in the title, in the volume gathering the contributions to the Congress:

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

243

both the Jews and the Blacks, but, after having described the “African diaspora” as a process of dispersion of the Blacks in the West between the 16th and the 19th centuries, he also sets his objective as one of extending the concept considerably, “both in time and in space”, adding that it would be necessary to extend it as far as possible so that “it is to be made of maximum value for the new African historiography.”61 For Shepperson, there are five key questions: the importance of the slave trade for an understanding of western history in general; of the history of Africa and Africans in particular; the problem of African survivals in the New World; the influence of New World Blacks in the emergence of black nationalism; and, finally, the influence of the African diaspora on the principle and the practicality of African unity.62 It follows that the study of the African diaspora is important for several reasons. First, it allows for a different enriching of the historiography of Africa. Second, it is an object of research that has a pedagogical value in itself, to the extent that it could be the object of specific courses: “If properly taught, courses on the African diaspora, surveying a wide range of cultural interactions, must, of necessity, introduce the student, at all levels, to problems of sociology, social anthropology, geography and related disciplines.”63 Third, it permits a vision of African history that is bigger than Africa itself. Finally, the enquiry contributes to recognising the legitimacy of the history of Africa and to granting Africa a proper place in the history of the world. Shepperson’s paper represents an important moment in the evolution of uses of the expression, not only because he uses it extensively in the body of his text, but also because he is apparently the first to grant it a veritable conceptual architecture.64 Irele’s text is more a reprise of an anterior usage than a conceptual ambition. The concomitant presence of these two occurrences

61

62 63 64

Shepperson (George), “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora”. Later on, Shepperson came back to this issue, once in the introduction to an edited book on the Afican diaspora (1976) – Shepperson (George), “Introduction”, in Kilson and Rotberg, The African Diaspora, 1-10 – and in 1982 in an edited volume that was to become a milestone in the field: “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph Harris (Washington, Harvard University Press, 1982), 46-53. Shepperson, “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora,” 152. It implied taking into consideration the migration of Black slaves and servants to Europe before the beginning of the slave trade. I quote from the 1968 version. Ibid., 161-170. Ibid., 173. Carlton Wilson considers Shepperson’s conceptualisation to be limited for it does not take into consideration the voluntary dimensions of migrations from Africa or certains aspects of the slave trade to Europe or the Indian Ocean. Wilson, “Conceptualizing the

244

Chapter 5

unquestionably signals the emergence of a concept destined to a rapid and widespread success. Indeed, despite the assertions of Martin Baumann and Edward Alpers, there is no reason to wait ten years, and the 1976 publication of The African Diaspora edited by Martin Kilson and Robert Rotberg, for the concept, in the guise of African diaspora, to meet with widespread success.65 The “ten-year adoption gap” claimed by Martin Baumann66 is untenable. Even if Africans Abroad,67 edited by Graham Irwin, appeared in 1977, Black Homeland, Black Diaspora, edited by Jacob Drachler, appeared in 1975, also sporting diaspora in its title.68 Even so, even the appearance of this text only just prior to 1976 does not adequately recognise the even more rapid adoption of the term by a number of specialists in the years following 1966-1967.69 As we have seen, a conceptualisation in terms of “diaspora” is also at the heart of Roger Bastide’s analysis of black Americans as early as 1967, most probably following the Chicago School, and he was soon followed by one of his students, Jean Ziegler.70 It is true that the expression subsequently seems to largely disappear from French academia. However, in the Anglophone world, it rapidly acquires

65

66 67

68 69

70

African Diaspora,” 119. Beyond this, as Edward Alpers cogently recalls, there is an ambiguity as to the title of the session in which Shepperson presented his text. Joseph Harris, who had chaired the session, mentions in 1968 that its title was “the African Diaspora, or the African Abroad”, whereas in 1966 he had indicated that it was “the African Abroad and African History”. See Joseph Harris, “Introduction to the African Diaspora,” in Ranger, Emerging Themes of African History, 147, and, same author, “The International Congress on African History, 1965,” African Forum, vol. 1, no. 3, 1966, 83. See Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 7, as well as Martin Baumann, “What you Always Wanted to Know About the Origins and Usage of That Word “Diaspora””, 1998. That paper used to be available online on the University of Leeds website, but no longer. Martin Baumann, “Shangri-La in Exile: Portraying Tibetan Diaspora Studies and Reconsidering Diaspora(s),” Diaspora, vol. 6, no. 3 (1997), 389. Graham W. Irwin ed., Africans Abroad: A Documentary History of the Black Diaspora in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean During the Age of Slavery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Jacob Drachler ed., Black Homeland, Black Diaspora: Cross Currents of the African Relationship. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1975. Jacques Bolle, “Die afrikanischen Mythen in der Diaspora,” Internationales Afrika Forum, vol. 2, no. 12 (December 1966), 534-539. See also Raymond Wendell Beachey, The African Diaspora and East Africa: An inaugural lecture delivered at Makerere University College (University of East Africa), Kampala, Uganda on 31 July, 1967. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969, cited in Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 6. Beachey explicitely cites Shepperson. Jean Ziegler, Le Pouvoir africain: éléments d’une sociologie politique de l’Afrique noire et de sa diaspora aux Amériques. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

245

importance. Paradoxically, it does not appear that this diffusion has its source in the popularisation stricto sensu of Shepperson’s paper, which, as far as I know, was not widely cited. It is certainly mentioned, often accompanying the expression African diaspora, among the great specialists of Africa or of PanAfricanism,71 but this is not particularly significant, and scarcely explains why the expressions African diaspora or black diaspora spread the way they did from the end of the 1970s onwards. We can similarly identify numerous uses between 1970 and 1975 – admittedly still rare – of the expressions African diaspora or black diaspora in the most important Africanist journals: The Journal of African History,72 Phylon,73 African Affairs,74 African Studies Review75 and so on. Furthermore, it was as if the use of these expressions required no definition or elaboration, as if they were self-evident. It is often used with inverted commas, thereby suggesting a usage still unwarranted or in any case derogatory, such as when the Haitian writer René Depestre gives it the meaning of dispersion to evoke the “‘Diaspora’ of the Negroes in America.”76 Others, however, have assimilated the usages and have not burdened themselves with precautions. In 1975 Melvin Drimmer, criticising the work of comparative historians of slavery, regrets that “there is no tying together the black diaspora,” before adding a few pages later that “until black people are made central to the writing of comparative history the comparative approach to the study of slavery will do little to further an understand-

71

72 73

74 75 76

Jabez Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, 5 and 113; Robert G. Weisbord, Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-American. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973, 237; Kenneth King, “James E. K. Aggrey: Collaborator, Nationalist, Pan-African,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 1969), 513 note 10. Kenneth P. Lohrentz, “Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo, and the Seventh Day Baptists in Northern Nyasaland, 1910-1912,” The Journal of African History, vol. 12, no. 3 (1971), 469. Suzanne Valenti, “The Black Diaspora: Negritude in the Poetry of West Africans and Black Americans,” Phylon, vol. 34, no. 4 (1973), 390-398; William A. Shack, “Ethiopia and AfroAmericans: Some Historical Notes, 1920-1970,” Phylon, vol. 35, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1974), 144. Theodore H. von Laue, “Transubstantiation in the Study of African Reality,” African Affairs, vol. 74, no. 297 (October 1975), 412. George J. Joyaux, “On African Literature,” African Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 2 (September 1972), 312. René Depestre, “Problems of Identity for the Black Man in Caribbean Literatures,” The New Caribbean Man, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 1973), 54. Also see Valenti, “The Black Diaspora,” 394.

246

Chapter 5

ing of black history and of the black diaspora”77 without himself ever proposing any kind of clarification. When Leo Spitzer reviews – four years after its publication – the volume edited by Kilson and Rotberg, he highlights to what point the word is already present to describe the migration and the dispersion consequent upon the enslaving of the black populations of Africa: “Although the Greek word diaspora, meaning “dispersion,” has most frequently been used to refer to the physical dispersal of Jews throughout the Gentile world … this term has also been widely employed in recent years to describe the greatest forced migration of peoples in modern times: the enslavement and involuntary resettlement of African peoples outside their home continent.”78 If not yet a great success, the term is nevertheless enjoying a growing popularity. How can this be explained? Certainly, it is inscribed, as Brent Hayes Edwards wrote, within a genealogy of “return” – real or symbolic – to Africa,79 a genealogy whose principal points of reference are Blyden, Du Bois, Garvey, but also, on a more academic or cultural level, Melville Herskovits and JeanPrice Mars, Alain Locke and the New Negro, La Dépêche africaine, La Revue du monde noir and Présence africaine, not forgetting the two Congresses of 1956 and 1959. Even so this is insufficient to explain why it only really appears in the 1960s. For Edwards, this eruption of diaspora is explained by the need to pass from the ideology of an “interest in Africa” to that of a link with Jewish history and the story of Exodus. It does so by drawing on George Shepperson and Thomas Price’s work Independent African, in which these two authors evoke the transnational influences that permit an appreciation of certain developments in the anti-colonial struggle,80 as well as on Shepperson’s other works, notably those in which he highlights the transnational force of PanAfricanism.81 Edwards’ analysis has the great advantage of anticipating the question of the relationship between the Anglophone and the Francophone worlds. Still, beyond the fact that it has hitherto remained somewhat functionalist, the analysis does not take into consideration the existence of two

77 78 79 80

81

Melvin Drimmer, “Thoughts on the Study of Slavery in the Americas and the Writing of Black History,” Phylon, vol. 36, no. 2 (1975), 129 and 137. Review by Leo Spitzer of the book edited by Kilson et Rotberg, in The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 4 (1980), 733-734. Brent Hayes Edward quickly carries out that genealogical work in “The Uses of Diaspora”. George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958. George Shepperson, “Pan-Africanism and ‘pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes,” Phylon, vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter 1962), 346–358.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

247

fields of use which remain essentially parallel: one academic and conceptual, which really only begins to consolidate itself from the beginning of the 1960s among Africanists; and the other militant, even academic-militant, which developed in the United States in the second half of the 1970s and within which diaspora is more a “name in itself” than a true concept. If Shepperson’s role should be emphasised, it is perhaps less for his 1965 paper than for the manner in which he progressively places his imprint upon a body of literature dealing with Blacks living outside Africa and popularises his use of African diaspora by authoring prefaces to re-editions of three texts fundamental to the black cause between 1969 and 1970: West African Countries and People by James “Africanus” Horton,82 The Negro in the New World by Harry Hamilton Johnston,83 and The Negro by W. E. B. Du Bois.84 His work was probably instrumental in the emergence of the expression African diaspora, and thus the use of the term diaspora itself, from the Africanist academic context, rendering it accessible in the wider context, particularly apposite and in full semantic effusion, of the militants of the Black American cause. Thus, Okon Edet Uya remarks in the introduction to a collection that he edited in 1970 on the theme of links between Afro-Americans and Africa that “Black people the world over are becoming increasingly aware that opression, vicitimization and dehumanization have been common elements in the history of contact between them and the white world. The diasporaic concept – that black Americans, as well as other blacks within the western hemisphere, are merely “Africans abroad” – appears to be winning adherents both in Africa and the New World.”85 Two years later Milton Morris appears to echo this sentiment, emphasising that the interest shown by Black Americans in Africa and in events there was one of the important outcomes of the “Black revolution” of the previous decade, and that we can find confirmation in the passionate rhetoric of the Black nationalist militants and in the emergence of Black popular styles in America, as well as in “the vigorous emphasis now given to the diasporic concept”.86

82 83 84 85 86

James “Africanus” Beale Horton, West African Countries and Peoples (1868). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969, xix. Harry Hamilton Johnston, The Negro in the New World (1910). New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969, ix, x and xi. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915). New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, x, xv and xxiii. Okon Edet Uya, “Introduction,” in Uya, Black Brotherhood, ix. Milton D. Morris, “Black Americans and the Foreign Policy Process: The Case of Africa,” The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 1972), 451.

248

Chapter 5 Transformations in the Field of the Black Cause in the United States

In the United States, and more precisely in the conflictual space of the Black American community, the period between 1964 and 1968, approximately corresponding to the years between the enactment of the Civil Rights Act (2 July 1964) and the assassination of Martin Luther King (4 April 1968), is absolutely essential to understanding the conditions for the possibility of the appropriation of diaspora by a growing segment of the Black American elite. Four elements appear to have been fundamental: the student question and access to higher education; the radicalisation of a part of the Black movement, particularly the birth of the Black Power movement from 1966 onwards under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael and the creation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that same year by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton; the parallel emergence, from the middle of the 1960s, of a new movement, generally accorded the name of cultural nationalism, for whom the restoration of the link with Africa is imagined particularly in the form of a “spiritual return”, thus distinguishing itself from the majority of alternatives on offer in solution of the Black question in the United States: integration through civil rights, racial separatism, political separation or emigrationism; and finally the rupture – if only partial – of the Great Alliance between Blacks and Jews. These four elements played, each in its own way, a role in the appropriation of diaspora to the ends of revalorisation of the Black experience, particularly in the United States but also outside Africa in a more general manner, in the context of a double movement, that of the formation of Black Studies and that of a rejection of former appellations in order to impose new ones. The first African Studies programme was established at Northwestern University by Melville Herskovits in 1948; but it was principally in the Black universities of the country that they were developed. Howard University was founded in 1866 by whites members of the First Congregational Society of Washington and for many years was the only institution of black higher education to receive federal funding. Its African Studies programme was established in 1953 thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation.87 Atlanta University was founded in 1865 and it too rapidly gained a reputation. W.E B. Du Bois, who taught there between 1896 and 1910, and again from 1932 to 1944, played an important role in the development of courses consecrated to racial questions. With a few exceptions (at Tuskegee and at Atlanta Baptist College, but also in the

87

Herschelle S. Challenor, “African Studies at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” African Issues, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002), 24-29.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

249

schools of the African Methodist Episcopal and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Churches), these institutions were managed by Whites: Black teachers were rare.88 Despite the subsidies granted for the construction or the operation of these establishments by philanthropists such as Carnegie or Rockefeller, or foundations such as the Rosenwald Fund, opportunities for higher education were generally only accessible to a minority of the Black American population. Other than at the University of Atlanta, before the Second World War there existed only a few Black History courses: at Atlanta Baptist College, with Benjamin Brawley; at Howard University with the arrival of Carter Woodson – like Du Bois, with a doctorate in history from Harvard – in 1919 and then the political scientist Ralph Bunche in 1928, who were instrumental in introducing the study of Africa and African history. The federal government only started supporting the development of doctoral programmes in African Studies following the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. But it was above all the Civil Rights Act that constituted the most important moment, transforming the question of equality of access to higher education. Title VI stipulated that any programme that received federal funding was required to guarantee equality of access to all citizens. This condition notably paved the way for an end to segregation in higher education in numerous states and granted access to university for growing numbers of Black American students. Between 1950 and 1975, the percentage of Black students between 18 and 24 enrolled in American universities rose from 4.5 % to 20 % for men and to 21 % for women.89 The student question is essential to an understanding of the radicalisation of a wing of the Black American movement. As the American sociologist Fabio Rojas has shown in his work on the genesis of Black Studies, the two processes – the arrival of Black students in American universities and the development of Black Studies – are inseparable.90 The Black Panthers were borne

88

89

90

Abel A. Bartley, “Development, Growth, and Transformation in Higher Education,” in A Companion to African-American History, ed. Alton Hornsby Jr. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 466. Manning Marable, “Afro-American History: Post-Reconstruction,” communication to the Black Studies Curriculum Development Course Evaluations, Atlanta, 1-3 October 1981, cited in Johnnetta B. Cole, “Black Studies in Liberal Arts Education,” in The Black Studies Reader, ed. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel (London: Routledge, 2004), 32 note 8. The figure for 1950 does not discriminate men and women. Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

250

Chapter 5

of the creation of a student group at Merritt College (Oakland) and it was as leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that Stokely Carmichael launched the Black Power slogan. The mobilisation of Black students, and particularly the student strikes of the late 1960s,91 paved the way for the creation of new courses or the establishment of new departments in universities such as Chicago, Illinois and Harvard.92 The emergence of a university space henceforth more accessible to Black students only underlined the limits of the civil rights movement: Blacks were accepted into white universities whose courses seemed to contribute to the maintenance of the inferiority of Blacks because their own history was not deemed sufficiently legitimate to be taught there. Thus, beyond the fact that some expected immediate economic and social results from civil rights legislation, and were thereby disappointed, desegregation paradoxically played into the hands of intellectual and student demands in favour of a greater consideration for their ethnic, racial, cultural and historical specificity, since these specificities were not amenable to being affirmed or even localised in a positive manner within the existing programmes.93 This tendency was accentuated by the fact that Black nationalism found fertile ground among the new Black recruits to the universities.94 The refusal of old names and the quest for new names that would permit self-description developed within this logic of renewed racial and cultural pride, and took the form of a undeniable cultural separatism. The critique of the strategy of integration as espoused by the leaders of the civil rights movement, within which the reconquest of a dignity sullied by slavery and segregation proceeded by way of their full recognition as American citizens, led to a denouncing not only of the strategy of non-violence but also the logic of cultural assimilation, so dear to the sociological tradition at Chicago, according to which former cultural markers and practices would tend to disappear in

91

92

93 94

One of the most famous among them, the Third World Strike that took place in San Francisco State College between November 1968 and February 1969, led to the creation of a Black Studies department in the Fall 1969. Ibid., 45-92. On Harvard, see Martin Kilson, “From the Birth to a Mature Afro-American Studies at Harvard, 1969-2002,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 59-75; and Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies, 93-108. We can easily see how the ingredients of the future “canon wars” in the 1980s are already there. For an example at Northwestern, see Freddye Hill, “The Nature and Context of Black Nationalism at Northwestern in 1971,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (March 1975), 320-336.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

251

the context of a rhythm of racial relations entirely aimed at final assimilation. It was not simply a matter of an isolated reconsideration, but of a veritable transformation of cognitive frameworks relative to the maintenance of cultural identity – which would gradually impose itself under the name of “ethnicity”95 –, on an academic96 level as much as on a militant one; new modes of reappropriation of links with one’s origins were being developed at the very moment that Congress affirmed the unacceptability of distinguishing between citizens on the basis of ethnic or racial differences. In the context of the radicalisation of the black movement, the “double conscience” formerly advocated by Du Bois was irrelevant because it did not permit an adequate rehabilitation of the Black. The birth of what came to be called “cultural nationalism” – and which should not be confused with the Harlem Renaissance movement or with négritude, even if the expression is sometimes used to describe the latter – towards the middle of the 1960s, corresponded to a foregrounding of a Black singularity dissociated both from the revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panthers and from any form of political separatism or emigrationism, such as that of the Nation of Islam.97 The Black American leader Malcolm X, an influential leader of the Nation of Islam, incontestably played a role in this shift. It was precisely, if not entirely, this question of separatism that led to his departure from the Nation of Islam in March 1964. The son of a follower of Marcus Garvey,98 Malcolm X shared the separatist convictions of Elijah Muhammad until this split. During a trip to Africa and the Middle East in April and May 1964, in the course of which he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, his thoughts turned from political separatism and the possibility of a return to Africa to envisage, following the Jewish example, the possibility of a spiritual return: “Just as the American Jew is in harmony (politically, economically and culturally) with world Jewry, it is time for all African-Americans to become an integral part of the world’s Pan-Africanists, and even though we might remain in America physically while fighting for the benefits that the Constitution guarantees us, we

95 96

97 98

Among others, see Marco Martiniello, L’Ethnicité dans les sciences sociales contemporaines. Paris: PUF, 1995. See notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. On the separatist, and even emigrationist, stance of the latter, see Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism, 258-264. Kenneth B. Clark, The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 18.

252

Chapter 5

must “return” to Africa philosopically and culturally and develop a working unity in the framework of Pan-Africanism.”99 Cultural nationalism developed on the basis of this new vision of a spiritual return, of a return to one’s roots without a physical return.100 The ideological evolution of Malcolm X lay at the origin of the creation, in 1965, by Maulana Karenga, of US Organisation, which defended the valorisation of African cultural heritage.101 The subsequent assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 fostered the political awareness of the Black American playwright and intellectual LeRoi Jones and prompted his move from Greenwich Village to Harlem, a symbolic initial manifestation of his support for Black nationalism and the impetus for the creation of the Black Arts Movement. The development of cultural nationalism accompanied the radicalisation of the Black movement, which increasingly severely criticised the integrationist option, white domination in the United States as well as Western domination in general, the State of Israel and even the Jews (see below). The defence of African culture, African arts and rituals, and African clothing, was often exclusive, according to the logic of “Black is beautiful” which, beyond the fact that it inverted the stigmata, sometimes also tended to inverse the relationship of values between Black and white, as we shall see with respect to Afrocentrism. The modification of names and the creation of a new lexicon were part of this quest for singularity. In October 1970, the Black American scientific organisation, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, founded in 1915 by Carter Goodwin Woodson, decided at its annual conference in Philadelphia to change its name to become the African-American Historical Association. 99

100

101

Letter dated 11 May 1964, in George Breitman ed., Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966 (first American edition 1965), 62-63. Several months later he wrote in a letter to African heads of state: “We also believe that as heads of the Independent African states you are the shepherd of all African peoples everywhere, whether they are still at home on the mother continent or have been scattered abroad.” Malcolm X, “Appeal to African heads of state,” July 1964, in ibid., 73. If territorial separatism and emigrationism seem to be in retreat for the benefit of cultural nationalism, those ideas still retain some power of attraction. In one of his short stories, Sean McMartin imagines that the United States have become a land only inhabited by white people. A series of “mysterious plagues” having “wiped out the black population of Africa”, the remaining African leaders had called “for a return of the children of the Diaspora”, call that “had been answered by an overwhelming exodus from England and the United States.” Sean McMartin, “Music for One Hand Only,” Phylon, vol. 30, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1969), 199-200. Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

253

This shift from Negro to African-American was not only indicative of a contemporary rejection of the term negro, capitalised or not, which had been claimed by militants for the Black cause during the first half of the 20th century. It also bore witness to a profound desire to go further than a simple inversion of stigmata, and to transform the image of Black people through a name change.102 Richard B. Moore, then president of the Afro-American Institute that he had founded in 1969 and a prominent militant for many years for the rejection of the name “Negro”, an issue that he pursued through the Committee to Present the Truth about The Name “Negro”, founded in 1960,103 affirmed in a declaration that he made during the conference that it was a matter of “the most significant advance toward a name and image reflecting human dignity and self-respect.”104 The text of the resolution justifying the name change is revealing regarding the coincidence of the politics of the name African-American or Afro-American and the adoption of diaspora: […] Whereas African nations in the process of re-emergence have afforded a new perspective of identity to people of African descent as Africans in the diaspora, Whereas it is now widely recognized that the name “Negro” is all too thoroughly associated in the public mind with slavery, debasement, contempt, and inferiority, Whereas polls conducted by “Jet” and “Ebony” magazines have shown a majority demand to end the shameful and harmful use of the degrading and hostile name “Negro” and organizations such as “Negro Digest” have accordingly changed their name and-or adopted names of dignity and self-respect showing obvious connection with land, history, and culture,

102

103

104

On the abandonment of the term Negro, see Ben L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 1 (Spring 1991, 83-107. For a synthesis, see Randall Kennedy, “Finding a Proper Name to Call Black Americans,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 46 (Winter 2004-2005), 72-83. Moreover, the Africanisation of the patronym becomes fundamental. Pauline Guedj, “What’s my original name? Changement de nom, transnationalisation et revendications identitaires dans le nationalisme noir états-unien,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2010), available online: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/59182. On Moore and this campaign, see W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner eds., Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920-1972. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 (first edition 1988), notably 72-73. Quoted in “Black scholarly group changes name”, Bay State Banner (Boston), vol. vi, no. 9, November 12, 1970, 12. This reference is available on the Ethnic Watch database.

254

Chapter 5 Whereas it is of vital importance that this Association maintain its place in the progressive vanguard and enhance its ties with the youth which will carry forward into the future, therefore be it Resolved that this business meeting of the ASNLH convened in Philadelphia in Saturday, October 24, 1970 at the 55th Anniversary Convention does hereby end the use of the name “Negro”, except in necessary and obvious quotation, and accordingly to change the name of this Association to African-American Historical Association […].105

This double objective of revalorisation and of rectification of names is equally at the heart of the emergence of a new discipline, that of Black Studies, which made its academic appearance during the second half of the 1960s. However, the establishment of a clear “birth certificate” for Black Studies is a difficult question. Robert Harris Jr proposes four evolutionary phases for Black Studies: the 1890s, the post-war years, the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, and then the period between the 1980s and the present.106 However, this perspective in the longue durée tends to flatten the differences. If the history of the courses, the programmes and those teaching departments that were involved in the history of black Americans or Africa is important, it can not be unquestioningly linked to Black Studies without being liable to charges of anachronism and depoliticisation. As Mike Thelwell wrote in 1969, “any attempt to discuss the question of what has come to be called “Black Studies” […] outside of a political perspective is futile.”107 Its birth is inscribed within a specific process of contestation of Eurocentrism and white domination by groups of students, intellectuals and black militants who affirmed the right of students to benefit from teaching programmes linked to “their” culture and “their” history. Once again, the process is closely linked to a deeper chronology: as Sylvia Wynter noted, it cannot be totally dissociated from other movements which similarly structured the space of the Black cause, such as Black Power or Black Arts.108 If each of them possessed their own dynamic, they all underwent further transformations following the death of Martin Luther King in 105 106 107 108

Ibid. Robert L. Harris Jr., “The Intellectual and Institutional Development of Africana Studies,” in Bobo, Hudley, and Michel, The Black Studies Reader, 15-20. Mike Thelwell, “Black Studies: A Political Perspective,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 10, no. 4, 1969, 703. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Gordon and Gordon, A Companion to African-American Studies, 107.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

255

April 1968. The creation of the Department of Black Studies at San Francisco State College in 1969 is often considered to be the point of departure for Black Studies,109 but it was nevertheless preceded by the formation of a similar programme at Cornell in 1967. Regardless, it was certain that from 1969 onwards numerous programs of African American Studies or Black Studies were established: at Harvard, at Temple University, and at the University of Florida. This evolution towards a discipline which worked towards the restoration of black pride not only operated against the white university establishment: it also divided Africanist circles, within which both white academics and black academics judged too timorous or too integrationist were rejected by advocates of a more radical approach. In this respect, the split that occurred in 1968-1969 within the African Studies Association (ASA) was an important moment of crystallisation of the forces working for the constitution of a specific discipline, to the point that Stephen Howe considers this split to mark the birth of Afrocentrism.110 In 1968, during the association’s annual meeting in Los Angeles a new group emerged, announcing itself under the name of Black Caucus, and whose delegates demanded greater representation for Blacks both in the association as a whole and amongst the executive, judging that “too few of the program chairmen and participants are drawn from Black Africanists, and in general, the Association reflects the White caste and is identified with a White posture.”111 In June 1969 the Black Caucus took the name African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA). During the ASA meeting in Montreal in October 1969, the AHSA not only reiterated its claims but buttressed them with accusations concerning the perpetuation of colonialism through the over-representation of Whites in the ASA executive and demanded the establishment of a “racial parity within the board of directors”.112 Despite reach109

110 111

112

See for instance Mario L. Small, “Departmental Conditions and the Emergence of New Disciplines: Two Cases in the Legitimation of African-American Studies,” Theory and Society, no. 28 (1999), 663. Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso, 1998, 60. Statement of the Black Caucus, October 19, 1968, in John Henrik Clarke, “The African Heritage Studies Association: Some Notes on the Conflict with the African Studies Association (ASA) and the Fight to Reclaim African History,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 6, no. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1976), 6-7. Clarke was one of the founders of the Black Caucus and he became the first chairman of the AHSA. William Martin and Michael West, “The Ascent, Triumph, and Disintegration of the Africanist Enterprise, USA,” in Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Meaning and Study of Africa, ed. William Martin and Michael West (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 98 sqq.

256

Chapter 5

ing an agreement with the ASA at Montreal, relations between the two association worsened rapidly until the complete split in 1970.113 This desire to transform the study of the Black world is evident in sustained reflections on the pedagogical contents of a curriculum adapted to the Black student wanting to discover his roots. In 1968 and 1969, at the request of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, John Paden and Edward Soja of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University114 produced a three-volume report dedicated to “the African experience”.115 In the first volume, which envisages how the establishment of new courses could allow a consideration of this “African experience”, it was clear that the theme of the dispersion of Black people and their place in the world outside Africa was fundamental: “What has been the imprint of the Afro-American community on the modern culture of the Western Hemisphere? This question, which is the basis of all ‘Afro-American Studies’ programs can only be posed in brief in this lecture. Yet it is clearly related to ‘African Studies’, for this black ‘diaspora’, transplanted from Africa primarily by force, consists of nearly a third of the world’s black people.”116 Again in the first volume, in a discussion of the questions that teachers should ask of students in order that they reflect on these themes, the authors suggest the following: “What have been the range of interpretations of the U.S. by African students studying in this country? What types of relationships have Africans in the United States had with AfroAmericans? To what extent is the concept of ‘diaspora’ appropriate to a description of African/Afro-American linkages?”117 In a section entitled “The Diaspora and Negritude”, within the chapter devoted to African concepts relative 113

114 115

116 117

The agreement found in Montreal did not please everyone. In 1970, Rupert Emerson, Martin Kilson, Joseph S. Nye and Robert I. Rotberg – the first three from Harvard, the latter from the MIT – denounced this agreement in a letter signed by 96 other Africanist scholars. Ibid., 101. On Kilson’s opposition to the Black Studies movement, and more especially on his criticism of it for the attention of the Ford Foudation for which he worked as an advisor, see Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies, 33-34. The first program in African studies was precisely founded at Northwestern in 1948 by Melville Herskovits. John N. Paden and Edward W. Soja eds. The African Experience: Final Report, African Curriculum Project. Evanston (Ill.): Program of African Studies, 1968-1969, vol. i, Syllabus Lectures, 1969; vol. ii, Bibliographic References, août 1968; vol. iii, Introductory Essays, août 1968. The three volumes have subsequently been published, though in a different order (Northwestern University Press, 1970). I have chosen to quote the original report in order to take into consideration the state of the reflection in 1968 and 1969. Ibid., vol. i, 437. Ibid., 477.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

257

to questions of belonging to the nation, John Paden discusses the role played by the analogy with Zionism in the development of concepts elaborated by the Blacks of the New World to frame their relationships with Africa: Since one tenet of negritude is the commonality of all black persons, the question of the relationship of black Africans to black people in the New World is of considerable importance to the negritude concept of nationhood. Two apparently mutually exclusive positions seem to have characterized African nationalist thought on this issue: (1) some form of Black Zionism, or espousal of return to the motherland, Africa; and (2) a ‘spiritual’ nationalism, comparable perhaps to certain conceptions of Judaism which do not espouse a return to a homeland. In this sense, this is the issue of irredentism, that is, of scattered minorities living outside the homeland. Continuing the analogy, those black African who were forcibly removed from their homeland and resettled throughout various parts of the world have come be known in some literature as the African Diaspora.118 He adds that the “assertion that blacks throughout the world are tied by a common collective unconscious may provide the basis for either a spiritual or political nationalism (the latter, particularly, in the form of irredentism) which is transcontinental in scope. The notion of diaspora, then, becomes especially relevant.”119 From the 1960s onwards the term diaspora, qualified by the adjectives African or Black, confronted racial, political, social and moral expectations. It encompassed a multiplicity of dimensions: spatial dispersion, duality, the biblical framework and the comparison with Jewish history, the experience of traumatism, the political link with a reborn Africa following decolonisation, a sense of belonging to a cultural ensemble, and the imperatives of rediscovering an ethnic pride. If all these dimensions are not explicitly present in all uses of the two expressions, they constitute sufficient conditions for the success of the term. However, if the term is not totally absent from the world of Black intellectuals, it remains substantially linked to the Jewish experience, at least until the mid-1960s. The rupture of the “Great Alliance” between Jews and Blacks in the United States seems to have provided the opportunity for the Black appropriation 118 119

John N. Paden, “African Concepts of Nationhood,” in ibid., vol. iii, 471. Ibid., 473. There are other occurrences of diaspora throughout the report: vol. i, 446; vol. iii, 171, 475, 484, and 667; which shows that its use is not accidental at all any more.

258

Chapter 5

of diaspora. Around 1967, the alliance in the United States between certain Jewish circles and certain Black circles fractured.120 The reasons are complex and concern the situation in the Middle East and the foreign policy of the State of Israel as well as the reciprocal and antagonistic radicalisation of certain Black American and Jewish-American factions, which favorised a growing antisemitism amongst the former and a growing racism among the latter. Not only were Jews increasingly being considered as being comparable to Whites121 by Black radical militants, and thus being complicit in the policies of subjugation of Blacks, but the growing influence of Islam among the more radical militants favorised an identification with the fate of the Palestinians. In Chapter II I showed how, from the beginning of the 1960s, there was a growing conservatism among Jewish Americans, together with an increasing awareness that there was a “Negro problem”, as it was described somewhat emblematically by Norman Podhoretz in 1963.122 The parallel radicalisation of Jewish and Black attitudes in the United States underwent a fundamental transformation during the Six Days War, Jewish Americans rallying to the Israeli cause, to whom they were growing increasingly close, while the more radical Black Americans sided with the Arab states in general and the Palestinian people in particular, the Black conscience mobilising for the Third World cause: just like the Arab, the Vietnamese or the Latin American “the black man in America is fighting for humanity,” as Stokely Carmichael explained in 1968.123 This general tendency was reinforced by other factors, such as the annexation of the Golan Heights and the West Bank following the Israeli military victory in 1967, and 120

121

122 123

On the creation and break of the Grand Alliance, outside aforementioned studies, see Nancy Green, “Juifs et Noirs aux États-Unis: la rupture d’une ‘alliance naturelle’,” Annales E.S.C., vol. 42, no. 2 (March-April 1987), 445-464; Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish alliance, New York: Free press, 1995 ; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 ; Nicole Lapierre, Causes communes: des Juifs et des Noirs. Paris: Stock, 2011. Voir notamment James Baldwin, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic because They’re Anti-White,” The New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1967. However this idea is older than the 1960s. As shown by Nancy Green it’s already present under Kenneth B. Clark’s pen in 1946: “Candor about Negro-Jewish Relations: A Social Scientist Charts a Complex Social Problem,” Commentary, vol. 1, no. 4 (February 1946), 8-14. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem – And Ours,” Commentary, vol. 35, no. 2 (February 1963), 93-101. Stokely Carmichael, “The Black American and Palestinian Revolutions,” in Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism, New York: Random House 1971, 143.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

259

the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa.124 The evolution of the relationships between Blacks and Jews is not without relevance for the evolution of uses of diaspora. The opposition between Blacks and Jews did not have the effect of confining the term to its Jewish usage but, on the contrary, liberated it from this semantic embrace and rendered it available to describe the situation of another dispersed people in quest of an identity worthy of respect and a name of their own. Unlike the Jews, who historically have had the name diaspora imposed upon them, either accepting it passively in the anticipation of the end of time or rejecting it in the name of the creation of a state, the Blacks appropriated it for themselves. In the constitution of African American Studies and Black Studies, the term diaspora met a fundamental objective: it permitted the gathering of that which had hitherto been dispersed or eclipsed, that is, African history, the history of the Blacks in the New World, their culture and their struggles.125 If in a general sense that implied an insistence on the specificity of Black history, there were still occasions upon which the link with the Jews was positively invoked. Thus, in the book that he devoted to the question in 1973, Nick Aaron Ford put forward the idea of including a course on biblical traditions in Black Studies curricula because “the Bible with its references to the Jewish experience of slavery in Egypt as well as its influence on the religious experiences of millions of blacks is quite relevant to black American culture.”126 But the powerful Afrocentric faction in Black Studies privileged instead the logic of substitution by practicing not a “exodus from Egypt”, representing the end of slavery, but rather, and simultaneously, a complex logic of an “exodus from Egypt” in emancipation from the western white domination and an “entrance into Egypt” with the aim of establishing Egyptian civilisation as the symbol of the grandeur of African history and emphasising its historical priority over western civilisation. The recognition of Egyptian civilisation as a Black civilisation and as the first civilisation, which subsequently shaped both Jewish civilisation and Western civilisation, permitted a re-placement of Africa at the centre of history. Following the works of the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1950s, which attempted to demonstrate that the Egyptians of Antiquity were 124 125 126

On this, see notably Naomi Chazan, “The Fallacies of Pragmatism: Israeli Foreign Policy Toward South Africa,” in Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, 148-181. Christine Chivallon too shows how important was the creation of those disciplines and the tensions within them. Chivallon, the Black Diaspora of the Americas, 83-84 Nick Aaron Ford, Black Studies: Threat or Challenge? Port Washington-Londres: Kennikat Press, 1973, 187-188.

260

Chapter 5

Black and that this great civilisation was therefore a “Negro” civilisation,127 the question of the anteriority of Egypt became fundamental to the rehabilitation of African history and the esteem of the Black people. As Herbert Foster summarises it, “the real issue is not merely whether the Egyptians were black or white, but that the Black Africans shared in the development of this great cradle of Western civilization. To say less would deny Black people in Africa and the Diaspora an import (sic) part of their culture (sic) history.”128 The diffusion of men and ideas beyond the frontiers of Egypt overturned the customary discourse attributing to Europeans alone the capacity to civilise. This exodus from Egypt establishes a parallel between the “middle passage” of the slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries and another Atlantic crossing, in the same direction but far older, which would have had men from Africa set foot in the Americans long before Christopher Columbus. In 1969 the historian LeGrand Clegg II published an article in two parts in the journal A Current Bibliography on African Affairs on the presence of Blacks in America in the antique and medieval periods entitled “The Beginning of the African Diaspora: Black Men in Ancient and Medieval America?”129 Diaspora thus integrated the “new lexicon” as it was constituted and which the New York Times recognised in a 1973 report on a symposium on Black Studies held at Queen’s College: “Examples of this ‘new Lexicon’ could be seen in a workshop on culture and ideology in which Keith Baird, a humanities professor at Hofstra College, repeatedly stressed the need to study blacks as the ‘scattered diasporic African nation’ on the one hand and the indiginous (sic) African on the other.”130 A knowledge of the diaspora and its history became a skill that could be useful in the search for employment in the discipline: thus, 127

128 129

130

His first book on this topic relies on a doctoral work begun under the supervision of Marcel Griaule in the early 1950s but that could never be submitted due to the impossibility to constitute a defence committee. Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture. De l’antiquité nègre égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l’Afrique noire d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Présence africaine, 1954. Herbert J. Foster, “The Ethnicity of the Ancient Egyptians,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (December 1974), 190. LeGrand H. Clegg II, “The Beginning of the African Diaspora: Black Men in Ancient and Medieval America?” (2 parts), A Current Bibliography on African Affairs, vol. 2, no. 11 (November 1969), 13-32 and vol. 2, no. 12 (December 1969), 13-34. If LeGrand Clegg seems to be a pioneer on this issue, he will be superseded by Ivan Sertima with his book They Came before Columbus (New York: Random House, 1976). Ronald Smothers, “Black Studies Get ‘New Lexicon’,” New York Times, March 10, 1973, 14. The word then belongs to those new concepts that come to be structuring the educational needs of African-Americans. It is no accident if, during the same symposium,

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

261

for example, in March 1975, the Journal of Black Studies published an advertisement in which the University of Maryland Baltimore County publicised its search for a Director of African-American Studies whose research and teaching experience would relate to one of the three areas of the program: Africa, African Diaspora, or Community Involvement Studies.131 The word diaspora therefore functioned both as a theme in research and teaching, and as a symbol of the very particular role that Black faculty were called upon to fulfil, as scholars and as activists: to reassemble anew that which was once dispersed.132 The appropriation of diaspora was equally inscribed within a process of reappropriation of identity, conceptualised as a “re-Africanisation.”133 It was in the link with Africa that identitary completeness should be sought, so that the Black, and above all the Black American, could grasp his or her “ancestral core”: “Afro-Americans must understand and accept the fact that they are Black Diasporans and that Africa is the ancestral land and major spiritual base. They must feel, at a profound level, the significance and importance of the historical and cultural continuity with Africa. They must develop a set of experiences that reawakens the African ‘core.’”134 Likewise, for Ali Mazrui, a political scientist of Kenyan origin – who, after taking his doctorate at Oxford in 1966 joined the staff at Makerere University in Uganda before being forced into exile in the United States – research on Africa, Africans and Blacks could not be dissociated from the imperatives of education. Beginning with the observation that “one out of every five black

131 132

133

134

the linguist Ernie Smith suggests to name ebonics the “black english” spoken by AfricanAmericans, thus employing the term coined only a few months before (late January 1973) by the African-American psychologist Robert Williams at the “Cognitive and Language Development of the Black Child” conference held in St Louis. Williams later published a book on this topic. Robert Williams ed., Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. Saint Louis: Institute of Black Studies, 1975. Journal of Black Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (March 1975), 319. This is highly visible from the third annual meeting of the AHSA held in Bâton Rouge (Louisiana) in April 1971. See C. Gerald Fraser, “Scholar Activism Urged on Blacks”, New York Times, April 12, 1971, 41. The concept of “re-Africanisation” has recently been used in quite a useful way by some French scholars working on African religions in the United States, such as Stefania Capone about the Yorubas and Pauline Guedj about the Akans. Stefania Capone, Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux États-Unis. Paris: Karthala, 2005; Pauline Guedj, Le Chemin du Sankofa: religion et identité “akan” aux ÉtatsUnis, dissertation thesis in ethnology, Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre, 2006. J. Alfred Cannon, “Re-Africanization: The Last Alternative for Black America,” Phylon, vol. 38, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1977), 208.

262

Chapter 5

men lives outside Africa,”135”, he distinguished five levels of Pan-Africanism: sub-Saharan, trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, West Hemispheric and global. The “diaspora” – a term that he uses on several occasions, without actually defining it but always qualifying it with the adjective “black”136 – is here considered particularly from the perspective of international relations and the capacity of the diaspora to influence the governments of the states in which they reside: “It is sometimes easier to see why Africa is important for the black diaspora than to recognize the future significance of the diaspora for Africa.”137 Mazrui’s objective was quite explicitly to achieve the level of influence wielded by Jewish Americans. Invoking the creation of a Black Commonwealth of Nations, he envisaged it as a “movement for cultural liberation” capable of introducing courses dealing with Africa into the syllabi of the educational systems of different states, be they Ghana, Trinidad, the United States or Jamaica. Between the end of the 1960s and the mid-1970s, diaspora found its niche in the United States as a dual concept allowing not only for an insistence on the unity of black people despite the dispersion caused by the slave trade, in a manner analogous to prior usage by the British (Davidson, Legum, Fyfe and Shepperson) and Francophone (Fanon and Senghor) authors, but equally for the proclamation of difference and the bestowal of a name upon this collectivity with the explicit aim of recognising its specificity. We cannot understand the diffusion of African diaspora and Black diaspora without taking into consideration the existence of these two related but distinct lineages.

The Constitution of a Concept If we have now established that barely ten years elapsed between the first uses of diaspora relative to Blacks and the popularisation of the expressions Black diaspora and African diaspora, it is important to note that several more years passed, undoubtedly until 1979, before the two lineages intersected once again and these expressions took their place, in a less militant manner, or at least in a more neutral one, in the academic lexicon of specialists on Africa and Africans living outside the African continent. Before the end of the 1970s, there appear to have been few monographs or articles that were not overtly militant that 135 136

137

Ali Mazrui, “Africa and the Black Diaspora: The Future in Historical Perspective,” International Journal, no. 30 (1974-1975), 569. On one occasion, diaspora is a noun complement: “In addition, the rise of independent African states increased the determination of diaspora Blacks and in the United States to fight for their own rights.” Ibid., 581. Ibid., 575.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

263

used the word diaspora. I have cited a number of them above, drawn from specialised Africanist journals. In more generalist journals the use of the term is often summary or inexplicit. Thus, one of the eight sections of the 1972 volume Intergroup Relations, edited by Pierre van den Berghe, was entitled “The African Diaspora and Cultural Survivals” and drew together the principle articles which had appeared in the 1940s controversy between Frazier and Herskovits.138 However, the term diaspora does not appear in any of these articles, which prompted the sociologist Peter Rose, in a review of the book, to observe that the contents of the “African Diaspora” section were better known as the “Herskovits-Frazier controversy.”139 Although there was interest in the term, it was rarely used beyond a small circle of specialists, and that despite the opportunities that it offered. Either it only appeared in the title, or its use in an article was isolated.140 Noting the link between the growing interest in Black Studies in the US and the idea of the “black diaspora” that he defined as “the global dispersion of Africans during the centuries of the slave trade,” the geographer John Hunter insisted on the importance of the renewal of interest that this “comparative diasporan studies” perspective permitted, that is, the growing emphasis on the question of cultural transfers, hitherto neglected by geographers.141 Even among Black American scholars it was as if the use of diaspora was branded by the label of Black Studies. It only appears once, and almost incidentally, in the chapter on Black Americans by Martin Kilson in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s classic 1975 text Ethnicity.142 It is certainly not without significance that it was again Martin Kilson who, together with Robert I. Rotberg, 138 139 140

141 142

Pierre L. Van den Berghe ed., Intergroup Relations: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Peter Rose, “Book Review,” Social Forces, vol. 52 (December 1973), 307. For instance Van den Berghe in 1976 publishes in Social Forces an article about the differences in assimilation and racial distinctions of slave descendents depending on their being in Brazil, Mexico or the United States. Although the title contains African diaspora, the phrase only appears once more in the text. Pierre L. Van Den Berghe, “The African Diaspora in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States,” Social Forces, vol. 54, no. 3 (March 1976), 541. John M. Hunter, “Geophagy in Africa and in the United States: A Culture-Nutrition Hypothesis,” The Geographical Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (April 1973), 192. Martin Kilson, “Blacks and Neo-Ethnicity in American Political Life,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Practice, ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 243: “Indeed, Ralph Ellison suggest persuasively that, owing to close black-white cultural interdependence this [i.e. the fact that black ethnicity borrows part of its cultural ingredients from white society] might remain the crux of the AfroAmerican’s plight. And perhaps too of others blacks in the diaspora.”

264

Chapter 5

was responsible for the publication of The African Diaspora in 1976.143 These two scholars, it will be recalled, were part of the quartet who had authored a letter of protest against the attempts at reconciliation during the conflict between the ASA and the AHSA. But The African Diaspora, often considered de facto to be the text that enduringly established the concept of African diaspora, is clearly part of the intellectual legacy of Shepperson – who wrote the introduction – and not of Black Studies. The list of contributing authors clearly indicates the collection’s strong British influence: Bernard Lewis, Christopher Fyfe, Frank Snowden Jr., George Eaton Simpson. But if the term is present in the title, and used frequently by Shepperson, it is conspicuously absent from the remaining chapters. In the specialist publications of Black Studies, on the other hand, critiques of diaspora are far more advanced. In 1975, the journal The Black Scholar, founded in 1969 under the aegis of the Black World Foundation, created that same year,144 dedicated a special edition to the “Black diaspora”.145 It opens with a long article in which the sociologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake develops a working definition of the Black diaspora based on a comparison with the Jewish diaspora, not without insisting on the necessary critical distance that such comparisons entail.146 In his article, St. Clair Drake suggests that subSaharan Africa be considered a “homeland” from where several diasporas were constituted, of which “the most immediately relevant” was that which brought more than ten million Africans to the West between 1500 and 1890.147 According to a larger chronological scale, that of the last ten thousand years, he distinguishes eight destinations of Black dispersal – Egypt and North Africa, Arabia and the Middle East, India and China, Latin America, the Caribbean, North

143 144

145

146

147

Kilson and Rotberg, The African Diaspora. Those two entities are at the time under the direction of the sociologist Nathan Hare who had been one of the main actors of the strike at San Francisco State College. Among the members of the committee of The Black Scholar are John Henrik Clarke, Maulana Karenga, Angela Davis or Muhammad Ali. The Black Scholar, special issue “Black Diaspora”, vol. 7, no. 1 (September 1975). Among the articles, let’s mention the one by Le Grand H. Clegg II on the anteriority of Black presence on the American continent. LeGrand H. Clegg II, “Who Were the First Americans?” 32-41. St. Clair Drake, “The Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective,” 2. For another elaboration of the comparison between both diasporas, see Vincent B. Thompson, Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness and Leadership in the Americas (From Slavery to the 1920s). Trenton-Asmara: Africa World Press, 2000, in particular chap. viii, “Concept of the African Diaspora vis-à-vis the Jewish Diaspora”, 223-265. St. Clair Drake, “The Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective,” 2.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

265

America, Northern Europe and finally Mediterranean Europe – with the aim of calling for the constitution of a “unified vision”, both global and diverse, of the “Black world”.148 Deploring the still-embryonic character of works of synthesis on the Black world – including those of Herskovits, Cheikh Anta Diop and Roger Bastide –, he pleads for the establishment of an interdisciplinary framework within which emphasis would be placed on the theme of the “‘flows’ of people, ideas and artifacts between the diaspora communities”.149 If St Clair Drake cites one of Shepperson’s articles as a rare example of works on the circulation of people, ideas and artefacts,150 at no moment does he cite the latter’s 1965 paper, which leads one to suspect that the new meaning that he gives to diaspora, significantly different from that which appears in his Black Metropolis, has its roots elsewhere. The convergence of the two lines of thought seems to have been achieved towards the end of the 1970s through the intermediary of Joseph Harris, professor of history at Howard University. Harris chaired the session at which Shepperson presented his paper in 1965, and was also involved in the split in the ASA: he resigned from his position as organiser of the upcoming 1970 meeting of the ASA.151 One of the first, along with R.W. Beachey and his 1967 paper, to work on the African presence in Asia and to argue, in a pioneer study, for the inclusion of Asia in the expression African diaspora,152 in 1979 Harris organised the First African Diaspora Studies Institute (FADSI) at Howard University, a gathering which brought together more than a hundred participants on the theme of the African diaspora.153 The proceedings of the FADSI were published in a 1982 volume entitled Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, which appears to have been a defining moment for the establishment of a specific research field, bringing together twenty contributions, the first two of

148 149 150 151 152

153

Ibid., 5-11. Ibid., 4. George Shepperson, “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism,” The Journal of African History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1960, 299-312. Martin and West, “The Ascent, Triumph, and Disintegration,” 103. Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Harris indicates that the writing of this book had been influenced by his participation to the 1965 session with Shepperson en 1965 (p. vii). Joseph E. Harris, “African Diaspora Studies: Some International Dimensions,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 24, no. 2 (1996), 6-8. See also Godfrey N. Uzoigwe, “A Matter of Identity: Africa and Its Diaspora in America Since 1900, Continuity and Change,” African and Asian Studies, no. 7 (2008), 264-267.

266

Chapter 5

which, by Elliott P. Skinner154 and George Shepperson, are specifically concerned with the concept of diaspora and its importance to research.155 Joseph Harris subsequently reorganised this collection to include, in the second edition dated 1993, a number of contributions, more “African” and less specifically “Atlantic”, from the Second African Diaspora Studies Institute (SADSI) which was held in Nairobi in 1981 and at which the majority of the participants were African.156 These conferences also seem to have prompted other works, such as that of St Clair Drake on the Black presence in the world, which appeared at the end of the 1990s,157 as well as the organisation of specific research programmes of which the most striking example is without doubt the African Diaspora Research Department, founded in 1986 by the sociologist Ruth Simms Hamilton at Michigan State University.158 The popularisation of the term was far from restricted to journals and academic texts. Black American magazines, not only aimed at a Black readership but invariably edited by Blacks, scholars amongst them, played an essential role in the spread of the term because they often relayed, for the benefit of a wider audience, the state of discussions within the “Black community”. This is particularly true of those magazines that were aligned with the cultural nationalism of the 1960s. If the monthly Negro Digest, launched in 1942 by John H. Johnson, owes part of its initial success to the inclusion of texts penned by white authors,159 it later marched in tandem with Black Power.160 The first appearance of diaspora only came in 1965, however, from the pen of the JewishAmerican author Karl Shapiro, who explained that Jewish writers were either assimilated, or mired in a Biblical vision of events; that the “mystique of the 154 155

156 157 158

159

160

In 1969 Elliott P. Skinner is one of the two Black members of the ASA bureau that supports the claims by the Black Caucus. Clarke, “The African Heritage Studies Association,” 8. Elliott P. Skinner, “The Dialectic Between Diasporas and Homelands,” in Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 17-45; Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in ibid., 46-53. The 1993 edition is the most well known and cited. On the modifications between the first and the second edition, see Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 8 note 21. John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There. Los Angeles: Center for AfroAmerican Studies (UCLA), 1990. The programme went on, even after Ruth Simms Hamilton’s decease in 2003. Ruth Simms Hamilton ed., Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing: MSU Press, 2007. See “John Harold Johnson,” in African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary, ed John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman, 366-379 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993). On this, see Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies, 31-33.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

267

diaspora” had disappeared and that Black writers would be confronted with the same dilemma: “Richard Wright, Baldwin, Tolson know that Mother Africa is not for them. And the Africans know it too”.161 By 1968, the Black or African version of diaspora had been thoroughly assimilated into the vocabulary of the contributors to Negro Digest. Vincent Harding, head of the department of history and sociology at Atlanta’s Spelman College, wrote in an issue dedicated to the question of the “Black University”: “Even within that group [that of nonWestern International Studies] our specialty would rightfully be found among the peoples of Africa, both those who remained on the continent and those who were forced into the New Wold through the diaspora of slavery162.” In the August 1968 issue, largely consecrated to Martin Luther King – who had been assassinated in April that year –, Wilfred G. Cartey, professor of literature at Columbia, evoked in turn Moses Hess, Ahad Ha-Am, Albert Einstein, Jacques Roumain, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas to show that “in much of the poetry of Zionism and Negritude, there runs, then, a sense of uniqueness, wherein the suffering of these peoples clothe them with distinctiveness.”163 In 1969, in an issue that resumed the themes of the 1968 special issue on the Black University, Vincent Harding wrote an open letter to Black students of the North in which, inter alia, he explained how a group of faculty were initiating the creation of an institute for African American studies in Atlanta. This open letter emphasised that the educational institutions at which Black students of the North were studying could contribute to the establishment of this institution: “It will need millions of dollars, the best staff from every part of the African diaspora, students who are ready to take care of business, and it must have continuous exposure throughout the black community.”164 This institute, named the Institute of the Black World, was created in 1970. It also gave its name to a magazine that became Black World in May that year. The prospectus for the Institute appeared in the March issue. Basing their text

161 162

163

164

Karl Shapiro, “Decolonization of American Literature,” Negro Digest, vol. 14, no. 12 (October 1965), 66-67. Vincent Harding, “Some International Implications of the Black University,” Negro Digest, vol. 17, no. 5 (March 1968), 34. In the next paragraph, he evokes Africa and its “scattered children”. Wilfred G. Cartey, “Earth Flow in Zionism and Negritude,” Negro Digest, vol. 17, no. 10 (August 1968), 57. In the article, Cartes uses diaspora twice, once referring to Garvey as “a black man in the Diaspora” (59). Vincent Harding, “New Creation of Familiar Death?” Negro Digest, vol. 18, no. 5 (March 1969), 13-14.

268

Chapter 5

on the fact that “Black Studies is really a field still being born”, the authors pointed out that “the establishing and the defining of the field of Black Studies stand logically as a task and a challenge for Black people in America and elsewhere”.165 The prospectus added that the Institute must also “expand to the encouragement and developpement of contacts among black students, scholars, political leaders and artists from various parts of the world. For it is clear that Black Studies cannot really be developed unless we understand more fully both the unique and the common elements of our experiences in the black diaspora”.166 It would be superfluous and fastidious to cite at any greater length the occurrences of the word in Black World from 1970 onwards because, even if it does not appear in each issue, it appears regularly167 – which is sufficient to demonstrate the essential point, the rapid adoption of the term in The Negro Digest and Black World. The political scientist Floyd W. Hayes III summed up the situation most effectively when, in a long bibliographical article, he wrote that “the study of the African diaspora will give the Black man, wherever he is, a sense of identity and pride in himself, his people and his past, which will enable him to deal effectively with the present and the future168”. The text on the back cover of the September 1974 issue pursues the same theme, foreseeing “the day when all those ‘lost’ children of the diaspora will be gathering their pride and power about them and coming home.”169 In Ebony, another, more popular magazine founded in 1945, diaspora only appears in 1970, from the pen of the same Vincent Harding, explaining how a disciplinary reorganisation would permit Blacks to understand how they had been able to “survive in the midst of unspeakable oppression, from the homeland throughout the diaspora.”170 At the same time numerous participants at the sixth Pan-African conference held in Dar es Salaam in July 1974 called for a greater place for Blacks of the diaspora. In order to achieve this some, such as Lerone Bennett Jr, reminded that “as in so many ‘Pan’ movements, the PanAfrican idea came not from the center but from the circumference, not from 165 166 167

168 169 170

“Institute of the Black World: Prospectus”, Negro Digest, vol. 19, n° 5, mars 1970, 21. Ibid., 23. Voir Nicholas D.U. Onyewu, “The Teaching of African Politics,” Black World, vol. 19, no. 10 (August 1970), 46. Diaspora has here a temporal dimension: “during the ‘Diaspora’”. Also see the more disenchanted article by Charlie Cobb about the issue of return. Charlie Cobb, “Africa Notebook: Views on Returning ‘Home’,” Black World, vol. 21, no. 7 (May 1972), 37. Floyd W. Hayes III, “Before Columbus,” Black World, vol. 22, no. 9 (July 1973), 19-20. “When Is a Black Man Not an African?” Black World, vol. 22, no. 11 (September 1974), 100. Vincent Harding, “Toward the Black University,” Ebony, vol. 25, no. 10 (August 1970), 158.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

269

Africa, but from Africans in the diaspora.”171 Others, like the political scientist Ronald Walters, called for the establishment of institutional links within the Pan-African organisations between Africans of the continent and those of the diaspora, all while deploring the evolution by which the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) progressively politicized Pan Africanism, thus identifying it with the political unity of the continent, to the detriment of its international dimension and notably relations with the Diaspora.172 These occurrences, collectively, seem to me to be sufficient proof not only of the rapid diffusion of diaspora in militant Black American circles but also of the role played in this diffusion by magazines functioning as intermediate spaces between the academic world and the journalistic world, in the pages of which militant scholars placed the reflections and the concepts being discussed in the debates and struggles relative to the defence of the dignity of the Black world at the disposal of a wider public. And what of France? Raising the hypothesis of a lag in work on the Black diaspora within the French social sciences, compared to the Anglophones, the sociologist Abdoulaye Gueye has recently proposed an analysis of the “incapacity of the French social sciences to think more specifically the black diaspora”.173 Focusing his attention on what he considered, a priori, to be the moment “of a significant expansion of research on the diaspora,” and thus that during which “reflection on the black diaspora in France would have been apt to evolve,” he made the methodological choice of selecting the decade from 1994 to 2004 for a survey of a corpus of texts drawn from the journals Diasporas: histoire et sociétés (founded in 2002), Cahiers d’études africaines and Politique africaine. Finding little of substance in this corpus, he inferred an absence of French reflection on the matter, which he explained particularly by the refusal of the category “race” in French social science as well as by

171 172

173

Lerone Bennett Jr., “Pan-Africanism at the Crossroads,” Ebony, vol. 29, no. 11 (September 1974), 151. Ronald Walters, “The Future of Pan-Africanism,” Black World, vol. 24, no. 12 (October 1975), 6-7. Walters’ article expresses a great admiration toward Du Bois, who constituted one of the major milestones for the advocates of Black Studies. To take but one example, the editors of Freedomways, the quarterly journal of the Negro Freedom Movement, among them John Henrik Clarke, published in 1970 a collection of texts paying tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois, who was presented as being certainly “the most significant voice” “in the wilderness of the black western diaspora.” John Henrik Clarke et al., Black Titan, Boston, Beacon Press, 1970, 67. Abdoulaye Gueye, “De la diaspora noire: enseignements du contexte français,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 22, no. 1 (2006), 11-33.

270

Chapter 5

the latter’s more general rejection of postcolonial or postmodern theories. If we may concede the two latter points, his point of departure prevented him from grasping the reality of the usage of Black diaspora and African diaspora in French academic circles. Beginning with the assertion that not only is no conceptualisation possible before 1994, but that when it does emerge it could only do so from within the sub-fields of diaspora studies or African studies, he thereby not only completely ignored usage prior to 1994, but he was unable to recognise that it was through other journals, such as the Revue européenne des migrations internationales and L’Homme174 that conceptions of “black diaspora” were imported into France from Great Britain.175 It thus follows that the outline that he sketched of the absence of reflection on the Black diaspora is both wrong from the chronological perspective and too severe on an analytical level. The 1970s and 1980s saw an increase in the political and academic uses of diaspora with reference to the Black world within the Francophone area. In 1974, the Haitian author Ghislain Gouraige, a specialist in literature, published a book on the relationship between Haiti and Africa in which the term diaspora occupies a place of some importance.176 Suggesting that the “Haitian is an African in exile,”177 on numerous occasions, and without really defining them, he uses the expressions “black dispersion” (“dispersion noire”),178 “black diaspora”, “black diaspora of the Caribbean”179, “Blacks of the Diaspora”,180 and so on. The Guinean historian Ibrahima Baba Kaké, who lived in France following the independence of Guinea in 1958 and was a tutor at the Sorbonne, author of a large number of texts on the history of Africa181 and regular contributor

174 175

176 177 178 179 180 181

Gueye cites these journals in the article but he never understands them as being channels for the importation of decentred visions of diaspora. He does not attach importance to the role played by the French geographer and anthropologist Christine Chivallon in the diffusion into the French academy of texts by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, long before the book she published on the black diaspora in 2004. On this point, see infra, chap. viii. Ghislain Gouraige, La Diaspora d’Haïti et l’Afrique. Ottawa: Éditions Naaman, 1974. Ibid., 43. See also p. 17 where he mentions the idea of the slaves’ “double exile”, being their distance from Africa and their isolation on the hostland. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 92-93. He edited with the Congolese historian Elikia M’Bokolo the twelve-volumes L’Histoire générale de l’Afrique. Paris: ABC, 1977-1978. A collection of his articles was published in: Combats pour l’histoire africaine. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

271

to the journal Présence africaine,182 was to the best of my knowledge one of the very first to evoke and define the Black diaspora183 and to publish on it in French. In 1976, he published Mémoire de l’Afrique: La Diaspora noire, an illustrated text in which he sketched portraits of eleven “African exiles [who] have all done us honour, by their creative genius and their love of liberty, the black race beyond the seas.”184 In his prologue, he presents the reader with a general overview of the definitional framework of his research: The word diaspora, which means “dispersion” in Greek, is usually collectively applied to the Jewish communities established outside Palestine. But usage has seen the term also come to be used to refer to the voluntary or involuntary exile from its country of origin of any human community. Therefore the historians of Antiquity spoke readily of the “Greek diaspora” in the Mediterranean basin. By Africans of the Diaspora, we mean not only Black communities, but also individuals who were torn from Africa and maintained in a state of slavery or segregation in a foreign land.185 Baba Kaké returns to this definition in the introduction to his 1978 book on “Blacks of the diaspora”.186 He emphasises the drama and the suffering: the “destiny of the Jewish people resembles on more than one level that of the Blacks of our world, dispersed slaves or, as often happens today, voluntary emigrants… these men constitute a diaspora”.187 The history of the latter begins with prehistory, for “it is generally admitted that Africa is the cradle of hu182

183

184

185

186 187

The Présence africaine Editions published in 1971 a French translation of some contributions to the 1965 Congress, including that of Shepperson: Perspectives nouvelles sur l’histoire africaine. Paris: Présence africaine, 1971. René Garliet reminds that Baba Kaké had used this expression at the Congress of African historians held in Dakar in 1972. René Garliet, Les Maîtres de la brousse. Kinshasa: Éditions La Grue couronnée, 1976, 138. Ibrahima Baba Kaké, Mémoire de l’Afrique: la diaspora noire. Paris-Dakar: ABC-Néa, 1976, 3. This book is hardly know and hence seldom cited. See however Pascal Blanchard, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron eds., Paris Noir: Présence afro-antillaise dans la capitale. Paris: Hazan, 2001, 12 note 20. Kaké, Mémoire de l’Afrique, 3. The beginning of the paragraph is clearly inspired by what can be read in most French dictionaries of the time. The reference to Greek Antiquity is more surprising for very few authors mention it yet. Maybe Baba Kaké has read Dubnow who was among the first to insist on this. Kaké, Les Noirs de la diaspora, 11. Ibid. Kaké devotes four pages to the Falashas, 119-123.

272

Chapter 5

manity.”188 Subsequently summarising in a succinct manner the entire history of Black African migration, voluntary or otherwise, Baba Kaké arrives at the conclusion that, unlike the Italians, the Irish or the Jews, “the American Black remains, himself, a doubly uprooted being. He is not only cut off from his culture, but also from his country”:189 it is therefore “urgent that African states show their solidarity with Blacks of the diaspora.”190 Abdoulaye Gueye found no issues on the Blacks diaspora out of the 42 published by the journal Politique africaine between 1994 and 2004. It would not have been thus a decade earlier. Not only did Politique africaine regularly use the expression diaspora in the 1980s, but it devoted a special issue to “Images of the black diaspora” in 1984,191 without, however, the contributing authors showing any great enthusiasm for the term192 and, it is true, without ever engaging in reflections on the theoretical interest of the notion of diaspora. Used by the West Indian writer Edouard Glissant since the early 1980s (see chap. vi), it also appears in the works of a number of French specialists on the Americas in general and the Black American world in particular, such as Geneviève and Michel Fabre on Black theatre193 or on Black American intellectuals.194 It was also current among the observers of the Caribbean world just as the term black entered French journalistic vocabulary. In 1983 the journal Autrement published a special issue on Black cultures in France, edited by two journalists, Brigitte Talon and Maurice Lemoine.195 Several articles used 188 189 190 191

192

193 194 195

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 184. Among the articles in this issue, see in particular Denis Martin (Denis), “Le Pain de maïs et le levain africain: la dialectique du mythe et de l’innovation dans les relations entre l’Afrique et les Amériques noires,” Politique africaine, no. 15 (October 1984), 4-23; Julius Outlaw, “‘Nous sommes un peuple africain’: les Afro-Américains et l’Afrique,” 24-33; Maryse Condé, “De l’autre bord, un autre pays: l’Afrique vue par les écrivains afroaméricains,” 34-47; and “Une nouvelle culture noire dans un monde nouveau: entretien avec Manuel Zapata Olivella,” 84-90 (the interview was conducted by Denis Martin). Reflecting upon Yves Coppens’ theory about Homo sapiens being born in Africa, Denis Martin writes that, according to this theory, “the black diaspora should then encompass the whole of humanity” before adding that it’s “only a joke”. Martin, “Le Pain de maïs,” 5. As for him, Manuel Zapata Olivella is very critical as to the use of diaspora (see infra, chap. viii). Geneviève Fabre, Le Théâtre noir aux États-Unis. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1982, notably p. 8 and 13. Fabre, La Rive noire. “Black. Africains, Antillais: Cultures noires en France,” special issue of the journal Autrement, no. 49 (April 1983).

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

273

the word diaspora to evoke the West Indian196 and Haitian197 communities in France or, more generally, Blacks wherever they were to be found.198 It was precisely with this perspective on a Black world outside Africa that Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau consecrated a chapter of their Atlas des diasporas to the “Black diaspora” at the beginning of the 1990s.199 I do not thereby wish to suggest that French thinking on the black world has long been intense, nor that French uses of diaspora are legion. I simply wish to underline that a certain number of works have appeared since the 1970s and that today they are largely forgotten. Their rediscovery would no doubt give us a better idea of the historicity of the consideration of this issue in France, and allow us to reflect on the fact that the militant and intellectual dynamism among Blacks writing in the Francophone space from the late 1940s onwards was, after a fashion, able to make its way and thus constitute an important element in the development of African studies in France. As the historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has observed, the precedent of the works of Cheikh Anta Diop in the Francophone world had the consequence of prompting the emergence of a critique of Eurocentrism among Africanists somewhat earlier in France than in the US which, she suggests, allowed France to escape the intense polemics that American Afrocentrism gave rise to in the 1980s.200 Indeed, if Afrocentrism’s institutional birthplace is in the America of the 1960s, and specifically in the 1968 split within the African Studies Association, it is really only in the 1980s, although still in the US, that a true “line” and an Afrocentric theorisation clearly emerges, around Molefi Kete Asante. In 1984, having discarded his former name of Arthur Smith, and considering himself the disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop and Maulana Karenga, Asante became the head of the department of African American Studies at Temple University in Pennsylvania where, in 1987, he created the first doctoral programme in the discipline. His principal writings, beginning in the early 1980s, give a new contour to Afrocentrism, henceforth endowed with new terminology such as Afro-

196 197 198 199 200

Simonne Henry-Valmore, “Vol au-dessus d’une diaspora”, in ibid., 18, 24, 25 and 28. Edwige Lambert, “Ex-île,” in ibid., 175 and 180, with the mention of the “Haitians of the diaspora” or “the diaspora of political refugees”. Eliane Azoulay, “Le Grand voyage des musiques nègres”, in ibid., 220, 221 and 224. Dispersion too appears p. 220. Chaliand and Rageau, Penguin Atlas of diasporas, xix and 113-122. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Réflexions comparées sur l’historiographie africaniste de langue française et anglaise,” Politique africaine, no. 66 (June 1997), 95-96.

274

Chapter 5

centricity, that is, the Afrocentric method,201 and Africology or Africana Studies, the field of studies covered by this method. One of the principal objectives of this, or rather these Afrocentrist schools of thought202 was the furtherance of a particular pedagogy at the heart of which Africa is constantly the centre of analysis203 and where the richness of African history is foregrounded in contestation of doctrines of the European origins of civilisation. The growth in influence of American Afrocentrisms has prompted a number of criticisms. One of them concerns the claims for an African origin for civilisation in general, and of western civilisation in particular. If this claim is not new, it came to attention on a global scale after the 1987 publication, by the – white – political scientist Martin Bernal, of Black Athena, a work in which he denounced the Eurocentrism of the classical vision of Greek Antiquity and defended the existence of a direct influence of African elements, notably Egyptian ones, on the development of Greek civilisation.204 The book unleashed a significant polemic within academia generally205 and among of

201

202

203

204

205

Asante has massively published on this topic since his first book about it in 1980: Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Chicago: African American Images, 1980; “Afrocentricity and Culture,” in African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 3-12; The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987; Afrocentricity. Trenton: Third World Press, 1988. It is indeed more adequate to speak about contemporary afrocentrisms, plural. If the vision organized around Molefi Kete Asante is the best known, there are some other movements that can be identified, more often than not more political, less academic and more racist ones. On this, see Chivallon, The Black Diaspora of the Americas, 86; Algernon Austin, Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University, 2006, 119; Robert Fay, “Afrocentrism,” in Appiah and Gates, Encyclopedia Africana, 45. Pauline Guedj suggests we should distinguish between Afrocentrism as an ideology and Afrocentrism as a practice. Pauline Guedj, “Afrocentrismes américains. Histoire, nationalisme noir et pratiques sociales,” Civilisations, vol. lviii, no. 1 (2009), 16-17. Molefi Kete Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” Journal of Negro Education, no. 60 (1991), 170-179, reproduced in Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice, ed. James L. Conyers (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003), 37-49. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. i, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985, New Brusnwick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. The second and third volumes, respectively devoted to the archeological and documentary evidence were published in 1991 in 2006. See Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. In French, see François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, “L’Affaire Black Athena (1987-2001),” Pour l’histoire des sciences de l’Homme, no. 22 (Fall 2001), 15-21.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

275

Hellenists in particular.206 However, Martin Bernal’s thesis was not only welcomed with joy, but appropriated and defended by Afrocentrist authors who saw in it the proof of their claims for the anteriority of African civilisation over Western civilisation.207 The other criticism concerned less the objectives of the Afrocentrist vision than the tone of certain of its declinations, in particular the antisemitism identifiable in the work of authors such as Leonard Jeffries and Tony Martin, not only associated with Afrocentrism but also considered to be the central figures of Afrocentricity. At the beginning of the 1990s these two scholars popularised among their students the false idea that the Jews had been involved in the slave trade and that they were continuing to militate against the Black cause in the US.208 Tony Martin referred in particular to a work published in 1991 by the Nation of Islam that condemned Jewish participation in the slave trade.209 The Nation of Islam, like a number of Afrocentrists, claimed the term holocaust to describe the enslavement of Africans, not without asserting, once the comparison had been made between Jews and Blacks, that the historical experience suffered by Blacks was far beyond anything suffered by the Jews. The term diaspora is of particular importance for Afrocentric authors because it offers the possibility, in its negative version whereby dispersion is the result of a catastrophe and where the very memory of trauma remains, of gathering Black people around the injustices of which they have been victims and,

206

207 208

209

See the book published by the scholar of Ancient Greece Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: New Republic and Basic Books, 1996. Bernal defended his thesis against the many criticisms addressed to him. Some of his replies to the critics were collected in Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2001. On the critique against afrocentrism, see Clarence Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. These episodes are not often present in the French academic literature. See FrançoisXavier Fauvelle-Aymar, “Les Juifs, la traite des esclaves et l’histoire des États-Unis: étude d’un courant antisémite au sein de la communauté noire américaine dans les années 1990,” Sources, no. 13 (Spring 2002), 62-75, as well as, in a shorter frame, Ndiaye, La Condition noire, 343-345. Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, vol. i, Chicago: Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, 1991. Among the opponents to this thesis, see Harold David Brackman, Farrakhan’s Reign of Historical Error: The Truth behind The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews. Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1992. A longer version was published two years later: Harold David Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth behind the Nation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews”. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994.

276

Chapter 5

in its positive version where dispersion becomes the very name of a dispersed community whose goals are not necessarily a return, of giving it a place and a role to play in its relations with the African continent. This emerges in a somewhat emblematic fashion from the paper given by Asante in 2004 at the First Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar: “The term Diaspora is derived from the Greek and has been used most prominently to refer to the scattering of the Jews. Its etymology in the Greek, from the word diaspeirein, suggests that it means, a dispersion. It has now come to mean the dispersal of any group of people outside of its traditional homeland. So it is possible to speak of an African Diaspora in a large context, that is, continental context or a Diaspora in a national sense, such as the Algerian Diaspora in France, or the Ghanaian Diaspora in the United Kingdom.”210 But Africa is not only the homeland of Africans living dispersed throughout the world: it is “homeland to the entire human race” since the moment when it was suggested that the DNA of all humans could be traced back “to an African woman who lived nearly 250,000 years ago in East Africa.”211 The objective is quite clear: to envisage all of humanity as having been born in Africa and bearing African genes: “We know from archaeology and paleontology that skeletal remains of hominids can be dated to 6 million years in Chad and nearly 4 million years in Ethiopia. However, in the continuous human line to the present we have enough evidence to suggest from mitachondrial (sic) DNA that all living humans are descended from an African woman, the African mother.”212 We can observe here the manner in which a recourse to paleo-anthropological research on the origins of humanity permits the scientific justification of intuitions that we could have read long ago from the pen of authors such as Du Bois, for example, and thus re-place Homo africanus not only at the centre, but at the very origins of human history.213 Even so, as Asante continues, “However, our current notion of the Diaspora is fairly recent, mainly within the past five hundred years during which time the people of Africa were attacked, victimized, colonized, and enslaved by those who lived outside of the continent. And now, our Diaspora is vast, en210

211 212 213

Molefi Kete Asante, “Africa and Its Diaspora: Forging the Ideas of an African Renaissance,” contribution to the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and of the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004, 2-3. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Agnès Lainé, “Ève africaine? De l’origine des races au racisme de l’origine,” in Afrocentrismes: l’histoire des Africains entre Egypte et Amérique, ed. François-Xavier FauvelleAymar, Jean-Pierre Chrétien, and Claude-Hélène Perrot (Paris: Karthala, 2000), p. 103-123.

The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora

277

compassing millions of people and many nations.”214 If the claim that Africa is the historical centre of humanity is an argument for the anteriority and the fundamental grandeur of the African, it is not the principal argument in favour of the conceptualisation of the African diaspora, for here it is the traumatic experience of slavery that gave birth to it and permitted it to claim the right of return, be this geographical, psychological or cultural: To claim to be a member of the Diaspora I think it is essential that one demonstrates a Pan African solidarity with the world African community, a desire for the revitalization of Africa, a consciousness of victory, and some accountability to the objectives of African renaissance. Any idea of homeland longing must be seen either in psychological, physical, spiritual, or economic terms. If you cannot return to Africa physically, you can return psychologically and economically. If you cannot return to Africa physically, you can return psychologically. If you cannot return to Africa physically, you can advance Africa’s cultural heritage. The least we can do is to stop disparaging the lives of our ancestors. You must make an Afrocentric response to all talk of the degradation of Africa. […] The right of Africans in the Diaspora to return is a legitimate issue for African governments. There is no reason why those who govern the lands of our ancestors should prevent those of us who were taken against our wills from our homeland from returning. This would be a major step in our reconciliation with each other.215 Diaspora is not simply part of the vocabulary of Molefi Kete Asante. Henceforth it is totally integrated into the Afrocentric lexicon, in both its militant version and its more academic version. For instance, as shown by Emmanuelle Simon, the work of an Afrocentric NGO like PROMETRA is entirely articulated around the notion of “Black diaspora”.216 Moreover, the presence of an entry “Diaspora” in the recent Encylopedia of Black Studies edited by Asante and Ama Mazama bears witness to a veritable institutionalisation of the concept among scholars adhering to it.217 For Mario Azevedo, the author of the entry, this ancient word is not considered to be 214 215 216 217

Asante, “Africa and Its Diaspora,” 3. Ibid., respectively p. 9 and 12. Emmanuelle Simon, “Une exportation du New Age en Afrique?” Cahiers d’Études africaines, vol. 43, no. 172 (2003), 894-895. Mario J. Azevedo, “Diaspora,” in Encyclopedia of Black Studies, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama (London: Sage, 2005), 216-219.

278

Chapter 5

the symbol of an ancient order of things, but on the contrary, an essential element in the “new paradigm” within which the concepts of state and nation lose their importance to the advantage of a consideration of the international, global dimensions, connected through the possible unity of a people despite their geographical dispersion. In this version, diaspora combines both centrality and scattering, the importance of the state and its irrelevance in the context of a particular type of nationalism presented as non-Western: diaspora is no longer only a “name in itself”, but a real concept on the basis of which we can think the articulation of unity and dispersion: In conclusion, the concept of the diaspora allows us to follow new vignettes of academic enquiry and grasp the totality of the experiences of the black world. It is through the study of the diaspora as a paradigm that one can properly illuminate the unique political and economic impact of black people on the world scene and realize that without them Europe and the Americas would not be the “peacock” nations that they are today. All in all, therefore, and despite its shortcomings, most African and African American scholars today agree that the concept of diaspora is the best academic tool of analysis we have discovered or recovered over the past few decades.218

218

Ibid., 218.

Chapter 6

The Reversal To return, rather than simply to re-visit or re-view, that is, to apparently turn back and return ‘fully’, to African, Caribbean or Indian roots in pursuit of a displaced and dispersed authenticity today hardly seems feasible. The impossible mission that seeks to preserve the singularity of a culture must paradoxically negate its fundamental element: its historical dynamic. Post-colonialism is perhaps the sign of an increasing awareness that it is not feasible to subtract a culture, a history, a language, an identity from the wider, transforming currents of the increasingly metropolitan world. It is impossible to ‘go home’ again.1 In the 1990s, the Afrocentric foundations of Black identity were called into question by English-speaking scholars, themselves Black, in the name of a critique of essentialism and a postmodern perspective on identity that rejected appeals to fixity, purity or authenticity in favour of an insistence on the permanent construction of identifications. We find a most of the arguments against Afrocentric essentialism in a 1990 text by the scholar bell hooks:2 Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the “primitive” and promoted the notion of an “authentic” experience, seeing as “natural” those expressions of black life which conformed to a preexisting pattern or stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonisation that continually opposes reinscribing notions of “authentic” black identity. […]

1 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994, 74. 2 bell hooks (in lower case) is the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at San Francisco State University and at Yale, and in 1981 published Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. This text is considered to be a manifesto of Black feminism, but also of so-called “postmodern” thought.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_010

280

Chapter 6 The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many AfricanAmericans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of “the authority of experience.” There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black “essence” and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle.3

Thus rejected as unidimensional, racist, ineffective and even – as an accomplice of White supremacy – counter-productive, the Afrocentric approach was critiqued by authors such as Paul Gilroy who had been engaged since the 1980s in describing how Black identity – in the sense of what it means to be Black – was constantly being reworked and reinterpreted to the point that the search for what it would truly be was fundamentally illusory. Indeed, for Gilroy, this quest sought the foundations of an immutable identity in a mythified precolonial Africa or in phenotypical characteristics, while the reality is that migrations – forced or voluntary – from Africa have produced innumerable recompositions and cultural displacements linked not to a common origin or identity, but to a reworking of origins closely dependent upon the territories upon which those who thus identify themselves as Black find themselves. Given this, not only does Gilroy subscribe to the arguments of bell hooks, notably on the collusion with European discourse,4 but he adds the nostalgic, Rousseauist, aspect of a lost golden age; an insistence on the individual and individual consciousness rather than on the nation; and finally the forgetting of contemporary Africa that prompts Gilroy to use the term Americocentrism in place of Afrocentrism.5 In The Black Atlantic, published in 1993, Gilroy repeatedly returns to “an overarching Africentrism which can be read as inventing its own totalising conception of black culture” and promoting a “heavily mythologised Africanity that is itself stamped by its origins not in Africa but

3 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1990). Postmodern Culture is an electronic journal with no “paper version”. bell hooks’s text is available on the journal’s website at: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.990/hooks.990. 4 Gilroy dwelt at length on this collusion during a dialogue with bell hooks in London in 1992. Paul Gilroy, “A Dialogue with bell hooks,” in Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993, in particular p. 209-212. 5 Paul Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair”, in Gilroy, Small Acts, 197.

The Reversal

281

in a variety of pan-African ideology produced most recently by black America.”6 It is only through granting equal importance to “roots and routes” that it becomes possible to “undermine the purified appeal of either Africentrism or the Eurocentrisms it struggles to answer.”7 Of course, Afrocentric authors vociferously denounced the idea that Black identity could be not linked to an essence or to roots. Tanya Price disapproved of the conceptualisation of identity as advocated by the antiessentialists, but she also felt that this conceptualisation rendered Afro-American resistance more difficult: “Not only does Gilroy deny the ‘roots’ of African Americans and Afro-Britons cultural identities and the importance of African cultural retentions that Herskovits describes, he fails to adequately confront the tactics of creative resistance against the ‘Eurocenter’ (the United States and Western Europe) that such ‘essentialized’ identities make possible.”8 It was through “diaspora” that creolisation and the destabilisation of the dominant culture occurred. This argument was also used by Asante himself, particularly in his 2001 reading of Paul Gilroy’s book, Against Race.9 According to Asante, the questions that Gilroy raises are “are those of Africans who are trying to deAfricanize Africans to make us more acceptable to Whites”.10 The rejection of Africa amounted to the “acceptance of a White definition of Blackness”, that is, simply “colored Americans” and not true Africans.11 Asante saw additional proof of this anti-African attitude in the fact that Gilroy regretted that so many Black Americans participated in events such as the Million Man March:12 “The only person who could make such a statement had to be one who did not

6 7

8

9 10 11 12

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 86-87. Note that Gilroy writes Afrocentrism and Africentrism almost indifferently. Ibid., 190. bell hooks and Gilroy are not alone in questioning the predominance of the Afrocentrists’ essentialist discourse. Cornel West does likewise. See Cornel West, Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Tanya Y. Price, “The Return: Slave Castles and the African Diaspora,” in Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice, ed. James L. Conyers (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003), 191. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Molefi Kete Asante, “Review of Against Race,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 6 (July 2001), 850. Ibid., 847. This was a demonstration organised by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, in Washington, 16 October 1995 in Washington to protest against the social and economic situation of Black Americans in American society.

282

Chapter 6

attend”.13 The denunciation of collaboration with the White or European discourse was also emphasised by Mark A. Christian, for whom Gilroy’s thesis rested upon the binary opposition Black-White, in which White was positive and Black negative, while the ideal was to be able to envisage the opposite.14 This rapid overview suggests that Afrocentric and anti-essentialist arguments find common ground in their denunciation of the adversary as being one who plays the Whites’ game, that is, one who is of the centre, of domination. In both cases, the authors concerned believe that their own positions are eccentric, aimed at decentering – evidence indeed of the manner in which this idea assumed a place within contemporary humour of the 1990s15 –, but this decentering does not take the same form since it does not refer to the same centre. The Afrocentrists wished to decentre what they considered to be the dominant discourse – European, White – on Africa, African and Blacks in general, to better replace Africa at the centre: at the centre of preoccupations of slave descendants, but also at the centre and at the origin of humanity, of history and of civilisation through the intermediary of the African Eve, of kemetism16 and of an insistence on the singularity of African civilisation. In contrast, the anti-essentialists like bell hooks and Gilroy emphasised the absolute necessity of decentering in any consideration of the question of identity. It was therefore not simply a matter of substitution, replacing one centre with another, but indeed an analysis in which the centre, the origin, the fixity, the essence are rejected to the advantage of a resolutely hybrid approach in which identification takes precedence over identity. The distinction between the two modes is never so clearly visible as in their conception of diaspora. For one camp, diaspora denotes the existence of an original centre, in time and in space, to which it is necessary to return, if not come back. For the other, however, diaspora denotes a decentering, a cultural identification which can survive without an origin and which does not imply a return, either in time

13 14 15

16

Ibid., 848. Mark A. Christian, “Black Atlantic,” in Asante and Mazama, Encyclopedia of Black Studies, 117. I use the term “humour” (humeur) here in the sense in which French sociologist JeanClaude Passeron (and Boudieu too) used it: Jean-Claude Passeron, “Mort d’un ami, disparition d’un penseur,” in Travailler avec Bourdieu, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 44-46. Kemet is an Ancient Egyptian word, generally translated as “black land”, referring to fertile deposits of silt in the Nile delta. It has been reappropriated by Afrocentrists, both English and French-speaking, to refer to Black Egypt, or even, as kemetic (kémétique in French) as a synonym of “Black”.

The Reversal

283

or in space. In the context of the history of the uses of the term, it is this latter conceptualisation which appears surprising, and calls out for analysis. The study of this development requires a detour in order to fully understand the social, intellectual and historical conditions of possibility for this conception to emerge…

The “Post-structuralist” Matrix The first stage in this trajectory towards a decentred vision of diaspora was located in France where, during the 1960s and 1970s, a collection of philosophical texts developed which, at the end of the 1970s, were labelled poststructuralism, French Theory, neo-structuralism or even postmodernism.17 Generally rejected or ignored by those subsumed within them,18 even though they often identified themselves as maintaining a critical engagement with structuralism,19 these labels are not particularly satisfying if their intent is to provide any sort of detailed analysis of the works of the authors in question. On the other hand, they can make sense if our aim is to understand not only the logic of circulation – and thus of transformation – of texts and ideas, but also how the contents of these authors’ texts – or at least some of them – have been able to provide others with the basis for a selective appropriation.

17

18

19

On this, see François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 (first French edition 2003), 8, as well as Johannes Angermüller, “Qu’est-ce que le poststructuralisme français? À propos de la notion de discours d’un pays à l’autre,” Langage et société, no. 120 (2007), 17-34. See also Yves Bonny, Sociologie du temps present: modernité avancée ou postmodernité? Paris: Armand Colin, 2004. Foucault felt that he couldn’t see “what kind of problem is common to the people we call post-modern or post-structuralist.” Gérard Raulet, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Telos, vol. xvi, no. 55 (Spring 1983), 205. Derrida believed that deconstruction was “a structuralist and anti-structuralist gesture at the same time,” while Foucault saw himself as “the altar boy of structuralism” while nevertheless making it clear that he maintained a relationship with structuralism that was both of distanciation and of reinforcement. Jacques Derrida, “‘The Almost nothing of the unpresentable’,” in Jacques Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 (first French edition 1992), 83. Michel Foucault, “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘aujourd’hui’ (entretien avec Georges Fellous),” La Presse de Tunisie, 12 April 1967, reproduced in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. i, Paris: Gallimard, 2001, 609 and 611.

284

Chapter 6

Initially, therefore, I will focus on the theme of dispersion among certain “post-structuralists”. My intention here is certainly not to demonstrate the existence of a common body of thought, but rather to indicate, through the prism of diaspora and the idea of dispersion, the existence of certain common problematics, even certain common objectives, that are to be found in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.20 Their desire, shared rather than common, to observe contemporary transformations in the human sciences in their relationship with language, and to use the possibilities offered by this new relationship with language and with meaning to displace, to decentre, the binary logic of the modern discourse of representation, of origins, of linear temporality, of continuity, of regularity and of the contours of the centre, simply in order to attempt to “say what happens”, assumes meaning in the context of the question of dispersion. This latter is already present in the works of Maurice Blanchot, a favourite author of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze, who, in the 1950s in his analysis of the literary space, raised the possibility of dispersions functioning as gatherings: “Un coup de dés orients the future of the book both in the direction of the greatest dispersion and in the direction of a tension capable of gathering infinite diversity, by the discovery of more complex structures.”21 Further on he adds: “It is a movement of diaspora that must never be repressed but instead preserved and welcomed as such into the space that is projected from it and to which this movement does nothing but answer, an answer to an indefinitely multiplied void, where dispersion takes on the form and appearance of unity. Such a book, always in movement, always on the verge of scattering, will also always be gathered in all directions, through dispersion itself and according to the division essential to it, which it makes not disappear but appear, maintaining this dispersion so the book can accomplish itself there.”22 This sentence alone illustrates most effectively how dispersion impregnates post-structuralist writings: it allows them to speak of multiplicity and unity, of space and of time, of dissemination and gathering, of centre and periphery, 20

21

22

The list could certainly be longer: Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan… Those I have chosen are not only those with whom I am best acquainted but also those whose texts or concepts have been most often cited by authors who, beginning in 1980s, started to rework the sense of the word diaspora. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (first French edition 1959), 234. The reference to Un coup de dés is of course a reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1897). Ibid., 235.

The Reversal

285

but in a way that does not simply oppose the two, preferring instead to play on the concordance of opposites, on the metaphor of the book, “always in movement, always on the verge of scattering,” but also always gathered, be it only by dispersion itself. As such, the word diaspora does not constitute a part of the conceptual arsenal of the authors referred to here, or even of their usual vocabulary. However, we occasionally find it in the writings of Jean-François Lyotard or Jacques Derrida.23 In Lyotard, we find several meanings, more or less negative. The Jewish meaning signals the distinction between galuth and diaspora: “Exile is not diaspora. From the latter, we can return to Jerusalem. Galouth, exile, […] prohibits a return to Jerusalem.”24 The “diaspora” is therefore not an annihilation by space because a return is possible. Moreover, it is not the worst malediction possible. Reflecting on the silence of the deportees and the impossibility of collective testimony following Auschwitz, he asks “would this be a case of a dispersion worse than the diaspora, the dispersion of phrases,”25 a “dispersive, merely negative […] dialectics,” which can create nothing.26 In opposition to this deleterious and negative dispersion, Lyotard believes he sees “epilogues to modernity and prologues to an honorable postmodernity”27 in both Kant and Wittgenstein, because “they lay the ground for the thought of dispersion, (diaspora, writes Kant).”28 Dispersion can thus be considered a “benediction”29 or as “a good thing”.30

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

To the best of my knowledge, it does not appear in Foucault’s writing. In Deleuze and Guattari’s works, together or individually, it only occurs twice, the first time in a citation from Jean-Pierre Faye in Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrénia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 (first French edition 1972), p. 418; the second was in a reference to Jewish semiotics, consisting “not just bring the wandering to a halt, but overcome the diaspora, which itself exists only as a function of an ideal regathering.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (first French edition 1980), 123. Jean-François Lyotard, “D’un trait d’union” (1993), in Jean-François Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 2000, 138 note 1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 (first French edition 1983), 98. Ibid., 101. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xiii. Emmanuel Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique (1798). Paris: Vrin, 2008, 155-156, note 1, p. 156. Jean-François Lyotard, “Judicieux dans le différend,” in Jacques Derrida et al., La Faculté de juger. Paris: Minuit, 1985, 206.

286

Chapter 6

In Derrida’s work, diaspora is notably present in his lecture on Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, in which, as I have shown in Chapter II, the element of dispersion is fundamental;31 but he also uses it twice in a 1964 article on Emmanuel Levinas, where the value of the term, associated with the idea of separation, seems to be different, negative in one case, positive in the other. If, in the first occurrence, dispersion is opposed to the necessary establishment of a community,32 it can also be constitutive of a respect for differences. Recalling Lévinas’s notion of the end of history, Derrida wrote that it was not a pacific discourse on absolute unity and ontological coherence, but rather on “Peace in separation, the diaspora of absolutes.”33 Beyond these occurrences, and instances where diaspora appears in citations from Blanchot34 or Lyotard,35 Derrida also used it in the context of the Jewish diaspora. In the work of a philosopher who had publicly declared that he did not much like either the word or the idea of community,36 Derrida’s Jewishness is a complex but fundamental point of reference: “Indeed, I find it hard to say ‘we’, but I say it sometimes […] despite all that [he is talking about Israeli policies judged “disastrous and suicidal”] and all the other problems that I have with my ‘Jewishness’, I will never deny it”.37 Still, this is a particular kind of Jewishness, stripped of religious belief, an identification dissociated from communitarian belonging.38 Derrida emphasises his identification with the figure of the Marrano, to whom he accords a particular signification, calling “Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place where he lives […] in the very place where he stays without say-

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

Jacques Derrida, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva” in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (first French edition 1972), 137-153. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (1964), in Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2001 (first French edition 1967), 98. Ibid., 403 note 42. Jacques Derrida, “The Book to Come” in Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 (first French edition 2001), 14. Jacques Derrida, “Lyotard and us,” (2001) parallax, vol. 6, no. 4 (2000), 33 and 42. Jacques Derrida, “A ‘Madness’ must watch over thinking” (interview with François Ewald), in Derrida, Points… 355: “I don’t much like the word community, I am not even sure I like the thing.” Jacques Derrida, “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même,” (interview with Jean Birnbaum), Le Monde, 19 August 2004. On this question, see particularly Régine Robin, “Autobiographie et judéité chez Jacques Derrida,” Études françaises, vol. 38, no. 1-2 (2002), 216.

The Reversal

287

ing no but without identifying himself as belonging to.”39 The Marrano, even the “Marrano’s Marrano” as he sometimes also described himself, thus became a figure of the identitarian non-definition, while according to the hypothesis formulated by John Caputo, Derrida perhaps speaks only of the figure of the Jew in his evocation of the aporias and of that which escapes: “[…] this dispersion and dissemination is the very substance of his Jewishness. When he writes of the exile, the outsider, the nomad, the desert, the uprooted, the dispersed, of dissemination and the cut, of writing itself – is that not to write under another name about the Jew, about Jewish passion, the passion and suffering of the Jew? And is this not to write about himself?”40 Derrida’s texts for Frédéric Brenner’s volume Diasporas demonstrates well this ambivalence towards diaspora: asked to provide commentaries for a selection of photographs, Derrida provides a perspective in which, unlike Lyotard, diaspora and exile are not distinguished from one another. Moreover, the dispersion prompted by exile is not simply geographic, spatial, but it is also internalised: “The ‘exile’ does not disperse Jews throughout the world in a multiplicity of communities identical to themselves and distributed over the surface of the earth, or even re-planted in other nations identical to themselves. No, the dispersion affects the inside, it divides the body and soul and memory of each community.”41 Even so, this division is complex because “the Diaspora is at home outside its home; it remains outside its home at home, at home at the other’s, even in Jerusalem. Even in Jerusalem, it is without being at home […].”42 As described by Derrida, the diaspora implies a complex relationship with space, which is also at the heart of Michel Foucault’s writings on dispersion. As early as 1964, he published a text in Critique on “the language of space”, in which he wrote – and this sentence takes on a particular resonance if one recalls that diaspora as a word was born in Alexandria – that for centuries, writing had been linked to time, “caught in the fundamental curve of the Homeric return; but also that of the accomplishment of Jewish Prophecies. Alexandria, which is our birthplace, has prescribed this circle to all Western language: to write was to make return, it was to return to the origin, to re-capture oneself in 39

40 41 42

Jacques Derrida, Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, 81. See also Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993 (first French edition 1991), 170-171. John D. Caputo, “A Community without Truth: Derrida and the Impossible Community,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 26, no. 1 (1996), 28. Frédéric Brenner, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, vol. ii, Voices. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, 35. Ibid., 21.

288

Chapter 6

the primal moment; it was to be new every morning.”43 Henceforth, following Nietzsche and Joyce, it would instead be space which would order literature, for the latter would rediscover language, through that which “is now given and comes to us”: “the gap, distance, the intermediary, dispersion, fracture and difference.”44 This same idea is reprised three years later. This time, time and space are opposed as emblematic of distinct epochs. Whereas the 19th century was the epoch characteristic of time, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the sideby-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”45 In a more general sense, in spatial terms, the foregrounding of dispersion permits a relinquishment of the fiction of unity. So, in Foucault’s introduction to his translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a confrontation between the text of Anthropology with that of Critique of Pure Reason showed that the question of dispersion clearly opposed that of the originary. Contrary to the time of Critique in which a synthesis, a unity was produced, “the time of the Anthropology is assured by a dispersion which cannot be contained”.46 It is however around questions of language and the epistemology of historical research that the role the thought of dispersion plays in the Foucauldian corpus is clearly manifested. In The Order of Things, language and men are analysed according to an inverted logic of dispersion and of gathering, the discourse on man appearing in the 18th century, at the very moment when the study of language was being formalised and when this latter no longer existed except “in a dispersed way”47. Suddenly, the contemporary resurgence of language posed an essential question: “Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?”48 Somewhat ironically, this gathering of language took the form of a new literature

43

44 45 46 47 48

Michel Foucault, “The Language of Space,” (1964), in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 163. Ibid., 163-164. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1 (1986), 22. Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008, 89. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002 (first French edition 1966), 331. Ibid., 421.

The Reversal

289

that took language seriously, a literature in which Foucault was deeply interested and to which he devoted several articles in Critique. Literature, “it is, rather, language getting as far away from itself as possible,” and it is precisely through this placing “outside of itself” that it is revealed such as it is, but in an unexpected form: “the sudden clarity reveals not a folding-back but a gap, not a turning back of signs upon themselves but a dispersion”.49 It is then the taking into consideration of the “chasm” through which “the being of language only appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject” which then justifies the establishment of a particular form of thought, the “thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence […].”50 “Making its dispersion shine forth” is also to render it noble and normal. That is why a certain form of literature, such as the “language of aspect” – or “language of distance” – of Marcellin Pleynet records this “thought of the outside”: “the space of distance and the relations of aspect […] belong to the dispersion of language (to that originary fact that one never speaks at the origin but in the distance).”51 It is within language that a literature of aspect “is sensitive to the distancing of the origin, its fragmentation, its scattered exteriority” because “the moment before the dispersion can never be restored”.52 From an epistemological perspective, Foucault continued to emphasise multiplicity and the refusal of the absolute origin, a theme that he frequently found in the shift from one type of discourse to another. Object and epistemology collude to think the construction and the stabilisation of discourses, dispersion capable of being both the being of language and the condition of the efficacy of disciplinary power, which is itself an enormous network englobing the social according to a logic of relations between distinct but linked disciplinary processes.53 Similarly, if the mediaeval discourse on sex and penitence was “markedly unitary [,] In the course of recent centuries, this relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities”: “So it is not simply in terms of a continual extension that we must speak of 49 50 51 52 53

Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside” (1966) in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. ii, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 149. Ibid., 149. Michel Foucault, “Distance, Aspect, Origin, » (1963), in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 106. Ibid., 106-107. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995 (first French edition 1975), in particular p. 138 and 176-177.

290

Chapter 6

this discursive growth; it should be seen rather as a dispersion of centres from which discourses emanated, a diversification of their forms, and the complex deployment of the network connecting them”.54 It is not the heart or the centre which is the most important, but rather the construction of margins. More precisely, the question of margins and limits is doubled in Foucault, it is both thematic and epistemological. A substantial part of his writings focuses on the construction of margins and marginals: the asylum and the madman, the delinquent and the prison, the abnormal, the monstrous, the heterotopian… A true research ethos will “move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analysing and reflecting upon limits”.55 But to think the limits implies also a particular mode of thought, one which is capable of making a place for multiplicity, difference, dispersion: “The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence; affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the multiple – of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or confined by the constraints of similarity”.56 Foucault would hone this mode of thought in the form of genealogical analysis which, in the early 1970s, became increasingly important in his work.57 While the archaeological method, dominant in The Order of Things and then in Archaeology of Knowledge, “analyses the processes of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in discourse; genealogy studies their formation, at once scattered, discontinuous and regular.”58 The genealogist must therefore study dispersion in order to deconstruct any attempt intending to recompose, solidify, unify that which has happened. The task of the genealogist is that of the scholar who sets himself the task of practicing an “effective” history, that which “differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for selfrecognition or for understanding other men.” He adds that “history becomes 54 55

56 57 58

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 (first French edition 1976), 33-34. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, 45. This was originally a lecture given at the Collège de France, 5 January 1983. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum philosophicum” (1970) in Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault, vol. ii, 359. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 104-117. Michel Foucault, “Orders of Discourse,” Social Science Information, vol. 10, no. 2 (1971, first published in French in 1970), 26.

The Reversal

291

‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being”.59 Otherwise put, this history “looks from above and descends to seize the various perspectives, to disclose dispersions and differences, to leave things undisturbed in their own dimension and intensity”:60 its purpose “is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.”61 It is the establishment of the discontinuity of the continuous that permits us to seize things in their dispersion; Michel Foucault expressed it thus in a commentary on Marcus Aurelius: “So, let us see things not in the great unity, but in their dispersion, like a flock of sparrows in the sky.”62 This questioning of discourses, stabilising, linear and reassuring, as well as the unveiling of another form of thought capable of taking into account aberration, discontinuity and difference, also emerges in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, notably in his report, undertaken at the request of the president of the Council of Universities of the government of Quebec, on the question of knowledge in more developed societies.63 This document was produced in response to the crisis of narrative, of “metanarratives”, the narratives of modernity: the political narrative of the emancipation of citizens, the scientific and positivist narrative of truth, the social narrative of the classless society, and so on. The postmodern condition, characterised precisely by “incredulity towards metanarratives”,64 also saw the emergence of scholarly research initiatives in mathematics, physics and chemistry, which called into question the notion of a stable system, characterised by continuity, and emphasised the study of discontinuities. These trends prompted Lyotard to draw on the French mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot’s work on fractals.65 Since the geometry of irregular objects could not be explained by classic Euclidian geometry, the study of fractals fell within the domain of “laws of disorder” or “chaos theory”, by which

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 87-88. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 95. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (first French edition 2001), 303 (lecture of 24 February, 1982). The report was published as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 (first French edition 1979). Ibid., xxiv. Benoît Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977 (first French edition 1975).

292

Chapter 6

the organising principles of phenomena or objects which had hitherto only been taken into consideration in the context of their abnormality could reveal themselves. In addition to Mandelbrot, Lyotard drew on the works of the physicist René Thom on catastrophe theory to demonstrate that regular forms or stable systems could constitute the exception, not the norm.66 Postmodern science as Lyotard conceived of it was no longer a search for regularities but on the contrary one for instabilities and difference: “the continuous differentiable function is losing its preeminence as a paradigm of knowledge and prediction. Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta,” catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.”67 This emphasis on discontinuities in order to foreground a new methodology is of course fundamental to Derrida’s thinking. It infuses the scholar’s very engagement, since Derrida believed that the interest lay in the silent, the inaudible, and that it was located “always in dispersion and in the minority”;68 but it also finds a place in the conceptual logic of Derridean deconstruction, particularly in the founding article, which was Derrida’s contribution to a conference on human sciences held in Baltimore in 1966.69 The notion of “play” is then the articulation of this discontinuity, of this perfect non-correspondence, this crisis of representation between the signifier and the signified, even between the signifier, the signified and the referent:70 “Play is the disruption of presence […] Play is always play of absence and presence, but […] play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence.”71 The notion of dissemination tends in the same direction, obliterating ideas of centre and of origin, since “if thought belongs from the beginning to no one, […] then this is quite simply because the text never in fact begins. Not that its rifts are erased or its ‘positive’ ruptures blurred and blended into the continuum of something

66 67 68 69 70

71

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 58-59. René Thom, Paraboles et catastrophes. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 60. Derrida, “The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable,” 93. See Cusset, French Theory, 38-42. Roland Barthes sees an illustration of this fact in Philippe Sollers’s novel Drame (Paris, Seuil, 1965). Roland Barthes, “Drama, Poem, Novel,” in Roland Barthes, Sollers Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 1987, 58. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2001 (first French edition 1967), 369.

The Reversal

293

always-already-there. But precisely because the rifts in it never stand as origins: they always transform a preexisting text”.72 Dissemination even recovers one of the primary significations of the verb speirein, that of semination, sowing, Derrida distinguishing between the semantic and the seminal, the former still referring to the horizon of meaning, content, while the seminal “on the contrary, disseminates itself without ever having been itself and without coming back to itself. Its very engagement in division, its involvement in its own multiplication, which is always carried out at a loss and unto death, is what constitutes it as such in its living proliferation. It exists in number.”73 Each germ becomes a term and vice versa.74 It is through another form of dissemination that the establishment of a thought that refuses centre and origins reveals itself, this time in the works of Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari. Undoubtedly drawing on the notion of “transversality” so dear to Félix Guattari in the 1960s75 as well as that of “disparation” borrowed from the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon by Deleuze,76 they emphasise the possibility of thinking together unity and difference. To do this, in 1976 they proposed the metaphor of the rhizome, “subterranean stem”, that they oppose to roots as much as to radicles.77 Roots are characterised by “binary logic”, developing “the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four”78; “the tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity”,79 while the radicles, under the cover of the destruction of the unity of the root, “[do] not really break with dualism”.80 Despite the opposition that they establish between the tree and the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari reject binary antagonism and simplistic dualism in order, on the contrary, to valorise the “and” and even more, the “and … and … and …”81 If

72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

Jacques Derrida, “Dissemination,” (1969), in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination. London: Athlone Press, 1981, 333. Ibid., 351. Ibid., 304. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, 81. Ibid., 200-201. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizome. Paris: Minuit, 1976. Four years later this text would reappear as the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, quotation p. 6. I cite the Thousand Plateaus text. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 25.

294

Chapter 6

the rhizome is opposed to the tree, it is because it is opposed to dualism itself, the “and” placing itself in the middle and establishing the link, ensuring the relationship: “Substitute the AND for IS. A and B. The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One or Whole. The AND as extra-being, inter-being.”82 Resisting any temptation towards a radical opposition between the one and the other, the tree and the rhizome thereby interlace, as do the patterns of territorialisation and deterritorialisation in the works of the two authors: “There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. […] The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel.”83 This thought which comes to substitute the “and … and” for the “or… or” does not always take the form of the rhizome. Sometimes it takes on that of the oxymoron,84 that stylistic device through which two antonyms are placed side by side to create a rhetorical effect. This usage is notably frequent in the works of Derrida, who conjures up the presence of absence,85 the “visibility of the invisible”86 or draws upon the oxymoronic character of the Greek pharmakon, at once poison and remedy,87 in a logic according to which “coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire”.88 Finally, it can take the form of the overcoming of antagonisms and oppositions through an enquiry into the very emergence of the discourses that constructed modernity. In his 1983 rereading of Kant’s “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Michel Foucault rejected any alternative that consisted in taking up a position 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. London: The Athlone Press, 1987 (first French edition 1977), 57. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 20. The word is from the Greek τὸ οξυμωρον (to oxumôron), itself composed of two contradictory adjectives, oxu meaning “fine sharp”, while môron means “soft, inert”. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 94-95. In his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge, 2006 (first French edition 1993), 46-48, Derrida offered a definition of the specter. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968), in Derrida, Dissemination, 95-98. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” 352.

The Reversal

295

either for or against the Enlightenment: “It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative… We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment.”89 This fundamental principle framed what he later called the “historical ontology of ourselves.”90 Decentering does not consist in valorising the margins, the periphery, the limits, but integrating the construction and the production of these margins as an element in itself of the historical construction of modernity, not as its reverse. If I have dwelt at length on the works of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, the theme of decentering is equally present in the texts of other authors generally associated with post-structuralism, notably Roland Barthes, from whose pen we read in 1969 that “writing decentres the word, the individual, the person, accomplishes a task whose origin is indiscernable”.91 Once again the value of decentering is clearly revealed, and emphasis is placed on the impossibility of the origin, themes common to the post-structuralists and of which we find a “prefiguration” in Friedrich Nietzsche almost a century earlier. We cannot truly understand the reversal with which we are concerned here if we do not grasp the place that Nietzsche’s thought occupies among French writers. As Louis Pinto recalls, the circulation of and the trade in philosophical ideas – we might add ideas generally – occurred particularly through the appropriation of sources from antiquity to contemporary ends.92 In the 1960s, in France, the recourse to Nietzsche – what Jacques Le Rider called “the third moment of Nietzsche in France”93 – can be understood as a strategy of reaction in the context of a philosophical field dominated by Hegelianism and existentialism.94 89 90 91

92 93

94

Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 43. Ibid., 45. Roland Barthes, “Dix raisons d’écrire,” (1969), reproduced in Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii. Paris: Seuil, 1994, 541. This text originally appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della sera 29 May 1969. The journal had asked him “Why write?” Louis Pinto ed., Le Commerce des idées philosophiques. Paris: Éditions du Croquant, 2009. Jacques Le Rider, Nietzsche en France. De la fin du xixe siècle au temps présent, Paris, PUF, 1991, p. 153. The first two moments were the early 20th century, when the “intermediaries” were André Gide and Paul Valéry, then the 1930s with Georges Bataille. Louis Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra: la réception de Nietzsche en France. Paris: Seuil, 1995. See also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, “Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without a Subject,” Social Forces, vol. 34, no. 1 (1967), 162-212.

296

Chapter 6

It was not the question of the Jewish diaspora that attracted Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze to Nietzsche. The latter, while nevertheless emphasising how the dispersion of the Jews gave them exceptional capacities, a “resourcefulness […] both in mind and soul [that] is extraordinary”, courage, freedom of spirit, tenacity and certitude of being “qualified for the very highest functions”,95 only devoted a few pages to them.96 This was not the attraction; if Nietzsche was attractive, it was because his late-19th century writings on Platonism and Leibnizianism parallel very closely what Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari had started to write in the 1960s about Marxism, Hegelianism and existentialism: “this mythology has now had its time.”97 Their common adversary was Hegelianism in particular. In his 1962 book on Nietzsche, Deleuze underlined how thoroughly “anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge.”98 The philosophical war that Nietzsche declared on the exaltation of origins, this “metaphysical after-shoot which sprouts again at the contemplation of history, and absolutely makes us imagine that in the beginning of things lies all that is most valuable and essential”,99 accompanies his critique of the power of assignation through language: “The seigneurial privilege of giving names even allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself

95 96

97 98

99

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day (1881). New York: MacMillan, 1911, 158-159. He most notably establishes a distinction between three phases of Judaism. Setting up an opposition between the Old Testament – prodigious and heroic – and the New Testament – rococo and overwrought –, Nietzsche contrasts an admirable Judaism, that of the earlier times, and a sacerdotal Judaism, proto-Christian and degenerate, from the times of the Second Temple. The destruction of the Second Temple paved the way for a third period, that of the Dispersion (Zerstreuung) during which in Nietzsche’s eyes Jews acquired superiority over all the other peoples of Europe by virtue of their adaptive capacities. On this latter point, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). New York: Vintage, 1966, § 251, 187-189. The complexity of Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Judaism is clearly demonstrated in Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, Chapter ix, p. 139-166. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes. Paris, Gallimard, 1982, xi 38[14] (June-July 1885), 247. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 1983 (first French edition 1962), 8. In a 1978 interview with Duccio Trombadori, Foucault explained that “Nietzsche, Blanchot and Bataille were the authors who enabled me to free myself from the dominant influences in my university training in the early fifties – Hegel and phenomenology.” “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault, vol. iii, 246. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human (1878). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 302.

The Reversal

297

as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say ‘this is so and so’, they set their seal on everything and every occurrence with a sound and thereby take possession of it, as it were”.100 The importance that the post-structuralists accorded to the question of language both found its source in a reading of Nietzsche and sought in it the confirmation of a change in era, the exhausting of the “grand narratives” and of a belief in origins that coincided with the arrival of the reign of interpretation. Within the field of French philosophy, he “could therefore appear as a legitimate and legitimising precursor”.101 In 1965 Gilles Deleuze and Maurice de Gandillac assumed the editorial role of the French edition of Œuvres philosophiques complètes,102 whose general introduction, by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, hoped that “the new day, in the light of previously unpublished works, would be that of a return to Nietzsche”103 and hoped that the collected notes left by the latter would allow glimpses of all the “possibilities of combinations, of permutations, which contain, now and for ever, in Nietzschean studies, the incomplete state of the ‘book to come’.”104 This “return to Nietzsche” was manifested notably in the organisation of two conferences; the first at Royaumont in July 1964 brought together classical interpretations of the German philosopher and the more incisive texts of Deleuze, Foucault and Klossowski, while the other, held at Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1972, was much more comprehensively organised around this new appreciation of Nietzsche, since it brought together Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard.105 This new reading saw in Nietzsche the precursor of decentered thought, in which certainties are erased – truth, origins, meaning, return, stability, unity – to the advantage of a more joyful quest for multiplicity and uncertainty. The original was not lost, in the sense of being definitively forgotten or becoming inaccessible, in the image of the Garden of Eden: it was lost because no original exists, or at least, no original towards which it would be possible to turn, to where it would be possible to return or whose disappearance could be deplored. Meaning, sense, as origin, truth, return, and so on, was the product,

100 101 102 103

104 105

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 12. Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra, 120. On the undertaking of new editions of Nietzsche’s works in German, French and Italian in the mid-1960s, see Le Rider, Nietzsche en France, 205-210. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Introduction générale,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Œuvres philosophiques complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, vol. v, p. i-iv, text republished in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. i, 592. Ibid. Note particularly the reference to Blanchot. Nietzsche aujourd’hui? Paris: UGE, 1973.

298

Chapter 6

the effect of interpretation: “You hear everyone talking about ‘sense’: original sense, forgotten sense, erased sense, veiled sense, reemployed sense, etc. All the old mirages are just rebaptised under the category of sense; Essence is being revived, with all its sacred and religious values In Nietzsche and Freud, it’s the exact opposite; the notion of sense is an instrument of absolute contestation, absolute critique, and also specific creation: sense is not a reservoir, not a principle or an origin, not even an end, it’s an ‘effect’, an effect produced, whose laws of production must be uncovered.”106 This approach had two principal consequences. First the absence of absolute origin implied the existence only of interpretations, which have neither beginning nor end, as Michel Foucault reminded us in his paper at the 1964 conference: “if interpretation can never be brought to an end, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret.”107 Then, the absence of an original sense gives rise to a multiplication of senses: “A thing never has only one sense [for Nietzsche]. Each thing has several senses that express the forces and the becoming of forces at work in it. Still more to the point, there is no ‘thing,’ but only interpretations hidden in one another, like masks layered, one on the other, or languages that include each other.”108 Nietzsche’s particularity was not to welcome this absence of centre and of origin with nostalgia but on the contrary with joy. Nietzsche’s laughter is present in Deleuze109 as in Derrida who opposes it to the nostalgia of the centre and of the origin found in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active

106

107

108

109

Gilles Deleuze, “On Nietzsche and the image of thought”, (1968 interview with Jean-Noël Vuarnet), in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2004 (first French edition 2002), 189. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” (1967), in Transforming the Hermeneutical Context: from Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. G.L. Ormiston and A.D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 64. Gilles Deleuze, “Conclusions on the Will to Power and the Eternal Return,” (1964), in Deleuze, Desert Islands, 165. These are Deleuze’s concluding remarks to the 1964 conference on Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” conference paper presented at “Nietzsche aujourd’hui”, July 1972 at Cerisy, in Deleuze, Desert Islands, 257-258.

The Reversal

299

interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center”.110 It follows then that the Nietzschean notion of the eternal recurrence must also be rethought in order to avoid making of it a notion implying the simple return to the origin and to the same. Once again, Deleuze takes on the task: “It is not a cycle. It does not presuppose the One, the Same, the Equal or equilibrium. It is not the return of All. It is not the return of the Same. […] Essentially, the unequal, the different is the true rationale for the eternal return. It is because nothing is equal, or the same, that ‘it’ comes back. In other words, the eternal return is predicated only of becoming and the multiple. It is the law of the world without being, without unity, without identity. Far from presupposing the One or the Same, the eternal return constitutes the only unity of the multiple as such, the only identity of what differs: coming back is the only ‘being’ of becoming”.111 As with interpretation, identification – for identity is not seen as existing in itself as a stable and immutable base – thus becomes interminable and infinite: “In its common concept, autobiographical anamnesis presupposes identification. And precisely not identity. No, an identity is never given, received or attained; only the interminably and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures.”112 For all these reasons, concerned with meaning, interpretation, the refusal of essence and above all the question of discontinuity,113 Foucault draws on Nietzsche and his vision of “effective history” (wirkliche Historie) to found his own genealogical method. It was through a study of the different German terms that Nietzsche used to think or to indicate the origin (in particular Ursprung, Entstehung, Herkunft, Anfang) that he sketched out the ambitions of a genealogical history as needing to concentrate on the multiple processes of the emergence of forces in the conflict.114 In his reading of Deleuze’s Différence et répétition, Foucault praises his “patience of a Nietzschean genealogist”.115 Finally, among philosophers, Nietzsche is considered to be the precursor of a new conceptualisation of philosophy, which is not sedentary and fixed but 110

111 112 113 114 115

Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” 369. For a prior usage, see Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 34-35, and “Difference,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 27. Deleuze, “Conclusions on the Will to Power,” 123-124. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 (first French edition 1996), 28, emphasis in original. See Judith Revel, “La Pensée verticale: une éthique de la problématisation,” in Le Courage de la vérité, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: PUF, 2002), 66. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 77-93. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” 355.

300

Chapter 6

on the contrary, nomadic and mobile: “And if Nietzsche does not belong in philosophy, perhaps it is because he is the first to conceive of another kind of discourse, a counter-philosophy, in other words, a discourse that is first and foremost nomadic, whose utterances would be produced not by a rational administrative machine – philosophers would be the bureaucrats of pure reason – but by a mobile war machine.”116 This mobility grants questions of space and of displacement a privilege hitherto little enjoyed. The “other space”, simultaneously included and excluded, becomes thinkable, and Foucault sees the boat as the most eloquent symbol of that which he calls heterotopias: “[…] if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization […] the great instrument of economic development [but] the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.”117 Reading these lines, it is difficult to imagine that he did not have in mind the magnificent §124 of Nietzsche’s Gay Science, called “In the Horizon of the infinite”: “We have left the land and have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, – nay, more, the land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is the ocean; […] But times will come when thou wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful than infinity. […] Alas, if home-sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, – and there is no ‘land’ any longer!”118 This call of the high seas, this “no ‘land’ any longer”, is doubtless the serene acceptance of the absence of a base, of a stable foundation which would possess the force of evidence, but it is also the apology of a displacement understood here not only as a displacement in space but also as a “shake”, as a displacement of meaning. Like the translation, the transferral – and the history of these two words has long been mingled – is in no sense a simple duplication, an identical reproduction, but rather a repeated variation on a single theme. In their translation towards other spaces, as much geographical as academic and disciplinary, the writings, the ideas, and the concepts of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard or Barthes underwent reorien-

116 117 118

Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” 361-362. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (1882). New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924, 167.

The Reversal

301

tations, re-elaborations, evolutions which only have meaning in the context of the particular conditions (social, intellectual, political, academic, historical, and so on) within which these utterances were inscribed. The use outside France of post-structuralist writings is fundamental to the understanding of the transformations that the term diaspora underwent in certain usages of Black diaspora or African diaspora from the end of the 1970s onwards.

Importations of Dispersion and of Diaspora As I have presented them here, the writings of French post-structuralists between the 1960s and the 1980s have traced out a scattered field with a common background. Elsewhere, however, and particularly in the United States, they have been presented as constituting not a complex of diversity but rather a coherent school: French Theory. Just as the Nietzsche drawn upon by Foucault or Deleuze is not the Nietzschean truth but rather reflects a logic of distinction and of positioning within the field of French philosophy in the 1960s,119 so the uses of Foucault, Derrida and others consist not of a simple reprise but reflect precisely a specific appropriation by certain authors who, historians, sociologists or specialists of comparative literature, often belong or present themselves as belonging, to a minority group. This idea of minority should not be understood in a numerical sense for it is rather inscribed within a logic of relations of power, a minority being a group whose voice is not, or is little heard, or, again, invented by those who have the power to do so. American, as well as British and Indian appropriations of post-structuralist writings are a key factor in the emergence or the consolidation of new currents of thought in the human and social sciences – cultural studies, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, postmodern studies, gay and lesbian studies… – most of which play an important role in the diffusion of a new meaning and a new form of usage of diaspora.

119

On this point, as well as, more generally, the question of national traditions, borrowings and the circulation of ideas, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 145 (2002), 3-8. The sociological and historical literature on the circulation of ideas has grown in importance in recent years. In addition to Louis Pinto’s above-cited work on the trade in philosophical ideas, see particularly Anna Boschetti (ed., L’Espace culturel transnational. Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2010, as well as the special issue of L’Homme entitled “Miroirs transatlantiques: circulation des savoirs et malentendus féconds entre les ÉtatsUnis et l’Europe, y compris la France” L’Homme, no. 187-188 (July-December 2008).

302

Chapter 6

As François Cusset has so eloquently demonstrated,120 this appropriation began in the United States following a conference held at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 18-21 October 1966, on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”, attended by Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Todorov, Deleuze,121 René Girard, and others. This was the conference at which Derrida presented his paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, and it was also where he met Paul de Man, called upon to play one of the leading roles in the diffusion of the theory of deconstruction in the United States. However, if this conference marked the birth of post-structuralism for its participants, it did not immediately lead to the importation of French theoretical texts. This occurred in the 1970s, not in philosophy departments, but in the French departments of universities such as Cornell, Wisconsin and Columbia, through journals – Semiotext(e), SubStance, Diacritics – whose objectives were precisely the diffusion of French Theory. If, in the 1980s, the usage of French Theory focused on the question of identity, or rather of identities of the “dominated groups”, through the American appropriation of British cultural studies – hence the proliferation of works on gender,122 gay, lesbian or postcolonial identities123 –, the end of the 1970s was instead a literary theory’s moment, whose two principal figures, Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, came to the discipline from comparative literature – the other discipline within which post-structuralism was spreading in a significant manner. Edward Said, born in Palestine and raised in Egypt, was professor of comparative literature at Princeton. In Orientalism, published in 1978, he set himself the task of demonstrating the extent to which the image of the Orient that had developed in the West since the 18th century had been orientated.124

120 121 122

123

124

Cusset, French Theory, 38-42. He was not present, but sent a paper. See particularly Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. On this point see particularly the French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle’s enquiry into the different continental appropriations of French Theory. Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes. Paris: Stock, 2008. Edward W. Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Since the 1980s this book, which Said himself described as “partisan” and not as a theoretical essay, has occupied a particular place in scholarship concerned with the way in which Western culture has imposed a view of the non-Western world. Many consider it to be the fundamental text of postcolonial studies.

The Reversal

303

Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discourse and on Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, Said affirmed that, far from being simply a body of knowledge about the Orient, Orientalism is also a Western discourse on the radical alterity: “it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world”.125 Fifteen years later, in Culture and Imperialism, Said developed the more general link that existed between the colonial enterprise and the cultural definition of the colonised, articulating, on this particular theme, the theses of Foucault on the relationships between knowledge and power.126 However, the recourse to Foucault, or others, goes hand in hand with the assertion that post-structuralists were never, or nearly never, interested in the colonial question.127 Moreover, the third chapter of the book was wholly consecrated not to the cultural domination of the West of its colonies, but rather to the dynamics of resistance and opposition developed by colonised writers and thinkers, whose influences were both imbued with Western ideas and marked by attempts to free themselves from them.128 Said’s position, both admiring, even grateful, and critical with respect to the post-structuralist authors, parallels that of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Born in Calcutta in 1942, she was a student of Paul de Man when in 1973 she discovered Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which she undertook to translate, prefacing her translation, published in 1976, with a very long introduction.129 Her work on Derrida was followed by critical writings on feminist theory, particularly French,130 but also the reading and translation into English of Draupadi, a short story written by the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi, which she published in Critical Inquiry in 1981.131 A study of this story allowed her to articulate the issue of the oppression of women with that, more specifically, of the Third World woman, whose voice is inaudible not only by virtue of the power exercised upon her by the patriarchy, and masculine power in general, but also by Western women. In the summer of 1983 she gave a paper entitled “Power as Desire” as part of a series of presentations organised at the 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

Ibid., 12. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994 (first edition 1993). Ibid., 26-27. See also Edward W. Said, “Michel Foucault (1927-1984),” in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 196. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 191-281. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 (first French edition 1967). Particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981), 154-184. Mahasveta Devi, “Draupadi,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2 (1981), 381-402.

304

Chapter 6

Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. The text of this paper subsequently evolved. Indeed, in 1984 her interpretations of Marx, Gramsci and Derrida were reorientated after reading a text written by the Indian historian Ranajit Guha on the historiography of colonial India.132 As she herself wrote, reading Guha allowed her to undertake a subaltern “recoding” not only of Gramsci and Marx, but also of her own position in the academic space.133 From that moment on, the connection was progressively established with the Indian group of subaltern studies which had launched a specific Subaltern Studies journal in 1982.134 In 1985, she published an article in their collection on the epistemology of subaltern studies, which she analyses as a deconstruction of historiography and within which she evokes for the first time the politically strategic character of an essentialist foregrounding of collective identity.135 The same year she published a first version of “Power as Desire” under the title “Can the Subaltern Speak?”136 In this paper she particularly highlights the relative blindness of Deleuze or Foucault to the imperialist question.137 Finally, in 1988, she edited, with Ranajit Guha, Selected Subaltern Studies, an anthology based on the first volumes of the collection. Edward Said wrote the preface, emphasising the belonging of subaltern studies to a larger group of narratives qualified as “minority”: “As an alternative discourse then,

132 133

134

135

136

137

Ranajit Guha, “On some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” (1982) in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 37-44. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In Response: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalynd Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 233. For an accessible introduction to the principal subaltern studies texts in the 1980s, see of course Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies; and Mamadou Diouf ed., L’Historiographie indienne en débat: colonialisme, nationalisme et sociétés postcoloniales. ParisAmsterdam: Karthala-Sephis, 1999. For a short history of the movement by one of its founding members, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 467-485. This idea is better known as “strategic essentialism”. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” (1985) in Guha and Spivak Selected Subaltern Studies, 13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice,” Wedge, no. 7-8 (1985), 120-130. This article was subsequently reworked and republished several times. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988), 289-291.

The Reversal

305

the work of the Subaltern scholars can be seen as an analogue of all those recent attempts in the West and throughout the rest of the world to articulate the hidden or suppressed accounts of numerous groups – women, minorities, disadvantaged or dispossessed groups, refugees, exiles, etc.”138 This collection of narratives outlines a transnational constellation of movements, authors and works emerging from the South in its widest sense: So in reading this selection from Subaltern Studies one becomes aware that this group of scholars is a self-conscious part of the vast postcolonial cultural and critical effort that would also include novelists like Salman Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, George Lamming, Sergio Ramirez and Ngugi Wa Thiongo, poets like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Mahmoud Darwich, Aimé Césaire, theoreticians and political philosophers like Fanon, Cabral, Syed Hussein Alatas, C.L.R. James, Ali Shariati, Eqbal Ahmad, Abdullah Laroui, Omar Cabezas, and a whole host of other figures, whose province is still a post-independence world (the South of the new North-South configuration) still dependent, still unfree, still dominated by coercion, the hegemony of dictatorial regimes, derivative and hypocritical nationalisms, insufficiently critical intellectual and ideological systems.139 He then adds that this is not an exclusively non-European phenomenon. Subaltern studies were impregnated by Marxism, often in its Gramscian version, structuralism and post-structuralism, and also drew inspiration from the work of Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm: “it is in fact a hybrid, partaking jointly of European and Western streams and of native Asian, Caribbean, Latin American or African strands.”140 If, as I will show in the next chapter, certain authors in subaltern studies or more widely in postcolonial studies have appropriated the use of diaspora, this was not linked to the question of Black identity. The processes by which the syntagms Black diaspora and/or African diaspora had come to be used, in French or in English, to designate a decentered socio-cultural can indeed be connected with readings of post-structuralist texts, but following a complex logic. These texts do not inspire a decentered thought. Rather, they furnish it with theoretical, conceptual tools, available for the development of an already organised, already articulated thought. It is therefore indeed on every occasion a matter of two conceptual lines which meet by elective affinity, and not sim138 139 140

Edward Said, “Foreword,” in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, vi. Ibid., ix-x. Ibid., x.

306

Chapter 6

ple upsurges through connections. Just as the “classic” sense of Black diaspora, Negro diaspora or African diaspora emerged in parallel, apparently with few points of contact, in French-language and English-language intellectual and militant circles, the reversal of diaspora seems to occur, on different premises, between the works (essays, poems, novels) of the Martiniquais Édouard Glissant since the 1950s and the progressive appropriation of a new sense of diaspora by certain members of the British cultural studies group from the end of the 1970s. Born in Martinique in 1928, Édouard Glissant rapidly became acquainted with questions of identity since, as a student at the Lycée Victor-Schoelcher since 1938, he had had Aimé Césaire as a teacher, as had Frantz Fanon before him.141 Founder and driving force of a cultural group call Franc-jeu, he was close to Césaire until he left for metropolitan France in 1946. He gradually drifted away from négritude to adopt Frantz Fanon’s ideas, whom he met three times before the latter’s death in 1961,142 and with whom he shared the idea that the history of the Caribbean was composed of ruptures and schisms.143 If Glissant’s principal ideas – relation, chaos-monde, tout-monde – were developed in the 1990s, it is too often forgotten that in the older texts, of the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of “relation” had already begun to emerge, envisaged both as a linking and a narrativization, notably at the moment when the explorers – whose poem is Les Indes – return to the shores that they had abandoned. The question “Who returns?” indicates well that no certainty can be read in the return:144 if the place is the same, is the man as well, this man modified by his exposure to the world, this man who “runs to meet the world”?145 For Glissant the Caribbean became the very model of the relation141

142

143 144 145

On Édouard Glissant, see J. Michael Dash, Édouard Glissant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Celia M. Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999; as well as Denis-Constant Martin, “Au-delà de la post-colonie, le Tout-Monde?” in La Situation postcoloniale, ed. Marie-Claude Smouts (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2007), 135-169. If our points of departure are different, this latter article is nevertheless, in many (not all) respects, very close to my position here. Carine Mardorossian, “From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy,” Small Axe, vol. 13, no. 30 (October 2009), 15 note 15. These meetings took place in 1946, in 1956 during the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and in Rome in 1961. Ibid., 18-20. See also Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 92-98, on alienation in the French Caribbean. Édouard Glissant, Les Indes. Paris: Seuil, 1965, 123. Les Indes is a poem dating from 1955. Édouard Glissant, Poétique, vol. i Soleil de la conscience. Paris: Seuil, 1956, 41, quoted in Martin, “Au-delà de la postcolonie,” 145.

The Reversal

307

ship, of the “relationship re-established between the islands”, thus constructing an archipelago, but also the opening to Africa and South America, as an “organic link, vibrant, free, between worlds hitherto ignorant of one another”.146 He refused to read the quest for an origin or a lost identity in the Caribbean experience. On the contrary, he saw the relationship with the world, the access to the totality of the world by the “planetarisation” of thought:147 “So essence is to birth what relation is to becoming. We were not born, we were deported, from East to West. A mariner’s knife sliced the umbilical cord. The chains of slavery staunched the flow of blood. There is no essence there, only perdition. In the relationship with the new land, in the relationship of this land to the sea and its surroundings, where perdition ends, becoming nevertheless inspects itself.”148 There is no trace of diaspora in any of these writings. It only appears for the first time in 1981 in Le Discours antillais, a 500-page collection of revised versions of texts written since the early 1960s.149 At first glance, it might seem that Glissant’s position is that the notion of diaspora is of little pertinence for the study of Africans transported outside Africa. Establishing the distinction between the displacement – “by exile or dispersion” – and the transfer – the trade – of a people, he affirms that, in the first case, the people “continue to survive elsewhere” while in the second, they “change into something different, into a new set of possibilities.”150 In the one case Being is maintained, in the other only traces of Being remain: “This is what distinguishes besides the persecution of one and the enslavement of the other, the Jewish Diaspora from the African slave trade.”151 The impulse and the possibility of return would only have meaning for a people who has maintained itself. For the transferred, the “impulse will decline” and will exorcise itself, as in the Caribbean, by the “practise of diversion.”152 Drawing on these pages, Christine Chivallon considered that Glissant thereby “provided […] an argument that

146 147 148 149

150 151 152

Édouard Glissant, “Culture et colonisation: l’équilibre antillais,” Esprit (April 1962), 594. Édouard Glissant, L’Intention poétique. Paris: Gallimard, 1969, 27. Ibid., 197. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989 (first French edition 1981). As the English translation does not include all the chapters to be found in the French edition, quotations from these non-included chapters have been translated by Iain Walker with the indication of the page in the French edition. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 18. Ibid.

308

Chapter 6

denied the access to the concept of ‘diaspora” for Black descendants of the slave trade.”153 However, an examination of Glissant’s uses of diaspora reveals a more nuanced position. In Caribbean Discourse, he uses this term five times, qualified by three different adjectives: “Negro”, “Black” and “Caribbean”154. These uses would appear to be evidence of his acceptance rather than his rejection of diaspora to describe populations descended from Africans, in the New World as in the Caribbean. Indeed, if he observes the specificity of the arrival of slaves in the French Caribbean where, “more than anywhere else in the black diaspora,”155 the impossibility of controlling the real favourised a tendency towards a “denigration of original values”, alienation and anomie – all properties that, for Chivallon, characterise the “non-diaspora”156 –, Glissant did not hesitate to refer to the “Caribbean diaspora”.157 Moreover, “Negro diaspora”, like “Black diaspora” do not appear to designate here the process of dispersion of Africans described as “transported”, “deported” or “transferred”, nor even a community, but rather a specific spatial collectivity.158 If this latter is characterised by a certain unity of origin – Africa is thus described as being a “matrix” –, it is particularly distinguished by the variety of experiences, according to the place of arrival and the diversity of reworkings of the origin, whether they take the form of a belief in a return to Africa, and thus, in a certain fashion, of the disappearance of the diaspora, or that, quite different, of a positive reappraisal of Black identity in response to the challenges of discrimination and racism, thereby furthering the existence of a community: “The thrust of negritude among Caribbean intellectuals was a response perhaps to the need, by relating to a common origin, to rediscover unity (equilibrium) beyond dispersion.”159 The “Table of the Diaspora” published as an annex to Caribbean Discourse (see Figure 2 infra p. 309) clearly establishes the difference between these two perspectives, but it inserts them into a single, unique ensemble.

153 154

155 156 157 158 159

Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 121. Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Folio-Essais”, 2002 (first edition 1981), 43, 504, 567 – twice – and 807. If Christine Chivallon notes that Glissant uses diaspora for the Black populations of the New World, she only refers to “Negro diaspora.” Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 121. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 16. Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 121-123. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 173. “This [the complete possession of a slave by the master] is consistently so throughout the entire Black diaspora.” Glissant, Le Discours antillais, 504. The emphasis is mine. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 5.

160

The Table of the Diaspora (Edouard Glissant).160

Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 258-259.

Figure 2

The Reversal 309

310

Chapter 6

This graphical analysis is representative of a perspective within which nothing is definitively fixed, neither the localisations, nor the geographies, nor the influences, nor even the labels. Antillanité coexists with négritude, the return to Africa, the renaissance in Harlem, in a set of relationships permitting multiple combinations in the manner of the deleuzo-guattarian rhizome, one of whose principles is precisely connectivity, a network that one travels and that one can only experience or describe through travelling it. More generally, Glissant’s use of diaspora is always linked to movement, for the word is almost systematically opposed to the idea of the root, the centre, fixity. Thus, in his 1996 text on Faulkner, the South is defined as “a changeover that leads from the stubborn single root to the spreading of the diaspora.”161 The “diaspora” is not a localisation in itself, it is “countless, unspeakable places,” “the roads of the Black diaspora” weaving its way in the world in a manner identical to the “provocative stance of the Beat generation poets in the United States, who constructed […] a nexus of place in this country. Wandering as the site of assembly.”162 The recourse to the properties of the rhizome proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in 1976 is crucial here and constantly permeates Glissant’s writings from the early 1980s onwards. Following Caribbean Discours, he refers to “rhizomatic thought” while nevertheless taking care to distinguish his use of the term, specifying that for him, the rhizome is not nomadic.163 The rhizome is first and foremost the inverse of the unique root, but it remains a root for all that, the “rhizome-thought” being “the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with another.”164 Identity thus becomes a “root moving towards other roots” without the meeting of the other, of others, representing a dilution or a risk of loss of identity.165 Through this “rhizome identity” the nation acquires a meaning more cultural than military, state, political or economic.166 If Deleuze and Guattari did not establish a link between rhizome and diaspora, this is not true of Glissant. Certain formulations reveal themselves to

161 162 163 164 165 166

Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 (first French edition 1996), 191. Ibid., 231. Glissant, Le Discours antillais, 338-339. Glissant recalls that in 1969, in L’Intention poétique, he opposed the tree as trunk and the spread of its foliage. Ibid., 339, note 1. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 (first French edition 1990), 11. Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 19 Ibid., 45 and 97.

The Reversal

311

be ambiguous and suggest that the “diaspora” is little more than the collectivity of Africans outside Africa, such as when Glissant writes that “the peoples of Black Africa have long been completely cut off from their diaspora in the Americas […],”167 but this is not the sense of his use of the term; indeed, it is rather the opposite. Diaspora almost always refers to the opposite of the source: Senghor appears as “the man of the African source” and Césaire as that “of the diaspora”.168 The word designates a form of existence that does not stem from the being, but from being,169 always in movement, and whose fixity must be sought for precisely in mobility, and not in immutability, like these “language diasporas that would change so rapidly within themselves and with such feedback, so many turnarounds of norms (deviations back and forth) that their fixity would lie in that change.”170 Fixity in movement leads us back to the image of the oxymoron, of the union of opposites as the antidote to binary thought: “continental thought […] reveals in diasporas the absolute splendours of the One”, while “archipelagic thought” is that “where the infinite variation of Diversity is concentrated”.171 The oxymorons favoured by Glissant rest on the notion of the archipelago, as unity of diversity, or even “the dispersion of non-Being, which gathers the being of the world”,172 wandering being for Glissant “the very thing that permits us to fix ourselves”.173 As we see, Glissant does not make immobility and wandering disappear, nor centre and periphery. He calls them together to demonstrate their possible abolition by

167

168 169

170 171 172 173

Édouard Glissant, Mémoire des esclavages. La Fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. Paris: Gallimard-La Documentation française, 2007, 29. A few lines further on, he refers to “this unhappy diaspora” (p. 30). This text is the one in which diaspora generally appears more as a geographical concept. See also p. 94 and p. 173. Ibid., 190. On the question of being in Glissant’s work, see Martin, “Au-delà de la postcolonie,” 152-154. This distinction underpins Glissant’s opposition to Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant’s idea of créolité, in favour of créolisation. Despite this, Glissant also reaffirms the utility that a creole moment could represent, as a form of estimation of identity analogous to négritude: “It is a manner of regression, from the perspective of process, but which may be necessary to defend the creole present. Just as négritude was vitally important to the defence of African values and the Black diaspora.” Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 125. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 98. Édouard Glissant, La Cohée du lamentin (Poétique v). Paris: Gallimard, 2005, 231, emphasis in the original. Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (Poétique iv). Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 327. Ibid., 63.

312

Chapter 6

the oxymoron, each centre being also a periphery, and each periphery being a centre. If certain “trajectories”, already traced, “link the places of the world into a whole made up of peripheries, which are listed in function of a Center,”174 from the centre towards the peripheries, as proposed by Victor Segalen, André Malraux, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Paul Claudel or Michel Leiris, or peripheries towards the centre, as in the writings of Jules Supervielle or SaintJohn Perse, it is “from the periphery to the periphery” that the word of the poet leads, that of Kateb Yacine or Cheikh Anta Diop. This word “reproduces the track of circular nomadism; that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery. All of this germinated in the works of writers such as Segalen.”175 The archipelago represents abolition, the becoming-centre of the periphery and the becomingperiphery of the centre as “the motherland of the Caribbean countries, Haïti […] in its turn spread itself through the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa, remaking diaspora.”176 The archipelago is indeed a source, but not a unique source, it is “diffracted, and like those practitioners of chaos theory, we will repeatedly insist that it is fractal […].”177 The reference to fractals, already dear to Jean-François Lyotard, is also present in the insistence on the necessity of taking into consideration the “fractal histories” or the “transversal histories”, this latter formulation recalling rather Félix Guattari.178 Unruliness thus become the rule, in the image of the baroque – in opposition to classicism – that Glissant defined as “a ‘natural’ expression of whatever scatters and comes together”179 all the cultural creations moving towards the transgression of classicism, practising discontinuity, the fragment, the tearing apart, are inscribed within the baroque and within the opening to the world, as in the works of William Faulkner, Bob Marley, Benoît Mandelbrot, the paintings of Vilfredo Lam or Roberto Matta, or again the Cantos of Ezra Pound.180 This idea of deconstruction, of the archipelago, of the baroque and of the diaspora, helps us to explain why we find in Glissant both an opposition to philosophies or ideologies of being and their integration in the constellation

174 175 176 177 178 179 180

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 28. Ibid., 29. Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 139. Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 2009, 47. Glissant, Mémoires des esclavages, 60. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 91. Ibid., 93. See also Lise Gauvin, “L’Imaginaire des langues: entretien avec Édouard Glissant,” Études françaises, vol. 28, no. 2-3 (1992), 13.

The Reversal

313

of cultural productions which makes “its dispersion shine forth” and manifests the diversity of modes of identification. Philosophie de la relation is certainly the work in which we find the clearest expression of Glissant’s desire to map – here I deliberately use Deleuze and Guattari’s idea – the space of cultural expressions, in the widest sense of the term, of Black identity in its diversity, bringing together in a single sentence Césaire, Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Black Power and Martin Luther King.181 In 1989, an abridged version of Caribbean Discours, translated by J. M. Dash, appeared in the United States, paving the way for a wider diffusion of Glissant’s ideas. He was gradually incorporated into the work of a group of British sociologists belonging, or having belonged to the University of Birmingham’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Once again, this integration did not occur ex nihilo. It was the result of a common perception of the question of identity, a theme that emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1970s within the field of an older tradition of studies of culture, and in particular popular culture. It is as the heart of writings of these British authors that an original conception of diaspora would emerge, close to Glissant’s usage, and sometimes explicitly drawing upon his work. Once again, the writings of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Derrida, with their insistence on the relativisation of the centre, on the dissemination of meaning, on the historicisation of categories and of discourse, on the decline of “grand narratives”, on the opposition between root and rhizome, offered theoretical support to members of the CCCS in Birmingham. However, we cannot attribute the paternity of the spark that would lead towards a new conception of identity and diaspora to readings of Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze. On the one hand, at the beginning of the 1980s, a familiarity with authors such as Said or Foucault was far from widespread within the CCCS. Gilroy related how, during the research for and writing of The Empire Strikes Back, which deals with the postcolonial society as well as racism and immigrant communities,182 CCCS students had not yet read Said’s Orientalism and their familiarity with Foucault, who had been largely translated, was “very uneven”.183 On the other hand, given that the most important authors 181 182

183

Glissant, Philosophie de la relation, 124. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1982. The book contains contributions by John Solomos, Paul Gilroy, Errol Lawrence, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, Pratibha Parmar and Hazel V. Carby. It emerged from collective research that had been undertaken by the Race and Politics group within the CCCS since 1978. Jim Cohen and Jade Lindgaard, “De l’Atlantique noir à la mélancolie postcoloniale. Entretien avec Paul Gilroy,” Mouvements, no. 51 (September-October 2007), 91-92.

314

Chapter 6

in the context of the evolution of diaspora did not read French, they were often obliged to wait for an English translation, or for the publication of a work on post-structuralism. The Postmodern Condition was only translated in 1984, A Thousand Plateaus in 1988. As for Stuart Hall, who claimed to use Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan as “tools”,184 for a long time he only cited Derrida indirectly through Christopher Norris’s work,185 even though he considered that Derrida’s concepts, and particularly that of différance, would allow for a thinking of identity as positional in character, and not essential.186 Several elements played in favour of a “field” favourable to the reception of post-structuralism.187 First, when it was established in 1964, the CCCS drew on the purely British heritage of English studies which, under the guidance of Frank Raymond Leavis during the first half of the 20th century, had foregrounded textual and literary criticism. Moreover, the four principal founders of the Centre – Raymond Williams, Edward P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall – were all specialists in the relationships between culture and the popular classes.188 Finally, all four were in some sense marginal, either through their working class origins (Williams, Hoggart and Hall) or through a colonial origin (Hall was born in Jamaica), and they were notable for having taught or carried out research in the peripheral institutions of the British academic world. If the first fifteen years of the functioning of the Centre were particularly marked by the study of sociability and popular culture, the themes diversified at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s in two different main directions: media studies on the one hand, and the study of identities on the other. It was this second theme that is of interest in the evolution of usage of diaspora. If work on identity and ethnicity initiated by British cultural studies 184 185 186

187 188

Mark Alizart, “Entretien avec Stuart Hall” (2005), in Stuart Hall, ed. Mark Alizart, Stuart Hall, Eric Macé, and Eric Maigret (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2007), 67. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1982; as well as, by the same author, Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 5; as well as Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal “Culture and Power: Interview with Stuart Hall,” Radical Philosophy, no. 86 (November-December 1997), 33. On the birth and evolution of the CCCS, see Armand Mattelart and Erik Neveu, Introduction aux Cultural Studies. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the British Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950. London-New York: Columbia University Press, 1958; and Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson Educational, 1964.

The Reversal

315

from the early 1980s was initially inscribed within a logic of the study of cultures and of racism in the United Kingdom, it later evolved, from the second half of the 1980s, towards the constitution of an alternative vision of forms of identity, and notably of Black identity.

The Decentered Vision of Diaspora In the 1960s the first occurrences of diaspora had highlighted both the resemblance between the causes of the forced migration of the Jews and that of the Blacks, that is, in Shepperson’s 1966 terms, “slavery and imperialism”, and the necessity of reinscribing Africa and the Black race in the history of the world through the question of the symbolic link to Africa – and this in a manner globally coherent with the notion of “double consciousness” that we find in Du Bois. Ulterior uses had taken up positions on one side or the other of this initial usage. Located at one end of the spectrum were the Afrocentrist visions, within which African diaspora was related to a centre, Africa as such, either as cradle or horizon of dispersed Africans. At the other end were the defenders of diaspora, Black or African, considered as a deterritorialised cultural ensemble whose identity was, simultaneously, stable and constantly changing. The term diaspora in general and the expressions Black diaspora and African diaspora in particular constituted then a crucial terrain in the competition for the definition of the political stakes in the cause. Thus, according to a paradox which is only illusory, they appear that much more efficient both in the light of the idea it is useless to define that of which one speaks, and that questions of definition are precisely and carefully conjured away, or limited to the refined debates of conferences. Still, everything happens as if the logic of inversion could only assume an academic form by associating a conceptual base and a basis of collective experiences. The former was provided by the theoretical framework of French poststructuralism. The second was linked to the migratory movement from the Caribbean to England.189 Most authors within British cultural studies working on Black culture, even other British specialists of the Black question such as 189

This migration largely took place between 1948 and 1962, for the 1948 British Nationality Act accorded all British colonial citizens the right of residence in the United Kingdom. This possibility ended with the passage of new legislation in 1962. See Randall Hansen, “Le Droit de l’immigration et de la nationalité au Royaume-Uni: des sujets aux citoyens,” in Nationalité et citoyenneté en Europe, ed. Patrick Weil and Randall Hansen (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 78-79. Between 1948 and 1962, 260 000 individuals of Caribbean origin

316

Chapter 6

Orlando Patterson,190 had had direct experience of it (Patterson, Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer were born in Jamaica) or were a product of it (Paul Gilroy was born of a British father and a British Guianan mother), and this experience stood as a discovery of their own ethnicity and of the complexity that the idea of origin – and which origin? Africa? The Caribbean? – could signify. Their interests in the Caribbean, for some of them even their Jamaican origins, also rendered them sensitive to the analogy between Jews and Blacks,191 as well as to the different perspectives on Black identity offered by the Rastafari movement, which appeared in many respects to be a movement both centered – on Africa – and decentered, for it did not rest, strictly speaking, on a communitarian ideology.192 But it was in the work of two sociologists, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, that this new conceptualisation of diaspora appeared most explicitly. Stuart Hall, who had left his native Jamaica for England in 1951, was the one who was the most explicit in exploring this combination in his texts and conversations. He defined himself as a “diasporic intellectual”, diaspora functioning for him equally well both as a category of experience and as a particular academic category, within which the question of “return” is raised in a specific manner, as demonstrated by this lengthy citation from an interview with the cultural studies specialist Kuan-Hsing Chen:

190

191

192

settled in the UK, of whom 60% were Jamaican. See particularly Christine Chivallon, “Présence antillaise au Royaume-Uni,” Hommes et migrations, no. 1237 (May-June 2002), 66. In the mid-1960s, Patterson proposed, without using diaspora, a transnational panorama of literary and poetic reflexions upon Black identity. Orlando Patterson, “Twilight of a Dark Myth,” The Times Literary Supplement, 16 September 1965, 805-806. He extended the scope a few years later, when he was simultaneously professor at Harvard and adviser to the Jamaican prime minister: Orlando Patterson, “Rethinking Black History,” Africa Report, vol. 17, no. 9 (November-December 1972), 29-31. Significantly, the title of his article was preceded by a headline reading “The Diaspora”. “Actually, my interest in Jewish history and culture began before going to the LSE due to my study of, and deep sympathy for, the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica.” Email from Orlando Patterson to the author, 20 December 2004. Patterson adds: “I strongly suspect that the main influence came simply from my London School of Economics environment and my early interest in comparing the dispersal of blacks with that of the Jews. Many of my professors and friends at LSE were Jewish.” On this point, see particularly Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995, as well as Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 171-185. However, the question of a return of Rastafaris to Africa indeed exists, particularly post-1950 when Haile Selassie made a grant of land to Rastafaris who wished to settle in Ethiopia. The reference work is clearly that of Bonacci, Exodus!.

The Reversal

317

This Jamaica [of the 1970s] was not where I had grown up. For one thing, it had become, culturally, a black society, a post- slave, postcolonial society, whereas I had lived there at the end of the colonial era. So I could negotiate it as a ‘familiar stranger’. Paradoxically, I had exactly the same relationship to England. Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I’m not and never will be ‘English’. I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that’s exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed ‘arrival’. […] Now that gap cannot be filled. You can’t ‘go home’ again.193 This “diasporic experience” stands in an elective affinity with Stuart Hall’s academic position as much as with his research themes. Teaching in the margins of British higher education, first at the University of Birmingham, then, from 1979, at the Open University, he focused his work on peripheries, first on popular culture, then on the identity of those who came from the margins, and particularly from the margins of the empire.194 As he himself often explained, taking literally, but to the best of my knowledge without explicitly citing it, Foucault’s statement on the necessity of being and of thinking at borders, it was by an insistence on the margins, on decentering, that the margins became central, not simply in contemporary experience, but also in English-language academia: “Thinking about my own sense of identity, I realise that it has always depended on the fact of being a migrant, on the difference from the rest of you. So one of the fascinating things about this discussion is to find myself centered at last. Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centered. What I’ve though of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is ‘coming home’ with a vengeance!”195 Indeed, during the last fifty years a quite singular phenomenon has occurred. Inversing the movement described by Benedict Anderson, in which 193

194 195

Stuart Hall, “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual,” (interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen), in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London-New York: Routledge, 1996, 490. This homology is noted in Mattelart and Neveu, Introduction aux Cultural Studies, 26-27. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity, The Real Me, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987), 44-46, reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 114.

318

Chapter 6

expatriation and decentering help to construct the sentiment of the homeland and of nationalism,196 here it is the migration of marginals towards the centre which helps in the relativisation of this latter and the construction of relationships with the origin articulated about the idea of cultural hybridity and of deterritorialisation, and not about the classical definitions of territory and of the nation. This concept lies at the heart not only of intellectual movements such as cultural studies, but also postcolonial studies and subaltern studies. The “Black diaspora” thereby becomes the prototype of the “decentred identity” in opposition to the “Jewish diaspora”, considered to be founded on continuity and the quest for a state. Stuart Hall began to develop this perspective in 1975 in a paper given to Unesco entitled “Africa is alive and well and lives in the diaspora”. The status of this document is quite mysterious and, in the end, reasonably coherent with the relationship with the origin as it appears in Hall’s writings. This text, often judged fundamental – notably by Paul Gilroy, who saw it as the first trace of a sociological concept of the “African diaspora”197 –, listed in all the bibliographies of Stuart Hall as a written text, is quite impossible to find,198 as if the founding text should not exist as a text, and the origin – if this be the origin of the concept of the non-original character of diaspora – should disappear without trace. Subsequently, diaspora seems to disappear completely from Hall’s work, until 1987-1988, at which time other CCCS members, such as Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer,199 started to accord it some importance,200 even though Hall himself had left the Centre in 1979. Perhaps we should see in this absence 196 197 198

199

200

Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons. London: Verso, 1998, 58-74. Cohen and Lindgaard, “De l’Atlantique noir à la mélancolie postcoloniale,” 92. Kuan-Hsing Chen, who is a world expert on Stuart Hall, has never seen it and thinks it was given as a lecture and never published (email to the author, 19 Jan 2006). Even Stuart Hall himself recalls no written text (email to the author, 20 January 2006). The archivists at Unesco to whom I have spoken have no knowledge of it either. Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain,” in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York-London: Routledge, 1994, 53-66. The article was originally published under this title in Black Frames: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham and et Claire Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1988), 50-61. Nevertheless, the idea of a particular Black diaspora remained alive within the CCCS, particularly in Dick Hebdige’s work on sub-cultures. See Dick Hebdige, “Reggae, Rastas & Rudies,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Hutchinson, 1976), particularly p. 151.

The Reversal

319

echoes of the Jewish polarisation of the term, as Hall himself explains: “I’ve been interested in what turns out to be the thematic of the diaspora for a long time, without necessarily calling it that. For a long time, I wouldn’t use the term diaspora, because it was mainly used in relation to Israel. That was the dominant political usage.”201. Still, not without making it clear that he is drawing upon recent uses of the term by Mercer and Gilroy,202 Hall starts to use diaspora in a new sense in 1987, in the context of reflexions on the theme of identity: “So the notion that identity is a simple – if I can use the metaphor – black or white question, has never been the experience of black people, at least in the diaspora. These are “imaginary communities” – and not a bit the less real because they are also symbolic.”203 It is in opposition to discourses of nationalism or of national identity that the appeal to Benedict Anderson and the imagined character – even if Hall here uses “imaginary” – of the nation204 allows him to sketch out the contours of a “new ethnicity”: “But in our times, as an imaginary community, it is also beginning to carry some other meanings, and to define a new space for identity”.205 These “new ethnicities” lie at the heart of an article that Hall wrote the following year on the “diaspora experience”, while considering that the expression “cultural diaspora-ization” was an “ugly term”.206 Furthermore, no link is made with Jewish history. The fundamental text in this respect, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, dates from 1989. The influence of Benedict Anderson, already evident in his article “Minimal Selves”, is somewhat more developed here, since it now refers explicitly to Africa in the form of an “African presence”, neither original nor geographic: 201 202

203 204

205 206

Hall, “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual,” 492-493. The references to Mercer’s article “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination” and Gilroy’s book, There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, occur repeatedly in Hall’s articles specifically on the diaspora. Hall, “Minimal Selves,” 116. On the use of Benedict Anderson by authors in postcolonial studies, see Christine Chivallon, “Retour sur la ‘communauté imaginée’ d’Anderson: essai de clarification théorique d’une notion restée floue,” Raisons politiques, no. 27 (2007), 131-172. I share Christine Chivallon’s perspectives on the way in which “post-modern thought” has used the idea of the “imagined community” to impose a hybrid and decentred version of identity. On the other hand, I am not convinced – we would need to look more closely – that the “intermediaries” were really Arjun Appadurai and Homi Bhabha, because “Minimal Selves” predates their use of the term. Hall, “Minimal Selves,” 118-119. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Black Film, British Cinema, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), 27-31, reprinted in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 447.

320

Chapter 6

“Our belongingness to it constitutes what Benedict Anderson calls ‘an imagined community’. To this ‘Africa’, which is a necessary part of the Caribbean imaginary, we can’t literally go home again.”207 Above all, through his article Hall expresses the opposition between two ways of thinking cultural identity, corresponding to two forms of ethnicity and two forms of diaspora. The first conceives of cultural identity as a sort of “collective me” organised about stable points of reference, continuous and immutable. Africa then occupies a centre, whether this be within the concept of négritude or within that of Afrocentrism. Pure and essentialised ethnicity informs the image of a diaspora orientated towards the return. The second conceptualisation envisages cultural identity as being founded upon similitudes but also on differences, for it is constructed by the narrative without postulating the existence of an essence or a fixed origin. Ethnicity is then hybrid, ceaselessly different and deferred, in Derrida’s sense of différance,208 and the diaspora which corresponds to this viewpoint no longer needs a return to an original land to constitute a “home”.209 As we can see, the history of representations of Africa and of Black identity includes these two conceptualisations, centred and decentered alike. But for all that, in a paragraph resuming the principal ideas of the article, Hall opposes the Black diaspora, that he calls “Afro-caribbean”, to the Jewish diaspora, as hybrid ethnicity is opposed to ethnicity founded upon the essence and purity: The ‘New World’ presence – America, Terra Incognita – is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean people already people of a diaspora. I use this term here metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperialising, the hegemonising, form of ‘ethnicity’. We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of this backward-looking conception of diaspora – and the complicity of the West with it.210 207

208 209 210

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Framework, no. 36 (1989), 68-81, reprinted in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 232. The most widely cited version is that reproduced in Rutherford’s edited volume. I quote the latter. Ibid., 233. Hall explicitly states that “the concept of diaspora is linked to the Derridean concept of dissemination”. Osborne and Segal, “Culture and Power,” 34. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 235.

The Reversal

321

If the reference to the Jewish people is here implicit – the word “Jew” does not even appear – it is quite explicit in a later text where Hall continues to oppose Jewish diaspora and Black diaspora, but in a more complex fashion. He notes that the “Caribbean people” have drawn on Jewish history, and on this interpretation of the concept of diaspora that “is modeled on the modern history of the Jewish people (from whom the term ‘diaspora’ was first derived), whose fate in the Holocaust – one of the few world-historical events comparable in barbarity to that of modern slavery – is well known.”211 Without falling into a logic of substitution that might consist of placing the Black holocaust ahead the Jewish holocaust, Hall here clearly indicates the existence of a logic of analogy with Jewish history in the constitution of the idea of a Black diaspora. However, the Jewish concept is “a closed conception of ‘tribe’, diaspora, and homeland. To have a culture identity in this sense is to be primordially in touch with an unchanging essential core, which is timeless, binding future and present to past in an unbroken line.”212 He adds: ‘It is a version of this conception of the Jewish diaspora, and its prophesied ‘return’ to Israel, that is the source of Israel quarrel with its middle Eastern neighbours, for which the Palestinian people have paid so dearly, and paradoxically, by expulsion from what is also, after all, their homeland.”213 In contrast, the “modern diaspora” is founded upon impurity, hybridity, on permanent reappropriation, and the example of the Caribbean is the very prototype: “The relationship between Caribbean cultures and their diasporas cannot therefore be adequately conceptualized in terms of origin to copy, primary source to pale reflection. It has to be understood as one diaspora to another”.214 The Black diaspora(s), considered as a global space of representations, sometimes concurrent, of Black identity, are indeed the Jewish anti-diaspora, given that, for Hall, there exists a specifically Jewish signification to diaspora: “So I certainly don’t mean diaspora in the Jewish sense – some umbilical connection to the holy land –, quite definitely! Quite the opposite.”215 The two perspectives upon diaspora, Jewish and Black, thus give body to a whole corpus of opposed couplets: closed-open, centred-decentered, homogeneous-heterogeneous, surviving-living. This latter point may lead us to think that, certain visions of the Black experience being projected into the existence of a Black essence or of a possible 211 212 213 214 215

Stuart Hall,“Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe, no. 6 (September 1999), 4. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 9. Osborne and Segal, “Culture and Power,” 34.

322

Chapter 6

return to African soil, they do not belong to the decentered vision of the “Black diaspora”, or even that Hall’s thought suffered from the same binary weakness for which he criticises the defenders of an essentialist ethnicity. In Hall’s thinking this is not so, both because his concept of identity stands not only in opposition to the essentialists but also to those who consider that identity does not exist at all,216 but also because the model that he develops of Black cultural identity allows him to integrate within the analysis a larger, even contradictory, corpus of readings of Africa and the relationship with Africa. Thus, even certain essentialist readings of Africa can find a place in the study of Black identity, in a manner analogous to what Glissant writes: But this is not primarily because we are connected to our African past and heritage by an unbreakable chain across which some singular African culture has flowed unchanged down the generations, but because how we have gone producing ‘Africa’ again, within the Caribbean narrative. At every juncture – think of Garveyism, Hibbert, Rastafarianism, the new urban popular culture – it has been a matter of interpreting ‘Africa’, rereading ‘Africa’, of what ‘Africa’ could mean to us now, after diaspora.217 In many respects, Paul Gilroy’s texts reflect the influence of Stuart Hall, whom he joined at CCCS in 1978 just before Hall left Birmingham.218 Like the latter, Gilroy foregrounded the question of cultural identity, as well as the opposition between a closed and an open conceptualisation of diaspora, although his conceptualisation proves to be even more complex than Stuart Hall’s. As Paul Gilroy explained to me, for him this theme required a political and a cultural dimension before taking on an academic meaning: I first encountered the concept of “diaspora” in a scholarly setting during the late 1970s. I started to use it straight away. It fitted in very closely 216

217

218

Hall draws particularly on Gilroy’s work to refuse the alternative “Black” or “British” and to advance “the potentiality or the possibility of an ‘and’.” Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” (1992) in Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues, 475. Hall, “Thinking the Diaspora,” 13. Joseph Hibbert was one of the founders of the Rastafari movement in the early 1930s. If Garveyism, itself very centered, was integrated into the space of rereadings and re-elaborations of Africa, this is not true of Afrocentrism. However, the idea itself, that an “after the diaspora” could exist suggests that a question of origin still exists, even if in a residual state. Gilroy defended his thesis at CCCS in 1986. Paul Gilroy, Racism, Class, and the Contemporary Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and ‘Nation’. Birmingham: Contemporary Centre of Cultural Studies, Birmingham, 1986.

The Reversal

323

to the thinking of the Rastafari movement which I had been involved with from about 1972-3. It seemed to resonate strongly with the Ethiopianist poetcs that they were using. I had heard Bobby Hill speak about black bibles during late 1982 when I also first heard Shepperson give a lecture which sent me off to read his book on Chilembwe. I had also been reading Roger Bastide and his thinking fed my initial interest in the cultural shifts involved in slave societies and in the creole dynamics of their successor regimes. The concept of diaspora was for me a political and cultural idea before it became a scholarly matter.219 Despite this assertion, I found no uses of diaspora by Paul Gilroy before 1986-1987. It seems that the first text in which Gilroy evokes the Black diaspora was in fact the book based on his thesis, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, devoted to the exploration of the theme of race and nation in Great Britain.220 Without a single mention of the “Jewish diaspora”, he uses diaspora as “an alternative to the different varieties of absolutism which would confine culture in ‘racial’, ethnic or national essences.”221 Diaspora thus allows him to struggle against what he called “ethnic absolutism”. Fairly rapidly, even though Hall scarcely used it, Gilroy proposed transforming the sense of the term, allowing it to incarnate a new way of thinking identity, as he expressed it in several papers at the end of the 1980s: The value of the term diaspora increases as its essentially symbolic character is understood. It points emphatically to the fact that there can be no pure, uncontaminated or essential blackness anchored in an unsullied originary moment. It suggests that a myth of shared origins is not a talisman which can suspend political antagonisms or a deity invoked to cement a pastoral view of black life that can answer the multiple pathologies of contemporary racism.222

219

220

221 222

Email from Paul Gilroy to the author, 27 November 2004. Thomas Price and George Shepperson, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958. Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 (first edition 1987). Contrary to Paul Gilroy’s recollections on this point, diaspora is quite absent from The Empire Strikes Back. Ibid., 155. Paul Gilroy, “Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective: An Agenda of Difficulties for the Black Arts Movement in Britain,” Third Text, no. 5 (Winter 1988-1989), 35. This article was republished in Gilroy, Small Acts, 97-114. It was originally a paper presented at a conference on “Critical Difference: Race, Ethnicity and Culture”, held at Southampton in October 1988.

324

Chapter 6

What is fundamental in Gilroy’s writings is the usefulness of the concept thus defined: “The concept of diaspora has become a useful one because it allows us to look simultaneously at the differences and the continuities in black experience.”223 Gilroy’s work inspired early versions of the notion of the “Black Atlantic”, in the form of the “diaspora of the Black Atlantic”, which began to appear in the early 1990s.224 Without the slightest reference to post-structuralism or to its principal authors, the idea of a transition from a binary model articulated about the alternative “either … or” to one permitting the “and … and” is not only present but becomes essential for thinking the complexity of the processes of identification: “I think we need a new line of thought that goes beyond either/or ism into a different conceptual logic of supplementarity. In its simplest form, this might turn on the alternative couplet both/and. I make no apology for the fact that this shift in my own thinking arises from a desire to be recognized as being both black and English in addition to everything else that I am.”225 A group of authors and a body of thought gradually emerged, and in parallel Gilroy developed his study of modes of identification in relation to Africa. In 1991, in the context of musical production and performance, long one of his favourite themes, he raised the question of how to think simultaneously the link that artistic products or aesthetic codes might maintain with places geographically distant, the changes that they might have undergone with the passage of time, and their “displacement, relocation, or dissemination through wider networks of communication and cultural exchange”.226 His use of diaspora articulates here with Saint Clair Drake and his Black Folks Here and There, but also with Édouard Glissant, whose Caribbean Discourse had been translated into English in 1989,227 or, again, with Edward Said, whose article “Traveling theory” (1983) dealt with the consequences of the appropriation of Lukács’ theory of reification, to evoke the “unforeseen detours and circuits that mark the new journeys and new arrival”.228 The use of the expression “fractal trajec223

224 225 226

227 228

Paul Gilroy, “The Peculiarities of the Black English,” in Gilroy, Small Acts, 54. This was originally a paper at a conference on “Race, Cultural Production and Everyday Life”, held in Copenhagen, in May 1989. Paul Gilroy, “Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism,” History Workshop Journal, vol. 30, no. 1 (1990), reprinted in Gilroy, Small Acts, 64. I quote the latter. Ibid., 68. Paul Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same,” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 1991), 111. The text of this article was largely integrated into The Black Atlantic. Ibid., 112 and 113. Edward Said, “Traveling Theory,” in Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Faber, 1983, 226-247, cited in Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic,” 117.

The Reversal

325

tories” demonstrates once again to what extent discontinuities needed to be emphasised without denying the existence of continuities:229 The dangers of idealism and pastoralization associated with the idea of the diaspora ought, by now, to be obvious, but the very least that it offers is a heuristic means to focus on the relationship of identity and nonidentity in black political culture. It can also be employed to project the rich diversity of black cultures in different parts of the world in counterpoint to their common sensibilities – both those features residually inherited from Africa and those generated from the special bitterness of New World racial slavery.230 The specific experience of Black migrations towards the United Kingdom, from the Caribbean or from countries on the American continents is fundamental, for it allows for an explanation of a certain form of absence of African foundations, their unity being more willingly constituted by the experience of migration than by slavery.231 In the same article Gilroy, drawing upon the idea of the “changing same”, an expression coined by the poet, essayist and militant LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) to describe the multiplicity of Black music at the end of the 1960s,232 suggests that the link that he established between an actualised notion of diaspora and the necessity of finding an intermediate position between the essentialist argument of identity founded upon origin or race and its inverse, anti-essentialist, refusing any idea of identity in the name of the constant fluidity of identifications. The position that Gilroy defended, and presented under the name of “anti-antiessentialism”, claimed explicitly to oppose these two perspectives, even if the more pressing issue seemed to be the struggle against the contemporary development, in Black political discourse, of the “trope of the family”, which for Gilroy is no less than a “distinctive and emphatically post-national variety of essentialism”:233 If we are to think of ourselves as a people whose black cultures and identities have grown from communicative webs that link several nation229 230 231 232

233

Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic,” 114. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 114. LeRoi Jones, “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music),” in Black Music. New York: W. Morrow, 1967, 180-211. In 1968, Jones changed his name to become Amiri Baraka. See Chapter v. Ibid., 194.

326

Chapter 6 states, how do we understand the notions of space and spatiality, intimacy and distance, raised by the writing of diaspora history […] We will have to refine the theorizing of the African diaspora if it is to fit our transnational post-contemporary circumstances. Although the current popularity of the Afrocentrism points to other possibilities, we might consider experimenting, at least, with giving up the idea that out culture needs to be centred anywhere except where we are when we launch our inquiries into it.234

In 1991, in an article that presaged the Black Atlantic project, the use of diaspora was again detached from the “Jewish model”, even though it referred to an experience that was fractal, not monolithic, positioning itself in opposition to any form of essence or return.235 It is precisely in The Black Atlantic, published in 1993, that Gilroy provided his most thorough presentation of Black culture and the link to Jewish history. As with Nietzsche, whose previously cited paragraph of Gay Science referring to “leaving the land” and “going aboard”, he cites, without a precise reference, in an epigraph;236 as with Foucault, who offered the image of the ship as heterotopia itself, it is the image of the ship that “anchors” Gilroy reflections by providing him with a metaphor that is both spatial and temporal, single and mobile, apt to symbolise the constant displacement of a form that can, despite all, be apprehended in its unity: I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise. The image of the ship – a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion – is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons […]. Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records and choirs.237

234 235 236 237

Paul Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair: Black Culture and the Trope of Kinship,” (1992), in Gilroy, Small Acts, 193-194. Paul Gilroy, “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At…: The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification,” Third Text, no. 13 (Winter 1991), 3-16. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, xiii. Ibid., 4.

The Reversal

327

The Black Atlantic is a dense and bountiful work that I do not intend to summarise here. I am of course interested in the place that the notion of “diaspora” occupies in it, more explicitly than previously, as well as the comparison between the “Black diaspora” and the “Jewish diaspora” which, contrary to examples that I have previously drawn upon, are not founded here upon a simple analogy or a simple opposition between the two. Gilroy’s analysis rests on the idea that the Jewish historical experience, or at least a part of that experience, has served, in a “transposed” or “transcoded” form – that is to say properly speaking identical but different, as is a translation –, to the fabrication of Black discourses of protest: “It is often forgotten that the term ‘diaspora’ comes into the vocabulary of black studies and the practice of pan-Africanist politics from Jewish thought. It is used in the Bible but begins to acquire something like its looser contemporary usage during the late nineteenth century – the period which saw the birth of modern Zionism and of the forms of black nationalist thought which share many of its aspirations and some of its rhetoric.”238 For Gilroy, this aspect of the diaspora is inseparable from contemplations of nationalism and modernity, and he even claims to have drawn inspiration from “writers whose relationship to Jewish lore and law was remote or ambivalent” who have permitted him “to map the ambivalent experiences of blacks inside and outside modernity.”239 This ambition of placing the two experiences parallel to one another is not without risks, for they are themselves “complex and internally heterogeneous”. If the Old Testament provides us with Biblical stories of cooperation and parallels between the histories of the two peoples, “it was Exodus which provided the primary semantic resource in the elaboration of slave identity, slave historicity, and a distinctive sense of time.”240 What then are the questions common to the two experiences? Gilroy enumerates them: “the status of ethnic identity, the power of cultural nationalism, and the manner in which carefully preserved social histories of ethnocidal suffering can function to supply ethical and political legitimacy.”241 He adds three supplementary ideas, “more evasive and mythical”: the “return to the point of origin,” the condition of exile and redemptive suffering.242 Despite all this, reading Gilroy we have a clear impression that the crux of the matter lies not in the reality of the resemblance between the two experiences, but rather 238 239 240 241 242

Ibid., 203. Ibid., 205-206. In a footnote Gilroy cites Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 207. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 208.

328

Chapter 6

in the construction of these resemblances. Edward Blyden’s role, and his references to the Pyramids and the sons of Ham,243 common points linking Jewish history and Black history, become crucial elements in the understanding of the “diaspora concept in black cultural history.” It is thus a question of “acknowledging the intercultural history of the diaspora concept and its transcoding by historians of the black dispersal into the western hemisphere.”244 He thus accords more importance to exchanges, mirror play, borrowings between the two historical experiences than to oppositions between them. This idea of “transcoding” is essential here, for it inscribes the analogy between Jews and Blacks in a complex trajectory: “Easy parallels are undermined by factors like the lack of religious unity among new world blacks and the different ways that the different groups formalise their imaginary, ritual returns to slavery and its terrors. Blacks in the West lack the idea of descent from a common ancestor, and there are also more recent factors like the identification of blacks with the Palestinian struggle for justice and democracy and the close relationship between the states of Israel and South Africa which intervene in any attempts to develop a dialogue about the significance of these convergences.245 The two histories are therefore close, but not identical. Unlike Stuart Hall, Gilroy does not set up an opposition between Jewish history and Black history, proposing instead that we consider historical and discursive constructions of their resemblance rather than any real resemblances that might exist. Likewise, neither does he oppose “Black diaspora” and “Jewish diaspora” as antagonistic forms of “diaspora”. Gilroy’s work is profoundly ternary, founded on the desire, in the study of cultural identity, to avoid the temptations of absolutist essentialism as much as those of pluralism, which only sees different cultural forms and no Black totality.246 In his analysis of the concept of diaspora, Gilroy does not set the Jewish diaspora and the Black diaspora against one another, but rather analyses both as particular forms of “diaspora consciousness” as he later calls it, themselves in opposition to another possible use of diaspora, anti-antiessentialist, holding the middle ground with respect both to essentialist perspectives on diaspora and to perspectives which consider it but a simple dispersion, a plurality without unity. 243 244 245 246

Edward W. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine. Freetown: T. J. Sawyer, 1873. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 211. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 148-152. In this matter we disagree with Christine Chivallon’s analysis, according to which Gilroy’s demonstration is structured about “dual irreconcilable schemata”. It would seem to the contrary that Gilroy denounces the two perspectives that he judges inadequate to propose a third, that of anti-antiessentialism. See Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, 118-119.

The Reversal

329

In The Black Atlantic as in later texts in which he considers the concept of diaspora, Gilroy never attempts to provide a precise conceptual framework. Like Hall, he does not inscribe the term within the space of definitions of conceptual history. In a short article published in 1994, he nevertheless synthesises his vision of a term which, “if it can be stripped of its authoritarian association […] may offer a seed capable of bearing fruit in struggles to comprehend the novel sociality of a new millennium.”247 Contenting himself with citing a selection of specialists of the concept (James Clifford and Robin Cohen, see Chapter vii), he insists particularly on the heuristic potential of the word which, in his opinion, offers a supplementary and indispensable point of entry, for “neither squeamish nationalist essentialism nor lazy pre-mature post-modernism – the supposedly strategic variety of essentialism248 – is a useful key to the untidy workings of creolized, syncretized, hybridized and impure cultural forms […].”249 Just as the “changing same” is neither the essence nor the absence of unity, “invariably promiscuous and unsystematically profane, diaspora challenges us to apprehend mutable itinerant culture.”250 In a procedure fairly close to that undertaken by Michel Foucault, Gilroy seems to have wanted to analyse the multiple variations by which Blacks and Jews had historically constructed a cultural identity that was both stable and creative. Diaspora then lies at the heart of a theory of unity and diversity which dispenses with neither pole. In her remarkable study of the tensions at work in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Christine Chivallon specifically reproaches the author for masking the diversity of Black experiences and the responses offered to the oppression suffered: “If this comparison between the two diasporic peoples, Black and Jewish, achieves the elimination of the very attributes which constitute the true specificity of the Black people, that is, the diversity of its communitarian registers and the absence of unitarian construction, have the results of such an undertaking any hope of remaining relevant? By ignoring diversity where it is deployed, Gilroy misses the lessons that a comparison with the Jewish people could provide.”251 The criticism is fair, but incomplete. Not only did Gilroy downplay Black diversity, like many authors he also downplayed Jewish diversity. If, like Hall, he 247 248 249 250 251

Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora,” Paragraph, vol. 17, no. 3 (March 1994), 207. The reference to Spivak is clear. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 212. Christine Chivallon, “La Diaspora noire des Amériques: réflexions sur le modèle de l’hybridité de Paul Gilroy,” L’Homme, no. 161 (2002), 65-66.

330

Chapter 6

noted the existence of perspectives that presented the Black experience and the relationship with Africa very differently, he completely flattens the historical diversity of Jewish constructions of Jewishness and relationships with the ancestral land, even as he claims to take into consideration the internal complexity of the Jewish experience. Indeed, his perspective on the “Jewish diaspora” limits itself to Zionism, and undermines entirely the complexities of usage of the terms diaspora, galuth or tfutsoth. In fact, Gilroy does not completely ignore the diversity of Jewish conceptualisations of the relationship with the land of Israel. In a passage in his 1994 article “Diaspora”, he wrote – doubtless on the basis of a reading of the Boyarin brothers, whose works he cites – that “diaspora has had a variety of different resonances in Jewish cultures inside and outside of Europe, before and after the founding of the state of Israel,”252 but he never fully explores this idea. The complete absence of any mention of an individual as central to Jewish thinking on displacement as Simon Dubnow is particularly astonishing, and it is even more so if we reflect the extent to which the emphasis that Dubnow places on the possibility of being at the same time a citizen of one’s state of residence and a member of the dispersed Jewish nation resembles the “double consciousness” of Du Bois. If we add to this another element of Dubnow’s thought on Jewish culture, i.e. its incessant creativity, we cannot but note all the common points between this perspective and that of Hall and Gilroy: transnationalism, creativity, emphasis on the cultural dimension, nonterritorial nationalism, the importance of the idea of links compared to that of the return… The similarities between the Jewish and the Black experiences of dispersion does not in the least limit itself to the question of the return, conceived of in its religious or secular redemptive form. It also embraces the force of the links between the elements of a single cultural whole gathered together over distance and beyond territorial continuity. Finally, how to define the “Black/African diaspora”? Is this a dispersed cultural nation characterised at once by deterritorialisation – the absence of a unique territory – and territorialisation – a presence on the soil of multiple territories – or indeed of dispersed fragments calling for their regathering and their adoption by a political entity? Recently, another perspective has emerged. Since achieving independence, most new African states have envisaged and subsequently put in place policies aimed at establishing links with emigrants of the past as well as with their descendants. If some of these pro-

252

Gilroy, “Diaspora,” 208. Gilroy developed these thoughts in Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge, 2004, 123-132.

The Reversal

331

grammes have made the “return” of “expatriates” their objective, it would appear that most are engaged in establishing links between the state and its expatriates live abroad. The most interesting aspect of this communitarian construction over distance is certainly the collective efforts over recent years by the African Union (AU) aimed at including the “African Diaspora” within its ranks.253 In 2003, two separate but linked processes were put into place, the first intended to prepare the future incorporation of the Diaspora within the African Union, the second consisting of the organisation of consultations aimed at producing a definition of the African Diaspora. On 3 February 2003, representatives of the AU gathered on the occasion of the extraordinary summit of the Assembly of heads of state and government in Addis Ababa voted to add to Article 3 of the Constitutive Act of the African Union a sub-paragraph according to which “The objectives of the Union shall be to […] invite and encourage the full participation of the African Diaspora as an important part of our Continent, in the building of the African Union.”254 This desire to reinforce the relationships between the continent and “its” diaspora was made concrete by the creation of a special institution, the Diaspora African Forum (DAF), whose first meeting was held in Accra, Ghana, 26th to 29th February 2004, and brought together more than 300 participants. Since then, the DAF building in Accra has been accorded the status of a diplomatic mission by the Ghanaian government. This development was accompanied by the proposition, made in 2004 by the Senegalese president Abdulaye Wade, that the African Diaspora be officially granted the status of the “Sixth region of Africa”.255 Largely accepted during the First Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, held in Dakar in October 2004, this project required a definition of the “diaspora”. Raised even before the conference was held, this consideration produced suggestions insisting primarily on the necessity of overcoming geography, nationality, race and culture, but also on the importance of adopting a “fluid” concept of identity: 1) Africa, whose construction is currently on the agenda, transcends geographical borders as well as cultural or racial barriers: it extends from 253

254 255

There are currently few studies of this question. See Obioma Nnaemeka, “Re-imagining the Diaspora: History, Responsibility, and Commitment in an Age of Globalization,” Dialectical Anthropology, no. 31 (November 2007), 127-141. “Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union”, February 2003, text available on the African Union website. Abdoulaye Wade, “Opening Speech,” Dakar, 7 October 2004, 7.

332

Chapter 6 both sides of the Sahara; it is white and black, Arab and African, continental and insular; it is a cultural meeting point where successive strata of cultures of Eurasian origin intermingle with indigenous cultures born in the Continent of Africa (Mbeki’s Speech: “I am an African” epitomizes these assertions in that it recognizes all the above assets). 2) The concept of identity fluidity has now become imperative; it is informed by President Abdoulaye Wade’s proposal that the African Diaspora should be made the sixth region of the African Union, and be fully incorporated in the reborn Pan-African movement […]256.

The committee of experts assembled by the African Union Commission in April 2005 adopted the following definition, which would become the official definition of the African Diaspora within the Union: “The African Diaspora consists of peoples of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union.”257 This open and “fluid” definition of the diaspora is sometimes called into question. Thus, at the First Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, the South African anthropologist Archie Mafeje refused to endorse such a vision: “It is fair to admit that there is black nationalism that goes beyond the borders of the African continent. But our argument is that not all blacks in the so-called diaspora are allied with the Africans. Alliances are made on political and ideological grounds. Therefore, thinking and progressive Africans cannot embrace all and sundry simply because they are black or originally came from Africa.”258 However, it was an inclusive and encompassing view of the diaspora that underpinned the different stages of the process initiated by the African Union to establish the diaspora as the sixth region of Africa. Regional consultative conferences that moved in this direction were organised in 2007.259 The conclusions of these consultative conferences were to be examined by

256 257

258 259

“Draft Concept Paper,” First Meeting of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, 2004, 7. “Meeting of Experts on the Definition of the African Diaspora,” Addis Ababa, 11-12 April 2005, 4, text available on the website of the South African Ministry of Cooperation (dirco.gov.za). Archie Mafeje, “The Diaspora and Africanity”, contribution to the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004, 4. They were held in New York 22-23 June for North America; in Bridgetown, Barbados, 27-29 August for the Caribbean; in Paris, 11-12 September for Europe; and in Addis Ababa, 15-16 October for Africa.

The Reversal

333

an international committee of experts with a view to reporting to the Global Summit of the African Union and the African Diaspora which was scheduled to be held in South Africa in 2008 but which was eventually adjourned. It was rescheduled for 2012.260 Whether or not it produces results, this project is incontestably, on the African scale, the equivalent of the Jewish tfutsoth. In much the same way, it combines a non-juridical vision of belonging, dissociated from citizenship, and an explicit link with a political entity, in this case the African Union. From the very first calls for a return to an African Zion, to the Wade plan, we once again encounter the four meanings of diaspora (see Chapter ii). What interest could there be in, on the one hand, dissecting “diaspora” in this fashion, according to four meanings, then demonstrating that the schemas thereby constructed for the “Jewish diaspora” and the “Black/African diaspora” correspond to one another? First of all, as I indicated at the end of Chapter ii, this allows us to divest the simple label diaspora of part of the unifying power which is often that of its usages, and thus attempt to better distinguish the different forms of economies of relationships to space and to time which could be revealed. Then, without wishing to assume any sort of absolute resemblance between discourses, and after having deconstructed the illusory unity of the term, we need to reconstruct the conceptual trajectories as well as the axes which support them and to note not only appearances, but also forgettings and reappearances. If Dubnow’s presentation, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the particularities of Jewish existence and identification in dispersion is evidently not identical with that which Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy produced – because the debate within which these visions were inscribed was not the same and the stakes, particularly academic and political, were not similar – we may nevertheless observe that they occupy a homologous position. If this homology is only rarely remarked upon, usage and the appropriation to argumentative ends of anterior references, often forgotten or “obscured” by other, more important references, or currently accepted as describing reality, gives them a new “topicality” which influences the ongoing analytical discussion. Significantly, while the history of “Jewish” and “Black” uses of diaspora had until recently had few points of contact and those that did exist were parallel comparisons of the two experiences, it was through the confrontation between the complexity of the “Jewish” and “Black” experiences of dispersion, and notably by the rediscovery of Jewish authors – such as Dubnow – having thought the dispersion dissociated from any consideration of a return to 260

The Global African Diaspora Summit was held in South Africa in May 2012.

334

Chapter 6

the native land, that a singular academic space on diasporas was constructed in the 1990s. Whether this be within its conceptual definition or its vernacular one, the term has established itself as a particularly pertinent word to describe the reality of a world become global, and in which dispersion may be though of as the emblematic condition of the postmodern era.

Part 3 The Name of the Global

∵

Introduction to Part 3 Diaspora To tell the truth I used to think the word meant some kind of fungus like the mold that attacks bread, something that survives a hostile environment, no matter. You say that the word cannot embrace those Cubans who left the island to seek exile elsewhere, many in cold places, that the word only applies to the cruel punishment inflicted on African slaves. Okay. But I have seen Cubans everywhere, scattered from Tierra del Fuego to Iceland. I have seen the ones perishing in snow, these wounded fish and when I look into their eyes, Nancy, like when I look into yours, I see the possibility of reconciliation, not the fixed gaze of hatred, but like mold we have taken root where exile threw us, like these persistent and determined growths, we will prevail. We hang on. The longing in our faces cannot end until both shores unite, yours and mine, the sting of these subtle twists of definitions1. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were two different conceptual series linked to diaspora in the global academic landscape. The first series draws on the archetypical example of the Jewish diaspora in its political version (the quest for a state) as much as in its centre-peripheral one – the link between this state, once constituted, and the collectivity of those who live abroad and

1 Virgil Suarez, “Diaspora,” Queen’s Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 1 (2000), 154.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_011

338

Introduction to Part 3

who recognise that they share with it a special link, symbolic, affective, ethnic, religious, and so on. The second – which has voluntarily and explicitly constructed itself in opposition to the first –, even though also historically founded on the history of the Jewish people, diverges from the former to encompass within diaspora the possibility of an a-centred cultural community, permeated by constant re-elaborations, sometimes competitive, even antagonistic. Until 1993, with a few rare exceptions, the two series remained perfectly in parallel, independent of one another. It was at this date that they met, as international interest in the question of diasporas grew, in the academic context of an increasing awareness of significant transformations of relations of distance as a result of progress in new technologies of information and communication. The birth of new journals, in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, was accompanied by the quest for new concepts capable of adequately describing the spatial relationships of communities dispersed in a world increasingly described as “global” or “globalising”. It was in this context that diaspora took off and that diaspora studies was constructed as an academic field in itself, shot through with oppositions and contradictions. In the space of a few years, diaspora imposed itself not only in academic vocabulary, but also in the lexicons of journalism, of governmental public action, and of international organisations in charge of questions of development, as well as progressively in the daily language of migrants and all those who are led to contemplate the character of the community to which they belong. The term even went beyond the field, already large, of themes linked to migrations, to the links between distant groups, to identities whose scope could not be restricted to a national framework. It extended itself beyond simply geographical dispersion to become a fashionable word, a word whose very beauty was extolled and which, according to various opinions, was associated with contradictory values – positive or negative – and with different historicities – it is pre-modern, modern or postmodern – as well as with antagonistic positions. For some, it is outmoded, incapable of accounting for the contemporary world. For others, it is, on the contrary, perfectly adapted to globalisation and to the transnational mode of life; it is at once the symbol and the signifier, the “diaspora” becoming the way of life specific to a humanity framed by the postmodern condition, and the term diaspora acquiring the capacity to embrace the global era. If its uses or its significations have been the object of important criticisms since the mid-1990s (too broad, too narrow, too charged with meaning, too common, incomprehensible) in the academy or in the world of community organisations, diaspora continued to grow in importance, largely because in the late 1990s it officially entered the vocabulary of international or-

Introduction to Part 3

339

ganisations responsible for development assistance to the non-industrialised countries (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Organization for Migration, and so on) as the most credible alternative to the “brain drain”. Founded on the works of social science scholars specialising in “diasporas”, disseminated by other scholars (economists, sociologists, experts in new technologies) who found themselves at the intersection of the worlds of scholarship and of international expertise, this terminology, the “diaspora option” insinuated itself into the lingua franca of development policy and became an essential element of international discourse concerning states and to those identified as their “expatriates”, whether they be citizens or simply descendants thereof. This identification of “diasporas” linked to states was not simply the result of the gaze of the expert or of the consultant. It was inscribed within a process in the longue durée: the esteem in which the state held its expatriates had gradually been changing. Long considered as excluded from the national space by virtue of their expatriation, since the 1970s migrants had progressively seen their existence abroad come to be interpreted as an advantage, as long as the link with the homeland was not broken. The “diaspora” here has value as a link and as the construction of a national community despite the distance, rendered possible by the quasi-simultaneity of exchanges over distance, by the potential “presence” of expatriates despite their geographical remoteness. Through this growing use by state authorities, taken up, even initiated by the representative of national communities abroad, the term thus acquired a fundamentally political dimension that rested upon prior bases – academic conceptualisation, politico-administrative institutionalisation in the international organisations, growing popularisation – to propose new relationships between states and their expatriates. In fact, these latter are no longer entirely so, since they are invited to rejoin, by diverse institutional mechanisms (voting rights, dual citizenship, parliamentary representation), the national space itself, thus contributing to the transformation of this latter in extending it beyond the physical frontiers of the state.

Chapter 7

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies Definitions are little elegies.1 The academic field of diaspora studies has constructed itself on an international scale over the past 20 years. Within it, diaspora functions as a concept permitting the description of groups characterised by the links that they maintain with a referent-origin (often a land or a state) despite the distance that separates them from it. However, it is a field in which the very definition of what a “diaspora” is a major issue in discussions and disagreements. If the proliferation of uses of diaspora has been the subject of numerous texts, the establishment and the logic of this academic space have produced few attempts specifically aimed at accounting for its historicity and its structuration. At an interval of ten years two authors, Khachig Tölölyan and Sudesh Mishra, nevertheless proposed interesting points of reference. In 1997 Khachig Tölölyan, editor of the journal Diaspora – founded in 1991 and whose existence is integral to the trajectories of the word in the social sciences – proposed a periodisation of the use of the term. According to him, it was around 1968 that a shift between two versions of diaspora occurred.2 The first was a Jewish-centered definition of diaspora, according to which the forced migration of a population clearly identified in the country of origin was translated by the maintenance of a collective memory in the context of a distinct community with respect to the host society and by the maintenance of links, as much between the dispersed communities as with the land of origin, where it still exists. After 1968, another definition emerged, much more open, that Tölölyan borrowed from Walter Conner – “that segment of a people living outside the homeland”3 –, a definition which resolved the question of the existence, real or otherwise, of a collective subject, since the emphasis was placed on representation rather than on action. This definition could encompass all the “dispersions” that had become “diasporas” since the end of the

1 Vassilis Alexakis, La Langue maternelle. Paris: Gallimard, 2006, 217. 2 Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora, vol. 5, no. 1 (1996), 3-36. 3 Conner, “The Impact of Homelands Upon Diaspora,” 16.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_012

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

341

1960s.4 Moreover, Tölölyan enumerates twelve factors that explain the adoption of the term by members of ethnocultural groups (artists, intellectuals, “leaders”, journalists, and so on): the growth of immigration towards the industrialised countries in the 1960s as a consequence of the development of transport links; the emergence (or otherwise) of policies aimed at a better integration of immigrants; the degree of organisation in the country of origin; the proportion of immigrants with respect to the indigenous populations; the “racial difference”; religious incompatibility – real or imagined; the affirmation of a collective subject; the success of Israel and its diaspora in the preservation of its existence after 1967; the progressive acceptance of communitarian lobbies in the United States; the development of supranational as well as infranational (decentralised) entities; the role of certain community elites in the penetration of western values in their country; and finally the role of universities and notably the emergence of new theories of ethnicity not necessarily implying assimilation. We have analysed above the role that some of these factors had played, as conditions of possibility, in the growing legitimacy of the use of the term or the concept. However, if the end of the 1960s saw the convergence, particularly within African-American movements, of several processes paving the way for the appropriation of diaspora, not only is this usage still largely modelled on the Jewish example, even though this only be to provide parameters for the use of the term, but nothing really allows us to establish why 1968 is such an important date, particularly since the decentered vision of diaspora only emerged slowly during the 1970s and 1980s. The Fijian-Australian writer Sudesh Mishra has different concerns, that of the constitution of an academic genre. The birth and the evolution of the “diasporic genre” is at the heart of a very complete text published in 2006.5 Rather than engaging in an undertaking to define diaspora or to search for a single moment of inflection, Mishra privileges an approach that consists of dissecting the space of academic discourses of and about “diaspora”. The diaspora criticism genre is then seen as “an immense culture industry ceaselessly defining an object – diaspora – without becoming in any way definite,” that is

4 Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 19 sqq. Tölölyan’s periodisation is repeated as such in Dominique Schnapper, “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept,” Diaspora, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1999), 226. 5 Mishra, Diaspora Criticism. For a more detailed critique of this text, see Stéphane Dufoix, “Le Champ de l’épars: naissance et histoire du ‘genre diasporique’,” La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, no. 7 (September-October 2008), 39-44.

342

Chapter 7

to say, without ever succeeding in totally defining the object.6 He lists three “scenes of exemplification,” i.e. discursive blocs working to define or redefine the limits of the genre: the scene of “dual territoriality”, that of “situational laterality” and finally that of “archival specificity”. Each of these corresponds to a different epistemological perspective on “diaspora”. The first scene is characterised by a desire to move beyond a simple consideration of the question of ethnic minorities to think the “trans-state networks” that constitute diasporas, thus establishing a triad constituted of three solid entities: the land of origin, the host state and the ethnic diaspora identifiable by its links with two territories. This approach gave rise to attempts at theorisation and definition by Gabriel Sheffer in 1986, William Safran in 1991, and Robin Cohen in 1997. The second scene rested on a very different idea: the “diaspora” is divested of the ethnic connotations that it possessed in the first scene to see itself constituted as a community of experiences, as symbolised by the “Black diaspora”, an expression which designates not an ethno-national entity, but a spatial network within which Africa is not the primary pole and which brings together a multitude of ways of being Black. This scene, inhabited by authors such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and even the Boyarin brothers, is founded on a refusal of the primacy of the centre and the origin and instead emphasises the margins, dispersion, unity in the scattering. Still, the tendency of certain of these authors to read this “unity in difference” in an ahistorical manner and on a resolutely macroscopic scale paved the way for the emergence of a third scene, in which diachronic inquiries into the populations are required in order to identify the ruptures and the differences existing at the heart of the “diaspora” and to justify the use of the plural rather than the singular. This perspective in terms of academic genre presents two advantages. First, it attempts to identify the different origins: 1986 and Sheffer’s text for the first scene, 1987 for the second7 and 1996 for the third.8 Then it allows us to propose a certain unity despite the existence of several scenarios. However, this reading also presents serious shortcomings. On the one hand, the insistence on genre, and not for example on space or on the field, favours the construction of a “diasporic genre” as a closed ensemble whose history would be dictated by a purely autonomous logic, a position that Mishra is regularly obliged to relativise in order to account for the complexity of the facts. Second, if the

6 Mishra, Diaspora Criticism, 19. 7 The year of the publication of Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. 8 Beginning with the publication of Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996), 421-447.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

343

study unfolds chronologically from 1986 to 2005, it displays a very uncertain relationship with temporality. Beyond the fact that Mishra tends to consider that there was no real theorisation of diaspora before 1986, the choice of this date as “birth” of the genre is almost arbitrary. Not only does Mishra fail to show how the appearance of Sheffer’s work triggered a flood of occurrences, but he sees no importance in the fact that this text is only very rarely cited before the beginning of the 1990s, and that the writings of Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy from the first half of the 1990s never refer to Sheffer’s text9. Our perspective is that of the study of the constitution of the academic field of diaspora studies, which emerged neither in 1968, given the absence, until at least the end of the 1970s, of explicit and general conceptualisations, nor in 1986, given that the volume edited by Gabriel Sheffer remained relatively obscure until the beginning of the 1990s. It seems rather that towards the end of the 1980s, between 1989 and 1991, the parameters were established, in an often disjointed fashion, that allowed for the progressive establishment of the field, via the citations and mutual critiques, but also through the attempts at synthesis through which the integration into a single ensemble of opposing or different versions of the concept manifested itself.

Foundations Between the publication of Modern Diasporas in International Politics and the progressive emergence of a specialised field of study based on the meeting, often concurrent, from 1990-1991, of the centred and decentered perspectives on “diasporas”, a number of articles or chapters bore witness to the rising influence of the term in certain disciplines, and above all to the perceived obligation to specify the sense in which it was being used, but without providing references on the basis of which an academic discussion could build. Thus, in 1987, the British philosopher and religious historian Ninian Smart, in a chapter completely lacking in references, enumerated, for religious studies specialists, the “other diasporas” which had hitherto attracted less attention than the Jewish diaspora: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, in order that they take their

9 Even James Clifford’s 1994 article “Diasporas” – an article that Mishra, probably correctly, considers to be the first that establishes a link between the different conceptualisations of diaspora, those of Safran on the one hand and Hall and Gilroy on the other – does not refer to Sheffer’s text, which was considered to lie at the heart of the first “scene”.

344

Chapter 7

place in a theory of exile, or even of migration, such as the Algerians in France or the Turks in Germany.10 Two years later, in an editorial that he wrote for the special issue of the journal Hérodote on “the geopolitics of diasporas”, the French geographer Yves Lacoste made an attempt at conceptual clarification, warning of the risk of overuse that a too “dilute” use represented. If the word could now be useful “to refer […] to the great dispersions of other [than Jewish] ethnic or religious communities […] we should nevertheless not use the word, as is too often the case today, to describe, for stylistic reasons, the many and significant migratory phenomena. Do we not for example speak of the Chinese diaspora in SouthEast Asia, although it only concerns some 20 million people, which is few in comparison to the billion Chinese who live in China?”11 His definition, which did not draw on previous texts, is revealing: “true diasporas” exist, recognisable by “the dispersion of the great majority of a people”, which means that a diaspora exists as of the moment when the majority of a people find themselves dispersed in a large number of states.12 Furthermore, it is necessary that the memory of the original territory be conserved and that the descendants of the individuals thus expelled – the exodus must have been “massive”13 – preserve and “maintain the sentiment that they belong to a single collective.”14 The criteria used are thus above all quantitative, which reduces the number of diasporas to five: Jewish (Ashkenazi and Sephardic), Palestinian, Lebanese, Armenian and Irish. Logically these are the ones that were the subject of articles in the special issue; but the scholars who participated did not necessar-

10

11

12 13 14

Ninian Smart, “The Importance of Diasporas,” in Gilgul: Essays on Transformation, Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions, ed. Shaul Shaked, David Shulman, and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 288-297, reprinted in Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Cheltenham: Elgar, 1999), 420. Yves Lacoste, “Éditorial: géopolitique des diasporas,” Hérodote, no. 53 (April-June 1989), 3. Specialists of Chinese migrations and of the Chinese abroad felt that usage precluded this restricted definition. Thus Pierre Trolliet recognised that although demographic criteria did not allow for Chinese abroad to be defined as a diaspora, “most Sinologists and French geographers speak of the Chinese diaspora!” Pierre Trolliet, La Diaspora chinoise. Paris: PUF, 1994, 3. See also, by the same author, “Peut-on parler d’une diaspora chinoise?” in Diasporas, ed. Michel Bruneau (Montpellier: GIP Reclus, 1995), 151-162. Lacoste, “Géopolitique des diasporas,” 4. The expression “true diasporas” is used again p. 5. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 5-6.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

345

ily share either the limits of the concept15 or its application to a given case study.16 Robert Fossaert, for his part, restricted his use of diaspora to Jews, Gypsies, Greeks, Armenians and Palestinians, believing that “the diaspora is the dispersal of a people who nevertheless do not let themselves be diluted in other peoples.”17 According to him, the concept thus can only be limited, as demonstrated by the spontaneous uses of the word: IBM employees are more numerous and more widely dispersed than the Gypsies, but the notion of an IBM diaspora would be preposterous. Many Buddhists, Christians or Muslims demonstrate, in their international activities, a religious fervour superior to that of most Jews, but no-one counts them among the diasporas. The Quebecois – well known to demographers – are “ethnically” more French than the French, but who would dream of including them, together with Walloons and the Frenchspeaking Swiss in some sort of French diaspora? History has scattered German colonies from the Volga to California and Brazil but, both before and after the expulsions of 1945, there has never been any question of a German diaspora. Nor an English or British diaspora, despite the most abundant of imperial scatterings.18 The Atlas of diasporas published by Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau in 1991 takes up the same examples but had wider ambitions. It offered, in addition to a very large section devoted to the Jewish people, chapters on the Armenians, the Gypsies, the Blacks, the Chinese, the Indians, the Irish, the Greeks, the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Vietnamese and the Koreans. This choice rests on criteria “which taken separately or together constitute the

15

16 17 18

While accepting Lacoste’s definition, Georges Corm adds the Kurds to the list, as do Maurice Goldring and Piaras Mac Einri, who also seem doubtful as to the justification for the use of diaspora for the Irish, “everywhere and always”. See, in the same special issue of Hérodote, Georges Corm, “La Diaspora libanaise (entretien),” 100; Maurice Goldring and et Piaras Mac Einri, “La Diaspora irlandaise,” », 183 and 169 respectively. Élias Sanbar, “La Diaspora palestinienne (entretien avec Yves Lacoste),” in ibid., 70-83. Robert Fossaert, “Devenir et avenir des diasporas,” in ibid., 162. Ibid., 158. However, not only does chap. ii show that Christian diaspora was an important category, and Chapter iii proves that German diaspora and British diaspora were not innovations of the late 1980s, but there has existed in Paris, since the 1950s, a publisher called Éditions de la diaspora française, founded by the Quebecois poet and novelist François Hertel. Furthermore, as we will see in chap. viii, an expression such as “the IBM diaspora” would not seem so farfetched today.

346

Chapter 7

specific fact of a diaspora”: the collective and forced dispersion of a religious and/or ethnic group following a disaster; a collective memory through which the memory of the disaster and a cultural heritage is transmitted; the transmission of heritage within a minority group; and finally, time, which, alone, “decides whether a minority that meets all or some of the criteria described above, having insured (sic) its survival and adaptation, is a diaspora.”19 Nevertheless, despite this list of criteria, the authors claim not to have “sought to make a sharp distinction between ‘authentic’ diasporas and those whose status may be disputed.”20 Although they refer to previous texts,21 no single reference appears as the source of their criteria and no prior definition is taken up or critiqued. With the exception of a few review articles, often fairly critical regarding the use of diaspora, in particular for the Blacks, the criteria proposed in the Atlas were not taken up in later works in either French or English.22 The same year the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie published a special issue called “Migration und Diaspora” – edited by Theodor Ikonomu – whose aim was to render the “category of ‘diaspora’ a little more comprehensible and usable within social science theory and practice.”23 The issue contains seven articles, but only three of them – Jochen Blaschke’s on the Kurdish diaspora, Theodor Ikonomu’s on the Greek diaspora and Robert Hettlage’s theoretical article – use the term. In a very dense article dealing with the Greek case study, and in which he draws specifically on Armstrong, Sheffer and Hettlage, Theodor Ikonomu proposed a breakdown of the different dimensions that should be taken into consideration in a study of diaspora: social, cultural, economic, personal, political, spatial and temporal.24 For his part, after claiming that “in the memory of man, there have always been diasporas,” Blaschke emphasised the considerable contemporary importance of “modern diasporas” as “non-state networks” whose activities are structured triadically:

19 20 21

22 23 24

Chaliand and Rageau, Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, xiv and xvii respectively, emphasis added. Ibid., xix. This is certainly an allusion to the rather strict criteria proposed by Yves Lacoste. They cited the edited volume by Joseph Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, as well as Les Amériques noires de Roger Bastide, the 1989 special issue of Hérodote and Sheffer’s text. See particularly Gabriel Sheffer, “The Emergence of New Ethno-National Diasporas,” Migration, no. 28 (1995), 27 note 1. Theodor Ikonomu, “Editorial,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 16, no. 3 (1991), 3. Theodor Ikonomu, “Europas griechische Diaspora,” in ibid., 94-113.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

347

the axis of the homeland, that of the host country, and that of the “supranational” level.25 If he refers to Sheffer, and never to Hettlage, this tripartite analysis is nevertheless central in the works of the Austrian sociologist, whose earliest contribution to the field seems to date back to 1987.26 He organised his essay of sociological theorisation of “diaspora” about two core principles: “structural tripartitism” and “interpretative tripartitism”. The first takes into consideration the existing tensions between the assimilationist logic of the host country, the particular position combining inclusion and exclusion of the diasporic group, and the existing loyalty towards the homeland. The second, which is complementary, sets itself the objective of grasping the processes of categorisation, both on the part of the host state, or social groups in the host state’s territory, and on the part of the home state, as well as on the part of the diasporic group in search of an identity.27 However, despite the conceptual promise of Ikonomu’s and Hettlage’s articles, they have not been widely read outside the German-speaking world. To the best of my knowledge, and with the exception of my own reference in my 2003 text in the “Que sais-je?” series,28 Robert Hettlage’s propositions have still not found an audience outside German academia29 and even within German academia, have had little influence on diaspora specialists.30 It is never a simple matter to date the emergence of a field of thought, partly because the information collected may be incomplete and fragmentary and partly because it is generally a multi-sited, multi-causal process, resulting

25 26 27 28 29

30

Jochen Blaschke, “Die Diaspora der Kurden in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in ibid., 85. According to the bibliography in Ikonomu, “Europas griechische Diaspora,” 112. Robert Hettlage, “Diaspora: Umrisse einer soziologischen Theorie,” in ibid., 4-24. In the meantime, Hettlage’s article has been translated in French: “Diaspora: esquisse d’une théorie sociologique,” Tracés, special issue on “Diasporas”, no. 23 (2012), 73-195. The only reference to Hettlage that I have found in the English-language literature is in Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Brij Maharaj eds., The Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader. New Delhi: Rawat, 2007, 81. I have found three exceptions: Krings, “Diaspora,” 149-150; Baumann, “Diaspora,’ 326, as well as, by the same author, “A Diachronic View of Diaspora: The Significance of Religion and Hindu Trinidadians,” in Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso (London-New York: Routledge, 2004), 182 note 7; Ruth Mayer, Diaspora: eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2005, 117. With the exception of Baumann, “Diaspora,” none of these authors cite the initial publication in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie. They all refer to an edited volume in which Hettlage’s article was republished: Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt eds., Identität in der Fremde. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1993, 75-105.

348

Chapter 7

from the convergence, through the formation of groups or journals, through the citation of texts, through meetings of scholars during conferences, of different nodes of structuration. If it is clearly necessary to establish the most precise cartography possible of the conceptual uses of the term, the existence of the latter does not necessarily imply the constitution of a conceptual field, as demonstrated by the relative isolation of the texts by Smart, Lacoste, Hettlage, Chaliand and Rageau cited above. On the other hand, beyond the prior consolidation that I have already mentioned, around Sheffer and a centered conception of diaspora in the early 1980s, as well as, independently, in British cultural studies, particularly from the mid-1980s onwards, the years 1989-1991 represent a moment when that which was formerly dispersed tended to gather together, and when diaspora suddenly seemed to become one of those words capable of describing a world in a process of profound transformation. The creation of two journals– Diaspora and Public Culture – played an important role in encouraging the conceptualisation of the word, the former because, since 1991, it had constituted a privileged space of publication, providing both an open vision of the concept and a certain form of materialisation of the promise of the field, the second because it explicitly transformed diaspora into a concept susceptible of constituting an alternative to the model of the nation-state. The conditions that allowed for the establishment of the journal Diaspora were closely linked to the personal history of its editor, Khachig Tölölyan, an American specialist in comparative literature. Born in 1994 in Syria to Armenian parents who had survived the 1915 genocide, he emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 16. His studies led him to a doctorate in comparative literature in 1975, then to the world of research and teaching. However, he was not particularly taken with the textual evolutions of his discipline, and in particular the emphasis placed on the theme of identity: I continued writing about literature at a slower pace but felt the gap between my own way of thinking about literature and that of the avant garde of colleagues, a gap that became wider – as French theory (Saussure, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Bataille etc) came to reshape the discourse of the US literary academy. This effect was both positive and in some ways alienating; what was REALLY alienating was the way that identity politics emerged and came to dominate the US literary agenda […].31

31

Email from Khachig Tölölyan to the author, 12 August 2008.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

349

These reflections on the continued shifts in his interests and his refusal to follow a post-structuralist path too focused on the politics of identity encouraged a gradual shift in his interests. Paradoxically, just as he turned his back on the theme of identity in literature, he moved towards the Armenian question, which had hitherto constituted a distinct, more militant part of his life. Since 1975, the year he was awarded his doctorate, he had been writing for Haratch, an Armenian journal, in Armenian, published in France – a country that he visited once a year. In 1982, he participated in the creation of the Zoryan Institute, an organisation both cultural and scientific in character, and whose objectives were to foster a better understanding of Armenia and to promote the recognition of genocide. It was through his participation in these circles that he first became interested in and “writing about diasporas and transnationalism […] before I had ever heard the words transnationalism and globalization.”32 The question of Armenian terrorism, which between 1975 and 1983 maintained links with Palestinian terrorism and operated, at least partially from Lebanese territory, constituted for Tölölyan an object of reflexion permitting a reconciliation of the national and the transnational. It was in 1987 that the decisive encounters for the creation of the journal occurred. That year, at the suggestion of the political scientist Hratch Zadoyan, also a member of the Zoryan Institute, he was sent as a delegate of the Institute to a meeting organised by Jewish students at Columbia with Howard Sachar, Abba Eban and Amos Oz, and at which Armenian and Greek students also participated. A year after this event, he suggested to the committee of the Institute that they found a journal about diasporas. Kourken Sarkissian, a businessman of Armenian origin, already a sponsor of the scientific activities of the Zoryan Institute, committed himself to financing the journal. The first meeting of the journal’s editorial committee was held in the offices of the Institute. The discussion concerning the title, Diaspora or Diasporas?, was animated. The committee finally chose Diaspora,33 but it was the subtitle that prompted the most interesting discussions: By 1990, when the editorial board of Diaspora convened to discuss the subtitle of the journal, it had three choices. The first was Journal of Transnational Studies, which won out in part because it helps to preserve the important term nation in the title; the second was Globalization Studies, which was casually proposed by one colleague who predicted

32 33

Ibid. Ibid.

350

Chapter 7 the term’s popularity when the rest of us did not; and the third was the suggestion of a sociologist of my acquaintance, who preferred Journal of Mobility Studies. The point of this anecdote is that in the past decade, it has become very clear that the socio-cultural formation diaspora is, on the one hand, linked to and nested within the two ever-larger and evervaguer notions of transnationalism and globalization, and gains some of its currency from its links with the notion of mobility and flow. On the other hand, diaspora remains equally strongly linked to the terms nation and ethnicity, and to the emergence of supranational identities such as those of the European Union, and of intranational identities such as those of Native Americans, Hawaiians, Samoans or Basques. This abundance of linkages simultaneously empowers and endangers the term as an analytical instrument.34

This ambiguity, which combines the abundance of links and the risks of polysemy, lies at the very heart of the journal’s mission. In his editorial for the first issue in 1991, Khachig Tölölyan wrote that “We use ‘diaspora’ provisionally to indicate our belief that the term that once described Jewish, Greek and Armenian dispersion now shares meaning with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guestworker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community. This is the vocabulary of transnationalism, and any of its terms can usefully be considered under more than one of its rubrics.”35 This semantic opening would transform the journal Diaspora into a structuring pole in diaspora studies because the flexibility of the definition as formulated by Tölölyan functioned both as an invitation to use the term in an enlarged manner and as a call to its conceptualisation, in order to avoid a total dilution. If Diaspora is invoked by some scholars as the journal that has doubtless made the greatest contribution towards “celebrating transnational mobility,”36 its first issue nevertheless opens with one of the founding essays of diaspora studies, characterised on the contrary by a desire to reduce the feathering of the concept. It was during a political science conference on Armenian terrorism organised in London in 1990 that Tölölyan met the American political scientist 34 35 36

Khachig Tölölyan, “Diasporas and Disciplinarity Today,” in Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity, 12. Khachig Tölölyan, “The Nation-State and Its Others: in Lieu of a Preface,” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 4. Bruce Robbins, “Some Versions of U.S. Internationalism,” Social Text, vol. 14, no. 45 (Winter 1995), 98.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

351

William Safran and mentioned the creation of the future journal to him.37 Safran, who was first and foremost a specialist on France, offered him the revised text of a paper that he had given at a conference in Rennes organised by Ida Simon-Barouh and Pierre-Jean Simon in December 1988. This 1988 text38 is, in fact, the first real attempt to construct a closed conceptual model, on the basis of restrictive criteria, of diaspora.39 Safran drew on a substantial bibliography which, yet again, is regrettably rare. However, on closer inspection, the authors that he cites in connection with the term diaspora are not particularly numerous. There are several articles from Sheffer’s edited volume (those of Conner, Helweg and Sheffer himself), but he also cites Marienstras’s 1985 article on the notion, as well as Elliott Skinner’s chapter in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. At first sight, Safran emphasises the lack of attention accorded to diasporas in studies of nationalism as a result of the very specific sense that it had carried, that of the Jewish diaspora, before noting that, like ghetto and genocide, diaspora had been used, metaphorically, to describe a number of categories of individuals: “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court”.40 In the light of this observation, and of Walker Conner’s 1986 “fairly broad working definition”, according to him a definition taken up by a number of scholars who applied diaspora to Cubans and Mexicans in the United States, to Pakistanis in Great Britain, to Maghrebis in France, to Turks in Germany as well as to Chinese, Greeks, Poles, Palestinians, Indians and Armenians, to the Blacks of North America and the Caribbean, he suggested restricting the scientific use of the concept of “diaspora” through the establishment of specific criteria. The undertaking is therefore in the first instance defensive. “Lest the term lose all meaning,” Safran suggested that it only be applied to “expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteristics:” their dispersal, or that of their ancestors, from a “centre”, towards at

37 38

39

40

Email from Khachig Tölölyan to the author, 12 August 2008. William Safran, “Ethnic Diasporas in Industrial Societies: A Comparative Study of the Political Implications of the ‘Homeland’ Myth,” in Les étrangers dans la ville: le regard des sciences sociales, ed. Ida Simon-Barouh and Pierre-Jean Simon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), 163-177. Safran had already used diaspora in earlier articles. William Safran, “Islamization in Western Europe: Political Consequences and Historical Parallel,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 485 (May 1986), 107, as well as “The Mitterrand Regime and Its Policies of Ethnocultural Accommodation,” Comparative Politics, vol. 18, no. 1 (October 1985), 49. Safran, “Ethnic Diasporas in Industrial Societies,” 163.

352

Chapter 7

least two peripheral regions abroad; the maintenance of a collective memory of the homeland; the conviction that integration within the host society is impossible; the maintenance of the objective of a return to an often idealised homeland; the belief in the collective obligation to fight for the perpetuation, the restoration or the security of the homeland; and the maintenance of relations, individually or collectively, with the homeland.41 Thus, following this definition, we can “legitimately” speak, in the present, of the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian Arab, Cuban and possibly Chinese and, in the past, the Polish diaspora, “although none of them fully conforms to the ‘ideal type’ of the Jewish diaspora.”42 Contrary to Sheffer’s definition, Safran’s definition presents itself, in its logic, if not explicitly, as historically born from the Jewish diaspora. If the comparison may or must be made, it is less between diasporas as such as between each of them and the Jewish diaspora, along a continuum from those that most closely resemble it (the Armenians) to those who less closely resemble it (the Portuguese and the Maghrebis in France, the Turks in Germany, the Cubans in Florida), all while taking care to eliminate those which do not fall within the scope of the definition, such as the Flemish in Belgium, who have never been exiled,43 or the Gypsies, who have no myth of return. The Indian and Chinese expatriate communities appear to be “true” diasporas in several aspects, but the absence of a myth of return combined with the possibility of a return to the homeland prevents their inclusion in the category, while the Blacks of the Americas, if they indeed have a myth of return, have no “specific homeland.”44 The article ends with a collection of questions intended to provide a “research agenda” and thus begin to trace the outline of a new field of study. With a few minor revisions, this article was published in the first issue of Diaspora three years after its first appearance, and a year after its first publication.45 The formulation of the challenges of the field in terms of questions raised has evolved significantly. Not only has the theme of inter-diaspora relations disappeared, but Safran added three new themes: that of the time necessary for the development of a diaspora consciousness; that of the role of 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 164. Ibid. In so doing, Safran explicitly sets himself in opposition to Marienstras, whom he cites. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 170. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 83-99. Safran present this as a “revised and much enlarged version” (p. 97).

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

353

nationality legislation (jus soli or jus sanguinis); and finally, that of the role of the socio-professional structure of a minority community in the development of a diasporic consciousness. For Safran, unlike Tölölyan, it is important not to err on the significance and on the extent of the concept of diaspora. The reference to the Jewish archetype underlines the relevance of the age of the notion. However, since 1988 – the year in which Safran presented the first version of his conceptual undertaking – within anthropology a different version has developed in which “diasporas” – and the word – have assumed their place in the new vocabulary which accompanied the emergence of a new world, without necessarily being endowed with a formal definition. The creation of the journal Public Culture by the anthropologists Arjun Appadurai46 and Carol Breckenridge is an important milestone in this new line of thought. In the editorial in the first issue of the journal, Appadurai and Breckenridge articulate in a fairly unique manner several terms, expressions and ideas which became common ground for research in anthropology and in sociology during the 1990s: global cultural flows, cosmopolitanism, the interpretation of modernity as an open multidirectional process, “in which the Euro-American experience is significant, but neither singular nor always the exemplary center”47: “In general, we oppose the view that the emergent transnational cultural forms and flows of today’s world are radically homogenizing, and that the burgeoning cosmopolitanisms of the world are but thin replicas of an experience we in the West are connoisseurs of ‘always already.’”48 Attentive to the search for a third way between an innocent interpretation of novelty and a theory according to which “all the ills of the world” could be described using terms from the past, Appadurai and Breckenridge called for the development of a more complex approach to relationships between elites and masses, for the latter, formed by “tourists, television-watchers, immigrants and gastarbeiter, constitute a partially deterritorialized and occasionally countercosmopolitan audience whose tastes and knowledge are ever-changing.”49 The ambition is thus to avoid two pitfalls: that which consists of “exceptionalizing the West” in concentrating only on distant cultures, and the exact opposite 46

47 48 49

See Jackie Assayag, “Comment devient-on un anthropologue post-moderniste et diasporique? Arjun Appadurai,” in Jackie Assayag, La Mondialisation des sciences sociales. Paris: Téraèdre, 2010, 171-200. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Editors’ Comments,” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1988), 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2.

354

Chapter 7

trap, in which all forms of the Other (the Third World, race, gender, and so on) are considered to be interchangeable. In a certain manner, the Rusdhie affair in early 1989 reinforced their appeal for new conceptual frameworks. They interpreted it as the internationalisation of the bourgeois public space as described by Jürgen Habermas. The affair could be an opportunity to form a “third space”, within which visions of modernity could be debated and the canonical oppositions between universalism and provincialism, East and West, tradition and modernity, could be discussed.50 Among the different questions raised by the affair, they identified “the historical bracketing out of religion from the bourgeois public sphere, the possibility of radical changes in the nature of democracy, the global portability of fiction in a postcolonial era” but also “the politics of global diasporas and global fundamentalisms”, before adding: “Well we may ask: is there a paradigm change here that finally announces our entry into a postcolonial world and that marks modernity as a completed project?”51 In a way, the Rushdie affair came to the aid of the constitution, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, of new themes of reflexion on questions of globalisation, modernity, postcolonialism, transnationalism and the possibilities for the construction of an acknowledged new paradigm within which state and territory seem to lose importance to the advantage of transnational identitarian movements. In the following issue, devoted precisely to the Rushdie affair, Appadurai and Breckenridge wrote an editorial entitled “On Moving Targets” in which they envisage the existence of diasporas of the past and diasporas of the present. The first “involved large-scale population movements across human landscapes (and political boundaries) otherwise characterized by a sense of stability” while “today’s diasporas seem somehow normative, creating a pattern of human movement and instability, against which geographical and territorial certainties seem increasingly fragile.”52 That said, they are only identifiable on the condition that their definition is modified: “Indeed, to speak of diasporas – if by diasporas we mean phenomena involving stable points of origin, clear and final destinations and coherent group identities – seems already 50 51

52

Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Editors’ Comments: On Fictionalizing the Real,” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1989), i-v. Ibid., v. It seems likely that the reference to modernity as a completed project is a nod to Habermas’s text on the “incomplete project” of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – an incomplete project,” (1981), in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, 3-15 (London: Pluto Press, 1985, second edition). Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Editors’ Comments: On Moving Targets,” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1989), i.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

355

part of a sociology for the world we have lost.”53 Populations emerging from this new diasporic process are characterised by bricolage, between the past and the present, between nostalgia and imagination, between different styles, different languages, and it is this bricolage which, according to the authors, should constitute the heart of a “global theory of diaspora.”54 For all this, we would seek in vain a precise theorisation of diaspora in the writings of Appadurai or Breckenridge. In 1990, again in Public Culture, Appadurai provides a more global analysis of the transformations in the global cultural economy. According to him, the contemporary world can no longer be thought of within classic frameworks, and notably according to a simple centre-periphery dichotomy, for it is a world characterised by complexity, a world of disjunctures and of overlappings:55 “The world we live in now seems rhizomic,”56 for it is characterised by a “technological explosion” leading to a “new condition of neighborliness, even with those most distant from ourselves.”57 The entire article is permeated by the question of geographical distance and its undermining by new technologies. In this framework, diaspora represents a double consequence of mobility: the “diaspora” through the world of certain western words such as rights, liberty sovereignty, representation or democracy has contributed to the diminishing of “the internal coherence that held these terms and images together in a Euro-American master-narrative”58 but, elsewhere, the “labor diasporas” of Turks and Italians, the diasporas of scholars or the “transnational diaspora” of the Tamils, had similarly weakened the relationship with the centre. In the final analysis, the diaspora always endangers the original centre, whether it be that of colonisation and its discursive diffusion or be it that of migration. It is the dynamic potential, creative, mobile and transforming, of dispersion which is foregrounded in a world that Appadurai describes as being more marked by fluidity than by points of reference.59

53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Ibid. Ibid., iv. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990), 6-7. The analyses presented in this text form the basis of Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 2-3. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 10. See particularly ibid.,18.

356

Chapter 7 Encounters of the Third Kind

The convergence around Public Culture took place in tandem with other clusterings and convergences during the same years, forming a body of thought which would increasingly come to be described as “postcolonial theory”. Among the waypoints of this convergence at the end of the 1980s, we might cite the publication of the edited volume Selected Subaltern Studies in 1988, which ensured the subaltern movement a global diffusion by explicitly associating it with deconstruction theory,60 as well as the common participation of Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, an American of Indian origin and a specialist in comparative literature, in two important publications: The Real Me, edited by Lisa Appignanesi in 1987,61 and a collection edited by Jonathan Rutherford in 1990 on the question of identity.62 The publication in 1990 by Homi Bhabha of an essay entitled “DissemiNation”63 constituted a similarly important moment in the diffusion of a decentered vision of identity and of history. But do these moments, for all that, constitute markers in the history of the usage of diaspora? The response is negative if we only consider the use of the term. It rarely appears in the principal texts of subaltern studies during the 1980s.64 Likewise, it only rarely appears in Spivak’s writings,65 and Bhabha only uses it

60

61 62 63 64 65

Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies. See Priyamvada Gopal, “Reading Subaltern History,” in Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), notably p. 146-148. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves”; Homi K. Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,” in Appignanesi, Identity, 5-11. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 222-237; Homi K. Bhabha, “The Third-Space,” in Rutherford, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 207-221. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322. The word is completely absent from Selected Subaltern Studies, as well as from the anthology edited by Diouf, L’Historiographie indienne en débat. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text from the Third World,” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York-London: Methuen, 1987, 241-268. In her “Author’s Note”, she acknowledges her debt towards Derrida, whose idea of deconstruction “had come to disrupt the diasporic space of a post-colonial academic” (p. xxvii). See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Strategy, Identity, Writing,” (1986) in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London-New York: Routledge, 1990, 35-49. She never elaborates on the meaning of the term. In 1996, she established an opposition between “new” and “old” diasporas: “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 245-269.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

357

twice in “DissemiNation.” But the response is positive if we take into consideration these texts, as well as perspectives on identity, the nation, the centre and history that they convey, as one of the conditions of possibility for the diffusion of an alternative version of diaspora that combines them with the texts emerging from British cultural studies. This alternative version of diaspora begins to take form, an academically shaped form, at the beginning of the 1990s. In 1993 an article by the sociologist Ien Ang, herself one of the linchpins of cultural studies for her work on the effects of television programmes,66 outlined a critique of Lynn Pan’s text on the Chinese of the diaspora.67 Drawing on Gilroy and his article “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at,” she calls into question the idea of any unity of the Chinese diaspora based on the existence of a common origin and a common centre.68 Rather the opposite, according to Ien Ang, given the problematic relation between the place whence one came and the place where one finds oneself, which is at the heart of the situation of “diaspora”, this latter necessarily being marked by ambivalence. Citing William Safran to better critique his position, she draws on Salman Rushdie, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, James Clifford and Stuart Hall,69 as well as on Khachig Tölölyan and his editorial in the first issue of the journal Diaspora, to join them in denouncing the insistence on the homeland and the fixity of the origin which accentuates the risk of essentialisation of the diaspora and nationalist developments: “Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope, always linking the local and the global, the here and the there, past and present, they have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of ‘national culture’ or ‘national identity’ with origins firmly rooted in fixed geography and common history.”70 If, despite everything,

66 67

68

69

70

She is the author of Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London-New York: Methuen, 1985. Ien Ang, “Migrations of Chineseness,” Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, no. 34-35 (1993), 3-15. Lynn Pan’s book is Sons of the Yellow Emperor. London: Mandarin, 1990. The same year the anthropologist Aihwa Ong also emphasised the need to question the unity of the term “Chinese” when referring to members of the Chinese diaspora, as well as the character of their links with the Chinese state. Aihwa Ong, “On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora,” Positions, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993), 745-778. This was not a text dealing with diaspora, but a manifesto on the change of an era. Stuart Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” in New Times, ed. Stuart Hall and Jacques Martin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 116-133. Ang, “Migrations of Chineseness,” 13.

358

Chapter 7

individual or collective identifications can refer to an ethnicity – Chinese in this case –, the contradiction is resolved thanks to Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism”. The reference to ethnicity becomes a means “not to ‘return home’” all the while being recognised for the singularity of its history or histories. Identity does not disappear, but it must be rethought in order to take into consideration the dislocations and recompositions of identities. The urgency rests in the development of a “postmodern notion of ethnicity” founded on an “‘identity’ which must be constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated.”71 For Ang, as for Appadurai, we thus find the idea that the “diaspora” is the inverse of nationalism, a position that we also observe, at the same time, in the work of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, professor of English and of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.72 In many respects, the article on diasporas published by the American anthropologist James Clifford in 1994 is a turning point in the constitution of the space of diaspora studies.73 Clifford is above all a specialist in anthropological thought, from his thesis on the French ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt to the 1988 publication of The Predicament of Culture.74 Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he was one of the originators of the Center for Cultural Studies at that university. In 1989, he published an article on the links between travel and theory in the Center’s journal, Inscriptions, in which he affirmed that “It is more and more difficult to ignore what has always to some extent been true – that every center or home is someone else’s periphery or diaspora.”75 Drawing notably on Edward Said and his article on travelling theory, he insists on the travels of 71 72

73

74

75

Ibid., 14-15. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and The Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 4 (Fall 1993), 750-771. By the same author, see also “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” in The State of Asian-America, ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 219-233. James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994), 302-338. In the same issue, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett feels that “Not only has Clifford mapped the conceptual terrain for such a task [rethinking diaspora], but also he has provided a seismograph of the sensibilities running through the diaspora debates.” Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, “Spaces of Dispersal,” in ibid., 343. James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory,” Inscriptions, no. 5 (1989), available on the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies website: http://ccs.ihr.ucsc.edu/inscriptions/volume-5/ james-clifford/.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

359

theories and of theorists, notably Gramscian Marxism in India in the form of subaltern studies before its “return” to the “first world”, in another guise, via the movements of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee or Dipesh Chakrabarty. It emerges from the references cited by Clifford in 1989 that he is thus already aware of some of the texts that will subsequently contribute to his thinking on the concept of diaspora: Said, Spivak, the subaltern studies writers, Appadurai’s and Breckenridge’s first editorials in Public Culture. On the other hand, as he himself admits, he was little familiar with the works of British cultural studies.76 The following year he came across Kobena Mercer’s article “Diaspora culture and the dialogic imagination,”77 as well as the works of Paul Gilroy, who he had had the opportunity of hearing at a conference on cultural studies held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in April 1990. If Clifford particularly insisted on the importance of Gilroy’s paper on the critique of “ethnic absolutism” by cultural studies,78 other authors such as Stuart Hall or Homi Bhabha were also present and reacted to Clifford’s own paper on “traveling cultures”. In this paper he proposed seizing, based on the notion of “travel”, that which moves, that which translates, that which modifies but also that which remains when cultures, whatever they may be, travel with the men and women who bear them. Bhabha’s and Hall’s reactions are particularly interesting for an understanding of the semantic evolution of diaspora: Bhabha questioned him on “the place of a lack of movement and fixity in a politics of movement and a theory of travel” while Hall, appreciating Clifford’s capacity for thinking movement without nevertheless succumbing to the “the fashionable postmodernist notion of nomadology”, asked him what does not move, what stays the same, including in the movement of travel.79 Clifford’s replies dealt, on the one hand, with the distinction between the modernist version, fixed, of exiles, and that of “diaspora”, where travelling and dwelling, the local and the global, fixation and movement come together; and on the other hand with the question, “a crucial one in discussing diaspora cultures,” of that which is both maintained and transformed at the same time when one moves from one place to another.80 76 77 78

79 80

Email from James Clifford to the author, 23 December, 2003. Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination”. The papers presented at this conference were published in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York-London: Routledge, 1992). In this book, see Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism,” 187-198. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, Cultural Studies, 114 for Bhabha’s reaction, 115 for Hall’s. Ibid.

360

Chapter 7

An important reading of sources would appear to have taken place between the oral presentation and the writing down of the text, since the written text of “Traveling cultures,” published two years later, contained new references to the works of Hall, Gilroy, Bhabha and Mercer. They came in particular from his association with Paul Gilroy, who held a visiting professorial position at Yale at the same time as Clifford, several months after the autumn 1990 conference:81 “I then read a lot more of the ‘Black British’ work and caught up with Stuart Hall’s thinking on diaspora.”82 It was this familiarisation with the new theorisation of diaspora, accompanied by a desire to understand the articulation83 between roots and routes, which provided the material for the article that he published in 1994. Rather explicitly, this text does not appear as a theoretical contribution to the definition of the concept but rather as a reflection on the political and intellectual stakes of “contemporary invocations of diaspora.”84 Even more than Ien Ang, he drew on relevant authors in several disciplines, but also from several periods, even if most of them shared a single version of diaspora, characterised less by a simple decentering than by the ambivalence and the tension between opposites: Homi Bhabha, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Avtar Brah, St Clair Drake, Simon Dubnow, Amitav Ghosh, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Aihwa Ong, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, William Safran and Khachig Tölölyan.85 More interested by the existence of so-called “diasporic” phenomena than by the existence of “diasporas” as such, Clifford drew on Safran’s attempt at classification to demonstrate that while it associated diaspora too closely with a specific group – the Jewish people – it only dealt with some of the latter, those who indeed maintained a strong attachment to the land of their ancestors and wished to return, thus effectively ignoring all those who believed in a return at the end of time, or who saw in the dispersion the very condition for the existence of a people. However, this criticism, this ambivalence, was not accompanied by a recourse to total fluidity or antiessentialism. Clifford wrote that “decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return”86 and not that 81 82 83

84 85 86

Clifford briefly refers to this in a footnote to “Traveling Cultures,” 112 note 13. Email from James Clifford to the author, 23 December, 2003. The concept of articulation, which he borrows from Hall, is fundamental to most of Clifford’s work since the early 1990s. James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003, 45 and 87-91. Clifford, “Diasporas,” 302. The two conspicuous absentees from this list are John Armstrong and Gabriel Sheffer. Ibid., 306, emphasis added.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

361

these latter should replace the former. While refusing the “postmodern” label, Clifford thus opposes two perspectives on diaspora: the “ideal type” perspective (that of Safran), founded on the accumulation of criteria and constructed with reference to a centre, on the one hand, and a totally decentered perspective on the on the other hand, where even the origin of the other disappears. For his part, he privileges a perspective close to that of Paul Gilroy, a perspective that he presents as being “anti-antiessentialist,”87 where the multiplicity of identity displacements and reconstructions do not make the question of identification disappear since, without being primordial because it is frequently re-elaborated, reworked, displaced, it is none the less an organising topos. The appeal to the “changing same” proposed by Gilroy allowed him to be interested less in the heart of that which would be a diaspora that with its boundaries, in order to understand that to which diaspora – including as a word – is opposed, that is to say, according to him, the fixedness of the nation-state. Suddenly therefore it is the very ambivalence of the relationship to the return and to the homeland which becomes of prime importance to Clifford. Drawing on the work of the Boyarin brothers,88 he then demonstrated to what extent a parallel could be drawn between the medieval Jewish world centred on the Mediterranean and the Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, even though African American and Caribbean (be they French or British) cultures did not fall within the scope of Safran’s model.89 It was on the basis of the complexity of the relationship with homeland and origins that Clifford highlighted the advantages, the efficacy of the term diaspora which has as its object articulations and work on the borders. In a manner analogous to that found in the work of the post-structuralists or in Hall’s and Gilroy’s texts, identity is not inscribed within a binary space but in a ternary one, the claims of diaspora arranging themselves both against the norms of the nation-state and against the claims of indigenous people: its logic is neither autochthonous nor national, but it is founded on the articulation of the two through the question of displacement. It follows that diasporas are not necessarily anti-nationalist, but they cannot be exclusively nationalist. Clifford recognised, notably through the historical experience of the Jewish people, that the founding return of a nation is but one of the possible features of life in diaspora, or more precisely one which 87 88 89

Ibid., 319-320. Gilroy’s anti-anti-essentialism is thus opposed to the simple “antiessentialism” of Kobena Mercer. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993), 693-725. Clifford, “Diasporas,” 305-306. A section of the article is devoted to the links between Jews (p. 321-325).

362

Chapter 7

denies the existence of the diaspora: “Diasporas have rarely founded nationstates: Israel is the prime example. And such ‘homecomings’ are, by definition, the negation of diaspora.”90 Diaspora does not simply denote transnationality and movement, it also denotes the struggle for the local definition of a community. It is the tension between the local and the global, the nomad and the national, the dispersed and the gathered, that marks the specificity of this communitarian form within which the binary opposition of majority/minority relations is ruptured.91 If it constitutes itself, negatively, through discrimination and exclusion, it also constitutes itself positively through identification with historical or cultural political forces as in Africa or China. The aspects of loss and hope are thus in permanent tension.92 The “diaspora” is neither a nostalgia for a disappeared “there” nor the refusal of the “here”, but well and truly the co-presence of here and there in the context of an anti-teleological temporality:93 “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987), forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference.”94 In the references in this article, Clifford cited an unpublished manuscript by Avtar Brah entitled “Diasporas and borders” and recognises that he owes much to this work which directly influenced the writing of the ‘Diasporas’ essay.”95 Indian by birth, Avtar Brah lived for much of her childhood in Uganda before leaving to study in the United States in the late 1960s, then being obliged to settle in Great Britain – where she taught at Birkbeck College, University of London–, Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972 rendering her stateless.96 In 1996 she published an analysis of diaspora in which a return is not necessarily obligatory.97 Noting that the term had hitherto not been the subject of sustained theoretical analysis, she set out to transform it into a

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Ibid., 307. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 308. Email from James Clifford to the author, 23 December, 2003. In 1993, Avtar Brah was a visiting scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies in Santa Cruz headed by Clifford. In 1972, the new strongman in Uganda, Idi Amin Dada, expelled 50,000 Ugandan Asians – mostly Indians – in order to seize their property. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996, viii.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

363

concept distinct from the “historical ‘experiences’ of diaspora.”98. Adopting a Foucauldian framework of genealogy, she refused to see it as a means of undertaking a search for origins. On the contrary, “the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire which is not the same thing as desire for a ‘homeland’.”99 The strength of the concept thus resided in its capacity to express the tension between forces often presented as contradictory and thus essentialised as purely antagonistic: centre and periphery, origin and residence, return and non-return, local and global… Diaspora, as the very site of the tension of identity relative to displacement and settlement elsewhere, which implies a reformulation of “there whence we came” and “there where we are”, tells the ambivalence and the articulation of principles defined as irreconcilable. As Brah writes, not only can we not identify the home without identifying the diaspora, and vice versa, but there exists a process of transformation of homing of diaspora and of diasporising of home.100 Because it expresses, almost in itself, the two themes of the critique of the essence and the importance of the relations of power in the struggle for identification,101 the concept of diaspora “should be seen as conceptual mapping which defies the search for originary absolutes, or genuine and authentic manifestations of a stable, pre-given, unchanging identity; for pristine, pure customs and traditions or unsullied glorious pasts.”102 As with Clifford – the two authors not only read one another’s works but frequently cite each other –, it is through the question of the border that we can draw on the full potential of diaspora to bring these two concepts into a relationship with the fundamental theme of location/dislocation. Just as in Clifford’s work loss and hope cannot be dissociated, so too in Brah’s writings there is the idea of a “positionality of dispersal” which only appears to be contradictory.103 But the space within which these borders and these localisations are negotiated is not diaspora. It is a larger space, one that Brah calls, in a rather ambiguous manner, “diaspora space”, that is, “the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, are contested […] In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of

98 99 100 101 102 103

Ibid., 176. Ibid.,177. Ibid., 187. Ibid., particularly p. 180. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 201.

364

Chapter 7

dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. The diaspora space is the site where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native.”104 Clifford and Brah thus represent, in 1996, the most fully formed conceptual realisation of a version of diaspora within which the centre as much as the absence thereof, the local and the global attempt to be taken into consideration, in the form of the notion of articulation or of tension. Diaspora is then less the name given to distinct populations than a conceptual description of ambivalences, of relations of power, which permeate the processes of identification of groups that present the particularity of being at once here and elsewhere, this elsewhere very likely being a native or ancestral land, real or invented, or indeed a space of links capable of being constructed with other individuals and other groups who recognise one another in the same identification(s). The theoretical concept therefore does not so much denote particular cases or experiences but rather permits an identification of the types of interrogations that should be submitted to the object. The other version of diaspora, that which finds its precursors in Armstrong, Sheffer and Safran, also underwent an important conceptual transformation during the second half of the 1990s with the publication in 1997, by the British sociologist Robin Cohen, of the book entitled Global Diasporas. In the preface to the second edition he invoked serendipity, the happy chance, to explain the circumstances that led him to write the text: “Looking meditatively (or was that vegetatively?) at the garden out of my window, I suddenly thought how migration scholars were increasingly using gardening terms like ‘uprooting’, ‘scattering’, ‘transplanting’ and the then newly-fashionable word ‘hybridity’. My interest mounted when I found that ‘diaspora’ was derived from the Greek word speiro (‘to sow’ or ‘to disperse’)”.105 In response to my questions, however, he provided a more complete version, a richer one, of this birth. Recalling the reminiscence that he had related in the preface to the second edition of Global Diasporas, he added: “This does not tell the whole story. I was very familiar with the concept of diaspora growing up in the Jewish community in South Africa. Though we were secular, the expression was in common use, by my father – born in Lithuania and my mother, both in South Africa of two Polish parents.”106 However, his early research, on the relationships between labour and politics in Nigeria, is rather Marxist in inspiration and, in his work

104 105 106

Ibid., 205, emphasis in the original. Robin Cohen, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2008, xvi. Email from Robin Cohen to the author, 4 November, 2009.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

365

at that time, as he himself put it, ethnicity “is subordinate to class, state, and power (the categories I worked most with over the first decade).”107 Taking up a position as lecturer in Sociology at the University of Birmingham in 1972, he met Stuart Hall who was then head of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. They both shared an interest in the study of West Indian migration. In the mid 1970s, they even envisaged writing a co-authored book on the “West Indian diaspora” but “the publishers were not keen”.108 It would be during a research visit to Trinidad between 1977 and 1979 that he rediscovered the notion. In 1978, during a seminar, he raised the idea of West Indian emigration as being the “diaspora of a diaspora” before, as he explained it, putting this idea to one side. In 1987, when he was head of the Center for Research in Ethnic Relations at Warwick, he suggested to the sociologist John Rex, a specialist on interethnic relations, that they work together on a book on diasporas. Rex’s refusal, on the basis that the project seemed “too Jewish”109 seems to have encouraged Cohen to reflect on the possibilities of transcending the association between diaspora and Judaism-Jewishness. We need to link these two moments in the personal and professional biography of Cohen in order to grasp the singularity of the task that he undertook on the question, beginning in the late 1980s.110 His previous work in the West Indies and this pursuit of a generalisation of the concept liberated from a too-strong “Jewish” grip led him both towards a certain form of systemisation under the form of criteria, and towards a growing complexity, since the West Indian migratory experience cannot simply be thought of as a dispersion from a point of origin. Thus, the first article that he published on the question in 1992 dealt with the West Indian diaspora, resuming the idea first proposed in 1978 according to which it was a question of a “diaspora of diasporas”. This text is characterised above all by the desire to render conceptually applicable a notion which had hitherto not been – or very little – theorised.111 Without any knowledge of Safran’s article, he briefly listed certain characteristics which would permit the use of diaspora in a more rigorous manner and with a minimum of “heuristic 107 108 109 110 111

Ibid. See Robin Cohen, Labour and Politics in Nigeria. London: Heinemann, 1974. Email from Robin Cohen to the author. Ibid. According to him, the core of his text on diasporas was ready in 1989. Robin Cohen, “The Diaspora of a Diaspora: The Case of the Caribbean,” Social Science Information, vol. 31, no. 1 (1992), 159. This text was originally a conference paper at “Cultures européennes et cultures des diasporas”, Paris, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 5-6 April 1991.

366

Chapter 7

intention”: the existence of an original trauma, a collective desire for return, and finally a sentiment of exile, of loss, of solitude, far from the homeland or land of the ancestors.112 In this sense, it seems indeed that one may speak of “paradigmatic diasporas”113 for certain populations: Indians, Jews, Africans, Sikhs, Armenians and Lebanese.114 If the migration of West Indian descendants of slaves to Panama, the United States or Europe is in no way the product of a trauma, the memory of slavery and the slave trade sufficed for Cohen to call it a diaspora, “though in a special and qualified sense.”115 No text specifically on the concept of “diaspora” – Dubnow, Armstrong, Sheffer, Marienstras– is cited, but a familiarity with British cultural studies is indicated by the reference to The Empire Strikes Back; the bibliography is entirely devoted to the Black and Caribbean world. Subsequent texts are inscribed within the same logic. In 1995, his quest for general criteria likely to underpin a reasoned definition of “diaspora” proposes “rethinking Babylon” as much as a place of creativity as a place of exile, and thus place the emphasis on “iconoclastic conceptions of the diaspora experience” in order to transcend the single vision of the diaspora as “victim diaspora” and to envisage a version that was more positive but also more decentered from this experience.116 Once again, he draws significantly on writings situated within the paradigm of a decentered vision of diaspora, such as those of Gilroy and Hall, and never refers to Sheffer or Safran, which is logical with his aims of demonstrating that the “conceptions of diaspora, even from the earliest times are far more diverse than the commonly-accepted catastrophic tradition.”117 The following year he notes – for the first time, to the best of my knowledge – Safran’s contribution to the first issue of the journal Diaspora and, while approving of the attempt towards a systematic formulation, he criticises it both for its restrictive aspects – the absence of West Indians, Irish, Kurds – and for its breadth, encompassing, for example, minorities living in neighbouring countries.118 It is however quite clear that it was on the basis

112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Cohen, “The Diaspora of a Diaspora,” 159-160. Ibid., 168. This list is followed by the question “but how about the Chinese, Italian, Greek, Polish or Turkish diasporas?” Ibid., 159. Ibid., 168. Robin Cohen, “Rethinking ‘Babylon’: Iconoclastic Conceptions of the Diaspora Experience,” New Community, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995), 5-18. Ibid., 16. Robin Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challengers,” International Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (1996), 514.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

367

of Safran’s list of criteria that he draws up his own: he merges two of them – the idealisation of the homeland absorbs the question of engagement for its maintenance and its security – and adds a further four. His list of “common characteristic of a diaspora” is therefore the following: 1) an often traumatic dispersal to at least two foreign territories; 2) or territorial expansion with the aim of conquest, labour or trade; 3) the existence of a collective memory of the homeland; 4) the idealisation of the ancestral home and a collective engagement towards its support or its creation; 5) the development of a sanctioned movement of collective return; 6) a strong ethnic group consciousness; 7) a conflictual relationship with host societies; 8) empathy for and solidarity with members of the same ethnic group in other territories; 9) the possibility of developing a sense of creativity in tolerant countries.119 This list lies at the heart of the book Global Diasporas, which appeared in 1997 in the series of the same name, edited by Cohen himself at UCL Press. Returning to the major debates on the notion that had arisen since the beginning of the 1990s, and adding prior attempts at definition, such as those of Armstrong and Sheffer, Cohen gives us a synthetic vision of the concept in “unhooking” it not simply from the Jewish archetype, but also from the obligatory traumatic experience. The process of elaboration of distinctive criteria goes in tandem with the growing number of case studies of “diasporas” –among others, Jewish, African, Armenian, Indian, British, Chinese, Lebanese, Sikh and West Indian. Like Gabriel Sheffer before him, Cohen is not satisfied with identifying diasporas, he sorts them into categories according to typology: victim diasporas (Jews, Armenians, Africans), labour diasporas (Indians), imperial diasporas (British), trade diasporas (Chinese and Lebanese) and finally cultural diasporas (Caribbean). Cohen is aware of the limitations of his approach. He recognises that his model is too rigid to be able to account for the reality of the form and the evolution of diasporas120 and that, moreover, the procedure by which he never uses the term “criteria”, preferring rather “common characteristics” is a “rather

119 120

Ibid., 515. An identical list appears in Global Diasporas, 26. Cohen, Global Diasporas, x.

368

Chapter 7

slack methodological device.”121 However, we cannot content ourselves with his claim that he had “simply written the right book at the right time.”122 Cohen’s book marks the culmination of a period of many years, approximately between 1989 and 1997, during which the two conceptual currents linked to diaspora not only came together in the body of references in articles and books but also came to constitute two distinct and concurrent axes of a particular conceptual field, that of diaspora studies, whose contours were gradually sketched out as attempts at definition developed. The book also marked a turning point, for, as a text written by a single author whose objective was as much to propose a conceptual framework for diaspora as to take stock of the history of experiences of diaspora, it occupied a decisive place in the diffusion – beyond specialised journals in migration studies, literary studies, postmodern studies, interethnic relations, even beyond the journal Diaspora, access to which was not always easy123 –, of debates around the concept.

The French Appropriation of the Concept How does a concept spread? The previous section showed how the conceptual bases were established over approximately a decade, largely in the Anglophone world, while German or French attempts at the beginning of the 1990s were barely noticed in Anglophone debates. In a general manner, but with a few exceptions,124 French theoretical works were rarely translated or even reported in English, the principal working language of diaspora studies. However, despite this state of affairs, it indeed seems that France was one of the first countries to accord a great importance to the concept and to organise gatherings and debates on its academic merits. It therefore seems to me of

121 122 123 124

Cohen, “Diasporas and the Nation-State,” 515. Cohen, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xv. Until the early 2000s, it was not held in any French library, either on paper or electronically. Outside the aforementioned article by Dominique Schnapper, Emmanuel Ma Mung and Christine Chivallon have appeared in English in Diaspora. Emmanuel Ma Mung, “Dispersal as a Resource,” Diaspora, vol. 13, no. 2-3 (Fall-Winter 2004), 211-225; Christine Chivallon, “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: the Experience of the African Diaspora,” Diaspora, vol. 11, no. 3 (2002), 359‐382. A survey of French works on the concept appeared in 2006 in Global Networks: Michael Collyer, “Diasporas à la française: Recent Francophone Contributions to the Literature,” Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 1 (2006), 101-107.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

369

some importance to attempt to follow the diffusion of the concept in France before taking into consideration the mechanisms of its multi-disciplinary diffusion and the constitution of the limits of the field. If we take the example of the adoption in France, not of diaspora, which as we have seen had been widely used since the 1980s even if in an untheorised manner, but the definitions of the term and the debates that surrounded that definition, it appears that Armstrong is almost totally unknown and the volume edited by Gabriel Sheffer is almost absent from French citations until 1993-1994. Historians of migrations, for example, rarely refer to it.125 Occasional uses of Sheffer126 or Safran127 can be found in the works of some scholars specialising in the Jewish world, geographers or political scientists working on migratory phenomena or anthropologists of minorities. Neither Yves Lacoste’s editorial in Hérodote nor Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau’s introduction in their Atlas of diasporas led to the development of any theoretical reflections on diaspora. The Revue européenne des migrations internationales (REMI), founded in 1985 around the geographer Gildas Simon and the Migrinter multi-disciplinary research centre (Poitiers) that specialises in international migrations and interethnic relations, is clearly the pioneer in the use of the first foreign works on diasporas in the early 1990s. We find in it a number of articles using diaspora with neither references nor exploration of the concept,128 as well as the first references to Sheffer. It seems that initially it was the anthropologist Anne Raulin who drew on Sheffer. If she acquired the text in an English-language bookshop in Paris, she acknowledges that it was during her time in the United States, in the early 1980s, that she acquired an awareness of questions of identity and was drawn 125 126 127

128

There is a reference in Claude Liauzu’s Histoire des migrations en Méditerranée occidentale. Bruxelles: Complexe, 1996, 270. Riva Kastoryano, “L’Intégration politique par l’extérieur: la communauté juive de Turquie,” Revue française de science politique, vol. 42, no. 5 (1992), 786 note 1. Mikhaël Elbaz, “Minorités d’intermédiaires, sous-économies et judéités,” in Les Juifs et l’économique: miroirs et mirages, ed. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Pierre-Jacques Rojtman (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1992), 354. See for example, Emil Hersak and Milan Mesic, “L’Espace migratoire de Yougoslavie: historique des migrations yougoslaves,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990), 27-64; in the same issue, see Jacques Marcadé, “L’émigration portugaise,” 133-145. The year after, see Christophe Guilmoto, Yves Charbit, and Madhavan Palat, “Le Cycle migratoire tamoul, 1830-1950,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 1 (1991), 123-150; Gildas Simon and Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, “Une Europe communautaire de moins en moins mobile? » Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 2 (1991), 41-61.

370

Chapter 7

towards the book.129 In 1988, during the conference at Rennes where Safran presented his model for the first time, she presented a paper called “Diasporas et minorités urbaines” in which she notably provided a brief summary of several chapters of Modern Diasporas in International Politics. Her paper was cited in 1990 by Gildas Simon, who took up a long quote by Sheffer, translated by Raulin, to conclude that the “the Maghrebian migratory system, viewed globally, falls within the scope of this long and broad definition,”130 since it united dispersion and solidarity and thus gave birth not to one but to three Maghrebian diasporas, one for each country concerned. In 1993, things gathered pace. The sociologist Alain Médam published, again in REMI, an article based on a paper he gave at a seminar in 1992 in which he not only notes the transformation of this “Proper noun of long standing which is tending to become a common noun,” but also of its exceptionality and previous negative value: at a time of economic and cultural globalisation, “‘diasporans’ are no longer traitors, but smugglers”.131 Without ever inquiring into previous works, he proposed ways to grasp the present diversity of the situations of “diaspora” in the form of typological oppositions according to their age, their recognition, their organisation or their endurance: they could thus be inflexible or fluid, official or clandestine, dynamic or amorphous, reversible or irreversible. If this contribution remains apart from prior texts – the article has no footnotes –, it nevertheless bears witness to a growing awareness of the interest of the form “diaspora” and of the transformations of the manifestations associated with it. In the spring of 1993 the Commission française de géographie politique, part of the Comité national français de géographie, in collaboration with the Cyprus Research Centre, organised a conference on diasporas in Cyprus that seems to have been inspired above all by thinking emerging from Sheffer’s text.132 Some

129 130

131 132

Details provided by Anne Raulin in conversation at Nanterre, Tuesday 25 May, 2010. Gildas Simon, “Les Diasporas maghrébines et la construction européenne,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990), 98. If Gildas Simon subsequently paid little attention to Sheffer, he nevertheless started using diaspora. See Gildas Simon, Géodynamique des migrations internationales. Paris, PUF, 1995. In 1991, Anne Raulin published a text that drew on her 1988 paper: Anne Raulin, “Minorités intermédiaires et diasporas,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 1 (1991), 163-169. Alain Médam, “Diaspora/Diasporas: archétype et typologie,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 9, no. 1 (1993), 59 and 63. “Avant-propos,” in Les Réseaux des diasporas, ed. Georges Prévélakis (Paris: L’HarmattanKYKEM, 1996), 13-15.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

371

of the papers presented at this conference, which brought together numerous French-speaking scholars, but also Greeks, Russians, and Dutch, as well as Sheffer himself, were published in the three issues devoted to the question by the journal L’Espace géographique in 1994;133 the remainder were collected in 1996 in a volume edited by the geographer Georges Prévélakis.134 In his introduction to the special issues of L’Espace géographique, the geographer Michel Bruneau, a specialist on the Greeks, drew significantly on Armstrong’s article, Sheffer’s book and the special issue of Hérodote, but his distinction between diasporas and non-diasporas among the ethnic minorities rests more on the “it goes without saying” approach than on any rigorous definition: “All diasporas are the product of a migration, be it voluntary or forced, but not all ethnic minorities necessarily belong to a diaspora. This is clearly not the case of ethnic minorities living in their homeland, as irridentist minorities, […] nor of politically dominant minorities in an empire.”135 Generally, he considered that, following Sheffer, the consciousness of an ethnic or national identity, the political, cultural or religious organisation of a dispersed group and the existence of contacts with the territory of origin were the three determining and necessary elements for a diaspora, be the migration voluntary or otherwise. Still, somewhat surprisingly in view of this latter criterion, which tends to “centre” diasporas, Bruneau insists on the fact that the organisation of diasporas is polycentric and reticulated while that of nation-states is continuous and centralised. Finally, he sketches out a tripartite typology of diasporas according to the character of the “pole” about which the diaspora is organised: entrepreneurial (Indian, Chinese, Lebanese), religious (Jewish, Greek, Armenian) or political (Palestinian, Tibetan), without really envisaging a possible combination of the three poles or the passage from one dominant pole to another.136 With the exception of the chapter by the geographer Emmanuel Ma Mung which discusses the importance of the diaspora as a “non-place” (non-lieu) despite the maintenance of a reference to the homeland, to the point that it may appear, to a certain extent, as a “new social form, an expression of new forms of relationships that society maintains with space, and which perhaps heralds

133 134 135 136

These three issues were published as a collection in Michel Bruneau ed., Diasporas. Montpellier: GIP Reclus, 1995. Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas. Michel Bruneau, “Espaces et territoires de diasporas,” in Bruneau, Diasporas, 7, my emphasis. Ibid., 20.

372

Chapter 7

the end of territories,”137 all the other authors associate their perspectives on diaspora with the theme of origin. Amir Abdulkarim lists the criteria: massive exodus, the majority of the population living outside the homeland, close links with the homeland, the existence of a collective memory and a collective consciousness, and finally the will to endure as an ethnic group,138 while the Russian geographers Vladimir Kolossov, Tamara Galkina and Mikhaïl Kouibychev, scarcely thinking it possible to provide satisfactory criteria in the absence of a greater knowledge of diasporas, are happy with a wide definition whereby the diaspora is the “part of a national community that lives outside the homeland, in well-organised, coherent and deeply established ethnic groups, whose existence has become necessary to the host country.”139 While the book Diasporas is disciplinarily geographical in orientation, The Networks of Diasporas is denser and more diverse, even though it readily recognises the influences of the geographer Jean Gottmann140 and of Gabriel Sheffer. The latter, in a text lacking the slightest reference to other authors, resumes the analyses elaborated ten years earlier by listing the elements of the “profile” of the “trans-state social and political entities” that are diasporas. On the basis of these elements he then writes that “in accordance with this definition, it appears that about four hundred million people are members of the various diaspora communities.”141 However, conscious that the study of diasporas was becoming a “field of scholarship”, he proposed theoretical and comparative pathways to hone the model: they included the necessity of considering types of migrants and diasporas, the choices made by diasporas (assimilation in the host country, minority status, irredentist or secessionist strategies), the relationships between the homeland and the diaspora, or the effects of diasporic strategies on the host country. The conclusion is clear: “Scholarly work on various aspects that I have mentioned is in progress, nevertheless it is also clear that all those who study diasporas have on their hands a very long and rich agenda of definitional, theoretical, analytical and comparative issues, whose discussion may result in a better idea of the place and role of diaspora studies as a separate field of inquiry.”142 137 138 139 140 141 142

Emmanuel Ma Mung, “Non-lieu et utopie: la diaspora chinoise et le territoire,” in ibid., 171. Amir Abdulkarim, “La Diaspora libanaise: une organisation communautaire,” in ibid., 90. Vladimir Kolossov, Tamara Galkina, and Mikhaïl Kouibychev, “La Géographie des diasporas et les communautés arménienne, juive, grecque de l’ex-URSS,” in ibid., 133. Jean Gottmann, “La Généralisation des diasporas et ses conséquences,” in Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, 21-28. This text contains no real attempt at definition. Gabriel Sheffer, “Whither the Study of Ethnic Diasporas? Some Theoretical, Definitional, Analytical and Comparative Considerations,” in ibid., 39. Ibid., 46.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

373

If the geographer Paul Claval believed in his conclusion that “participants agreed with the ideal type of diaspora as presented by Gabi Sheffer,”143 it is true that the collected texts draw very little on his criteria or that they do not at least attempt to apply that definition to construct their object. In a general manner, the concept of diaspora that dominates in the volume is at once maximalist and spontaneous, such that, as Jean Gottmann wrote, “it becomes difficult today to find a nation which does not have its diaspora, that is, that does not have an often significant part of its population dispersed beyond the borders of the national state.”144 Stanley Brunn stretched the notion to its limits by defining diaspora as “a movement of people or a group displaced from one setting and taking up residence in another country,” “diaspora populations” thus including populations forced to migrate (refugees, victims of persecution, of civil war, of natural or technological catastrophes) or those who have chosen migration, this latter category including not only labour migrants but also tourists, foreign students, spies, competitors at Olympic Games and whaling crews!145 Many of the participants pursued their own theoretical pathways. This was particularly the case for Emmanuel Ma Mung, who founded his theory more on processes than on static indicators. As he explained in his article, two objective morphological characteristics defined the diaspora: the multipolarity of migration – the existence of a number of territorial poles – and the interpolarity of relations with the homeland and between the different poles of migration.146 Other authors adhered to a common sense definition in which diaspora referred to the collected members of a national population dispersed on the territory of one or more countries, thereby according it the sense of an “ethnic group of foreign origin”.147 Some authors, such as André-Louis Sanguin, refused to construct a “catch-all” concept altogether: “An abusive and allembracing usage of the concept consists in considering any immigrant population from a third country as a diaspora. Thus the 36,000 French and the 32,000 British in Montreal are diasporas! Clearly this is not so, since they are

143 144 145 146

147

Paul Claval, “Diasporas and Politics: An Overview,” in ibid., 439. Gottmann, “La Généralisation des diasporas et ses conséquences,” 22. Stanley Brunn, “The Internationalization of Diasporas in a Shrinking World,” in Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, 263. Also see Emmanuel Ma Mung, “Dispositif économique et ressources spatiales: éléments d’une économie de diaspora,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 8, no. 3 (1992), 175-194. Gérard-François Dumont, “Diasporas et valeurs républicaines en France,” in Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, 355-372.

374

Chapter 7

people from wealthy states, democratic and not overpopulated, who have emigrated for strictly personal reasons, and voluntarily, in order to realise personal or professional aims.”148 The particularity of the French texts, or all those published in a French context during the first half of the 1990s, is their exclusive use of the territorial version of diaspora. The decentered version only arrived in France later, which is hardly surprising if one considers that British cultural studies was little known in France before the mid-1990s.149 Before this period, the few translations of books or articles, undertaken by sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron or the historians of the EHESS, were of authors such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams or E.P. Thompson.150 A knowledge of Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy, or their translation, only came later. We find a few scattered references to Gilroy from the early 1990s among sociologists or political scientists interested in questions of migration, racism or minorities, such as Michel Wieviorka, Didier Lapeyronnie or Catherine Neveu,151 while Hall is generally confined to the domain of communication, where journals such as Hermès and, particularly, Réseaux would contribute to a wider knowledge of his work through translations from 1994 onwards.152 The first French texts that refer to Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy’s decentered concept of diaspora started to appear in 1995 and find their place on the trajectory of the anthropologist and geographer Christine Chivallon. After defending her thesis on the peasantry of Martinique in 1992,153 she turned to an analysis of territory more specifically focused on the notion of networks, without how148 149 150 151

152

153

André-Louis Sanguin, “Les Diasporas et leurs trajectoires dans les grandes métropoles canadiennes: le cas de Montréal,” in ibid., 410-411. Erik Neveu, “Les Voyages des Cultural Studies,” L’Homme, no. 187-188 (2008), 321-322. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz, 1963. Didier Lapeyronnie, L’Individu et les minorities: la France et la Grande-Bretagne face à leurs immigrés. Paris: PUF, 1993, 102, 119, and 120; Catherine Neveu, Communauté, nationalité et citoyenneté. De l’autre côté du miroir : les Bangladeshis de Londres. Paris: Karthala, 1993, 344 sqq; Michel Wieviorka, L’Espace du racisme. Paris: Seuil, 1991, 246. Stuart Hall, “Codage/décodage,” Réseaux, no. 68 (1994), 27-39. It is in Réseaux that we find one of the first general works on Cultural Studies. Armand Mattelart and Erik Neveu, “Cultural studies’ stories: la domestication d’une pensée sauvage?” Réseaux, vol. 14, no. 80 (1996), 11-58. Christine Chivallon, Tradition et modernité dans le monde paysan martiniquais: approche ethno-géographique, Dissertation thesis in Geography, Université Bordeaux III, 1992. This work was the basis of a monograph published in 1998: Christine Chivallon, Espace et identité à la Martinique: paysannerie des mornes et reconquête collective, 1840-1960. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

375

ever extending to diasporas.154 In 1994, she spent a period at the University of Portsmouth in England, which allowed her not only to undertake a survey of the works of British post-modern geographers,155 but also to begin to reflect upon and to publish in terms of a “Caribbean diaspora” from 1995.156 The first articles that she published on the question referred to Hall and Gilroy, but also to Sheffer, in an approach in which territory is no longer anything more than a particular form of spatiality.157 According to her, the contribution of the analyses of Édouard Glissant, Hall or Gilroy concerning Caribbean identities lay in the fact that they did not necessarily conceive of diaspora as a unit.158 In 1997, Chivallon started to contrast quite explicitly two perspectives upon diaspora, that of unity and of the territory-root, with which were associated the names Gabriel Sheffer, Michel Bruneau and Alain Médam, and that of the wandering-network and of hybridity represented by Glissant, Hall and Gilroy.159 In her opinion, the impossibility of extricating a unifying narrative relating to origin in the Caribbean case created a diaspora distinct from the “more classic diasporas”.160 However, she also criticises the fluid conceptualisation of identity which, according to her, may function as a certain form of essentialism, only seeing identity in mobility, thus bringing into play a dualism nevertheless criticised by those same authors.161 The same year she returned 154

155

156

157

158 159 160 161

In February 1994, she spoke on the topic “social networks and territory” at the Maison de la recherche en sciences humaines in Caen. Christine Chivallon, “Deux notions pour comprendre l’expérience sociale de l’espace: réseaux sociaux et territoires,” Cahiers de la Maison de la recherche en sciences humaines de Caen, no. 3 (June 1994), 73-90. Christine Chivallon, “La Géographie britannique et ses diagnostics sur l’époque postmoderne,” Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 43, no. 118 (April 1999), 97-119; as well as, by the same author, “Les Pensées postmodernes britanniques ou la quête d’une pensée meilleure,” Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 43, no. 119 (September 1999), 293-322. Christine Chivallon, “Summary of research on the Caribbean Diaspora,” Department of Geography research seminar, University of Portsmouth, 1 February, 1995. In September she participated at a conference on “Identities in flux: the politics of belonging and exclusion in the new Europe,” with a paper called “The African‐Caribbean Diaspora and Diversity of Registers of Identity,” University of Portsmouth, 22‐24 September 1995. Christine Chivallon, “Les Espaces de la diaspora antillaise au Royaume‐Uni: limites des concepts socioanthropologiques,” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, no. 68‐69 (1995), 198‐210. Christine Chivallon, “Repenser le territoire, à propos de l’expérience antillaise,” Géographie et cultures, no. 20 (1996), 45-54. Christine Chivallon, “Du territoire au réseau: comment penser l’identité antillaise,” Cahiers d’études africaines, vol. 37, no. 148 (4th trimester 1997), 775. Ibid., 784. Ibid., 787-788.

376

Chapter 7

to this idea in more detail: in the British postmodern usage of diaspora, it is the unstable that becomes noteworthy while the fixed and the centre are stigmatised.162 Presented as neutral, these concepts are charged with intention and, in Britain as elsewhere, underpin implicit hierarchies through the dualisms that they express. If Hall was the principal target of the article that appeared in Cahiers d’études africaines, here it is Paul Gilroy who, doubtless because he appears more nuanced, takes up more space. She would subsequently devote several critical texts163 to his work on the Black Atlantic before publishing a whole book in 2004, thoroughly documented, on the “Black diaspora of the Americas”. Thus, all while remaining critical of the two antagonistic poles of the territory-roots and of the postmodernist wandering-network, she claims the use of the term for herself. In 1999 she wrote that “diasporas teach us [much] about the recomposition of the communitarian link through dispersion,”164 and her 2004 argument is even more interesting, since she asserts that we should “’take it to task’” and thereby “make use it, both in the exploration of the realities it evokes and in that of the categories for understanding both of the realities that offer themselves up to us and the categories used to understand these realities”. She thus proposes to “employ not only the stable contents expected of a concept, but also the indeterminacy the concept entails in order to extract whatever these contents have to offer or to reveal concerning certain social phenomena and their modes of intellection.”165 The critical reflection on the use of the notion thus goes together with a recognition of its importance and its polysemy At the end of the 1990s Chivallon’s undertaking encountered a growing interest in the concept of diaspora in the French academic world. Several special issues of journals, in different disciplines, were devoted to it at the beginning of the 2000s,166 while an increasing number of articles questioned the

162 163

164 165 166

Christine Chivallon, “De quelques préconstruits de la notion de diaspora à partir de l’exemple antillais,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 13, no. 1 (1997), 157. Chivallon, “La Diaspora noire des Amériques”; by the same author, “‘Black Atlantic’ revisited: une lecture de Paul Gilroy pour quelques prolongements vers le jazz,” L’Homme, no. 187‐188 (2008), 343‐374. Christine Chivallon, “Fin des territoires ou nécessité d’une conceptualisation autre?” Géographie et cultures, no. 31 (1999), 134. Chivallon, The Black Diaspora, xiv. “Les Anonymes de la mondialisation,” Cultures et conflits, no. 33-34 (Spring-Summer 1999); “Les Diasporas,” CEMOTI (Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerranée orientale et le monde turcoiranien), no. 30 (2nd semester 2000); “Diasporas, développements et mondialisations,” Autrepart, no. 22 (2002); “Diasporas caribéennes,” Hommes et migrations, no. 1237 (2002);

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

377

meaning, the usage, even the limits of the concept.167 Since 2002, within the FRAMESPA (France méridionale et Espagne: histoire des sociétés du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine) research centre at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail, the Diasporas team, particularly specialised in the study of the history of Judaism and Protestantism, launched a new journal, Diasporas, histoires et sociétés, whose aims were less the study of diasporas as such than that of the “critical issues of diaspora”168 (promised lands, returns, conversion and fidelities), it being understood that “to study diasporas involves interrogating this vast lexical and semantic field which ceaselessly describes […] the migratory ordeal.”169 Resolutely multidisciplinary, the project also set itself the task of a renewed understanding, not of diaspora as a unique category but diasporas as experiences of dispersion and links. In a framing article the sociologist Chantal Bordes-Benayoun proposed a largely new approach consisting of abstracting the study of diasporas from the question of territory, which had the notable effect of detaching them from the Jewish prototype, the Jewish dispersion revealing itself to be fundamental less for its exemplarity than for the incessant reformulations of its relationship with the community and with territory.170 The diasporic condition as a spatial and cultural relationship particular to itself and to others becomes the central issue, and it has fertilised the different issues of Diasporas since 2002. Moreover, the launch of this journal established the Toulouse research team as one of the essential centres for the research on diasporas in France, together with Migrinter in Poitiers and its Revue européenne des migrations internationales.

167

168

169 170

“Migrations et diasporas,” Balkanologie, vol. 7, no. 1 (2003); “Diaspora: identité plurielle,” Africultures, no. 72 (2005); “Traversées, diasporas, modernité,” Raisons politiques, no. 21 (2006); “Figures et expériences diasporiques,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 22, no. 1 (2006). Martine Hovanessian, “La Notion de diaspora: usages et champ sémantique,” Journal des anthropologues, no. 72-73 (1998), 11-29. Despite its interest, this article only presents a largely French perspective on the field of diasporas, foreign theoretical contributions being limited to Sheffer and Safran. Barely two years later, an article on the subject by the anthropologist Pierre Centlivres is significantly more concerned with Anglophone theoretical perspectives. Pierre Centlivres, “Portée et limites de la notion de diaspora,” CEMOTI, no. 30 (2nd semester 2000), 5-12. As demonstrated by the themes of the different issues since 2002: “Terres promises, terres rêvées” (1), “Langues dépaysées” (2), “Passages, conversions, retours” (3), “Cinéma, cinema” (4), “Généalogies rêvées” (5), “Migrations en mémoire”(6), and so on. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Patrick Cabanel, “Projet éditorial,” Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés, no. 1 (2nd semester 2002), 7-9. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, “Revisiter les diasporas,” in ibid., 12.

378

Chapter 7

A large international conference, originally to be held in Jerusalem, was organised in Poitiers in 2002. In addition to the French specialists on the concept (Dominique Schnapper, Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, Martine Hovanessian, Emmanuel Ma Mung, Georges Prévélakis, Michel Bruneau, Christine Chivallon), it brought together some of the “big names” of the nascent international field (Sheffer, Safran, Tölölyan) as well as a large number of young scholars. The introduction to the edited volume that ensued, written by the anthropologist Lisa Anteby-Yemini, the geographer William Berthomière and the political scientist Gabriel Sheffer, while noting that diaspora is one of those “words which are used indiscriminately,” “overloaded with meaning as much as it is emptied of it,” intended to “undertake a critique of the concept through an exploration of the multiple facets that it offers to research.”171 The book in general, well framed by the introduction, offers one of the first panoramas of the field in French, including in a single volume references to – and sometimes chapters by – Armstrong, Sheffer, Safran, Tölölyan, Cohen, Clifford, Appadurai, Bhabha, Hall and Gilroy as well as chapters from French scholars such as Richard Marienstras, Alain Médam and Michel Bruneau. In this “time of confusion”, Anteby-Yemini and Bertomière called for the elaboration of a more refined “theoretical infrastructure” to thereby “contribute to the elevation of the word diaspora towards a concept truly inscribed within an explicative social theory through a multidisciplinary approach.”172 At the same time, between 2002 and 2004, the geographers Christine Chivallon and William Berthomière organised a research programme entitled “Interrogating diasporas, understanding constancies and mobilities,” organised around a number of seminars. The ensuing edited volume appeared in 2006 and the introduction, by Chivallon and Berthomière showed various evolutions in comparison with the 2002 conference papers. On the one hand, the declared objective was that of a “snapshot” rather than an “appraisal”, since it seems to have been accepted that diaspora “has become in itself a focal point without however acquiring a clear shape, the notion instead serving to say everything and its opposite.”173 Second, the highly bipolar structure – continuity 171 172

173

Anteby-Yemini and Berthomière, “Di[a]spositif : décrire et comprendre les diasporas,” 9. Ibid., 15. The volume brought together geographers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and empirical texts on a diverse variety of populations: Chinese, Armenians, Jews or Israelis, Palestinians, Philippinos, Blacks, Gypsies, Russians, Turks, Algerians. William Berthomière and Christine Chivallon, “Introduction. Diaspora: ferveur académique autour d’un mot,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 15 and 17. This is not to imply that the idea of a conceptual stocktaking was absent. The first part of the text was entitled “Esquisse d’un bilan théorique,” 29.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

379

versus refusal of an equivocal continuity – of the “field of diasporic studies” was brought up to date in an attempt to grasp the indissociably scientific and social issues linked to the use of the term.174 Third, the ambition of theoretical unification had become backgrounded in favour of a collection of interrogations on the parameters of the uses of the concept. The annex, returning to the initial questions of the groups, therefore speaks eloquently of the desire to organise debates around questions and not certitudes.175 Finally, the very homogeneity inherent to many uses of diaspora became an explicit object of interrogation.176 Still, despite this very ambitious programme, a consideration of the constitutive history of the field, rare are the chapters that attempt to understand the passage to “diaspora”, in the sense of the passage to the usage of the term diaspora. If we consider the distance between the two edited volumes from the 1993 conference and those from 2005 and 2006, we note that the intellectual landscape that they describe has evolved significantly, becoming both more international and more multidisciplinary. This is clear evidence of a growing awareness of foreign scholarship on diasporas – largely in English – on the part of French scholars, but also a progressive structuration of the global academic space considering the question. If this structuration has, in France, often assumed a written form, as journal articles or edited volumes, in the Englishspeaking world it has rather developed through research programmes, publishing series and conferences.

Fixing the Limits The Transnational Communities Programme, which ran from 1997 to 2003177 at the University of Oxford around the sociologist Steven Vertovec – who was the director – and Robin Cohen – a member of the advisory board –, became an essential structuring research axis on diasporas by including it in, a more general sense, in the encompassing category of “transnational communities”. Once its website was online,178 the selection of research tools on offer doubtless had the effect of rendering visible a new academic production, and of 174 175 176 177 178

Ibid., 17-18. See the Annex to the introduction, ibid., 24-27. Ibid., p. 25. In 2003 the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) was established at the University of Oxford. www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk. The website is still active (as of April 2016) although the programme has formally ended in 2003.

380

Chapter 7

furnishing markers for scholars likely to participate in this new venture: a bibliography; more than 24 working papers; a newsletter; a press review entitled Traces; but also a journal and an editorial service. The 2001 launch of the journal Global Networks, subtitled a Journal of Transnational Affairs, one of the very first exclusively dedicated to questions of globalisation and transnationalism, was clearly constituted as a companion to the journal Diaspora. Finally, the TCP was also associated with four book series: The International Library of Studies on Migration edited by Robin Cohen; Transnationalism, edited at Routledge by Steven Vertovec; Global Social Movements edited by Robin Cohen and Shirin Rai with Athlone Press; and finally Global Diasporas, edited by Robin Cohen at UCL Press and then with Routledge. Launched by Cohen’s book, whose importance I have already highlighted, the Global Diasporas serie today includes nine titles, three of them (by Cohen, Van Hear and Koser) being concerned with the study of several populations, the others being devoted to a single group: Italians, Palestinians, Sikhs, Israelis, Hindus and Ukrainians.179 If all the authors have taken on board the conceptual framework developed by Cohen, they certainly do not follow it blindly. On his own admission, Nicholas van Hear adopted a “cowardly perspective” on diaspora, for he suggested that the name could be applied to any population satisfying at least three criteria: a dispersion on the territory of at least two host countries from an original homeland; a continuing presence abroad, even though it be compatible with a degree of circulation between the homeland and the host country; and finally the existence of exchanges (social, political, economic or cultural) between the populations composing the diaspora.180 For her part, Helena Lindholm Schulz undertook to not focus on a group of criteria to define the Palestinian diaspora, but rather to address the question of “diasporic lives” as a condition in which there is a constant reworking of the tension between the two opposed principles represented by the national and the global. It follows that diaspora does not simply refer to dispersion and

179

180

The other eight are, in order of publication: Nicholas Van Hear, New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. London: UCL Press, 1998; Darshan Singh Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood. London: UCL Press, 1999; Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press, 2000; Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge, 2000; Stephen J. Gold, The Israeli Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002; Vic Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002; Khalid Koser ed., New African Diasporas. London: Routledge, 2003; Helena Lindholm Schulz (with Julianne Hammer), The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. London: Routledge, 2003. Van Hear, New Diasporas, 6.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

381

migration, but also in a more general manner to a feeling of displacement.181 In the introduction to the volume that he edited on new African diasporas, Khalid Koser referred to the absence of a clear consensus on the definition among the contributors and made this observation one of the reasons for the plural used in the title.182 In contrast, four of the authors adhered more explicitly to the conceptual model as defined by Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas.183 Vertovec lists the attributes that allow Hinduism to meet Cohen’s criteria.184 Satzewich takes into consideration the principal criticisms levelled at the model before concluding that they “do not alter the fundamental value of Cohen’s overall framework.”185 Stephen Gold and Darshan Singh Tatla adopt more “acrobatic” stances. In the first instance the former believes that, since Cohen’s criteria apply to Jews, they apply also to Israelis. Despite the fact that, if we turn this time to Safran, “Israeli emigrants probably do not qualify as a diaspora per se, largely because of the short duration of their exile and the relative ease of return,” he considers that despite everything, they “are intimately familiar with the language of diaspora and often describe their experience and identity as such.”186 Similarly, as he attempts to prove the existence of a Sikh diaspora, Darshan Singh Tatla finds himself faced with the apparent impossibility of explaining Sikh dispersion in terms of forced migration since they have generally settled abroad in the context of an organised labour migration, under contract, known as an indenture. Since he thereby implicitly refuses to apply Cohen’s second criterion to them, that of voluntary migration, he creates an escape hatch: “However, the tragic consequences and shock at the destruction of the Akal Takhat in 1984 in Amritsar invite some comparison with the Babylonian tragedy following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Applying Cohen’s criteria, it seems that overseas Sikh communities fulfill the sufficient conditions of a diaspora…”187 QED. This rapid consideration of the justifications of the usage of the term in the texts of the Global Diasporas series demonstrates not only that this latter is open to different visions of what a diaspora is, but also that being able to de181 182 183 184 185 186 187

Lindholm Schulz, The Palestinian Diaspora, 21. Khalid Koser, “New African Diasporas: An Introduction,” in Koser, New African Diasporas, 4-5 and 7. Donna Gabaccia’s position will be presented infra. Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora, 2-4. This at least allows Cohen to justify his point by reference to Vertovec the following year. See infra. Satzewich, The Ukrainian Diaspora, 18. Gold, The Israeli Diaspora, 2. Safran’s text is “Comparing Diasporas: A Review Essay,” Diaspora, vol. 8, no. 3 (1999), 255-291. Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora, 5.

382

Chapter 7

scribe a population as a diaspora acquires a new persuasive force and opens a sort of “academic niche” offering possibilities of funding and publication. One of the most conclusive indicators of this officialisation in the academic lexicon is certainly the multiplication, since the end of the 1990s, of entries consecrated to the concept of diaspora in dictionaries or encyclopaedias specialised in the social sciences and humanities in general188 or by discipline (geography in particular) or by theme such as they may be defined according to country: global culture,189 ethnic studies,190 intercultural relations,191 postcolonial studies192, cultural studies193, globalisation,194 and doubtless many others. Moreover, since 1999, collective interrogations on the notion of diaspora and its heuristic character have multiplied within the social sciences, be it in international conferences or in journal special issues. Again, the disciplines concerned are numerous: international relations, geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and so on. In addition to specialised conferences,195 numerous panels on the question have been organised in the 188 189 190

191 192 193 194

195

Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Dominique Schnapper, “Diaspora,” in Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, ed. Sylvie Mesure and Patrick Savidan (Paris: PUF, 2006), 272-274. “Diaspora,” in Appiah and Gates, The Dictionary of Global Culture, 178-179. Denys Cuche, “Diaspora,” Pluriel Recherches, no. 8 (2001), 14-23; Peter Braham and Aldo Zargani, “Diaspora,” in Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture, ed. Guido Bolaffi (London: Sage, 2003), 73-76; Vertovec, “Diaspora”. Michel Valière, “Diaspora,” in Dictionnaire de l’altérité et des relations interculturelles, ed. Gilles Ferréol and Guy Jucquois (Paris: Armand Colin, 2003), 89-91. See particularly Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin eds., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2007 (first edition 1998), 61-62. Chris Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2004, 51-52. I should confess that my own works have contributed to this growth, even if, within the context of the present work, I have always attempted to emphasise the history of usages of the concept. See “Diasporas,” in Encyclopedia of Globalization, ed. Roland Robertson and Jan Aart Scholte (New York: Routledge, 2007), 311-316, as well as “Diaspora,” in Dictionnaire de l’immigration, ed. Smaïn Laacher (Paris: Larousse, 2012), 160-164. To cite but a selection: “Diasporas: Transnational Identities and the Politics of the Homeland,” University of California, Berkeley, 13 November 1999; “Arméniens et Grecs en diaspora,” École française d’Athènes, Athens, 4-6 October 2001; “2 000 ans de diasporas,” Migrinter, Poitiers, February 2002; “Imagining Diasporas: Space, Identity and Social Change,” University of Windsor (Canada), 14-16 May 2004; “Transnational Diasporas in Comparative Perspective,” Hebrew University of Tel-Aviv, 4-6 September 2007; “Diaspora and Transnationalism,” IMISCOE, European University Institute, Florence, 10-11 April 2008; or indeed, the series of “Global Conferences,” organised at Mansfield College, Oxford, in July 2008, 2009 and 2010 on the general theme of “Diasporas: Exploring Critical Issues,”; and many more since 2010.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

383

large disciplinary conferences such as, amongst others, the International Studies Association, the American Political Science Association or the International Sociological Association. Elsewhere, in addition to the creation of journals dedicated to the question of diasporas,196 numerous journals, such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Asian Studies Review, Migration, African Studies Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Journal of Population Geography, have devoted special issues to diaspora in recent years,197 further proof of the relative rapidity with which the term has inserted itself into a growing number of academic disciplines during the past fifteen years, thereby becoming a contemporary concept in academic research. An examination of the incorporation of the term in the titles or abstracts of theses is also indicative of this diffusion. All the reliable databases that I have been able to consult in the domain largely indicate a similar evolution, that is, a steady increase, often in successive stages, since the end of the 1980s. Occasionally this growth is not quantitatively significant, given the small number of theses submitted. In the French case, for example, the number of defended theses containing diaspora, diasporas, or diasporique in their titles is insignificant. There were two between 1980 and 1984, and the numbers increase slowly over subsequent years: three between 1985 and 1989, five between 1990 and 1994, three between 1995 and 1999, seven between 2000 and 2004 then six between 2005 and 2009. Still, other criteria allow for a better measure of this growth. Taking into consideration the occurrences of diaspora, diasporas, and diasporique in thesis abstracts, written by the students themselves, demonstrates a much clearer evolution. If there were only two between 1980 and 1984, there were 15 and 16 in 1985-1989 and 1990-1994 respectively, before continuing to multiply in a regular fashion: 25 in 1995-1999, 27 in 2000-2004. There were 47 between 2005 and 2009.198 (see Figure 3 infra, p. 384) Three stages are revealed, one during the second half of the 1980s, the second during the second half of the 1990s and a third during the second half of

196

197

198

In addition to Tölölyan’s journal, Diaspora, and the French journal Diasporas, we note the creation, in New Delhi in 2008, of Diaspora Studies, which is primarily concerned with the Indian diaspora. The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 98, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 1999); African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (2000); “Globalization and Diasporas,” Migration, no. 33-34-35 (2002); Asian Studies Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (June 2003); “Geographies of Diaspora,” International Journal of Population Geography, vol. 9, no. 4 (2003); Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (July 2004); Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 2 (Spring 2007). Source: SUDOC (www.sudoc.abes.fr).

384

Chapter 7

Figure 3

Yearly evolution of the French submitted thesis abstracts with “diaspora” or “diasporas” in their title (1980-2009).199

Figure 4

Yearly evolution of the French thesis topics with “diaspora” or “diasporas” in their title (1980-2009).200

the first decade of the 2000s. If we take as our source the Central register of theses, the database that catalogues the registration of thesis subjects, we note that the progression is even clearer and that it is, as one might expect, a few years in advance of the defence of the works in question (see Figure 4 p. 384). 199 200

Results from the Sudoc database (http://www.sudoc.abes.fr). The Central File for Theses does not register theses in progress at Sciences Po Paris since 2005. I have found three such theses for the period 2005-2009. I have added them to the 29 theses founds on the database of the Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur (http://www.abes.fr).

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

385

If we consider the disciplines of enrolment, there were five for the period 1990-1994: history (four), ethnology (three), geography (three), political science (two) and African studies (one). Between 1995 and 1999, geography held the lead with four theses, ahead of sociology, (three), ethnology (two), history (one) and Iberian studies (one). The five following years saw a distinct growth in the disciplinary spread. Behind political science (five), sociology (four), history (four) and geography (four), arrive ethnology (three), linguistics (two), followed by a number of other disciplines: literature, IT, law, North American studies, African studies. Since 2005 anthropology/ethnology holds the lead (five), followed by a number of disciplines with three registered theses: sociology, history, IT, economics, political science, and geography, while new disciplines make their appearance, such as film studies, Arab studies or Hispanic studies, each with one thesis a piece. The most striking feature is the progressive disappearance, within this body of work, of studies dealing with the Jewish people and their history. Out of 32 thesis subjects registered since 2005, none concern Jews or Israel: the populations concerned are the Irish, Bretons, Indians, Algerians, Portuguese, Ivorians, Armenians, Vietnamese, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and West Indians. The Index of Theses allows us to similarly analyse theses defended in Great Britain and in Ireland. The evolution displays much the same regularity as far as the presence of the words diaspora, diasporas, or diasporic in the titles is concerned: from two in 1980-1984, there are nine in 1985-1989, before rising to 23 in 1990-1994, 32 in 1995-1999 and more than 40 in the following periods. Once again, we note that studies concerning Jews have almost entirely disappeared: only one among the thirteen theses defended in 2001,201 and again only one among fourteen in 2002. During these two years, the works concerned Hindus Croats, Scots, Blacks, Chinese Irish, West Indians, Greeks, Pakistanis, and Palestinians. For works in North American universities, the Proquest database202 shows that there has been a similar growth over the past two decades: the number of thesis titles containing diaspora, diasporas, or diasporic increased tenfold between the 1980s and the 1990s (ten between 1980 and 1989, 99 between 1990 and 1999) before being again multipled by three during the first decade of the 2000s: 320 between 2000 and 2009.

201 202

And this was comparing Jewish and Afro-Caribbean communities in Great Britain during the 20th century. As this database also includes theses submitted in some German, French, Australian or British universities, I have of course only counted those submitted in North America.

386

Figure 5

Chapter 7

Yearly evolution of the North-American theses with “diaspora,” “diasporas,” or “diasporic” in their title (1990-2009).

A closer analysis since the beginning of the 1990s shows, beyond the annual fluctuation observed, particularly since 2006, the existence of steps similar to those visible in the figures: more than ten from the mid-1990s onwards, more than 20 at the beginning of the 2000s, and more than 30 since the mid-2000s (see Figure 5, p. 386). As in other countries, the increase in the number of populations studied in terms of diaspora parallels a very marked decrease in the proportion of these works devoted to the study of the Jewish or Israeli diaspora. Out of 97 North American theses defended in 2008 and 2009, only five, that is 6 %, concern Jews or the relationships between the state of Israel and the Jewish population worldwide. It thus seems clearly that the concept of diaspora, still little used at the end of the 1980s, rapidly took its place in the vocabulary of a growing number of disciplines – history, geography, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, comparative literature – and of interdisciplinary fields: migration studies, ethnic studies, studies on globalisation… In less than a decade, it acquired the status of an established concept, and this despite the tensions that permeated the foundations of the new domain. Beyond the distinction between the two principal perspectives, centred and decentred, the forms of definitions, where they existed, were themselves quite different: we can highlight the open definitions – such as those of John Armstrong and Gabriel Sheffer –, proposing a loose and undiscriminating view of the object under study and leaving the door open to, a priori, an undetermined number of cases; the categorical definitions that inscribe the object to be studied within a panoply of strict criteria, most or all of which need to be met in order to be granted the scientific definition of true diaspora; and, finally, the oxymoronic definitions, such as those of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, among others, which propose not a

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

387

real definition of the concept, but a concept of cultural identity in dispersion, reworked by permanence and change. These tensions, however, sketch out the contours of the field of diaspora studies, for they allow us to assign positions to the different scholars who use the concept, as demonstrated most notably by attempts at an epistemological description of this conceptual and interdisciplinary space. Otherwise, it was through the synthesis of the tensions that, post-1997, the attempts at a localisation of the constitutive axes of the field were elaborated, in particular around the Transnational Communities Programme and its principal actors, Robin Cohen and Steven Vertovec. In addition to the initial attempt, represented by Global Diasporas, Vertovec, who was at the time a scholar working largely on Hinduism outside India, proposed in the journal Diaspora the same year, to consider diaspora in the form of three distinct but complementary significations. Diaspora could represent a “social form”, a definition that foregrounds the transnational political and economic dimensions of groups and networks maintaining links, explicit or implicit, with their homeland within the framework of a “triadic relationship”, including the dispersed groups, the host states and the homeland states; a “type of consciousness,” characterised by duality and paradox, here and there, roots and itineraries, multilocality; and finally, a specific “mode of cultural production,” linked to the process of globalisation and implying a constructivist, anti-essentialist and processual approach to ethnicity which valorises the notions of métissage, creolisation and hybridisation and raises the question of modes of communication.203 The particularity of Vertovec’s analysis is to not directly associate each of these with specific group of authors. If Sheffer, Safran, Cohen, Baumann are grouped fairly logically for the definition in terms of social form, Appadurai is also included. The latter, together with Carol Breckenridge, is equally involved in the “type of consciousness” project with Safran, Clifford, Gilroy, Hall, but also Robin Cohen. As for the last definition, it brings together Appadurai, Ulf Hannerz, Nina Glick-Schiller and Stuart Hall. Two years later, Vertovec and Cohen published an anthology of nearly 700 pages, composed of 34 texts arranged in three sections, the first on contemporary migrations, the second on “Old and New Meanings of Diaspora” and the last on the question of transnationalism, three themes that are incontestably “intuitively linked”, although these links require some understanding.204 Con203 204

Steven Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’ Exemplified among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora, vol. 6, no. 3 (1997), 277-299. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, “Introduction,” in Vertovec and Cohen, Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, xiii.

388

Chapter 7

cerning diaspora, the two editors insist on the fact that they “have spent a good deal of time in previous and current writing trying to arrest the tendency whereby the continuing potency of the term is threatened by its misuse as a loose reference – conflating categories such as immigrants, guest-workers, ethnic and ‘racial’ minorities, refugees, expatriates and travellers.”205 The desire for a synthesis is undeniable, not only because Vertovec and Cohen return to the tripartite schema of the former (social form, type of consciousness and cultural mode of production206) but also because, for the first time in a single volume, they bring together articles considered founding texts of the field: Armstrong, Marienstras, Sheffer, Tölölyan, Cohen, Clifford, Hall, Gilroy, Appadurai. The synthesis of opposites appears equally in another pivotal moment in the consolidation of the field, the “return” of the concept to the prestigious International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences published in 2001 under the editorship of Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes, and which returns to the ambitious project attempted by the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences in the 1930s. Almost 70 years after Dubnow’s entry, Robin Cohen wrote an entry for “Diaspora” which is fundamental in its capacity to embrace almost the entire nascent field whose birth he situates during the 1980s, as demonstrated by the fact that none of the bibliographic references at the end of the article predates 1986. Indeed, if Cohen leans heavily on Global Diasporas, a text clearly marked by a largely territorial vision of diasporas, and if he “forgets” Hall, Gilroy and Appadurai, he returns to the idea of the “forms of diaspora”, transforming Vertovec’s ternary model, already resumed in 1999, into a quadripartite model whose fourth axis is constituted by the “diaspora as political orientation”, placing the emphasis on the international dimension and on the influence exercised by “diasporas” on both their homeland states and their host states.207 The entry finishes with a reflection on the uses of the term, suggesting that its future “may be imperilled by having been commandeered to serve too many discrepant purposes and its use to describe cognate, yet different, phenomena.” In a consistent manner with the launch of the journal 205 206 207

Ibid., xvii. It is difficult to ignore allusions to Tölölyan’s editorial in the first issue of Diaspora in this list. Ibid., xvii-xx. Robin Cohen, “Diaspora,” 3644. See also, for a similar perspective, Robin Cohen, “Changing Meanings and Limits of the Concept,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 45. Surprisingly, Cohen suggests that the model he proposed together with Vertovec in 1999 was already quadripartite. Steven Vertovec remained faithful to his ternary model. See particularly Steven Vertovec, “Diaspora,” 106-107.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

389

Global Networks, the transnational now becomes the more encompassing category, the one which allows for the study of communities on the internet as much as global professional associations, global social movements or transnational communities founded on ethnicity. To lay this conceptual division of labour to rest, and consequently the existence of a particular field of analysis, diaspora must therefore possess a facade that is neither too narrow – limited to a few cases – nor too broad – open to all cases –, which implies a certain form of conceptual discipline: “Within the rubric of transnational communities can shelter ‘diaspora’ as a particular form of ethnically defined community. Some degree of self-restraint may, in other words, prove necessary if the term is to retain its conceptual purchase.”208 If this position has always been Cohen’s, he has remained attentive to the transformations of the field and has recently produced an attempt at classification of the forms of solidity associated with the term.209 The taking into consideration of the most “fluid” uses of diaspora is precisely at the heart of another anthology, that edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur in 2003.210 It collects together eleven texts organised in four parts. In their introduction, the two editors specify that “by mapping the trajectory of diaspora studies since the early 1990s, Theorizing Diaspora hopes to contribute to future diasporic paths and theorizations of the multiple migratory subjectivities lived in diaspora.”211 However, the tone of the articles included in the volume indicates that the intentions are otherwise. Indeed, mapping the trajectory of diaspora studies would imply the inclusion of a number of authors who were not included, such as Sheffer, Safran, Tölölyan, Cohen or Clifford. The authors who were included –Appadurai, Gilroy, Hall, the Boyarin brothers, Radhakrishnan, Rey Chow, Kobena Mercer to cite but the better known – are in fact representative not of the field of diaspora studies but of a certain representation of the concept, the most decentered one. Moreover, Braziel and Mannur recognise this, believing that “most recent theorizations of diaspora, notably the essays collected here, have been marked by the ambiguities of the term diaspora itself.”212 The urgency to theorise diaspora therefore rests on two potent ideas that very often lie at the core of decentered 208 209 210 211 212

Cohen, “Diaspora,” 3644-3645. Robin Cohen, “Solid, Ductile and Liquid: Changing Notions of Homeland and Home in Diaspora Studies,” Queen Elizabeth House Working Paper Series, no. 156 (October 2007). Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur eds., Theorizing Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in ibid., 12. Ibid., 4.

390

Chapter 7

definitions: “First, diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation-states. Second, diaspora offers myriad dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of globalisation.”213 Diaspora is therefore an essential term, for it “offers critical spaces for thinking about the discordant movements of modernity, the massive migrations that have defined this century”: “this diasporic movement marks not a postmodern turn from history, but a nomadic turn in which the very parameters of specific historical moments are embodied and – as diaspora itself suggests – re scattered and regrouped into new points of becoming.”214 There is a third collection, more recent still, of texts dealing with diaspora. Published in India, it adopts a sociological approach.215 However, to read the first part in particular, devoted to theoretical aspects, it appears that, there too, the selection is partial. Tölölyan, Sheffer, Baumann are present, as well as other authors who I will refer to in the following chapter. However, the book has no place for Appadurai, Hall, Gilroy or Clifford, as if this anthology were intended as a mirror image of Theorizing Diaspora.216 However, the compilation of “diaspora cases” had already begun, as shown by the publication in 2005 of the first Encyclopedia of Diasporas, in two volumes, which attempts to mark out a unique academic space.217 Noting the evolution of the term since what they felt to be its origins – the Babylonian exile – the editors of the book recalled that it was subsequently used for other historical dispersions, such as that of the Armenians or of slaves seized from Africa. If the book in its entirely, with the exception of a few articles, has no theoretical ambitions, its creators nevertheless proposed a surprising distinction between “six major diasporas” (in alphabetical order, African, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Korean and that from South-East Asia), and a large collection “of other diasporas,”218 whose description constitutes the greater part of the text. Through conferences, special issues of journals, entries in dictionaries or encyclopaedias of the social and human sciences, edited volumes, research 213 214 215 216

217 218

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 3. Sahoo and Maharaj, Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader. An article by William Safran is included, but not that which appeared in Diaspora: “The Jewish Diaspora in Comparative and Theoretical Perspective,” Israel Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 36-60. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard eds., Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures around the World. New York: Kluwer-Plenum, 2005. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard, “Preface,” in ibid., xiv.

Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies

391

programmes and anthologies, over scarcely twenty years, a specific academic space has been staked out. It has the specificity of defining itself less by a methodological or disciplinary relationship with an object than by the unifying force of a concept which, beyond its very diverse, even contradictory definitions, has imposed itself as important and likely to admit for an analysis of a certain number of phenomena in a new manner.

Chapter 8

The Critical Turn If everybody stayed at home (assuming they had a home to stay at), there would be no need for diaspora studies.1 How relevant is the notion of diaspora at a time when it is possible to get from one end of the world to another in 24 hours or less?2 In fifteen years, diaspora has acquired an undeniable academic presence which exceeds its gradual theorisation. By the beginning of the 1990s, the term appeared to offer a framework liable to provide a new approach to the study of migrations, mobilities, the roles of non-state actors, geography and networks at a time when, at the end of the Cold War, new interpretations of the world were appearing in terms of globalisation, the “end of history”, the “clash of civilisations”, the “end of territories”, an “era of networks”, and so on. Elsewhere the term spread and gained popularity in a significant way, not only in the academy, but also, as we have seen, among the representatives of the “dispersed communities”. The dispersion did not stop there: it has also influenced journalistic language and the vernacular, where diaspora has come to describe a growing number of situations and experiences of dispersion. This dispersion I call the “critical turn”. It corresponds to two different phenomena: on the one hand a generalised diffusion raised questions concerning the capacity of scholars to maintain a rigid academic definition or usage; and on the other hand, within academia, the passage to a period of critical examination of the concept followed the celebrations of which it had been the object since the early 1990s. If some of these criticisms concerned the very relevance of its usage, others only concerned one or another of its principal uses, centred or decentered, state-oriented or “post-modern”. So, in either case, whether one insists on the persistence of the nation-state or its end, on the importance of civilisations conceived as essences or on fluid identifications constantly subject to reworking, on the centre, the margins or in the spaces in between, on the territory or on open spatialisation, diaspora appeared as one of the words of its time. It therefore seems useful, in order to understand the 1 Colin Davis, “Diasporic Subjectivities,” French Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2006), 335. 2 Jeet Thayil, “Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 42, no. 2 (November 2006), 125.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_013

The Critical Turn

393

reasons for its success, to undertake a thorough survey of its uses – admiring or critical – in the scientific world, as well as its appropriations, facile or otherwise, unanimous or disputed, in other lexicons, those of journalists, but also of militants and members of the said “diasporas” as they wonder which name would allow them to best describe themselves.

A Word that Asserts Itself One of the first modes through which diaspora imposed itself is that of “it goes without saying”: usage of the word is subject to no reflection, no definition, it is simply incorporated into analyses in a transparent and spontaneous manner, even though the research themes clearly require the problematisation of the terms used. This is undoubtedly the most widespread contemporary usage of the term, by which this latter is intended to speak alone, possibly in an ambiguous and contradictory manner. By way of example, in the introduction that they wrote for a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on the West Indian diaspora, John Goulbourne and John Solomos yielded to the temptation of evidence. After having specified that “the Caribbean diaspora is therefore profoundly an image or representation of modernity in the age when ordinary people can also partake in globalizing processes,”3 they added that the question of a definition had not been their primary concern in the production of the issue and that “the concept was largely taken for granted.”4 In this section, I would like to turn my attention particularly towards other ways in which the term has imposed itself. Among the consequences of the interest in diaspora beginning in the early 1990s, one of the most important and least noticed by specialists was this capacity to impose itself, including on those who do not meet the definition, and even subsequently to leave a rather bitter taste in the mouths of those scholars who had used the term prior to its success. The principal characteristic of these uses is no longer the questioning of the pertinence or otherwise of the appellation diaspora for such and such a population. It is not the taxonomic utility of the concept that is the most important, but rather its heuristic interest, its capacity to bring forth new questions, despite the problems that its use might raise. Through the literature, it is possible to identify several arguments, sometimes contradictory, 3 John Goulbourne and John Solomos, “The Caribbean Diaspora: Some Introductory Remarks,” introduction to a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on the Caribbean diaspora, vol. 27, no. 4 (July 2004), 536. 4 Ibid., 538.

394

Chapter 8

but nevertheless pleading in favour of diaspora: its capacity to bring scholars together, its capacity to modify the traditional gaze on a community, its englobing character, even its neutrality. In the first case, the lability associated with diaspora and its generic character permits scholars, be it in the context of a conference or an edited volume, to agree on a minimal definition in order to compare experiences of historical phenomena. In his introduction to an edited volume on Japanese diasporas, Nobuko Adachi noted that not only had the Japanese and the Nikkei (the overseas born descendants of Japanese) been much less studied by anthropologists, historians and sociologists than other groups of migrants such as Africans, Jews, the Irish and the Chinese, but “nor does much of the existing literature consider them as members of a ‘diaspora’ […], authors are often ‘cautious about using’ the word as it is such a ‘slippery term’ and not clearly defined.”5 In this book in question, all the authors used diaspora: “Among us, there is general agreement that we are examining the societies, cultures, economics, politics and histories of communities of people who have left their ancestral homeland, yet who continue to maintain cultural and emotional group identities that link them to it.”6 Sometimes such an agreement can be achieved by “playing” with the criteria. Carmel Vassallo thus remembers that despite the misgivings expressed by William Safran and Judith Shuval regarding the possibility of considering commercial networks as diasporas, “participants at the recent Corfu Pre-Conference for session X of the Thirteenth International Economic History Congress scheduled for Buenos Aires in 2002, nevertheless, adopted the term ‘diaspora entrepreneurial network’ to represent the somewhat more exclusive phenomenon of the entrepreneurial networks associated with the so-called ‘historical’ diasporas: the Jewish, the Armenian and the Greek. Indians, Chinese and Arabs have been added to the first three even though they would seem to lack, as a collectivity, at least one of the basic attributes which some believe characterise a diaspora narrowly conceived, namely, collective forced dispersion.”7

5 Nobuko Adachi, “Theorizing Japanese Diaspora,” in Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures, ed. Nobuko Adachi (London-New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. On the “slippery” slope of diaspora, see Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 219. 6 Adachi, “Theorizing Japanese Diaspora,” 2. 7 Carmel Vassallo, “The Maltese Entrepreneurial Networks from the Seventeenth Century Onwards: A Review of the Work Done so Far,” paper presented at the Thirteenth International Economic History Congress, Buenos Aires, 22-26 July 2002, 6, available

The Critical Turn

395

For other scholars, the attraction of using diaspora, even though the term might not be entirely appropriate, lies in the way in which it may, under certain conditions, allow them to think otherwise migrations and populations created by migrations. Particularly interesting in this respect is the British political scientist Dibyesh Anand’s 2003 reflection on the “Tibetan diaspora”, for it does not approach the question in the form “do Tibetans constitute a diaspora?” It considers rather the “contested nature” of the concept as well as the significance of its use for Tibetans. After having observed that “the word “Diaspora” is gaining wide circulation within the Tibetan intellectual community as well as within the Tibetanist scholarly community,” he notes that “this growing adoption of Diaspora within the academic field studying the dispersed Tibetans seems to have been inspired less by the specific Jewish example than by its appropriation within the wider field of cultural and postcolonial theory.”8 Before addressing the use of diaspora by Tibetans themselves, he attempts to identify more clearly the different conceptual uses of the term. He thus identifies five versions of the concept, dismisses the two most extreme – a “purist” version in which the applicability of the concept is limited to a handful of cases, and a “nomad” version, for which diaspora is in reality only a strategic metaphor9 – and develops the three remaining ones – a territorial version, with a maintenance of strong links with the homeland; a more encompassing version in which memory and collective action play an important role; and finally a version that places the emphasis on hybridity, discontinuity and decentering – better to grasp the pertinence of the concept in the Tibetan case: The Diaspora concept allows us to consider markers of Tibetan identity and culture in a fresh light, without ridiculing the tremendously important efforts at preserving a specific, historically particularized way of life. While recognizing the crucial role of these acts of preservation in the material, symbolic, and psychic lives of diasporic Tibetans, the re-

online on Academia.edu at the following address: https://www.academia.edu/868419/The_ Maltese_Entrepreneurial_Networks_from_the_seventeenth_century_onwards_A_review_of_ the_work_done_so_far. Prominently addressed in the original paper, the discussion on usage of diaspora almost entirely disappeared from the published version: “Maltese Entrepreneurial Networks,” in Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History, ed. Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, Gelina Harlafis, and Ioanna Pepelagis Minoglou (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 124-144. 8 Dibyesh Anand, “A Contemporary Story of ‘Diaspora’: The Tibetan Version,” Diaspora, vol. 12, no. 2 (2003), 215-216. 9 Ibid., 227 note 5. Anand cites no names.

396

Chapter 8 formulated concept of Diaspora (its third version) problematizes these acts productively. It facilitates an understanding of how, in some ways, they constitute the very traditions they seek to preserve. It also warns against simplistic readings of themes such as the “desire for homeland” and “return” to it, for it is a particularized and idealized space-time projection of Tibet that is imagined and presented as timeless. The Diaspora approach appreciates the practical need to espouse Tibetan identity in essentialist terms and at the same time highlights the contingent and strategic character of these claims, at least at a theoretical level. The adoption of the concept of Diaspora with all its versions (particularly the third version) within Tibetan studies is therefore a significant development. It constitutes, in some sense, a paradigm shift, given that the focus moves away from tradition to innovation, from preservation to construction, from culture to performative and material cultural practices, from identity to processes of identification, from politics to politicization, and, finally, from stasis to change. All these changes afford us new, more positive ways of conceptualizing the Tibetan diaspora.10

Even though she did not problematise her relationship with the term to the extent that Anand did, the American historian Donna Gabaccia, a specialist of Italian migrations, adopted a similar line in justifying both her reticence towards using diaspora for Italians – feeling that the term could not or should not be “stretched” to the point of including migrations from Italy – and her final choice of a supple use of the concept permitting a modification of the traditional gaze of historians of immigration. In a book that appeared in 2000 in the “Global Diasporas” series edited by Robin Cohen, she sketches out a triple heuristic interest: the term allows her to “imagine the possibility of a single Italian diaspora,” and thereby to work towards the establishment of a broad historical synthesis; its plural usage – the “Italian diasporas” – emphasises the difference between networks of trader, labourers, fascists, anarchists; finally, “the seductiveness of the term ‘diaspora’ is that it forces us to look simultaneously at the many places to which migrants traveled, and at the connections among them.”11 The emphasis on connexions, and on networks, frequently appears to justify the use of the word. Despite feeling that the concept is “analytically prob-

10 11

Ibid., 223. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, 9. By the same author, see also “Was There an Italian Diaspora?” in Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity, 17-30.

The Critical Turn

397

lematic,”12 the lawyer Prakash Shah provides a fairly precise definition: “diasporas form ‘translocal’ communities with links […] with very particular local networks in areas of origin or in fresher pastures.”13 As we can see, an insistence on the networks, on the links between the different nexuses which constitute it, lies at the heart of the analysis: diaspora displaces the territorial gaze towards links, leaving no room for other expressions. For Gordon Cheung, “‘Chinese diaspora’ is not perfect either, but it does capture the notion of their economic and networking relations, especially through border-crossing activities.”14 If, for some, diaspora makes a more complex consideration of the situation possible, often by the intermediary of the plural, for others it presents the opposite advantage of being all-inclusive and thus of erasing certain differences and connotations. This emerges, symptomatically, in the work of the Cuban author, critic and publisher Ambrosio Fornet. If the term imposes itself, even if it is not part of the armoury of concepts and metaphors used to describe the Cubans, notably because two other words, “emigration” and “exile”, have already assumed this role, it is because of its neutrality and its capacity to “smooth out” the differences: I myself for years resisted using diaspora because it seemed to me that to do so would mean, first, taking it out of context, and second, that this would serve only to occlude the connotations of the traditional terms, especially those of a political nature. The question of political connotations, however, was what finally made me adopt it, because I became aware that its “semantic neutrality,” so to speak, facilitated its insertion into a terrain – that of literary criticism – where it was necessary to work without preconceived ideas, without prejudices. Besides, today the Cuban diaspora is a hybrid of exile and emigration, to which we would have to add unclassified displacements, from the socio- logical point of view, such as the so-called Peter Pan children, forced by their own parents to emigrate while still young.15

12 13 14 15

Prakash Shah, “Diasporas as Legal Actors: Implications for Established Legal Boundaries,” Non-State Actors and International Law, vol. 5, no. 2 (2005), 154. Ibid., 165. Gordon C.K. Cheung, “Chinese Diaspora as a Virtual Nation: Interactive Roles between Economic and Social Capital,” Political Studies, vol. 52, no. 4 (2004), 664. Ambrosio Fornet, “The Cuban Literary Diaspora and Its Contexts: A Glossary,” Boundary 2, vol. 29, no. 3 (2002), 92.

398

Chapter 8

Thus, despite the resistances that it meets, diaspora occupies an increasing amount of space. In a 2007 article that he devoted to Hindus in Australia, the Australian anthropologist and philosopher Purushottama Bilimoria specified that if he was following “the growing trend” in referring to the “Hindu diaspora”, he was not satisfied by the term: “Its peculiar origins in the homeless reidentification with an imagined or politically constructed nation state with the long dispersed Jewish, Palestinian and Armenian people notwithstanding, there are two issues that urge against its widespread adoption in the study of transnational migration and settlement of Hindus”: the fact that most of these latter were expatriates who had chosen to leave, and the inability of diaspora to grasp the “psychosocial anomie” inherent in the process of displacement suffered by the Hindus.16 Still, he specified that he would continue to use diaspora given its increasing spread. Indeed, it is precisely this proliferation and this generalisation that poses the problem of a very particular category of scholars, that might be called the “diaspora repentants,” those scholars who, by virtue of their use of the term since the 1980s or 1990s in their respective domains, accorded it a scientific acceptance before going back on their decision and decided that, given the recent developments regarding the concept, a different approach to the term was required, or that it should only be used with the greatest vigilance. Three cases seem to me to be eloquent, in three different fields (Filipino studies, Chinese studies and Russian and East European studies), those of Epifanio San Juan Jr, Wang Gungwu and Rogers Brubaker. In 2001 the first, a former professor of both comparative literature and of ethnic studies in the United States, began to consider the popularity of diaspora, and wrote specifically of the dangers that might come from some of its more recent and more common uses: Like the words “hybridity,” border crossing, ambivalence, subaltern, transculturation, and so on, the term “diaspora” has now become chic in polite conversations and genteel colloquia. […] One indeed dreads to encounter in this context such buzzwords as “post-nation,” “alterity,” or ludic “differance” now overshadowed by “globalization” and everything prefixed with “trans-” and assorted postalities. In fact I myself used the word “diaspora” as part of the title of my book, From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States. Diaspora becomes

16

Purushottama Bilimoria, “Transglobalism of Self-Exiled Hindus: The Case of Australia,” Religion Compass, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 2007), 306.

The Critical Turn

399

oxymoronic: a particularizing universal, a local narrative that subsumes all experiences within its fold. Diaspora enacts a mimicry of itself, dispersing its members around in a kaleidoscope of simulations and simulacras borne by the flow of goods, money, labor, and so on, in the international commodity chain.17 Epifanio San Juan Jr does not suggest that the term to be abandoned, but calls for wariness.18 Wang Gungwu, a historian of Chinese origin and a recognised international specialist in overseas Chinese, takes a more radical position. Author of numerous works on the question,19 himself the product of a “diasporic” trajectory (born in Indonesia in 1930, he studied in London before settling in Australia, Hong Kong and finally Singapore), in 1999 he took a stance strongly against the application of diaspora to Chinese populations living overseas, particularly regretting having himself participated in what he considered an abusive and deleterious usage: The current acceptance of the term [diaspora] for “dispersed Chinese communities” suggests that scholars of the Chinese overseas have certainly created much new work for themselves for many years to come. The more I think about it, the unhappier I am that the term has come to be applied to the Chinese. I have used the term with great reluctance and regret, and I still believe that it carries the wrong connotation and that, unless it is used carefully to avoid projecting the image of a single Chinese diaspora, it will eventually bring tragedy to the Chinese overseas.20 In an interview given in 2001 to the magazine Asian Affairs, he gave his perspective on the term, one he associated with wealth and business acumen. In this sense, the economic success of the first Chinese traders centuries ago, “reminded many of a similar social position achieved by the Jewish merchants

17 18 19 20

Epifanio San Juan Jr., “Interrogating Transmigrancy, Remapping Diaspora: The Globalization of Laboring Filipinos/as,” Discourse, vol. 23, no. 3 (2001), 61. See particularly Epifanio San Juan Jr., Toward Filipino Self-Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. See particularly Wang Gungwu, China and Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991. Wang Gungwu, “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” Inaugural address to the Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University, Canberra, February 1999, published in Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu, ed. Gregor Benton and Hong Liu (London: Routledge, 2004), 15.

400

Chapter 8

elsewhere.” On the other hand, “The word diaspora is in itself an oversimplification and I find personally very alarming that people talk commonly of a Jewish diaspora, an Indian diaspora or a Chinese one, as if the world consist of few ‘leagues’. It is simply not true, but unscrupulous people can use such description to build up the image of a new yellow peril.”21 This sudden scepticism concerning the use of diaspora, coming particularly from one of its experts, has frequently been referred to in the academic literature on overseas Chinese, not, it would seem, to follow suit but rather to establish a slight conceptual distance, particularly in studies which very often no longer problematise the terms used to describe the phenomena under consideration.22 Another example of significant evolution on the part of a scholar with respect to the academic use of diaspora is that of the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker. As he wrote, he had himself “contributed to this form of proliferation.”23 Indeed, the term appeared in several of the texts that he devoted to Russian minorities during the 1990s.24 In a 2000 text, still devoted to the question, he dealt with the “spectacular career [of the term] in the social sciences and humanities.”25 Feeling that its proliferation only rendered its meaning less and less clear, he attempted to specify in which sense he was using it, notably to mark the difference with certain other uses: “In most contemporary discussions, the term ‘diaspora’, together with kindred terms such as ‘globalization’, ‘transnationalism’, and ‘identity’ (especially when this last is understood as fractured, fragmented, multiple, fluid, and so on) evokes the image of a

21

22

23 24

25

Laurent Malvezin, “Diaspora, a Much Abused Word: Interview with Wang Gungwu,” Asian Affairs, no. 14 (Winter 2000-2001), available online at www.asian-affairs.com/Diasporas/wanggungwu.html (accessed April 2016), republished as “The Problems with (Chinese) Diaspora,” in Benton and Liu, Diasporic Chinese Ventures, 49-60. See for instance Frank Pieke, “Chinese Globalization and Migration to Europe,” UC San Diego, Working Paper no. 94, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, March 2004, accessible on the E-scholarship website: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gv6w1bj (last accessed April 2016), 1. Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 14 note 5. See particularly, in chronological order, “The Russian Diaspora and Non-Russian Nationalism,” paper presented at the American Sociological Association annual conference, Cincinnati, 13-16 August 1991; “L’Éclatement des peuples après la chute des empires,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 98 (1993), 3-19; as well as the book he devoted to the issue of nationalism in 1996: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rogers Brubaker, “Accidental Diasporas and External ‘Homelands’ in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present,” Political Science Series, no. 71, Institut für Höhere Studien, Vienne, Octobee 2000, 1.

The Critical Turn

401

post-modern, uprooted, mobile, deterritorialized world. It suggests, moreover, a post-national world, a world in which the nation-state is no longer an appropriate category of analysis.”26 A contrario, the “diasporas” that Brubaker studies are instead “post-multinational” for they are the result of the disappearance of an empire and are thus the product of a national logic. Five years later, the turn is even more important, since for Brubaker it is no longer a matter of justifying the meaning that he gave to the term, but to suggest, much as he did with Frederick Cooper in a 2000 article on identity,27 ways of emerging from the general confusion: “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.”28 After attempting to identify the three essential characteristics which lay at the core of the majority of definitions of diaspora, that is, spatial dispersion, orientation towards a homeland, real or imaginary, and finally the preservation of group boundaries,29 he challenges two interpretations that have emerged from the novelty that the multiplication of diasporas and discourses of diasporas represents: the first a radical change in ways of seeing the world, opposed to the classic nationalist vision, assimilationist and teleological; and the second a radical transformation of the world itself, which has become more postcolonial, deterritorialised, globalised, transcultural and transnational. According to Brubaker, not only had a new perspective on migration and on assimilation emerged “long before ‘diaspora’ became fashionable,” in the 1960s, but the belief in a growing porosity of state frontiers and in the quantitative growth in international migrations did not stand up to an examination of the facts. The nation-state has not disappeared to make way for diasporas. Finally, Brubaker suggests that the use of the term often risks reifying the group in question, thus risking an essentialist perspective that presumes the existence of an identity. “To overcome these problems of groupism, I want to argue that we should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim.”30 If Brubaker’s article undeniably has its limitations – both because

26 27 28 29 30

Ibid. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society, vol. 29, no. 1 (2000), 1-47. Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 1. Ibid., 5-7. Ibid., 12.

402

Chapter 8

he considers that the popularity of diaspora only dates from the 1990s and because his criticisms, entirely legitimate and just, of the “novelty” of diasporas, or of the attention that they have attracted, undermines any analysis of the conditions of the possibility of a “diaspora discourse” –, he points the finger at a fundamental element: the necessary “desubstantialisation” of diaspora in the academic world in order to make of it a “category of practice.”31 This call for an analysis of the discursive practices of diaspora calls for a slight distancing from the academic world and its definitions in order to better grasp its non-academic uses, be they journalistic, political, popular or artistic. Just as it did in certain Black American circles at the beginning of the 1970, diaspora offered new opportunities for self-description, to grant an individual sense to one’s identity, to attach oneself to positive identifications, at the risk of “stretching the word”. In 2004, Carol Latchford, a Black woman adopted by White Canadian parents, a feminist militant and social justice worker, meditates on the possibility of using diaspora to describe herself, to give herself a place as a member of a group, in the following terms: Now, at 42, I can say I am a Black woman of Bi-racial ancestry and I can own that. But it’s been a hell of a journey. I still struggle with the language that defines my racial identity “half-caste,” “mixed race,” “halfbreed,” “mulatto,” “Bi-racial.” These words scatter me, halve me, disperse me. As in Diaspora. If you are the child I was, raised with loving parents from a different race, and in a very different time, there is a wide range of conflict and confusion to navigate. Now throw in sexuality. Is there room in Diaspora to be Lesbian, Queer, or Transgendered and Bi-racial? Perhaps it is necessary for us to redefine Diaspora, to stretch the word to make it bend and blend with the realities of so many children like myself.32 In the end, she concludes that diaspora “sounds like a beautiful woman’s name.”33 Likewise, it is the beauty of the word, accompanied by its new positivity, that emerges from the testimonial written in his blog in January 2007 by a man, 50-ish, originally from West Africa and working in London in the technology sector: 31

32 33

This position is not new in itself. In addition to my own work, see Christine Chivallon, “De quelques préconstruits de la notion de diaspora à partir de l’exemple antillais,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 13, no. 1 (1997), 149-160. Carol Latchford, “Diaspora?” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2004), 166. Ibid.

The Critical Turn

403

I have been away from Nigeria for 30years. […] In all these thirty years I have been convinced that I was living abroad and, at a push, overseas. It now turns out however that I have actually been living in the diaspora. This sounds like a very lovely place, with fauna and flora, nubile virgins, blue skies and a certain je ne c’est quois (sic). […] All this time I have been “abroad” studying and working my ass off, sitting in dull offices, with dull people, doing dull things to pay off dull bills when I could have been in the diaspora with nubile virgins with understanding ways. I am so mad. Diaspora. What a lovely word. I can just picture myself in Paris whispering it into the ear of an innocent victim “would mademoiselle like to come back with me to the diaspora?” Bet she wouldn’t say no. […] So why in the hell have I never come across this word. Soliloquy. Yes. Ergo. Yes. Ipso facto. Yes. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Yes. Diaspora. Hell no. It has just passed me by.34 These two examples are indicative of transformations in the meaning of the term and its allure for those who might use it to attach themselves to certain groups. Positive, attractive, encompassing, diaspora offers new possibilities for self-description, despite the reservations that it might also raise. Its power of attraction surpasses its power of repulsion, even in cases where the profile of the community in question seems unable, or not required, to “justify” the use of diaspora. Thus, in 2000, on the occasion of the Second World Congress of Basque Communities, the representative of Basque clubs, Iñaki Esnal, noted among his recommendations concerning Basque identity: “Avoid the use of the word ‘diaspora’, as it has connotations of nations with no territory of their own”.35 However, during the same congress, the opening speech, delivered by the American anthropologist William A. Douglass, a specialist of the Basque people, included the word diaspora no fewer than 23 times in scarcely three pages!36 Examples of the interrogatory wanderings over the legitimacy of the use of the term can be found in messages exchanged in the Goanet discussion forum, bringing together individuals whose origins lie in the southwestern In34 35

36

“Look Ma. I’m in the Diaspora Now!,” text posted 5 January, 2007 on the Toks-Boy blog: http://toksie.blogspot.fr/2007/01/look-ma-im-in-diaspora-now.html. Iñaki Esnal, “Evaluation of the 1995-1999 Four-Year Plan by the Basque Centres,” in Euskadi munjduan eraikitzen, proceedings of the 1999 World Congress on Basque Communities, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Gobierno Vasco, 2000, 59. “Speech delivered by Professor William A. Douglass,” in ibid., 15-17. See also “Speech Delivered by the Basque President During the Congress’s Opening Ceremony,” in ibid., 21-25.

404

Chapter 8

dian state of Goa, a former Portuguese colony annexed by India in 1961. Between December 2003 and January 2004, following a message asking if the term diaspora, “used rather frequently in Goanet discussions”, could be “applicable to the Goans not residing in Goa”,37 a lengthy exchange of messages on the theme ensued, lasting until the end of January. During the discussion, various questions followed, about the “Jewish” character of the term, the desire to adopt diaspora for Goans living outside Goa as well as the temptation to create their own name. At the beginning of January 2004 a member of the forum propose creating the word disporia to describe “the voluntary and ongoing exodus of Goans to all parts of the globe for various reasons”.38 This proposition was then rapidly countered by another, two days later, which consisted in forging, in Konkani – an Indo-European language and the official language of Goa – an equivalent of diaspora, inscribed with a logic of vernacularisation. The word pordexporia (from pordex meaning “abroad” in Konkani) was proposed to describe Goans living overseas.39 Despite all these efforts, diaspora finally won, notably because it was widely understood internationally”.40 If some members of the mailing list persisted in using pordexporia or disporia, this neological endodenomination did not “take”. Thus, from the 15th to the 17th June 2007, it was indeed a “Convention of the Goan diaspora” that was held in Lisbon, at the Casa de Goa.41 Disporia and pordexporia are but two examples of the inventiveness prompted by the attractiveness of diaspora over the years. The “proliferation of terms” observed by Brubaker, to describe a condition (diasporicity, diasporism), a process (diasporization and its derivations) or a field of enquiry (diasporology, diasporistics), as well as diverse adjectives such as diasporist, diasporic and diasporan,42 turned out to fall short of the reality. Among the possible neologisms that he invented, with some irony (diasporosity, diasporific, diaspornography, diasportfolio, diasporapathy, diasperanto43), some already existed – such as diasporific – and many others were circulating: diasporian, diaspore, diasporistic, diasporama, diaspositif, diasporaic, diasporan, diasporean,

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Message signed by Terry Braganza, 30 December 2003. All messages used to be accessible in the forum archives until recently. They are not any longer. Message from Cecil Pinto, 2 January 2004. Message by Teotonio de Souza, 5 January 2004. Message by Cornel da Costa, 6 January 2004. “Convention of the Goan Diaspora: From Goa into the World,” Casa de Goa, Lisbonne, 15-17 June 2007. Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” 4. Ibid., 14 note 13.

The Critical Turn

405

diasporicness, diasporaness, diasporeic, diaspoetics, to cite but words used in English.44 We may also count a number of portmanteau words in the image of pordexporia: diaspeace, euspora (contraction of euskadi diaspora, “Basque diaspora” in Basque), diamspora… The attraction of diaspora – a term which seems to allow us to accord unity and cohesion to groups that, although specified by their common origin, are also characterised by their geographical dispersion – is the principal reason for the dispersion of the term itself and its uses. This dispersion is referred to by several scholars, notably Henry Goldschmidt in the epigraph of this work,45 and Rogers Brubaker.46

Growth and Dispersal of Common Usages The appearance of diaspora as a common noun in journalistic vocabulary can roughly be dated to the 1960s and 1970s, thereby providing scope for a reworking of the dictionary definition of the term beyond that derived from religious history, since dictionaries draw partly on newspapers in their recording of evolutions in the meanings of words. The statistical analysis of the number of articles in the New York Times in which the word diaspora appears is particularly revealing (Figure 6, infra p. 406). A more detailed breakdown – every five years – between 1961 and 2000 shows the regularity of the progression (Figure 7, p. 406). At the moment it is very difficult to conduct a similar analysis for the French press in view of the slow digitisation of newspapers and thus the lack of a homogenous series propitious to a statistical analysis. Only Le Monde can be thus analysed over the past twenty years via the Lexis-Nexis, Europresse and Factiva databases. If the purely quantitative evolution between 1990 and October 2003 (Figure 8, infra, p. 407) does not appear significant – which is hardly surprising if one considers that France appeared to discover the potential polysemy of diaspora during the 1980s –, it is not so for the distribution of usage. Indeed, from October 2002 to September 2003 inclusive, 89 articles used the term diaspora against only 50 in 1990. More importantly, if this usage covers 19 44 45 46

In French we find diasporique, diasporiste, diasporan, diasporéen, diasporés… Goldschmidt, “Jews and Others in Brooklyn and its Diaspora,” 43. Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora”. See also Katherine Astbury, Ingrid De Smet, and Jane Hiddleston, “Introduction,” French Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2006), 252, as well as, more recently, Eleni Sideri, “The Diaspora of the Term Diaspora: A Working-Paper of a Definition,” Transtext(e)s Transcultures, no. 4 (2008), 32-47.

406

Chapter 8

Figure 6

Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in the New York Times (1881-2000).

Figure 7

Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in the New York Times (1961-2000).

“ethnic” or religious groups in 1990, only three of them (Jews, Armenians and Palestinians) accounting for more than two occurrences each,47 it extends to

47

They are, in decreasing order, Jews (thirteen), Armenians and Palestinians (five), three with two occurrences each (Chinese, Haitians and Vietnamese), and finally thirteen groups with one occurrence each (Albanians, Argentinians, Cape Verdeans, West Indi-

The Critical Turn

Figure 8

407

Number of articles with “diaspora” in their content in Le Monde (1990 to October 2003).

31 in 2002-2003, of who eleven groups account for more than two occurrence each, tending to prove the extension of the semantic horizon of the word (Figure 9, p. 408).48 Two other phenomena are to be noted. On the one hand, the proportion of articles in which diaspora is used to refer to the Jews decreases: 12.5% in 2002-2003, compared to 26% in 1990. This is doubtless a sign of the banalisation of the term. On the other hand, we see no noticeable evolution of the categorical or generic use of diaspora – collectively, all the uses for which the word is associated not with a people, a geographic unit, a racial or a religious group, but with a social or professional group, or indeed, standing alone, in the singular or in the plural. The proportion was even on the decline somewhat: 14% in 1990 against 12.35% in 2002-2003. Generally, this quantitative growth in the number of occurrences in the press is accompanied both by the extension of the semantic field of the term,

48

ans, Corsicans, Dahomians, French, Lebanese, Lithuanians, North Africans, Blacks, Somalis and Turks). In addition to the uses of diaspora as a category without reference to any specific population (seven), there is one article in which the collection “Diaspora” of Calmann-Lévy is mentioned. Jews (thirteen), Afghans (five), Iraqis (five), Palestinians (five), Iranians (four), Russians (four), Africans (three), Chinese (three), Corsicans (three), Irish (three), and Kurds (three), seven groups with two occurrences each (Cape Verdeans, Indians, Lebanese, Malians, Muslims, Chechens, Turks) and finally thirteen with one occurrence each (Arabs, Armenians, Austrians, Balts, Bretons, Cubans, Greeks, Haitians, North Africans, Mauritanians, Blacks, Poles, Romanians). There are also eleven uses of diaspora as a category.

408

Chapter 8

Figure 9

Populations associated with the word “diaspora” in Le Monde (October 2002 – September 2003), n = 89.

and by an increase in the number of populations to whom the term applies. Of course, it would be possible to provide a table of this distribution by counting all the uses in one or several newspapers, French or foreign, over a given period. We could also get an idea by examining this semantic field in one or more newspapers on a single day, or over a period of several weeks. Most often, in the French or French-language press, the term is today synonymous with a foreign community, or a community of foreign origin living outside the frontiers of its native land, and considered according to its settlement around the world, on a continent or in a country, region or town. To take but one example, in the 20 May 2009 edition of the daily Le Monde, the three populations to whom diaspora is applied are Uyghurs, Somalis and Comorians living far from their homeland. It was used to refer to a part of the collected group of emigrants, in a country or in a town, such as “Munich, where a sizeable Uyghur diaspora has settled.”49 In the same article, diaspora also refers to this same Uyghur community, but on Turkish territory: “The family had opted for exile, choosing to settle in Turkey, a country speaking a related language and where today the largest Uyghur diaspora in the world lives (8000 people).” Two other articles use it in connection with the “organisation of the Somali diaspora in the Netherlands”50 or with the holding in the Comoros of 49 50

Lorraine Rossignol, “Les Ouïgours divisent l’Allemagne,” Le Monde, 20 May 2009. Stéphanie Maupas, “Osman M. F., pêcheur somalien devenu pirate ‘parce que la mer est vide’,” Le Monde, 20 May 2009.

The Critical Turn

409

a constitutional referendum on 17 Mai, in which “the Comorian diaspora”, despite its size, was unable to participate.51 However, a wider perspective shows other types of usage. A consultation of articles that appeared in the French or French-speaking press in January and February 2010 thus indicated a broader spectrum. In particular, the earthquake having struck Haiti in January had been an opportunity to speak on numerous occasions of the “Haitian diaspora”, either in a quantitative context, estimating the number of Haitians or people of Haitian origin living abroad, or to describe an organised part of this larger group in a specific country, or, again, the representatives of the principal Haitian organisations on a continental or global scale, presumed to speak in the name of the entire diaspora. Elsewhere, in diaspora also began to refer, in opposition to “here” or “within”, to individuals who had left the island, as we read on the Haïti Liberté website: “We wish that the present government will at last face up to its responsibilities and lift itself to meet the drama which has completely overwhelmed Haitians, in the country as well as those living in diaspora”.52 As we see, in this simple case, the meaning of diaspora varies significantly: a statistical population group, a local or global community, an actor on the international scene via its representatives or even a geographical space of migration. Sometimes, in the same text, the meaning varies. Elsewhere, we can also identify less frequent occurrences, more generic, related to different forms of dispersions, notably professional.53 This polysemy also appears in the English-language press. As examples, I have chosen the five identifiable occurrences of diaspora in the New York Times of 21 January 2007. Next to a calendar entry announcing the “Jersey City African Diaspora Film Festival,”54 a review of a book by Elif Shafak includes a fairly classic usage, where the expression “members of the Armenian diaspora”55 refers to the collected Armenians abroad. On the other hand, an article on the property left behind by “Cuban exiles” living in the United States offers a different use of the term: “Several public opinion polls and surveys of Cuban-Americans conducted recently in South Florida and North Jersey show that a declining percentage of the diaspora still dreams of reclaiming houses. 51 52 53 54 55

Jean-Pierre Tuquoi, “Aux Comores, un référendum permet au président de prolonger son mandate,” Le Monde, 20 May 2009. Nicolas Dufour, “Haïti, le web pour réduire l’angoisse,” Le Temps, 15 January 2010. Diaspora is frequently used to describe athletes playing for foreign sports clubs. See “CAN de handball : les Lions peaufinent leur préparation,” Cameroon Tribune, 4 February 2010. “Calendar,” The New York Times, “New Jersey Weekly Desk,” 21 January 2007, 12. Lorraine Adams, “Armenian in Istanbul,” The New York Times, “Book Review Desk,” 21 January 2007, F7.

410

Chapter 8

This is especially true among the younger generation, whose members never lived in Cuba.”56 In contrast with “exiles”, more frequently used throughout the article, diaspora is broader in its scope, for it also includes those who are not exiles as such, that is the younger generation, while nevertheless indicating their belonging to a Cuban community characterised by their opposition to Castro. The last two occurrences differ quite clearly from the most common definition of diaspora, while nevertheless re-establishing, after a fashion, a link with its Greek etymology since they concern a migratory process from a land. Still “Connecticut’s diaspora”, which appears in the title of the first article in reference to the departure of the young for other states,57 is hardly comparable with mass flight of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana at the end of August 2005, referred to in the second article. In an article about the future of New Orleans, the journalist Adam Nossiter reflects on the economic impact that the departure of so many inhabitants would have, to conclude with the positive consequences that the departure of the poorest could have on the employment rate. To illustrate his point, he cites the conclusions of William Oakland, a retired economist, who states that “where there are high concentrations of poverty, people can’t see a way out. Maybe the diaspora is a blessing.’‘58 Oakland here notes not only the possibility of referring to the flight of the inhabitants of New Orleans as a diaspora, but also the habitual characterisation of this latter as a negative situation. This might turn out to be a blessing because this is not the meaning generally attributed to it. With this example, we touch on one of the most interesting contemporary uses of the term. If references to “refugees” leaving New Orleans are present from the start, they only refer to victims of the hurricane. It then appears as if it were the appeal to diaspora that would assist in understanding the event, subsequent to 31 August 2005. That day, two different texts used the term: a dispatch from Associated Press used it as its title59 while an article in the New York Times insisted on this “new reality […]: an extended diaspora of a city’s worth of people, one rarely seen in the annals of 56 57 58 59

Anthony De Palma, “What Was Once Theirs,” The New York Times, “Week in Review Desk,” 21 January 2007, 1. “Connecticut’s Diaspora,” The New York Times, “Connecticut Weekly Desk,” 21 January 2007, 13. Adam Nossiter, “New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size,” The New York Times, “National Desk,” 21 January 2007, 1. Deborah Hastings, “Katrina’s Diaspora, Thrown to the Winds and Longing for Home,” Associated Press, 31 August 2005.

The Critical Turn

411

urban disaster.”60 Through invoking diaspora, the two texts provided a different perspective upon its relevance: the identification of the displacement of a population on a scale previously unknown among internal migrations within the United States; but also the force of an expression, by which diaspora allows for a description both of the movement of dispersion of refugees and the result of this dispersion. From the first days of September, texts dealing with the catastrophe called for the usage of diaspora,61 but the word also swiftly began to describe it, and to give it a name: “Katrina’s Diaspora”: an expression that encountered considerable success, notably by its instantly descriptive character, which, for example, allowed for an illustration of the spatial distribution, across the territory of the United States, of those who had fled the hurricane (Maps 1 and 2, p. 412 and 413). Nevertheless, diaspora is not always so eloquent. On 12 September 2005, the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune lead with “The Nation Witnesses Another Diaspora”, a story from the New York Times information service. The paper’s readers reacted to this article: as letters’ editor Gina Lubrano observed, “some readers complained that its meaning was obscure. One reader said he couldn’t find a definition for it except as a proper noun referring to Jews. Another said she had to go to two dictionaries before learning its meaning.”62 Gina Lubrano finished her article quoting another reader: “‘Diaspora’ is not a word to use casually, but in this case, it was appropriate and […] precise. It captured the enormity of the event.” Diaspora’s arrival in the journalistic lexicon did not therefore necessarily imply its diffusion through all spheres of social life, nor any widespread popular knowledge of its meaning.63 According to a poll carried out in Russia in November 2000 by the Public Opinion Foundation, it appeared quite clearly that the 51% of respondents who affirmed that they knew the word diaspora, or had already heard it (15% and 36% respectively), represented 78% of those who had had a higher education. Inversely, the 40% who stated that they were hearing it for the first time represented 46% of those who had only had a pri-

60 61

62 63

Kate Zernike and Jodi Wilgoren, “In Search of a Place to Sleep, and News of Home,” The New York Times, “National Desk,” 31 August 2005, 1. “Current Katrina Quotations,” Associated Press, 2 September 2005. See also Jane Gross, “In Throes of a Diaspora, Two Families Bind,” The New York Times, “National Desk,” 6 September 2005, 24. Gina Lubrano, “Choosing what goes on Page One,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 September 2005, B7. Tölölyan, “Diasporas and Disciplinarity,” 13.

Map 1

Map of Katrina’s Diaspora (1).64

412 Chapter 8

64

Map 2

Maps 1 (p. 412) and 2 (p. 413) were published in the New York Times, respectively 2 October 2005 and 23 August 2006.

Map of Katrina’s Diaspora (2).

The Critical Turn 413

414

Chapter 8

mary education.65 The results were even lower when respondents were asked to give the meaning of the word: only 24% gave a definition judged correct by the Public Opinion Foundation – diaspora refers to “ethnic community” (in Russian этническое сообщество) – while 67% admitted that they were unable to reply or gave an answer judged “incorrect” by the organisers of the poll.66 This glimpse of the contrast between the popularity of diaspora among the upper and middle classes and its relative ability to convey meaning to the lower classes seems to be confirmed by other researchers. So, studying Cubans of Cuban-Americans living in the United States, and more particularly in Florida, Lorraine Karnoouh specified that is was a frequently employed term, but essentially by an “artistico-political élite.”67 In the case of Haiti, the anthropologists Nina Glick-Schiller and George Fouron observed that in 1985 “only a handful of the leaders reported that they used the term “diaspora,” and those who did used it to mean the obligation of all Haitians to return and rebuild Haiti. Many leaders said they were unfamiliar with the term.” Three years later, according to them, the term had entered popular usage.68 Its use in the context of the programme of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his organisation, Lavalas, during the presidential campaign of 1990 popularised it before it was eclipsed by another idea, that of the Tenth Haitian Department,69 first in 1991, then following the return from exile of Aristide in 1994. According to GlickSchiller and Fouron, ministers questioned on the matter in 1995 subsequently refused to use the term diaspora70. The popularity of a term is therefore never

65

66 67

68

69 70

Poll of 1 500 people, 11 and 12 November 2000. The statistical table is available on the Public Opinion Foundation website. It used to be in English. It’s only accessible in Russian in 2016: http://bd.fom.ru/report/map/dd003030#tb003010. More details about the replies concerning the meaning of the word can be found in ibid. The replies were not sorted by age or education. Lorraine Karnoouh, “‘Gusano’, ‘balsero’, ‘marielito’, ‘cubanoamericano’: réflexions sur la question migratoire cubaine,” in Dynamiques migratoires de la Caraïbe, ed. André Calmont, and Cédric Audebert (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 72. Nina Glick-Schiller and Georges Fouron, “‘Everywhere we go, We are in danger’: Ti Manno and the Emergence of a Haitian Transnational Identity,” American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 2 (May 1990), 343 note 10. A question on the meaning of diaspora was included in a questionnaire distributed to the leaders of 91 Haitian organisations. The expression “tenth department” was used by Aristide and his supporters to refer to Haitians living abroad. Nina Glick-Schiller and Georges Fouron, “Transnational Lives and National Identities: the Identity Politics of Haitian Immigrants,” in Transnationalism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo Jr. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 138.

The Critical Turn

415

acquired. It varies according to the political importance – as well as the positive or negative connotations – accorded to the idea that it represents. So, is diaspora an emic term or an etic term, to invoke the dichotomy frequently used in anthropology to distinguish between local, “indigenous” terms, used by the individuals or the groups concerned, and “scientific” terms, used by scholars to account for the results of their observations?71 It is not easy to find a simple response to this question. If we consider the history of usage of the term, it is evident that, removed from its religious context, diaspora is above all an etic term, with which scholars have progressively established similarities between experiences of forced displacement or the migration of different peoples. Likewise, it is a word – and an idea – which, for those who have already heard it, still seems fairly restricted, to its primary definition and to the Jewish example. If this first definition is familiar to the least educated social groups, it is less commonly the case for more recent definitions, and particularly the positive definitions which permit self-description as a diaspora. However, we cannot stop there. Indeed, the initial usage of diaspora by scholars in a positive sense has not condemned the term to a vacuum. It has spread, via books, articles, conferences, to students but also to the more educated sectors of the communities in question, even more rapidly when the scholars belong to the very communities that they contribute to bringing into existence by describing them with a unifying term. Via the Internet, the circulation of diaspora has accelerated and reinforced itself through the henceforth acquired capacity to be “speaking” for a growing number of people. If there was a time when diaspora was certainly an etic term, it is scarcely possible to maintain such a position today. Taken up by journalists of the written press, radio and television, but also, as I will show below, by more and more state, international or non-governmental bodies, it has increasingly tended to “emicise” itself, sometimes acquiring, in a local manner, quite unexpected forms or meanings, be they positive or negative. Thus, in Burkina Faso, students with Burkinabe nationality who return from Côte d’Ivoire, to where their parents had migrated, are called diaspo or dias, these terms bearing strongly pejorative connotations, associating these students with louts, rootless individuals, pariahs.72 71

72

The distinction between emic and etic was first formulated by Kenneth Pike in 1954, based on the distinction, in linguistics, between phonetic and phonemic. Kenneth Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behaviour. The Hague: Mouton, 1954. Bouraïman Zongo, “La Problématique diaspo à l’Université de Ouagadougou ou les paradoxes d’une identité nationale burkinabé,” in Immigration et identité nationale »: une altérité revisitée, ed. Séverine Dessajan, Nicolas Hossard, and Elsa Ramos (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 123-140.

416

Chapter 8

The meaning of diaspora itself is now highly dispersed, to the point that it is not uncommon to observe several semantic shifts in a single text, sometimes even in the same paragraph. It is possible to distinguish at least nine principal definitions: – a statistical population group, that is, a number; – an ethnocultural or religious community, organised on several territories, sometime divided into sub-diasporas: Sephardic and Ashkenazi for the Jews, Gujarati or Telugu for the Indians; – the collected expatriates of a given state, that is, the sum of the number of nationals living outside the national borders; – an “ethnic” population living on a national territory, a community based on origins; – a specific migratory logic, for example, a trading diaspora; – a condition both historical and moral, individual or collective, that may be interpreted as being positive or negative: being a people in diaspora; – a collectivity of political groups struggling for the establishment of a state or the restoration of the independence of their state after the fall of a political regime judged illegitimate. One speaks thus of the Chechen diaspora, the Tibetan diaspora or the Cuban diaspora; – a geographical space of dispersion, which may be accompanied by the absence of a state (the Kurds of the diaspora) or the presence of a state (the Moroccans of the diaspora); – and, finally, by extension, a more general dispersion. With this latter usage, even more metaphorical than the preceding ones, we encounter the replacement of the term dispersion by that of diaspora, already observed by Tölölyan in his 1996 article. All dispersion, even displacement, can now, by simple extension, be qualified as diaspora, in the image of the examples we gave above, be it that of Connecticut or of Cameroonian handball players. Other populations have been thus qualified in the French press, be they the “diaspora of tax exiles”73 or that of “Russian engineers”.74 In the autumn of 2007, the French politician François Bayrou worried about the “diaspora of deputies” from the centrist parties towards the UMP majority and

73 74

Béatrice de Rochebouët, “Les Français en commando à Bruxelles,” Le Figaro, 20 January 2006. Sylvestre Huet, “Les Utopies technologiques se sont effondrées,” Libération, 18 December 2001.

The Critical Turn

417

called for a regrouping.75 The galuth-kibbutz galuyoth logic, with its procession of mixed misfortunes and hopes is here applied, in a metaphoric and secular manner, to an episode irreducible to any analysis in terms of community, people, exile, migration or return. Everything, or almost everything, can then become a diaspora in any domain, from the largest to the smallest phenomenon. Thus, specialists in genetics applied to the history of human populations, linguists or paleoanthropologists, have taken up the baton of intuition developed at the beginning of the 1970s by Hockett and Ascher and have contributed to the diffusion of the term in order to refer to the dispersion of the human race across the entire planet.76 But the application of diaspora to phenomena more and more distant in time does not stop with the global spread of Homo sapiens. The French sociologist Edgar Morin, who since the beginning of the 1970s has also participated in this popularisation of the use of diaspora,77 has a grander vision, since he invites us to see this dispersion as being itself the result of an earlier diaspora when he writes that human history began with “a planetary diaspora on every continent,”78 and that, moreover, humanity constitutes “the dust of the cosmic diaspora.”79 It is also partially on the basis of this dispersion that certain specialists on the matter have voiced reservations, feeling that the conceptual value of the word cannot admit to such abuses and such overflowings.80

75 76

77 78 79

80

Interview of François Bayrou conducted by Nicolas Demorand on France Inter, 2 October 2007. Michael Crawford ed., Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. New York, Addison-Wesley, 1995. Morin, Le Paradigme perdu, mainly p. 168-169, 185, and 186. Edgar Morin, Les Sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur. Paris: Seuil-Unesco, 1999, 24. Ibid., 34. Conversely, for some science fiction writers, the future of humanity lies in its ability to leave the Earth for other planets. See Michael P. Kube-McDowell, The Quiet Pools. New York: Ace Books, 1990, and Greg Egan, Diaspora. London: Orion/Millenium, 1997. In 1994, Khachig Tölölyan started proposing, under the title “Diasporama”, what he later (2000) called “a sample of odd, sometimes interestingly nuanced and at other times outrageously inappropriate uses of the word in media accounts”. Khachig Tölölyan, “Diasporama,” Diaspora, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall 1994), 235. He returns to the theme in 2000: “Diasporama,” Diaspora, vol. 9, no. 2 (2000), 309.

418

Chapter 8 Academic Critiques of Diaspora

Doubts concerning the pertinence and the legitimacy of the usage of diaspora for certain populations are not new, as I have shown in Chapter III.81 Doubts as to the potential risks of such an extension of usage not only concern the academic lexicon, but also the language of journalists. In 2005, Evelyn HuDehart expressed concerned about how “the word and concept of ‘diaspora,’ which until a few years ago was unknown even to many academics and which was certainly unheard of among the general reading public, has taken hold in the popular imagination.”82 She further noted that this popularisation was not without consequences on the field of diaspora studies since it required “[regaining] some control over its meaning and parameters before it is reduced totally to a simple and simplistic essentialism denoting any kind of human mobility and scattering […] or any kind of sentimental yearning by upper-class exiles.”83 Indeed, the stakes for the control of the meaning of diaspora have rapidly become fundamental as uses of the term have multiplied since the beginning of the 1990s. The first true critical studies of usages of the concept of the term started to appear in the second half of the 1990s. To my knowledge, the first seems to have been that produced by the Canadian historian Donald Akenson in 1995. Himself a user of the term in a prior work in connection with the Irish,84 he brings a sceptical eye to bear on the proliferation of uses of diaspora, feeling that there is a significant risk that those who use the term no longer be “masters” of the word, but would instead be steered by it, beginning with the moment when it started to concern populations other than the Jews: “But where does one stop? The term ‘diaspora’ threatens to become a massive linguistic weed. One can find, for example, serious studies on aspects of the Russian diaspora, the Greek diaspora, even the Cornish diaspora. What does the term diaspora exclude?”85 When he comes to presenting the construction of conceptual models as a possible means – nonetheless judged ineffective – of classifying diasporas, Akenson only draws on Safran and Sheffer, leaving 81 82 83 84 85

In 1989, Elias Sanbar felt that the expression “Palestinian diaspora” was too simplistic and thus “inappropriate”. “La Diaspora palestinienne: entretien avec Elias Sanbar,” 70. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Afterword: Brief Meditation on Diaspora Studies,” Modern Drama, vol. 48, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 429. Ibid. Donald A. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Toronto: Meany, 1993. Donald A. Akenson, “The Historiography of English-Speaking Canada and the Concept of Diaspora: A Sceptical Appreciation,” Canadian Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (1995), 382.

The Critical Turn

419

aside – or ignoring – Armstrong, Tölölyan and Cohen as well as Hall, Clifford and Gilroy. On the other hand, in an article published in 1999, Phil Cohen strongly emphasised the role of scholars defending the decentred version of diaspora (Clifford, Appadurai, Rey Chow, Avtar Brah, Gilroy, Katharyne Mitchell, Khachig Tölölyan, to whom should be added Robin Cohen86) and whom he accused of a usage too undifferentiated, the term being applied to political exiles and economic migrants alike, to White settlers but also to Blacks, or to intellectuals.87 Judging that the term diaspora had become “one of the buzzwords of the postmodern age,”88 “a portmanteau word, one that may mean almost all things to all people,”89 he noted its recent positive evolution. It was through its espousal of the nomadism of the time that diaspora imposed itself, the migrant being henceforth considered to be “an orphan from the storms of modernity, but one whose salvation lies in boldly proclaiming that fact.”90 Finally, in 1998, the sociologist Floya Anthias produced the first critical article which drew extensively on writings that had attempted to conceptualise diaspora.91 With the notable exception of Armstrong, her bibliography included Appadurai, Bhabha, Brah, Clifford, Cohen, Gilroy, Safran, Sheffer, Smart and Vertovec. Believing that “the term now constitutes a kind of mantra,” she attempts to “evaluate the heuristic potential of the concept […] [and to] draw attention to the disjunction between what the term ‘diaspora’ purports to do and what in fact it often fails to do.”92 She is highly critical: according to Anthias, the emphasis that the use of the concept placed on the question of origins prevented a true consideration of that which depends on the transnational, all the while concealing inequalities linked to class or gender, which 86

87

88

89 90 91 92

On the other hand, no trace of Armstrong, Safran, Sheffer or, even more curiously, Stuart Hall, who wrote the preface to a volume edited by Phil Cohen to same year. Phil Cohen ed., New Ethnicities, Old Racisms. London: Zed Books, 1999. Phil Cohen, “Rethinking the Diasporama,” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 1 (1999), 7. A first version of this text had appeared two years earlier in New Ethnicities, vol. 1, no. 3 (1997), 3-10. Cohen, “Rethinking the Diasporama,” 3. This reference to diaspora as a buzzword would henceforth be frequent. See also Tiffany Ruby Patterson, “Diaspora and Beyond: The Promise and Limitations of Black Transnational Studies in the United States,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 125-126. Cohen, “Rethinking the Diasporama,” 7. Ibid., 17. Floya Anthias, “‘Evaluating Diaspora’: Beyond Ethnicity?,” Sociology, vol. 32, no. 3 (August 1998), 557-580. Ibid., 557 and 558, respectively.

420

Chapter 8

“seriously hinders the use of the concept.”93 Anthias distinguished between two principal approaches to the concept, the first – represented particularly by Robin Cohen – using it as a “descriptive typological tool”, the second – represented by James Clifford, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy – treating diaspora as a social condition. Each of these two approaches has their advantages and their disadvantages: if the typology offers tools for comparison, Anthias considers that Cohen’s approach leans too heavily on the origin of the dispersion to be able to envisage possible transformations, while the insistence on the diaspora as a transnational community tends to place the question of the “primordial link” – to the origin, to a territory, to ethnicity – at the heart of the notion and thus homogenise the population under consideration.94 Conversely, the conceptualisation of diaspora as a social condition puts the emphasis precisely on difference, on syncretism and on the hybridity of identities, bestowing the concept with a transgressive dimension with respect to the reifying visions of identity, ethnicity, territory and the nation-state. According to Anthias, not only are the defenders of this approach suddenly incapable of seeing to what extent certain movements functioning in diaspora promote essentialist visions, but this insistence on hybridity is for her only a variant on a primordialism linked to the homeland. Thus the two approaches share a primordialist vision of ethnicity. Furthermore, both reveal themselves incapable of treating the question of intersectionality, that is the relevance, for the study of diasporas, of social stratifications linked to class, gender, trans-ethnic alliances and relations of power. It is uniquely through this capacity to take into consideration a multiplicity of factors of identification that diaspora can constitute a “heuristic advance,” and “it is not an easy task”95 These three critical articles foreground the principal criticisms levelled at the multiplication of uses of diaspora: that of opening the Pandora’s box of the catch-all concept (multiplication of referents associated with the word), that of pansemism (the multiplication of signifieds), and finally that of abusive simplification (risks linked as much to the essentialisation of community, origin, ethnicity as to its possible dissolution in identities that are too “fluid”). If a definitive position with respect to the concept – should it be abandoned, saved or honed? – has not emerged from these sceptical or critical observations on the part of Akenson, Cohen and Anthias, numerous other authors have, over the past fifteen years, adopted more categorical attitudes with regard to its usage. 93 94 95

Ibid., 558. Ibid., 563. Ibid., 577-578.

The Critical Turn

421

Calls to abandon the concept, pure and simple, in general or for a given population, are scarce. If certain studies relative to the history of the concept focus on the emergence of the “diaspora discourse” without seeing in it a “category of practice” whose usage may be exterior to the academic world,96 others envisaged the entire spectrum and, by finally transforming concept into object of study, renounce it as a concept.97 The authors of “applicable” typologies or definitions of diaspora, foremost amongst whom are Gabriel Sheffer, William Safran and Robin Cohen, have always defended, with variants, the necessity of not extending its field of validity too far. As I have already indicated in the previous chapter, Robin Cohen has continually insisted, while incorporating into his analyses the most recent evolutions in usage, on the necessity of preserving “the heuristic value” of the concept, indissociable from a certain form of “self-restraint”.98 For his part, often more focused on the development of his own conceptual framework than on the development of diaspora studies as such, Gabriel Sheffer has barely commented on this question, often contenting himself with specifying that he is interested in “ethno-national diasporas”, to distinguish them from the “various transnational formations” to which other scholars have applied the term.99 One of his rare comments on the matter was on 6 September 2007, during a conference held in Tel-Aviv on “transnational diasporas”. Following a panel which had included Michel Laguerre, Victor Azarya, Yitzhak Sternberg, and Nissim Calderon, Gabriel Sheffer declared that in his opinion, “the extension of the field of diasporas has become too large. We should limit ourselves to the cases that match the concept. I’m now facing a dilemma: shall I go on or quit diaspora studies?”100 This comment, expressed with some anger, says 96 97

98 99 100

This is particularly so of Krings, “Diaspora,” and of Mishra, Diaspora Criticism, who never take into consideration state, popular or community uses of diaspora. In addition to my own works, this is also true of Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” as well as of Francesco Ragazzi, when he writes that it is impossible to use the word as an efficient and heuristic concept of social science because of its high ‘social value’”. Francesco Ragazzi, “The Concept of ‘diaspora’ and the ‘Transnational Social Space’,” paper presented at the “Diaspora and Transnationalism. Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges” conference, Florence, 10-11 April 2008, 16. Cohen, “‘Diaspora’: Changing Meanings and Limits of the Concept,” 40 and 46-47. Sheffer, Diaspora Politics, 10. Author’s notes from a conference on “Transnational Diasporas in Comparative Perspective,” Tel-Aviv, Hebrew University of Tel-Aviv, 4-6 September 2007. The papers have been published in Eliezer Ben Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg eds., Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (dis)order. Leiden: Brill, 2009. I referred to this incident in the introduction.

422

Chapter 8

much about the importance accorded by scholars who had laid the foundations of the field, to ensuring that its limits did not grow too much. William Safran has certainly been one of those most attentive to this risk. His first texts on diaspora already bore traces of his concerns, since the conceptual framework that he had proposed at the end of the 1980s was conceived as a sort of guardrail to frame the academic use of the term. The publication of Cohen’s 1997 book gave him the opportunity to reiterate his warnings. He particularly contested the distance that Cohen maintained with the Jewish archetype of diaspora, without nevertheless ruling out the establishment of a comparative framework.101 His principal criticisms concerned the refusal of a “unique character” to the Jewish diaspora, which for Safran remained the very paradigm of the diaspora, but he also emphasised the necessity of constraining the extension of uses “lest one commit terrible simplifications and stretch the concept like a rubber band that snaps.”102 If Cohen’s “inclusionary efforts” contrasted with the tendency of so many scholars working on ethnic minorities to not take diasporas into consideration, Safran wondered “how far inclusion should go”103 and finally, on the basis of an equally open typology, “what ethnic community that has migrated, or consists of descendant of those who have done so, is not a diaspora”104 The attention to “uses and misuses of [the] concept” brought to bear by Safran has not limited itself to a critique of Cohen’ model. In a more recent text, he considers the use of the concept of diaspora as an “academic growth industry”105 and condemns the negative effects: “the indiscriminate extension of the label to almost any group of expatriates, or even to individual migrants, has denuded the concept of much of its historical meaning and led to a conflation of the term, which has made it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish diasporas from other kinds of minority communities and to reduce the concept to a useless metaphor”.106 In an attempt to distinguish “legitimate” diasporas, that is those whose members maintain a symbolic, organisational or affective link, with their homeland without assimilating in their

101 102 103 104 105

106

William Safran, “Comparing Diasporas: A Review Essay,” Diaspora, vol. 8, no. 3 (1999), 255-291. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 265. That was one danger Akenson had already highlighted in 1995. William Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” in Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan, and Carolin Alfonso (London-New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. Ibid., 9-10.

The Critical Turn

423

host country, Safran cites, in addition to Jews and Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Sikhs, Turks, West Indians, Cubans, Tibetans, Kosovo Albanians, Croats and Serbs, but also adds “religious diasporas”, such as Tibetan Buddhists and Huguenots, and “ideological diasporas” such as antifascist Spaniards or Nazis settled in Latin America. However, the absence of orientation towards the homeland and the fact of not constituting a minority in the host country cannot be legitimate criteria for a diaspora. Elsewhere, beyond the question of the definition and the critique of typologies, Safran also denounces, and in a more emphatic manner, the metaphorisation of diaspora, that is, the way in which the word “has become a metaphor of discomfort, alienation, and transcendence, features that, presumably, are aspects of postmodernity.”107 With what he describes as “constructivist” approaches, “diaspora identity may be an essentially idiosyncratic creation that has little to do with ‘objective’ (or intersubjectively accepted) characteristics, so that the connection with physical expatriation and its consequences is in danger of being lost. This conceptual juggling is analogous to other kinds of conceptual manipulation.”108 In 1996, Tölölyan himself, often considered to be one of those who, in his editorial comment in the first issue of the journal Diaspora, had opened up the way for a broad extension of the concept, returned to the question. While noting the interest and the validity of works described as “humanist”, in a poststructuralist framework attentive to structures of identity and subjectivity, he deplored that “the richness and complexity of this work on diasporic identity has entailed […] a reduction of or an inattention to the complexity of the past and present of diasporic social formations.”109 This reduction is also a “reduction of diaspora” in the sense that it focuses on the critique of the nation-state. However, this vision, refusing to consider that a community of a people living outside their country is necessarily a diaspora, is not accompanied by an appeal to a “return to an older definition of diaspora”110 but rather by a certain form of vigilance in terms of definition. In contrast, while she draws on the distinction elaborated by Khachig Tölölyan between the usage of diaspora before and after 1968, Dominique Schnapper limits the utility of the concept to cases where it applies to a people or to a historic collectivity, in order to understand “a number of developing 107 108 109 110

Ibid., 26. See also Safran, “Comparing Diasporas,” 284. Safran’s critique is particularly concerned with Homi Bhabha’s writings. Ibid. Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” 28. Ibid., 29.

424

Chapter 8

transnational and the renewal of collective identities in an age when nationstates are growing weaker.”111 Faced with the abuses which have transformed it into a simple synonym of “ethnic group”, the utility of diaspora depends on the neutrality of its usage as well as its limitation to cases of populations that “maintain institutionalized ties, whether objective or symbolic, beyond the borders of nation-states”112 despite their dispersion. This insistence on the “pre-1968” meaning of diaspora leads us to suspect that the “post-1968” meaning is too broad. In a book that Schnapper co-authored with Chantal BordesBenayoun a few years later on the same question, they proposed a definition of diaspora that they considered “narrow”, reserved for exclusive cases where “relations are established between the ‘historical centre’, real or mythical, the dispersed settlements and the host societies” and where “men are equally conscious of their common destiny.”113 It was decidedly an attempt at “saving” the concept and its utility.114 This salvage element is also present in the work of José Moya for whom the concept is “not a superfluous addition to scholarly jargon” because, despite the misuses, “There is simply no other word in the English language to describe such phenomena”.115 He refers specifically to the “dispersion of people, unlike transnational that can refer to anything from business corporations to hip-hop music”.116 Among the defenders of the concept we also find critics not only of the unbridled usage of diaspora, but also of the first typologies proposed in order to deepen them or to render them more operative. The historian Kim Butler, a specialist of the Black world in Central and South America, thus proposes “developing an epistemology of diaspora studies.”117 She sees the “‘sexiness’ of the discourse of diasporas studies in academia” as the principal reason why “specialists in other fields rush to capitalize on opportunities by recasting their work as diasporan study.”118 It is therefore necessary to pass beyond what she calls “the ethnographic approach” concentrated on a given population in order to propose a framework that transcends specific histories. She constructs this on the basis of previous attempts, those of Safran and Cohen in particular, but

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Schnapper, “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World,” 249. Ibid., 251. Bordes-Benayoun and Schnapper, Diasporas et nations, 178-179. Ibid., 215. Moya, “Diaspora Studies: New Concepts, Approaches, and Realities?,” 10. I thank José Moya for having provided me with a copy of his paper. Ibid., 28. Kim D. Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 2 (2001), 189. Ibid., 190.

The Critical Turn

425

with the intention of simplifying the criteria. She retains three essential characteristics – dispersion to at least two destinations, a relationship with a real or imagined homeland and an awareness of belonging to an ethno-national group – and adds a fourth, a temporal depth beyond two generations.119 If Butler writes very clearly that it is impossible to “offer a fixed definition of diaspora”, and that it should not be considered as an ethnicity but as “a framework for the study of a specific process of community formation,”120 she nevertheless describes its criteria as a “checklist”121 permitting a distinction between diasporas and other forms of community in a manner apt to create research approaches applicable to any given diaspora. So far, the critics have highlighted the importance of conceptual precision – which community is a diaspora? Which is not? – and criticised the imprecision of voguish uses of the term, be they journalistic or academic. In particular, the decentred usage, considered to be postmodern, of diaspora is judged indefensible, dangerous or, at best, imprecise and non-empirical. Conversely, other critiques attack the drawbacks of modern concepts, centred, even essentialist, of diaspora. The political scientist Yasemin Soysal, who had been one of the first, in the mid 1990s, to explore the possibilities of a post-national citizenship,122 remains concerned with the old definition of the concept, suddenly considering it to be ill-adapted to the description of contemporary transformations in belonging. The inscription of the concept within the nation-state model does not allow it to grasp the “contemporary changes in the geography and practice of citizenship and belonging.”123 The “conventional conceptions of diaspora,” which are but an extension of the nation-state model, like those of Cohen and van Hear, particularly singled out by Soysal, possess a normative weight that is overestimated in the light of their capacity to account for reality. The concept is thus “too limited”124 to describe transformations in the ethnic composition of populations in western countries, the intensification of the transnational discourse on human rights and the person, the growing legitimacy of the right to one’s own culture (the right to a collective identity) or the development of

119 120 121

122 123 124

Ibid., 192. Ibid., 193-194. Ibid., 193. A first version of the “checklist” was published in Kim D. Butler, “From Black History to Diaspora History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context,” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000), 125-139. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, “Citizenship and Identity: Living in Diasporas in Post- War Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (January 2000), 2-3. Ibid.

426

Chapter 8

political entities on a number of levels (local, regional, national, European). By fixing identities with respect to national or ethnic points of reference, it cannot grasp the instability of new practices: “Diaspora finds a strong placement in our political and intellectual discourses through its naturalizing metaphors of roots, soil and kinship. However, lacking analytical rigour, it is destined to be a trope for nostalgia. Diaspora indexes timeless recollection and animates what has come to be known as identity politics.”125 This critique of the essentialism of diaspora does not always lead to the abandonment of the term, far from it. The debates over the usage of diaspora for the Chinese demonstrate quite effectively the existence of a sort of costbenefit calculation linked to the adoption of the word. If some feel that the idea of a Chinese diaspora implies a homogenous conception of mainland China and that it would therefore be necessary to “de-imagine China itself,”126 others, like Aihwa Ong, are careful to caution against the risk of essentialisation inherent in its usage.127 Numerous are those, moreover, who, at the same time, adopt diaspora as a concept that allows for a denaturalisation of Chinese identity but who nevertheless question its dangers. Ien Ang thus explains that the “diasporic paradigm,” that is, the usage of the version of diaspora proposed by cultural studies, has called into question, by its anti-essentialist dimension,128 the very possibility of a Chinese identity stabilised once and for all: “Central to the diasporic paradigm is the theoretical axiom that Chineseness is not a category with a fixed content – be it racial, cultural or geographical – but operates as an open and indeterminate signifier whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora.”129 The celebration of the diaspora is “deeply problematic” because the crossing of the national frontier is carried out at the price of the establishment of a border around the diaspora itself, which becomes an “imaginary community” much as the nation is itself.130 125 126 127 128

129 130

Ibid., 13. Yunte Huang, “Writing Against the Chinese Diaspora,” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 145-146. Aihwa Ong, “Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese,” Interventions, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003), 87. Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 223-242. Elsewhere in the article, Ien Ang describes the diasporic paradigm as being “necessarily unstable” (p. 227), characterised by the “decentering of the centre” (p. 228), as well as by “the privileging of the periphery” (p. 230). Ibid., 225. Ien Ang, “Together-In-Difference: Beyond Diaspora, Into Hybridity,” Asian Studies Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (June 2003), 144.

The Critical Turn

427

Black Diaspora? One of the fields of study within which the critique of diaspora is most explicitly expressed is that of the Black or African diaspora. Some authors have long made clear their disapproval of the use of the term diaspora in referring to Blacks or Africans. In his contribution to the edited volume Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Tony Martin preferred that the term not be used.131 At about the same time, Manuel Zapata Olivella considered null and void any comparison with Jewish history, the forced character of the trade rendering impossible the use of a term implying a simple “dispersion”.132 More recently the historian Clarence Walker said much the same thing when he wrote that “as currently used by mainstream scholars and particularly by Afrocentrists, the word ‘diaspora’ obscures more than it reveals,”133 and that the resemblance between the experiences of the Jewish and Black peoples should not be permitted to conceal the “obvious and enormous differences between expulsion and captivity.” Walker wonders “what special claim, then, are black people making about their history when they use this word?”134 Nevertheless, these refusals, and calls for the expressions Black diaspora and African diaspora to be dropped are marginal. Since the mid-1990s, the usage of the expressions “Black diaspora” or “African diaspora” has spread well beyond academic circles specialising in the history of slavery and populations descended from the trade. Sanctified by a growing number of books, encyclopaedias and anthologies that use it as a generic term, they have also been the target of critiques, notably in journal special issues, be they specific to the Black or African world, such as African Studies Review135 or Black Scholar136, or

131

132 133 134 135 136

Tony Martin, “Garvey and Scattered Africa,” in Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 441. However, he seems to have since adopted the term. See Tony Martin, “PanAfricanism, 1441 to the 21st Century: Building on the Vision of Our Ancestors,” paper presented to the First Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Une nouvelle culture noire dans un monde nouveau (entretien avec Denis Martin),” Politique africaine, no. 15 (October 1984), 87. Clarence Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 101. Ibid., 158 note 50. Likewise, Walker analyses – and criticises – the use of the term holocaust for African slaves, p. 192 sqq. African Studies Review, special issue “Rethinking the African Diaspora,” vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000). Black Scholar, vol. 30, no. 3-4 (2000).

428

Chapter 8

more generalist, such as Issue137 or the Revue européenne des migrations internationales.138 This spread, and this near-unanimity, contrasts with the two principal elements that I have explored above, that is, the recent character of the spread of the expressions Black diaspora and African diaspora as well as the great diversity of interpretation attached to them. Based on this very observation Brent Hayes Edwards envisaged – not without ambiguity, it must be said139 – the importance of a history of usage of the word in order to take into consideration both the role that these usages fill and the historicity of the application of the term to Blacks and to Africans: “I am rethinking the uses of diaspora more precisely to compel a discussion of the politics of nominalization, in a moment of prolixity and careless rhetoric when such a question is often the first casualty. An intellectual history of the term is needed, in other words, because diaspora is taken up at a particular conjuncture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work.”140 One can but note the rarity of this type of approach in the texts. For the great majority of those who accept the usage of diaspora, the definition is the most important issue, whether one believes that “no one has really attempted a systematic and comprehensive definition of the term ‘African diaspora’,”141 that “anyone who seeks to write about the African diaspora is almost certain to get entangled in the exercise of definition”142 or even that “some of us are rather frustrated by how the African diaspora is being identified, defined, structured, analyzed, and presented.”143 Even so, ultimately this interrogation 137 138 139

140

141

142 143

Issue: A Journal of Opinion, special issue on “African [Diaspora] Studies,” vol. 24, no. 2 (1996). Revue européenne des migrations internationales, “Figures et expériences diasporiques,” vol. 22, no. 1 (2006). Indeed, in his book on the transatlantic circulation of reflections on the Black experience between the wars, he uses diaspora without quotation marks, even though the term is rarely used in the Black world, and he does not refer to the existing uses identified in Chapter V. Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” 46, emphasis in the original. Moreover, he criticises “diaspora” specialists for not being sufficiently attentive to the history of usage of the term. See Brent Hayes Edwards, “‘Unfinished Migrations’: Commentary and Response,” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000), 47-48. Colin Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 85, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 2000), 27. See also Colin Palmer, “The African Diaspora,” Black Scholar, vol. 30, no. 3-4 (2000), 56-59. Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 1. Wilson, “Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” 118.

The Critical Turn

429

is often more closely linked to the question of the limits of the uses of African diaspora or Black diaspora than to that of the relevance, the legitimacy or the heuristic force of the concept. Beyond the two opposing risks of racial essentialisation – the accusation most commonly levelled at Afrocentrist perspectives – and of a too fluid conceptualisation of identity – a failing often levelled at cultural studies –, the two principal constraints concern the homogenising and simplifying tendencies of a term judged to be highly globalising. The historians Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin G. Kelley thus feel that it tends to “hide the differences and discontinuities”144 between the multiple historical experiences gathered within the term, the lived experience in the United States often overwhelming all others to the point of becoming the heart of the conceptual matrix. This too allencompassing vision presents, according to James Walvin, two opposing risks: that of creating a deadlock on the local specificities of the Black experience or, on the contrary, of neglecting the links between the diaspora and global processes such as colonialism.145 For Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin G. Kelley, going “beyond diaspora” then implies most notably to grasp that which it reveals itself incapable of bringing to light, that is, the “international contexts” at the heart of the constitution of “‘Black’ identities”. Indeed, diaspora tends to place too much emphasis on the cultural dimension of identification to the detriment of the political dimension and of the role that international movements could play, such as feminism, pacifism, communism, Islam.146 However, these critiques of diaspora and their plea in favour of an analysis of “Black Globality”147 in no way prevent Patterson and Kelley from considering that, “for all its limitations,” the concept of diaspora remains “fundamental,” in particular to make of the Atlantic, but also of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean units of analysis of the multiplicities of the African diaspora.148 It is precisely this Atlantic emphasis that the historian Paul Zeleza149 considers to 144

145

146 147 148 149

Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000), 20. James Walvin, “Black Slavery in Europe in the 17th and 18th Centuries: The Historical Implications for the Black Diaspora,” in Emerging Perspectives on the Black Diaspora, ed. Aubrey W. Bonnett and G. Llewellyn Watson (Lanham: University Press of America, 1990), 25, cited in Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 9-10. Robin D.G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: On the Uses and Limitations of Diaspora,” Black Scholar, vol. 30, no. 4 (2000), 32. Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations,” 24-29. Ibid., 29-30, as well as Kelley, “How the West Was One,” 33. On Zeleza, see Amselle, L’Occident décroché, 87-90.

430

Chapter 8

be one of the principal limits of diaspora: for this emphasis on “the Atlantic, or rather the Anglophone, indeed the American branch of the African diaspora” limits our understanding of the phenomenon.150 Global against global: the denunciation of diaspora as both too globalising – reductive – and too homogenising – too centred on the Atlantic but also only on the history of slavery to the detriment of more recent African migrations – thereby requires that it be “globalised’ in another sense, that is say to consider it in a manner that is both broader and more complex. It is without a doubt thus that we must understand the observation that the concept has been undertheorised,151 and the permanent call for a “greater conceptualisation,”152 even “continued refinement of the definition of the concept of diaspora.”153 As Carlton Wilson reminds us, “In the face of so many diaspora studies, departments, and programs, we would be remiss if we do not continue to reexamine the parameters of the African diaspora.”154 The character of African diaspora, at first sight immediately comprehensible, is both an asset and an obstacle: “Flexible and all encompassing, its very capaciousness is precisely what gives the term both its functional utility and, perversely, its analytical imprecision.”155 This latter represents a real problem for it renders the expression far too welcoming.156 The desire to render the contents of the expression African diaspora or Black diaspora both less uniform and more globalised seems to oscillate between two tendencies: one which consists of extending its usage to more experiences, in time and in space, often on the basis of a broad definition of diaspora, and one which, on the basis of a more restrictive even though rarely categoric definition, consists in distinguishing, in the entire migratory experience out of Africa, that which is “diasporic” in character and that which is not. We can group together in this category the works aimed at demonstrating the existence of several “African diasporas”, in time as well as in space.157

150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,” African Affairs, vol. 104, no. 414 (2005), 36. Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 3. Lisa Brock, “Questioning the Diaspora: Hegemony, Black Intellectuals and Doing International History from Below,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 24, no. 2 (1996), 10. Joseph E. Harris, “Expanding the Scope of African Diaspora Studies: The Middle East and India, a Research Agenda,” Radical History Review, no. 87 (Fall 2003), 158. Wilson, “Conceptualizing the African Diaspora,” 120-121. Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 1. Ibid., 39. Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” 30; Alpers, “Defining the African Diaspora,” 23-24. See also Edward A. Alpers and Allen F. Roberts, “What is African

The Critical Turn

431

Through the complexity acquired over the past 40 years, and notably because the historical experience of Black Africans outside Africa was the principal crucible of its conceptual inversion, diaspora could thus simultaneously appear as the signal of a return to Africa in a centred version; as the trace of the constant cultural and political redefinition, inventive and dynamic, of a decentred relationship with Africa, in a version that places the emphasis on hybridity and the absence of roots; or again, as the symbol of a conceptual obligation imposing itself upon whoever wishes to understand the particularity of the historical experience of Africans outside Africa. Thus, Edmund Gordon and Mark Anderson set up in opposition the limits of essentialist and hybrid conceptions in order to invite us to focus less on certain essential characteristics common to peoples of African origin than on the processes by which diasporic identification occurs.158 In this light, diaspora thus takes two distinct forms: a conceptual tool referring to a group, and a term denoting a certain form of identity construction.159 According to these authors, Gilroy confused the two by forgetting to see that the construction of a diasporic identity can take the form of roots as well as routes. Whereas Kim Butler pleaded for a going-beyond the ethnographic approach, here we find on the contrary calls for an ethnography of different forms “of diasporic politics and identification.”160 From this perspective, diaspora functions on two levels: it is at once emic and etic, but in different spheres. It is in this sense that Ruby Patterson and Kelley want to think the notion as “open”, a “concept-metaphor” à la Deleuze and Guattari,161 heuristic rather than exhaustive: “Diaspora is, in other words, an historical process, analytical framework and philosophical lens though which identities and experiences are understood.”162 For Alpers, the concept contains two fundamental theoretical dimensions. The first is that of comparativism, envisaged as an epistemological principle, in order to be able to practice a comparison with other diasporas, but equally to compare the different experiences of the African diaspora with each other, and to not lose sight of

158

159 160 161 162

Studies? Some Reflections,” African Issues, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002), 14; Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora”. Edmund T. Gordon and Mark Anderson, “The African Diaspora: Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification,” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no. 445 (Summer 1999), 282-296. Ibid., 288. Ibid., 289. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia, 1994 (first French edition 1991). Tiffany Ruby Patterson, “Diaspora and Beyond: The Promise and Limitations of Black Transnational Studies in the United States,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 130.

432

Chapter 8

the intersections between numerous movements of the transnational kind, in the image of the “overlapping diasporas” developed by Earl Lewis.163 The second is that of the tension between continuity and discontinuity, similitude and dissimilitude, such as it has been introduced into the debate by cultural studies. It would seem that by diaspora, in the singular or in the plural, not only can the field of study be unified but its epistemological specificities can also be affirmed. Colin Palmer’s assertion that “the field must embrace disciplinary and interdisciplinary orientations and must, perforce, be comparative in its methodological dimensions”164 echoes that of Darlene Clark Hine who also pleaded for the establishment of a transatlantic framework, an interdisciplinary methodology and a comparative perspective.165 This comparative perspective henceforth increasingly includes the different African – including intra-African – diasporas, and seeks to excessively radicalise the distinction between Africa on the one hand and the diaspora on the other. If, we remember, the Afrocentrists included these two subjects at the heart of Africana studies, the American historian Patrick Manning had called in 2003 for the establishment of more important links between “African studies” and “studies of the African diaspora” in the form of a new discipline that he baptised “AfricaDiaspora studies.”166

A Word, an Era I have dwelt at length on the fact that, since the end of the 1980s, diaspora had found a place in the lexicon of scholars who thought they had detected the signs of emergence of a new era, less state-centered, less territorial, less national. This tendency was only further confirmed with the institutionalisation of diaspora studies and the concomitant diffusion of the concept, henceforth endowed with positive attributes, and highly stratified, beyond its original usage. Works on globalisation in particular had established a new lexicon including diaspora as a deterritorialised form of belonging and symbolic of a new 163 164 165

166

Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 3 (1995), 765-787. Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” 31. Darlene Clark Hine, “Frontiers in Black Diaspora Studies and Comparative Black History: Enhanced Knowledge of our Complex Past,” The Negro Educational Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (July 2001), 103 sqq. Patrick Manning, “Africa and the African Diaspora: New Directions of Study,” Journal of African History, no. 44 (2003), 488. By the same author, see The African Diaspora: A History through Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

The Critical Turn

433

cosmopolitan era relieved of the “methodological nationalism” characteristic of modernity. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote that “The term diaspora has by its wide use become inflated” before noting that “the inflation does not so much demonstrate that the concept is losing force as it shows the extent to which a both/and consciousness is emerging in the self-understanding of individuals, groups, publics, movements, and ultimately even religions.”167 Likewise, Helmuth Berking – who had himself contested the fact that globalisation signalled the end of the modern nation-state but nevertheless saw in it a reconfiguration of relations between state, sovereignty, territoriality and identity – noticed the manner in which diaspora had become a preferred term in studies devoted to this process: “To the concept of diaspora […] originally restricted to classic cases of violent expulsion and territorial resettlement, first of the Greek, then the Jewish and finally the Armenian communities. We have to attribute special importance, inasmuch as this concept is now applied more or less to all ethnic groups living outside their original territory.”168 According to him, this new importance involves at least three changes in meaning explaining why we have passed from the expression “ethnic group” to diaspora: “Unlike the informal communities known from ethnic neighbourhoods, some of which vanish over time into the melting pot, diasporas are (1) intentional political and cultural organizations, which (2) are dedicated to special interest policies, i.e. a struggle for recognition of their identity at the transnational and subnational levels, and (3) whose particular sociospatial quality is that they are located simultaneously within particular states and outside any state; in short, diaspora means forms of community not defined in territorial terms as well as a source of power emerging out of transnational spaces that are no longer fixed within the boundaries of nation-states.”169 Numerous authors, working in very different disciplines, see in the sudden multiplication of uses of diaspora, or of “diasporas” themselves, less a sign of the radical historical novelty of a phenomenon than of a transformation of a gaze on the world, even a return to a previous state, considering that the novelty was perhaps finally “the imagination of the world as a modern geopolitical space, constituted by territorially distinct nation-states.”170 The sudden visi167 168 169 170

Ulrich Beck, “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach,” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3 (2004), 449. Helmuth Berking, “‘Ethnicity is Everywhere’: On Globalization and the Transformation of Cultural Identity,” Current Sociology, vol. 51, no. 3-4 (May-July 2003), 253-254. Ibid., 254. Christopher Chekuri and Himadeep Muppidi, “Diasporas Before and After the Nation: Displacing the Modern,” Interventions, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003), 54.

434

Chapter 8

bility of diasporas did not simply constitute “symbols of the disintegration of the nation-state system; they are constitutive elements of a different global order.”171 Given the manner in which the term acquired the capacity to propose an alternative to the nation-state by emphasising another territorial form not contained within borders, it appeared equally as a symbol of the times, during which the predominance of modern, state-based and national narratives crumbled away, necessarily calling into question the interpretation of the migratory phenomenon as a simple displacement from one state to another: “The idea of diaspora […] questions the teleological narrative and the nationalist presumption of the dominant migration narrative. Rather than the singular journey from one country to another, the concept of diaspora makes space for multiple and complex trajectories. Indeed, the very possibility of transnationalism denies the irreversibility of the migration processor the inevitable assimilation of the migrant. Instead, the idea of diaspora is inextricable from the idea of transnationalism, redolent with the possibility of myriad identities and multifarious networks.”172 In a general manner, and apparently paradoxically, an ancient word has become synonymous with newness, or at least, with innovation, whether it be through a transformation of scientific habits by infusing them with more conceptual openness through the rejection of concepts that are too burdened or too rigid (see supra, Chapter vii), or the description of an era. As a concept as much as a reality, it is the symbol of destabilisation, of the questioning of that which had until then appeared to be stable, fixed, evident. In the continuity of poststructuralist writing, identity and territory are above all the targets of these destabilisations. Words such as hybridity, creolisation and of course diaspora represent, as Katharyne Mitchell wrote, “spaces of subversion”: “The terms are attractive because of the inherent instability associated with each concept. In contrast with the unappealing teleologies of modernist paradigms or the paralyzing binaries of either/or frameworks, hybridity and diaspora seem to offer a satisfyingly unstable and ambivalent alternative. […] The ‘third space’ of hybridity and the margins of the diasporic have been offered to the sacred altar of resistance as new sites of hope.”173 The new signification of the term has greatly exceeded the Jewish case and even the case of a people living outside their homeland, for it “has come to signify a more general sense of dis171 172 173

Ibid., 55. John Lie, “Diasporic Nationalism,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, vol. 1, no. 3 (2001), 356. Katharyne Mitchell, “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 15, no. 5 (1997), 533.

The Critical Turn

435

placement, as well as a challenge to the limits of existing boundaries.”174 The subversiveness is therefore found in “the spaces in the margins, the unfixed spaces in-between states and subject positions.”175 Samir Dayal expressed it slightly differently: “The diasporic, always in the waiting rooms of the nationspace, is preserved at least from the illusion of a fixed identity and a prefabricated cultural role.”176 The fracture of identity and the subject is envisaged as being more realistic than the coherence of one or even two identities. For Dayal, the double conscience is indeed less a “and/and” than a “neither just this/nor just that”:177 “Diaspora, with its rootedness in claims to an originary homeland, resolves the new dilemmas of belonging because of the flexibility that it brings to identity. In a sense, Diaspora reveals itself as the true expression of modern subjectivity”.178 This emphasis on subjectivity invites us to go beyond the idea of diaspora as an object of analysis, and thus of definitions, to grasp in it the elements necessary for the current era. Diaspora is the name of a desire: “The turn to diaspora signals a demand for finding a way to speak about the complexities of connections between communities, of the unredressed griefs and disarticulated longings from which collectivities emerge.”179 Finally, for Brent Hayes Edwards the term marks not identity, fractured or otherwise, but difference: “If diaspora is a discursive form, then the point might not be to unearth the ‘correct’ version of that history of dispersal, or to wallow in the old arguments about cultural continuity and African survivals that go along with such a focus. Instead, our attention is drawn to the multiple and clashing versions of that discourse. So diaspora is not about sameness (not even a ‘changing same’): it’s about difference.”180 Next to the fracture of the subject, we find the theme, more deleuzoguattarian, of the rhizomatic connection. Diaspora marks the end of the great narrative on the subject, but also the great narrative on national territory and its corollary, the loss signalled by migration and geographical distance. The 174 175 176 177 178 179 180

Ibid., 534. Ibid., 536. Samir Dayal, “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 51. Ibid., 48. Percy Hintzen, “Diaspora, Globalization and the Politics of Identity,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 113. Lily Cho, “The Turn to Diaspora,” Topia, no. 17 (2007), 13. She also believes that “Diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity” (p. 14). “An Interview with Brent Hayes Edwards (par Charles H. Rowell),” Callaloo, vol. 22, no. 4 (Fall 1999), 793.

436

Chapter 8

“spatial turn” that the emergence of the academic discourse on globalisation had represented had shifted the emphasis to the forms of links despite the distance. This is how, in James Clifford’s words, “‘Diaspora’, also imperfect, gets somewhat closer to a socio-spatial reality of connectedness-in-dispersion.”181 Likewise, the sociologist Yao Assogba saw in diaspora a territorial form particularly adapted to globalisation: “Diaspora invokes the ‘multipolarity’ of migration and the ‘interpolarity’ of relations. Finally, diaspora is fundamentally characterised by networked existence. Today, the globalisation of the economy and of information and communication technologies is largely favourable to the formation and consolidation of networks, as well as to the emergence of new forms of diaspora.”182 The anthropologist Aihwa Ong, pioneer in the use of a post-classical sense of diaspora,183 does not want to abandon the term but on the contrary “to resurrect to theoretical respectability the theme of diaspora,” in order to transform it into a positive concept allowing us to describe the “common condition” of communities, individuals and groups separated in space, a form of “arrangement, moreover, that these persons see themselves as sharing (‘we Chinese…’).”184 In this way, while nevertheless attentive to the risks of essentialisation inherent in the usage of the term, Ong then turns her back on the idea of “permanent exile” to see in diaspora a reference to “the global imaginary invoked by transnational subjects located in metropolitan centers who wish to exercise a new form of power through the use of informational technology.”185 To grasp that which plays out spatially in the contemporary world, it then becomes fundamental to discard a part of the meaning of the term: “It seems to me, therefore, that the old meaning of diaspora – of being scattered or in dispersion, with no hope of return – is too limiting an analytical concept to capture the multiplicity of vectors and agendas associated with the majority of contemporary border crossings.”186 She suggests considering

181 182 183

184

185 186

James Clifford, “Indigenous Diasporas,” in Berthomière and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, 52. Yao Assogba, “Diaspora, mondialisation et développement de l’Afrique,” Nouvelles pratiques sociales, vol. 15, no. 1 (2002), 99-100. Aihwa Ong, “On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora,” positions, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1993), 745-778, reproduced in Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Donald M. Nonini and Aihwa Ong, “Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity,” in Ungrounded Empires. The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (New York-London: Routledge, 1997), 18. Ong, “Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese,” 86. Ibid., 87.

The Critical Turn

437

“discourses of diaspora” not as descriptions of pre-existing social entities but “rather as specific political practices projected on a global scale”. “Diaspora politics” then refers to “a social category called into being by newly empowered transnational subjects.” The transnationalisation of ethnic groups has created the need for new forms of global identification: “The proliferation of discourses of diaspora is part of a political project which aims to weave together diverse populations who can be ethnicized as a single worldwide entity. In other words, diaspora becomes the framing device for contemporary forms of mass customization of global ethnic identities.”187 The term is no longer associated with an ordinary definition or a reality that it would be liable to describe, but as a means of self-description. It could be therefore that “Diaspora may be the metaphor of ‘our time’”188 or, to follow Kim Butler, that the present era of human history is “the era of the diaspora.”189 Yet it is necessary that “our time” or “the current era” be defined… Of which time are we talking? To return to what is without a doubt the most structuring opposition that has appeared concerning diaspora since the beginning of the 1990s, is it the time of the nation-state or, on the contrary, is it the time of the end of this latter and of the proclamation of that which would seem to oppose it – deterritorialisation, the porosity of borders, postcolonialism, hybridity, globalisation, networks, fluidity of identities, and the like? Throughout this chapter it has appeared that this opposition was at the very heart of the success of the term since each of these visions could claim the capacity of the term to grasp that which the process of globalisation was revealing, in one case, the possibility of extolling the link with the homeland, a territory, in the other a decentering, a celebration of the cultural construction of identity. And, furthermore, even the defenders of a less binary vision embraced diaspora, whether they envisaged, like Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy, the question of identity as being neither fixed nor fluid, or felt that the opposition between the diaspora and the nation-state did not depend on an alternative or on a zero-sum game. Generally, the defenders of a usage of diaspora in elective affinity with the real world see in it much more that a simple alternative to nationalism, as bears witness most notably the definition of diaspora as the “significant other” of nationalism.190 A “significant other” is not simply a third 187 188

189 190

Ibid., 88. Michael E. Samers, “Diaspora Unbound: Muslim Identity and the Erratic Regulation of Islam in France,” International Journal of Population Geography, no. 9 (2003), 351, emphasis in original. Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” 214. An expression that we find in R. Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 4 (Fall 1993), 753.

438

Chapter 8

party, but a third party which permits the construct of the self. It is in this sense that we need to understand John Lie’s admonition to avoid the “nationalist reification” of diasporas, and glimpse their study as useful as the study of the history of the nation.191 Beginning with the idea that globalisation and nationalism had evolved together, through, for example, the intermediary of colonialism, he concluded that “This poses a profound challenge to the usual way of doing the human sciences, divided as it is by disciplines; national, area, or ethnic studies; and language groups. We must, alas, become at once interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, do area studies and ethnic studies, and even learn a language or two. This is all hard work, but the past and present of diasporas demand nothing less.”192 This desire to think nation and diaspora together, and not against each other, crops up again in the work of the Turkish historian Arif Dirlik for whom “a fundamental contradiction built into diaspora discourse is that, while it seeks to negate the nation, or more strictly, the nation-state, it is itself incomprehensible without reference to the latter.”193 Dirlik insists on the fact that it is not the contradiction between nation-state and diaspora which has changed, but the attention accorded to this contradiction, for “the term diaspora no longer carries the same memories and, therefore, the same valorizations as it did earlier.”194 If most contemporary discussions of diaspora, as I have also shown here, tend to establish it as the opposite of the nation-state, as much as an alternative to the nation-state, Dirlik warns against the risk of confusing discourse and reality.195 This articulation of the nation-state and diaspora is thus only paradoxical in so far as it is assigned to one or the other of the antagonistic positions to the detriment of all the indications that permit us to think their links.

From the Brain Drain to Scientific Diasporas This conjugation, this intimacy between the so-called “diasporic” logic and the “territorial” logic, whether it be a question of the existence of diasporas at the heart of the state or of the proclamation of nationalist projects at the heart of communities living abroad, does not cease to surprise. Stathis 191 192 193 194 195

Lie, “Diasporic Nationalism,” 361. Ibid., 362. Arif Dirlik, “Intimate Others: [Private] Nations and Diasporas in an Age of Globalization,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2004), 491. Ibid., 493. Ibid., 501.

The Critical Turn

439

Gourgouris expresses amazement that “diasporic communities now come to embody the symbolic cohesion of ancestral nationality, often voluntarily assuming the agency of the nation abroad, in a bizarre (ultimately paradoxical) simultaneity of both confirming and exceeding national boundaries.”196 However, it is indeed at the intersection of the logic of origin and that of the “connectivity in dispersion” that there emerges, in the mid-1990s, a new usage of diaspora, linked to the networks that establish groups of highly qualified migrants who participate in the development of their homelands, but also, in a more general manner, to the possibility of a link maintained – or established – between expatriates and their homeland. Until the beginning of the 1990s, the emigration of students and elites from so-called “developing” countries was perceived as a catastrophe for these latter, as a “haemorrhage” of their life blood. Qualified migrants, expatriates, students, were considered as “lost” to the homeland. In this discourse, that of the “brain drain”, emigration was a loss, to the point that the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in the 1970s, proposed a tax on the brain drain.197 Taking into consideration the new economic policies established by China and then by India between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s in order to facilitate emigrant investment,198 Bhagwati gradually amended his original model to take into consideration the wealth that expatriates represented, even if this did not for him remove the need for a tax. In an article in 1994, co-authored with Milind Rao, he contrasted the brain drain and the diaspora, feeling that developing countries “increasingly see such emigration as an opportunity on the part of their talented citizens to distinguish themselves and bring glory to their countries of origin… In short, the model today is not that of a brain drain, but rather of a diaspora.”199 Since 1996, but particularly since an article published in 2003 in Foreign Affairs, Bhagwati has referred to the “diaspora 196

197

198 199

Stathis Gourgouris, “The Concept of Diaspora in the Contemporary World,” in Baghdiantz-McCabe, Harlafis, and Pepelagis Minoglou, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History, 389. Jagdish N. Bhagwati, “The United States in the Nixon Era: The End of Innocence,” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 25 (1972), 41-44, as well as Jagdish N. Bhagwati ed., Taxing the Brain Drain. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976; Jagdish N. Bhagwati and John Douglas Wilson, “Income Taxation in the Presence of International Personal Mobility: An Overview,” in Income Taxation and International Mobility, ed. Jagdish N. Bhagwati and John Douglas Wilson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 3-39. On Chinese policy, see Carine Guerassimoff, L’État chinois et les communautés chinoises d’outre-mer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Milind Rao, “Foreign Students Spur US Brain Gain,” The Wall Street Journal, 31 August 1994, cited in Jacques Gaillard and Anne-Marie Gaillard, “Fuite des cerveaux, retours et diasporas,” Futuribles, no. 228 (February 1998), 26.

440

Chapter 8

model,”200 envisaging the possibility for states to consider “extending a warmer embrace to their nationals abroad”.201 However, on the basis of the creation of networks of qualified migrants – like the Colombian network Red Caldas (founded in 1991) and the South African network SANSA (founded in 1998)202 – and their analysis by scholars such as the French sociologists Jacques Gaillard and Jean-Baptiste Meyer, both affiliated to ORSTOM (now IRD), or the Colombian Jorge Charum, a specialist in applied mathematics, the term diaspora imposed itself to designate a new form of relationship between states and their expatriates. Between 1994 and 1998, several of these authors examined the transformations of the brain drain and the gradual establishment of new forms of “scientific migration”, thanks to new information and communication technologies, migrations that could be grasped within a new paradigm, that of the brain gain,203 in which the migration of the educated is an opportunity for developing states.204 Within the framework of the brain gain new terms appeared, such as the generic expressions “scientific diaspora”, “scientific and technical diasporas”205 or “intellectual diaspora”.206 The expression “diaspora-network” characterised networks such as Red Caldas207 while the expression “diaspora option”, used by JeanBaptiste Meyer and Jorge Charum since 1994,208 refers to “a novel approach 200 201 202

203

204

205 206

207 208

Jagdish N. Bhagwati, “Borders Beyond Control,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 82, no. 1 (JanuaryFebruary 2003), 101. Jagdish N. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 215. On Caldas, see Fernando Chaparro, Hernán Jaramillo, and Vladimir Quintero, Role of Diaspora in Facilitating Participation in Global Knowledge Networks: Lessons of Red Caldas in Colombia, Report for the World Bank Knowledge for Development Program, Bogota, 2004. On SANSA, see their website: https://www.sansa.org.za/. At the end of the 1960s, the expression referred to the manner in which the brain drain benefited developed countries, an analysis quite different to that which emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. See particularly Jean-Baptiste Meyer and Jorge Charum, “Se agoto el brain drain? Paradigmo perdido y nuevas perspectivas,” Integracion, Ciencia y Tecnologia, no. 1 (1994), 47-54. In French, the first appearance seems to have been in André-Yves Portnoff, “Les diasporas scientifiques et techniques modèlent l’avenir,” Futuribles, no. 210 (June 1996), 57-59. David Kaplan, “Reversing the Brain Drain: The Case for Utilising South Africa’s Unique Intellectual Diaspora,” Science, Technology and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (July-December 1997), 387-406. Jacques Gaillard, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, and Bernard Schlemmer, “Nouvelle approche des migrations scientifiques internationales,” Chroniques du Sud, no. 15 (1995), 64. Meyer and Charum, “Se agoto el brain drain?”

The Critical Turn

441

[that] consists of reconnecting national research communities living abroad with the national scientific community in the context of scientific activities of common interest.”209 The problematic of the diaspora option spread more widely within the scientific community following the 1997 publication of a jointly authored article in which Meyer, Gaillard and Charum participated, and in which the diaspora option was more precisely defined: The diaspora option is the most recent policy that has been fully implemented with regard to the migration of highly qualified human resources. As a brain gain strategy it differs from the return option in the sense that it does not aim at the physical repatriation of the nationals living and working abroad. Its purpose is the remote mobilisation of the diaspora’s resources and their association to the country of origin’s programmes. Scientists and engineers may stay wherever they are; what matters is that they work for their mother nation in some way. This is done through a formal, institutionally organised, networking.210 The different expressions using diaspora to describe these forms of organisation are multiplying: intellectual diaspora networks; scientific diasporas; technological and scientific diasporas; scientific, technological and economic diasporas; knowledge networks abroad or diaspora knowledge networks,211 to cite but a selection. However, with a few exceptions, this usage has not generally been subject to critical analysis. In 1998, Jacques and Anne-Marie Gaillard drew largely upon the works of the French geographers Michel Bruneau, Georges Prévélakis, and Emmanuel Ma Mung, to emphasise the idea of the network, the “scientific and technical diaspora” being considered more tree-like, more 209

210

211

Jacques Gaillard and Jean-Baptiste Meyer, “Le brain drain revisité: de l’exode au réseau,” in Coopérations scientifiques internationales, ed. Jacques Gaillard (Paris: Orstom, 1996), 338. Jean-Baptiste Meyer et al., “Turning Brain Drain into Brain Gain: The Colombian Experience of the Diaspora Option,” Science, Technology and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (JulyDecember 1997), 285-315. See also Jean-Baptiste Meyer, “Network Approach versus Brain Drain: Lessons from the Diaspora,” International Migration, vol. 39, no. 5 (2001), 91-108. Jean-Baptiste Meyer and Jean-Paul Wattiaux, “Diaspora Knowledge Networks: Vanishing Doubts and Increasing Evidence,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies, vol. 8, no. 1 (2006), 4. See Yevgeny Kuznetsov ed., Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills: How Countries Can Draw on Their Talent Abroad. Washington: World Bank, 2006; Béatrice Séguin, Leah State, Peter A. Singer, and Abdallah S. Daar, “Scientific Diasporas as an Option for Brain Drain: Re-Circulating Knowledge for Development,” International Journal of Biotechnology, vol. 8, no. 1-2 (2006), 78-90.

442

Chapter 8

centralised, than traditional diasporas.212 A few years later, a group of experts lead by researchers from the IRD on “scientific diasporas” produced a text that was not particularly eloquent on the opportunities for using this idea rather than any other, contenting itself with noting, in the section “Definitions”, that “diasporas” are “self-organised expatriate collectives” before defining the expressions “scientific and technical diasporas” and “network diasporas”, the latter differing from the former by the participation of non-expatriates.213 In contrast, the chapter that Jean-Baptiste Meyer devoted to the question in the same volume demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the axes of structuration of diaspora studies and its principal authors.214 Following the presentation of centred or extraterritorial visions of diaspora, he undertakes a triple turn: first, an empirical turn, interested above all in the reality and the functioning of scientific networks oriented towards the development of their country; a turn that is also somewhat epistemological, since the “scientific and technical diasporas”, at once “activist” (in the sense of voluntary) and “useful” to their country, are characterised as much by the connectivity specific to the network as by the link to the country, or even to the state; and finally a normative turn, since it involves providing expertise aimed at permitting states to call upon their expatriates. As Meyer wrote, “the sociology of networks demonstrates well the strategic position of actors of the diaspora. […] These are at once intersecting marginals, chokepoints, intersections, peripheral but integrated in both worlds. Through them, all kinds of resources, otherwise confined, may circulate.”215 This triple turn, by which new actors, a new definition of the term and a new form of research manifested themselves, offers diaspora a different visibility, destined to grow.216 For the past decade reports and studies devoted to the question, as well as surveys of networks on the internet, have multiplied. If the ephemeral character of these networks might cast doubts upon the results of these surveys, it remains true that their numbers are growing. The latest figures, dating from 2006, estimated their number at some 200, with the proviso that it is still dif-

212 213

214 215 216

Gaillard and Gaillard, “Fuite des cerveaux, retours et diasporas,” 41-42. Rémi Barré, Valeria Hernández, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, and Dominique Vinck eds., Diasporas scientifiques: comment les pays en développement peuvent-ils tirer parti de leurs chercheurs et de leurs ingénieurs expatriés. Paris: IRD Éditions, 2003 (CD-ROM included), 17-18. Jean-Baptiste Meyer, “Diasporas: concepts et pratiques,” in ibid., 2nd part (on CD-ROM). Ibid., 5. See particularly Sami Mahroum and Paul de Guchteneire, “Editorial,” International Journal on Multicultural Societies, vol. 8, no. 1 (2006), 2.

The Critical Turn

443

ficult to evaluate the importance of Chinese networks.217 Research on these networks is in full expansion, within research centres but also within international organisations, multilateral agencies and different state bodies, for this new link between expatriate network connectivity and national development assistance, coupled with the existence of the technological means allowing this link to function nearly in real time, has quickly found an echo, just as the usage of diaspora did, in governmental circles. A new version of diaspora finds itself synthesised through this intermediary, in which the replacement of loss by gain, traumatism by assets, nostalgia by investment, the centre-periphery relationship by rhizomatic connectivity uncovers new meaning in its relationship with the state. If the classical form, associated with the loss of a state or territory, or with their quest through the idea of the return, has been challenged by a connected form, of more recent origin, which downplayed anchoring and territory to the advantage of a positive and largely deterritorialised connected perspective, this third approach articulates expatriation, links and the state in a new way, by taking into consideration transformations in the relationship with space brought about by the development of new information and communication technologies. The “diaspora” is thus no longer characterised by being “without a state” or by being able to exist “without the state”, but indeed by the possibility of the establishment of a link which is not constrained by the obligation to return to the homeland. If the diaspora option described above, or the economic mechanism of diaspora bonds initiated by Israel, are principally concerned with the economic sphere, or the development sphere, the link that has been created between states and “their diasporas” no longer has any limits. Henceforth, with the support of various international organisations and multilateral agencies, indeed, often on their initiative, it allows us to envisage a nation which no longer defines itself simply as being “contained” within borders, but as also being composed of segments of the national population, or populations of national origin, living overseas and not constrained by the suggestions that their intimate relations – most of the time collective – with the homeland be framed by the idea of return.

217

Figure cited in Jean-Baptiste Meyer, Human Resource Flows from and between Developing Countries: Implications for Social and Public Policies, Report for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the International Organization for Migration and the Institute for Future Studies, March 2008, particularly p. 23, available on the UNRISD website: www.unrisd.org.

Chapter 9

States and Their Diasporas1 The point of departure for any initiative should be that every government ask the following essential questions: How may our diaspora abroad contribute to the development of the country? How can the diasporas living in my country contribute to the development of their homelands? What barriers are there currently that prevent the participation of our diaspora in the development of the country? What barriers are there currently that prevent the participation of diasporas living in my country in the development of their homelands? What steps has our government really taken to encourage the participation of the diaspora(s) in the development of the homeland(s)? Which diaspora organisations or migrant associations are recognised by and work with our government ?2 Globalisation has often been theorised within the context of the disappearance of the state in general and of the nation-state in particular, by virtue of the incapacity of state borders to prevent the multiplication and the influence of flows of all sorts (financial, economic, informational, human…). If this porosity of borders is undeniable, if it indeed seems that states have tended, over the course of the past three decades, to “lose control”3 and notably of their borders, that does not mean that they have disappeared, or even that they are doomed to disappear. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, if the scale of flows undermines the logic of border control, these latter have

1 The first two sections of this chapter draw substantially on the introduction that I wrote for the edited volume on state policies towards expatriates. Stéphane Dufoix, “Un pont par-dessus la porte: extraterritorialisation et transétatisation des identifications nationales,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 15-57. 2 Ndioro Ndiaye, “Rôle des pouvoirs publics tant dans les pays d’origine que dans les pays de destination,” speech by the Deputy Director-General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Migration and Development Seminar, Brussels, 13 March 2006, formerly available on the IOM website. 3 On this, see Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_014

States and Their Diasporas

445

at the same time been reinforced, from land borders that are strengthened and take the form of fences or walls4 to electronic borders that record the passage of undesirables.5 On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think that the transnational logic plays solely to the detriment of states. If movements and multiple belongings can transgress the territoriality of the state, they can equally serve the development of other forms of state policies for which the national territory is not the “natural” framework. Numerous indicators seem to demonstrate that the state and the nation are also “transnationalising”. The process of globalisation, understood as an open spatialisation of economic, political, cultural and social relationships, also encompasses a dynamic through which states, increasingly, and more effectively, attempt to incorporate their populations living beyond the borders of the state. The policies of nationality – or of dual nationality or citizenship –, of representation, or of voting rights, the policies of cultural, religious or symbolic links, are proliferating on a planetary scale. For at least thirty years, we have been witnessing transformations in the relationships that the state, as a historical form of the political, maintains with space and with distance, as if “out of sight” no longer necessarily meant “out of mind”. The way is thus open to another form of policy towards the scattered segments that previous policies of mistrust, indifference or abstention had left far from the centre of the nation: a policy of attention and of linkages. The establishment of programmes and practices of links between those who are considered to be members of the national community, the existence of activities that ignore national frontiers and bring together individuals recognising each other as being linked by a common origin, have had the effect of producing a nation which, although not imperial, extends its limits beyond its territory, beyond the borders of the state: truly a transnational or trans-territorial nation.6 4 See the special issue of the journal Cités: “Murs et frontières: de la chute du mur de Berlin aux murs du xxie siècle,” Cités, no. 31 (October-December 2007). 5 On electronic borders, see particularly the work of Dana Diminescu. Dana Diminescu, “Le Passage par l’écran ou l’émergence de nouvelles frontières,” in Actes du colloque Les frontières de l’Europe (Bucarest: Ed. Universitatii, 2007), 263-274. More generally, see the Diasporas Lab website: http://diasporaslab.hypotheses.org 6 Arjun Appadurai calls these entities “transnations” in his Modernity at Large. This usage does not appear appropriate to me, for the same reason that adjective transnational or the noun transnationalism are questionable: they imply that the phenomena occur between nations, thereby obscuring the fact that they call upon definitions of the nation. Riva Kastoryano resolves the problem by using the expression “transnational nationalism”. Riva Kastoryano, “Vers un nationalisme transnational? Redéfinir la nation, le nationalisme et le territoire,” Revue française de science politique, vol. 56, no. 4 (August 2006), 533-553.

446

Chapter 9 From Double Absence to Double Presence

To better grasp these transformations, we first need to review the principal characteristics of the classic paradigm of the nation-state. The latter is a historical form of polity, which may principally be identified by the desire to bring into alignment, as far as possible, a territory, an administration, and a form of legitimate constraint. We find the most concise definition in Max Weber: “A compulsory political organization […] will be called a ’state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”7 This view of the state, both historical and conceptual, and distinguished from the “nation” as such by Weber, has progressively become a sociological doxa now describing the nation-state. The most eloquent definition is thus doubtless that of the state-container put forward by Anthony Giddens: “the nation-state is a power-container whose administrative purview corresponds exactly to its territorial delimitation.”8 Here, again, the territory defines the sphere of competence. In this context, it seems that there exist two populations exclusive one of the other: one which lives on the territory and one which, living on the territory, possesses the nationality and/or the citizenship thereof. National law imposes itself on foreigners while, concurrently, the sovereignty of the state is expressed through the monopoly of the capacity for inclusion within nationality and within citizenship. The distinction between nationality and citizenship here is important. Indeed, in the 19th century states had adopted different solutions to define the acquisition and the transmission of nationality: in the majority of cases, it depended on birth on the soil – jus soli – as in the United Kingdom,9 the United States,10 Argentina or Bolivia; on settlement and/or residence on the territory, as in France from 1790 to 1803; or on descent – jus sanguinis – as in France from 1803 to 1899,11 in Prussia and then Germany from 1842 to 2000, or again in

7 8 9 10

11

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978 (first German edition 1921), 54. Anthony Giddens, Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985, 172. On the history of nationality in the United Kingdom, see Clive Parry, British Nationality Law and the History of Naturalisation. Milan: Giuffrè, 1954. On the history of the origins of American nationality, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. On the French case, the essential reference is Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1791. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008 (first French edition 2000).

States and Their Diasporas

447

Japan since 1899.12 It is relatively rare for the chosen solutions to be monolithic and be based on only one of these main principles: they generally offer a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis in which the matter of residence often occupies an important place. Nevertheless, despite these differences in the determination of nationality, two principles seem to be recognised as ideal in the context of the legal inter-state game that developed during the 19th century: first, the definition of the nation inscribed itself within the limits of nationality, this latter progressively coming to indicate belonging to a state and thus the necessity for the latter to take charge of its nationals, even if they were outside its borders; second, the physical distance to the territory of origin corresponds to a distension of the link. According to this principle, the further an individual is from his land – of birth or of civic belonging –, the more the link weakens and the more the individual in question becomes potentially suspect by the very fact of the danger that this weakening represents. At the same time, the immigrant, an individual who becomes increasingly important during the 19th century, becomes the object of an opposite suspicion, that of a dilution of national identity. The two principles mentioned above were manifested in two processes of closure which were gradually established in nation-states: the progressive nationalisation of the political space, limiting the right to vote and to hold office to nationals alone,13 and the monopolisation by the national political space of political activities occurring on its territory, thus officially forbidding the development of “foreign policies”, undertaken by foreigners and orientated towards their country of origin.14 The national space is thus doubly closed: politics is reserved for nationals and the territory is reserved for national politics only. The historical evolution of citizenship demonstrates that these two principles have recently been called into question, by the establishment of European citizenship, but also by the formalization of multicultural policies paving the way for more open definitions of the nation.15

12

13 14

15

On the Japanese case, see Chikako Kashiwazaki, “Jus Sanguinis in Japan: The Origin of Citizenship in a Comparative Perspective,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 39, no. 3 (1998), 278-300. See Gérard Noiriel, La Tyrannie du national: le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793-1993. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991, 83-100. On this, see Stéphane Dufoix, Politiques d’exil: Hongrois, Polonais et Tchécoslovaques en France après 1945. Paris, PUF, 2002, particularly 86-90. This official prohibition did generally not prevent political activities aimed at the homeland, but it constrained the ways in which these activities were carried out. There are now a number of works on this transformation, including Stephen Castles and Alasdair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging.

448

Chapter 9

Without being able to deal with this fundamental question at any length here, it seems that displacement and settlement abroad, that is, the presence of “national” populations beyond the borders, have historically inscribed themselves within two radically different forms of experience: colonisation, where the link with the homeland is organised around the idea of empire and the domination of the state over distant lands and their indigenous populations; and emigration, individual and collective, for which the persistence of a link with the state is subordinated to the existence of a “spirit of return”. In this latter case, physical and temporal distancing from the home territory represents simultaneously a symbolic and affective distance from the nation, and a stretching of the link of allegiance. With colonisation, the nation spreads; with emigration, it loses its subjects.16 The history of legislation on citizenship and nationality during the 19th century is full of examples of this localisation (municipal or national) of belonging and the accompanying need to manage the question of “expatriation”. The essential concept in the matter is that of the “spirit of return.” For generally, and contrary to what the usage of the term might lead us to suspect, expatriation is not first and foremost a departure from the territory but rather a departure from the homeland, materialised by the loss of belonging to the nation.17 Distancing is only possible if it is temporary – and thus naturally calling for a return – and does not imply allegiance to another state; in all other cases, there is expatriation, that is, the loss of nationality.18 To give but a few examples, the Prussian law of 1842 provided for the au-

16

17

18

London: Macmillan, 2000 and Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. It is striking that these two excellent texts, despite dealing with the historical development of citizenship, devote very little space to the establishment of state policies towards expatriates. This is not an absolute either. The Italian example demonstrates most effectively how emigration may sometimes be viewed as a means of expansion for a state that does not have the capacity for colonisation. See Guido Tintori, “L’Italie et ses expatriés: une perspective historique,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 85. Thus the marriage of a woman to a foreigner, and her “departure” from her nationality of origin, was for a long time a product of expatriation. On this, see Candice Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage and the Law of Citizenship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, as well as Weil, How to be French, 194-202. On the legal aspects of expatriation, see Nancy L. Green, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept,” American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 2 (April 2009), 307-328. See Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, “Theories of Loss of Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review, vol. 84, no. 7 (June 1986), 1471-1503, and Harald Waldrauch, “Loss of Nationality,” in Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European States, vol. i, ed. Rainer

States and Their Diasporas

449

tomatic loss of nationality after ten years’ absence; Bavarian law by simple emigration;19 while Article 15 of the French Constitution of 5 Fructidor, An III (22 August 1795) provided that “any citizen who lives for seven consecutive years outside the territory of the Republic, without mission or authorisation in the name of the nation, will be considered a foreigner; he will only again become a French citizen after having satisfied the requirements prescribed by Article 10 [establishment of residence on the territory].”20 States which base the right to nationality on the principle of jus sanguinis, or incorporate an element of jus sanguinis in legislation dominated by jus soli, often refused, regardless of the circumstance, to permit a full and unconditional transmission of nationality to children born abroad of national parents, or of parents themselves born abroad, and placed conditions on this transmission or maintenance of nationality that required contacts with the national territory. Thus American legislation stipulated that a child born abroad to two American citizens only acquired American citizenship if at least one parent had lived in the United States prior to the birth of the child.21 It might therefore seem that states who had opted for “perpetual allegiance”, that is, the near-impossibility for an individual, born a national of one of these states, to lose or to renounce that belonging, would not subscribe to this mistrust regarding distance. Nevertheless, whether they base this perpetual allegiance on jus soli – as in the United Kingdom until 1870 – or on jus sanguinis – as in France from the Napoleonic reforms of 1803 until 1889 –, they still grapple with the same problem, that of the relationship between the link of allegiance and distance.22 Moreover, during the second half of the 19th century this question of perpetual allegiance lies at the very heart of relationships between states. The increasing reconsideration of perpetual allegiance was accompanied by the establishment of two fundamental principles: the individual right to change

19

20 21

22

Bauböck, Eva Ersbøll, Kees Groenendijk, and Harald Waldrauch (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 183-219. Opinions of the Principal Officers of the Executive Departments and Other Papers Relating to Expatriation, Naturalization and Change of Allegiance. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872, 118-119. Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (presented by Jacques Godechot). Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1979, 105. 48 Stat. 797, 24 May 1934. See Durward V. Sandifer, “A Comparative Study of Laws Relating to Nationality at Birth and to Loss of Nationality,” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 2 (April 1935), 255-256. For the British case, see particularly Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States 1789-1870. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000. For France, see Weil, How to Be French, 30-31.

450

Chapter 9

nationality without the authorisation of the state of origin, but also the reluctance to accept the possibility of multiple citizenship. This reluctance finds its culmination in the League of Nations Codification Conference of 12 April 1930, which addressed the conflict of nationality laws and of which the first lines insisted on the obligation of states, “in the general interest of the international community”, to permit everyone to possess “a nationality and […] one nationality only”. This logic of mono-nationality is coherent with the development of an inter-state system that international law is increasingly coming to frame at the end of the 19th century. This is followed by the rise of what Ulrich Beck calls the “‘territorial either/or’ theory of identity,”23 in which the emphasis is placed on the alternative. This idea goes hand in hand with the two related mistrusts indicated above: mistrust of the immigrant and mistrust of the emigrant. The “either/or” corresponds logically to the “neither-neither”, neither of here, nor of there, conceptualised by Abdelmalek Sayad by the name of “double absence”.24 For Sayad, naturalisation lies at the heart of this exclusionary dynamic. He invokes “the impossible ‘ubiquity’” which imposes itself upon the immigrant or the emigrant: “to be a member, agent and subject, of one society or another, but not both at once […]: to be a citizen exclusively of one nation or another.”25 According to Sayad this alternative is a result of the very conditions of production of emigration and immigration, but also the game of the states: “With the rights they have acquired over nationality, nations do not like conflict between nationalities: they all try to prevent these from happening. They would all like membership of one nation to preclude any form of allegiance to any other power, even if it is not, strictly speaking, political.”26 Indubitably attentive to contemporary transformations in international migrations, he understands well that “the extraordinary extension and imbrication of different spaces (geographical, economic, linguistic, cultural, ideological, and so on) […] can result in people having several nationalities, either at the same time or at different times.”27 The paradox of this situation has as a consequence, still according to Sayad, the progressive transformation of the physical and moral 23 24 25

26 27

Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006 (first German edition 2004), 5. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004 (first French edition 1999). Abdelmalek Sayad, “La Naturalisation, ses conditions sociales et sa signification chez les immigrés algériens en France (première partie),” Gréco 13, recherches sur les migrations internationales, no. 3 (1981), 40. Abdelmalek Sayad, “Naturalisation,” in Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, 246. Ibid.

States and Their Diasporas

451

incompleteness of the emigrant-immigrant into a completeness at once physical and moral: morally here and physically there, the immigrant ends up by being both morally and physically in a “there” that becomes his or her “here” to the detriment of the community now lost.28 It is with this in mind that Sayad called for the constitution of a science of emigration, a science indeed paradoxical since “it appears to be a ‘science of absence’ and of absentees.”29 This “double absence”, this tension between citizenship and distancing, does not appear to indicate a progressive acquisition of a civic reason intended to ignore the distinctions which permeate the national population. In my understanding it is on the contrary the trace of a fundamental aporia tending to limit as far as possible the exercise of their rights of citizenship to the national population living on the territory. The oldest democracies have carefully elaborated an essential difference between citizens living on the national territory and those living abroad. This distinction is entirely coherent with the fact that the exercise of the right to vote was considered to depend upon payment of taxes and thus residence on a territory. The study of the evolution of legislation on the transmission of nationality or on the capacities to exercise political rights demonstrates that even emigration states, having attempted to maintain a formal link with their emigrants through the intermediary of rights to nationality founded above all on jus sanguinis and on the near impossibility of losing one’s nationality, including by naturalisation in another country – we are thinking here in particular of the case of Italy at the end of the 19th century30 –, refused them, despite everything, the right to fully exercise their political rights abroad, thus placing them in a position where they were the object both of much concern and of great injustices. During the “classical” period of the nation-state, national populations living abroad did not attract any particular attention, to the point that diplomatic protection of citizens abroad did not develop until the end of the 19th century and did not – or rarely – give rise to the establishment of specific policies or institutions.31 It was in the 1960s and 1970s that these practices of indifference or abstention with respect to expatriates were gradually transformed into policies of attention. 28 29 30

31

Abdelmalek Sayad, “A relationship of domination” in Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, 125-126. Ibid., 125. See Gianfausto Rosoli, “La Crise des relations entre l’Italie et le Brésil: la grande naturalisation (1889-1896),” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 2, no. 2 (November 1986), 69-90. See Edwin M. Borchard, “Basic Elements of Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad,” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1913), 497-520.

452

Chapter 9

If it is clear that the call for a constitution of a science of absence was justified and that the double absence invoked by Sayad in his texts was – and remains – a valid concept, neither one nor the other allows us to account for the numerous transformations that have reworked the relationships of migrant to space and to the link. The world of migration has changed, the disembedding of space and time has not slowed and ubiquity is not longer entirely impossible. The contemporary migratory world is post-Sayadian and this observation calls for the establishment of a new science: a science of the “double presence”.32 This is not to suggest that Sayad is outmoded or that he should no longer be read. Rather, it implies that his works and his perspective should be included in a dynamic vision of emigration and immigration. To emphasise the double presence is not to imply the disappearance of the double absence: it is more a matter of bringing a second pole into view, thereby establishing an axis leading from double absence to double presence, an axis along the length of which we can locate the different forms of relationships between migrants and their homelands and their host countries. Just as the “double absence” was not an expression intended to describe a situation in a realist manner – no migrant is physically absent from both his land of departure and his land of arrival! –, so the “double presence” is not a realistic description either: no migrant, no individual possesses the gift of physical ubiquity.33 Even so, information and communication technologies (mobile phones, videophones, teleconferencing, the Internet, email, SMS and MMS) and the opportunities that more and more states offer their expatriates in order that they might reconcile distance with certain modes of participation in homeland life allows an increasing number of people to live, in a certain way, here and there, far but always near. This does not vanquish all the paradoxes, far from it. The classic tension between distance and citizenship has changed, but it nevertheless remains relevant. If the tension that we have been emphasising had disappeared, a growing number of states would not go to the trouble of developing an active policy regarding transnational linkages aimed at integrating their expatriate populations in the map of the nation… This “double presence” would somehow be self-evident. However, it is clear that a certain number of mental factors in 32

33

See Dana Diminescu and Stéphane Dufoix, “Pour une science de la double présence,” paper presented to the “Actualité de la pensée d’Abdelmalek Sayad” conference, Paris, Musée social, 15- 16 June 2006. On the modalities of presence and absence in the case of Iranian emigration, see Fariba Adelkhah, “Partir sans quitter, quitter sans partir,” Critique internationale, no. 19 (April 2003), 141-155.

States and Their Diasporas

453

the distance-citizenship tension have eased over the past decades, in particular through the acceptance of different conceptions of ethnicity – a foreign population on a given territory is no longer necessarily considered as being obliged to cut its links with the home community –, but also thanks to the active policies that a growing number of states are establishing towards their expatriates abroad. These transformations of the nation are of two kinds: the spatialisation of the nation beyond the territorial framework, that is, the formation of what may be called extra-territorial nations; but also the inclusion in the national space of individuals who live abroad and who have a link not of nationality but of origin with the state, thereby constituting what I call overstate nations – not in the sense of being above the state, but beyond the state. This evolution has generally been taken into consideration by the academic community within the context of the construction of a new conceptual framework: “transnationalism” or the “transnational”, often articulated with the “new” question of the “global” and of “globalisation” which slowly emerged towards the mid-1980s. In the English-speaking world, just as in Germany, it was often sociology, anthropology and geography which developed this approach towards phenomena that involved individuals, groups and institutions situated on the territories of different states, or the networks whose nodes communicate without respecting frontiers.34 In France the recognition of this reality developed later.35 Translations of authors who have worked on these questions remain scarce, the controversies that animated the specialists of transnational studies were barely heard,36 and seminars, academic meetings, 34

35

36

We might cite here Ulf Hannerz, Arjun Appadurai, Nina Glick-Schiller, Peggy Levitt, Alejandro Portes, Lüdger Pries, Thomas Faist, Roger Waldinger, Rainer Bauböck, Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy. On the establishment of transnational studies, see Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, “Constructing Transnational Studies,” in The Transnational Studies Reader, ed. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1-18. See Monika Salzbrunn, “World Society, Transnationalism and Champs Migratoires: Reflections on German, Anglo-Saxon and French Academic Debates,” in The Making of World Society: Perspectives from Transnational Research, ed. Remus Anghel, Eva Gerharz, Gilberto Rescher, and Monika Salzbrunn (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008), 75-100. In 2004, the publication of an article by Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, “Transnationalism in Question,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 109, no. 5 (March 2004), 1177-1195, which critiqued part of the sociological and anthropological literature on transnationalism, provoked a number of reactions, amongst which Nina Glick-Schiller and Peggy Levitt, “Haven’t We Heard This Somewhere Before? A Substantive View of Transnational Migration Studies by Way of a Reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald,” Center for Migration and Development, Princeton University, January 2006, available on the CMD website: www.cmd.princeton.edu/papers/wp0601.pdf.

454

Chapter 9

texts or special issues remain rare. Moreover, the disciplinary circles interested in the theme are still more frequently those of history, geography, political science or anthropology than those of sociology. Over the past fifteen years a field of research concerning the question of the citizenship of migrants has developed within transnational studies. The declared ambition of these studies is to attempt to identify more precisely the relationship that migrants maintain with their country of origin, but also with their host country or country of residence. We can roughly37 divide this academic activity according to three categories: 1) the works primarily concerned with emigration policies; 2) research concerned with political transnationalism in a wide sense to envisage, generally from the perspective of emigrants or their descendants, the forms of belonging (in the sense of membership) to the homeland and forms of involvement in domestic politics; 3) studies that concentrate more specifically on the policies of states towards their expatriates. In the first group, in addition to the pioneer article published by Barbara Schmitter-Heisler in 1985,38 we must accord a particular place to the volume edited by Nancy Green and François Weil on the “politics of departure”.39 Bringing together studies mostly by historians, but also by sociologists and political scientists, it sets itself the task not only of reminding us that emigration cannot be dissociated from immigration, but also that the countries of departure must confront the question of citizenship. If the tropism of the book is undeniably more concerned with the attitudes of the states of departure towards emigration than with the policies established by these same states concerning their expatriates, certain chapters (particularly those on Italy and China) contain equally rich analyses of the establishment of policies concerning expatriates. Above all, as Nancy Green writes elsewhere, a focus on the policies towards emigration underpins a reversal of two strong tendencies in recent studies on migration and citizenship: on the one hand, one which only studied migrant citizenship in the host country or country of residence, insisting on the relevance of a classic model of citizenship founded on nationality; on the other, the perspective of transnationalism, which often presupposes the disappearance of the state and prioritises deterritorialisation.40 This latter 37 38 39

40

Often – how could it really be otherwise? –, the three aspects are present but one of the three is foregrounded. This is the basis for this distinction. Barbara Schmitter-Heisler, “Sending Countries and the Politics of Emigration and Destination,” International Migration Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985), 469-484. Nancy L. Green and François Weil eds., Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007 (first French edition 2006). Nancy L. Green, “The Politics of Exit: Reversing the Immigration Paradigm,” The Journal of Modern History, no. 77 (2005), 265.

States and Their Diasporas

455

observation needs to be relativised. Indeed, if early studies on transnationalism (the second category identified above) had a tendency to see the development of transnational links being accomplished without the state, or even that they weakened states,41 or only accorded little importance to state policies,42 certain authors, such as Rainer Bauböck, have nevertheless pleaded for a perspective on citizenship that takes into consideration the claims of migrants as much as the policies of states.43 Still, while this theme of citizenship of emigrants in the land of origin was able to be particularly envisaged through the lens of emigrants alone, and by placing the emphasis on “transborder citizenship”,44 it is now more often considered to be the product of a complex interaction between emigrants and the state in the framework of the construction of a new object of study: “external citizenship”.45 Within the field marked out by the study of emigration policies or transnationalism, several more general works have been directly concerned with the relationships between states and their populations living abroad. If in some texts or articles the sheer number of case studies or examples is sufficient to illustrate the uniquely contemporary character of the proliferation of experiences of the link between states and expatriates,46 most studies have attempted to account for these policies by proposing an interpretative frame-

41

42

43

44

45

46

As in the case of the pioneer text by Linda Basch, Nina Glick-Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-Colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London-New York: Routledge, 1994. See Jean-Michel Lafleur, Le Transnationalisme politique: pouvoir des communautés immigrées dans leurs pays d’accueil et pays d’origine. Louvain: Bruylant-Academia, 2005, 50-51. The state policy dimension is much more present in his thesis: Le Transnationalisme politique et l’État, thesis in political science, University of Liège and Sciences Po Paris, May 2008. Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Aldershot: Elgar, 1994. By the same author, see “Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism,” International Migration Review, vol. 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 700-723. Nina Glick-Schiller, “Transborder Citizenship: An Outcome of Legal Pluralism within Transnational Social Fields,” in Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, ed. Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Anne Griffiths (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005), 27-49. Specifically on the theme of citizenship, see Kim Barry, “Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in an Emigration Context,” New York University Law Review, vol. 81, no. 11 (April 2006), 11-59. In the same issue, see also David Fitzgerald, “Rethinking Emigrant Citizenship,” 90-116 and Peter J. Spiro, “Perfecting Political Diaspora,” 207-233. This is particularly true of Carlos Gonzalez Gutiérrez, “Introducción: de estados y diasporas,” in Relaciones Estado-Diáspora, vol. i, Aproximaciones desde cuatro continentes, ed. Carlos Gonzalez Gutiérrez (Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrua, 2006), 11-21.

456

Chapter 9

work for their appearance, or a typology of the forms of the state which enacts them. In 2003, Peggy Levitt and Rafael de la Dehesa, and Eva ØstergaardNielsen both analysed in some detail the different categories of policies or states who had incorporated them into their political agendas. Criticising Robert Smith’s use of the generic notion of “global nations policies”,47 Levitt and de la Dehesa highlight five categories of possible policies: bureaucratic reforms, the encouragement or management of emigrant remittances, the extension of political rights, the development of state assistance or protection of its expatriates, and finally the establishment of symbolic policies aimed at ensuring the persistence of the link between emigrants and their homeland.48 But not all states are able to pursue a global policy that includes these five categories, largely due to the costs that such measures would incur – the least costly, such as symbolic policies, are generally the most common, while the most costly, such as the granting of voting rights to expatriates, remain rare –, but also as a result of the relative capacity of domestic political actors to appreciate these issues. Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, in addition to enumerating state actions according to three distinct but often overlapping domains (economic, socio-cultural and political), identifies three types of sending countries: labour exporting states, independent post-colonial states and states at war, either civil or with another state.49 It emerges both from this typology, and from the case studies in the text in question (Eritrea, Turkey, India, Armenia, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Cyprus, Philippines), that the category of “sending countries” whose emigrant-orientated policies are under consideration, are exclusively so-called countries of “the South”, or “emerging economies” and never “industrialised” countries. Notable in this regard is the New Zealand geographer Alan Gamlen, who, in a perspective often very close to my own, distinguishes himself from previous studies.50 According to Gamlen, any analysis of the transnational can 47

48

49

50

Robert Smith, “Reflections on Migration, the State and the Construction, Durability and Newness of Transnational Life,” in Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, ed. Ludger Pries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 187-219. Peggy Levitt and Rafael De la Dehesa, “Transnational Migration and the Redefinition of the State: Variations and Explanations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (July 2003), 587–611. Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, “International Migration and Sending Countries: Key Issues and Themes,” in International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies and Transnational Relations, ed. Eva Østergaard-Nielsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 6-8. The author makes it clear that these categories are not respectively exclusive. This author’s most complete analysis is to be found in “The Emigration State and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination,” Political Geography, vol. 7, no. 8 (2008), 840-856.

States and Their Diasporas

457

not restrict itself to viewing the state as if it were outmoded, or as if it had exceeded its rights in trying to extend its policies to encompass migrants because, historically, the “domestic” sphere of states has never been strictly constrained by territorial borders. Furthermore, Gamlen takes a significant step in observing that all states are concerned by emigration: he suggests calling “emigration state” that part of the state apparatus dedicated to the mission of managing emigration as a process and as a product – those who leave, but also the communities that they form in the host country.51 It thus becomes possible to include in the analysis policies established by so-called Western states. Nevertheless, a point fundamental to the questions examined here is not explicitly addressed in the previously cited works: that of the inclusion in the space of the nation not only of expatriates, but also certain non-expatriates, that is, populations whose origin is national but who do not possess the nationality of the state.

Contours and Contents of Policies of Attention Towards Expatriates This belonging without requiring a legal attachment, that the Greeks call homogeneia,52 this common origin detached from real nationality, is a fundamental given of contemporary transformations of the relations between states and their expatriates. It is also one of the pathways by which diaspora entered the political vocabulary, because the term often permits the inclusion, under the same designation, of both citizens living abroad and people whose ethnic origin can be attached to the homeland. The idea in itself is not a new one. It underpinned a number of “disappeared” national ideologies, pan-ideologies such as pangermanism or panslavism, in which a consideration of ethnicity took precedence over a consideration of nationality, or indeed, in a case such as that of Israel, where the obstacles to establishing the law of return and the struggle led by North American Jewish organisations paved the way for the establishment of a Jewish nation composed of Israeli citizens and members of the dispersion (tfutsoth). This “return” of a form of nation that goes beyond simple nationality is not a simple “step backwards”. If it sometimes draws, as in the case of “ethnic Germans” (the Aussiedler), on a right to nationality, of long standing since it refers

51 52

Ibid., 851. Lina Venturas, “État grec et diaspora: des ‘émigrés’ à l’‘hellénisme œcuménique’,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 239-259.

458

Chapter 9

to the immediate post-war period,53 it also and above all recognises the important territorial transformations that, for example, Europe and the former Soviet Union have undergone since the end of the 1980s in the context of the disappearance of the Soviet empire. The minorities formerly inscribed within an imperial logic saw themselves henceforth attached, anchored, to a distant national-state centre, even though their nationality made them members of another state. The Russian and Hungarian examples demonstrated the extent to which these populations of national origin living in neighbouring countries were thus distinguished from other expatriates and officially depended upon different policies and distinct legal frameworks, still inscribed within the problematic question of return.54 A contrario, if the evolution of Indian policy in this context is indeed characterised by a tendency to favour Non-Resident Indians (or “NRI”, Indian citizens living abroad) or Persons of Indian Origin (or “PIO”, people who are not of Indian nationality but who can claim to have been Indian citizens or have had a parent or grand-parent who was Indian according to the provisions of the Indian Constitution or of the 1955 Citizenship Act) living in the United States, this is certainly not the result of any official distinction. The very recent category of Overseas Citizenship of India does not discriminate according to the country of residence of PIOs.55 This particular form of citizenship was born of the refusal of the Indian state to formally recognise dual citizenship, called for by the PIOs. Indeed, the implementation of policies aimed at expatriates do not necessarily depend upon a unilateral decision of the state. The expatriates themselves, by their own voices or by those of their representatives, often participate in this implementation – when they are not the instigators. Just as Italian and French emigrants had attempted since the end of the 19th century to obtain certain concessions guaranteeing, for example, their representation in the space of the nation or their right to return to the homeland, it seems that, in a growing number of cases, the place of emigrants and their descendants in the space of the nation is negotiated within a veritable

53

54

55

Bénédicte Michalon, “Les Aussiedler, une migration parmi tant d’autres. Contingences géopolitiques et désethnicisation de la loi d’immigration en Allemagne,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 165-182. See, in ibid., Anne de Tinguy, “La Russie et les ‘compatriotes’ de l’étranger. Hier rejetés, demain mobilisés?” 183-204, and Judit Toth, “Entre politique étrangère et politique intérieure. La ‘politique de diaspora’ de la Hongrie,” 221-237. The law was passed in December 2003 and the category established in December 2005. It should be noted that it does not apply to any individual who is or has been a citizen of Pakistan or Bangladesh.

States and Their Diasporas

459

transnational national space, where actors emerging from the national political sphere (institutions, politicians, political parties…) coexist with actors emerging from the communitarian space outside the country (newspapers, associations, intellectuals), both parties finding themselves engaged in a struggle with one another to impose their own definition of the nation and to define the institutional, juridical, economic, social and symbolic frameworks to manage the presence of those who are absent. At first glance, one could be forgiven for thinking that the reasons that push a government to engage a specific policy regarding its expatriates are above all domestic. The Malian case seems to indicate that the attention devoted to migrants by the military regime between 1968 and 1991 was aimed at an instrumentalisation towards domestic political ends.56 Moreover, it appears logical that the arrival in power of a nationalist government would lead to a prioritization of the consideration of national populations, or populations of national origin, living abroad, to the detriment, for example, of foreigners living on the territory. One might cite the case of Italy, which adopted a more purposeful programme in favour of the civil rights of Italians living abroad after Silvio Berlusconi’s victory at the 2001 general election, or again, that of India, where the victory of the Hindu nationalist party BJP at the Indian general elections in 1998 coincided with the adoption of policies more attentive to the rights of Indians abroad. In 2000 the prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee named a Special Committee, headed by Laxmi Mall Singhvi, with the aim of preparing a report on the “Indian diaspora”. Finally submitted in 2001,57 this report established the framework for a new programme of inclusion of expatriates with the national space. However, upon closer inspection, two elements prompt us to relativise the importance of the relationship between nationalism and the policy of attachment. The latter emerged in the 1970s, if in a slightly timid manner, when the Indian government established a policy aimed at attracting capital from Indians abroad, and to this end, in 1973 created the two categories of Indians abroad, the NRI and the PIO.58 The change in majority and the rise

56

57 58

Daouda Gary-Tounkara, “Encadrement et contrôle des migrants par le régime militaire au Mali (1968-1991),” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 147-162. Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, December 2001. The text of the report is available at www.indiandiaspora.nic.in (last accessed April 2016). On the evolution of Indian policy in this regard, see Marie-Carine Lall, India’s Missed Opportunity: India’s Relationship With the Non-Resident Indians. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, and Ingrid Therwath, L’état face à la diaspora: stratégies et trajectoires indiennes, thesis in political science, Sciences-Po Paris, 2007.

460

Chapter 9

to power in 2004 of the Congress Party, historically hostile to Indians abroad, did not reverse the policy.59 Likewise, in China, if the death of Mao, somewhat hostile to policies in favour of Chinese abroad, opened up the possibility of launching a policy in the favour of the latter, the changes were inscribed within a growing integration into the world economy with the aim of encouraging the economic modernisation of the country.60 If the domestic dimension is clearly not to be neglected, it is often inserted within a historical transformation of relations between interior and exterior. This transformation may take the singular form of a modification of the meaning attached to the notion of the border, or it may – and the two are not incompatible – be inscribed within a global evolution of the relationship with distance and attachments. The relationship with the border may have been transformed by one of several types of process.61 1) The disappearance, in Europe and in Asia, of the large geopolitical complex that was the Soviet Empire played a fundamental role. Indeed, borders certainly existed at the heart of this empire – of states or republics –, but as a result of the very nature of the regime, real conflicts linked to the presence of minorities were impossible. Its fall and its dismemberment led not only to the re-emergence of questions previously “frozen” by the empire, such as those of national minorities, requiring either the old or the new states to encompass these latter within the space of the nation (Croatia, Hungary, Germany, but also Serbia or the Baltic states62), but equally to the recognition of the presence of millions of ethnic Russians beyond the new frontiers of Russia; 2) The accession to independence, by creating borders but also through materialising the existence of a national entity, equally acts in favour of an extra-territorial vision of the nation, where populations of national origin

59 60 61

62

Ingrid Therwath, “Les ‘Journées des Indiens de l’étranger’. Le Gouvernement face à la diaspora,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 216-220. Carine Guerassimoff, “Limites floues, frontières vives. La Chine et les ‘Chinois d’outremer’,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 61-78. The aspects of exile, democratisation and conflict have been clearly identified by Eva Østergaard-Nielsen: see “International Migration and Sending Countries,” 18-19, 24 and 28. The case of Estonia is particularly interesting, since in 1992 this country established a policy of return for “ethnic Estonians” living in Russia or in the countries of the Community of Independent States (CIS). See Hill Kulu, “Policy towards the Diaspora and Ethnic (Return) Migration: An Estonian Case,” GeoJournal, vol. 51, no. 3 (July 2000), 135-143.

States and Their Diasporas

461

living abroad occupy a special place. The case of Eritrea is remarkable in this respect. During the conflict with Ethiopia Eritreans abroad had already been mobilised. Not only were they eligible to participate in a referendum on independence in 1993, but they also subsequently benefitted from representation in the assembly charged with drafting the constitution.63 Numerous countries who had recently acceded to independence immediately recognised the possibility of dual citizenship. 3) The case of Croatia already corresponds to the two preceding types, but it adds a further factor, again present in the Eritrean case: that of war. The participation of a state in armed conflict on its own territory almost automatically leads to an appeal to emigrants, either directly, that they participate in combat, or that they contribute financially to the war effort, or for the legitimation of the conflict.64 In the case of a favourable result, nationals abroad benefit from a credit that often takes the form of greater inclusion in the symbolic space of the nation. In the French case, it was the contribution of emigrants to the war effort that explains at least partially why the longstanding demands of French overseas finally led to the creation in the immediate post-war period of the Conseil supérieur des Français de l’étranger (today the Assemblée des Français de l’étranger).65 4) Changes affecting the migratory regime can constitute circumstances favourable for the transformation of relationships with emigrants. The closing of borders by most European states in the mid-1970s and the gradual settlement of immigrants in these countries prompted a number of states (such as Morocco, Tunisia or Greece) to establish mechanisms (modifications of the nationality law, creation of specific ministerial services, and so on) permitting them to maintain links with these populations. 5) Finally, in a general manner, the promise of democratic transition also favours the inclusion of emigrants. Transitions from dictatorship to democracy created a situation in which the restoration of national unity by the 63

64

65

On the Eritrean case, see particularly Khalid Koser, “Mobilizing New African Diasporas: An Eritrean Case Study,” in Koser, New African Diasporas, 111-123, and Victoria Bernal, “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: the Eritrean Diaspora Online,” Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 2 (2006), 161-179. See particularly Aline Angustures and Valérie Pascal, “Diasporas et financement des conflits,” in Économie des guerres civiles, ed. François Jean and Jean-Christophe Rufin (Paris: Hachette, 1996), 495-542. Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam, “Un pays pionnier. La représentation politique des expatriés en France,” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 105-127. By the same author, see Qu’est-ce que l’Assemblée des Français de l’étranger? Paris: L’Archipel, 2008.

462

Chapter 9

re-establishment of pluralist procedures for designating representatives encountered the preoccupations of emigrants (as notably in the Mexican and Greek cases), and even exiles, in cases when the former regime had prompted the organisation of a political opposition in exile, as in the case of Chile.66 However, the proliferation of policies of attention is also inscribed within a more global process which has seen a steady increase in the number of countries (Armenia, Australia, China, Colombia, Croatia, Eritrea, Haiti, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, to cite but a selection) which have established at least one of the seven principal features of extra-territorial or over-state nations: the possibility of overseas voting at some or all national elections; the existence of political representation of populations living abroad; their official or symbolic inclusion within territorial organisation; the possibility for dual nationality and dual citizenship; the creation of spaces of links between “expatriates” as well as between them and the state; the creation of spaces for physical meetings between representatives of the state and representatives of national populations, or populations of national origin, living abroad; and finally, the inclusion of populations of national origin in the very definition of the nation. The extension of the right to vote in national elections to citizens living abroad without requiring their return to the country is quite recent – with the exception of New Zealand, who extended the right to seamen in 1890 and Australia which did likewise in 1902 – even in democracies as old as France (1948), the United States (1975), the United Kingdom (1985), Canada (1993) and Italy (2001).67 We observe, however, a rapid progression in this mechanism for voting, often associated with registration on the electoral rolls in consulates and embassies, but equally with electronic voting. At present approximately a hundred states permit external voting, a figure which demonstrates the extent to which this internal-external tension is constitutive of democratic citizenship, but also the extent to which we are witnessing an increasing awareness of pop-

66

67

Although very useful, the typology developed by Gamlen does not allow for the analytical integration of a population living abroad who does not recognise the legitimacy of the ruling regime. Gamlen, “The Emigration State and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination,” 852. The literature on the question of external voting is accumulating rapidly, as are different national case studies. See the preliminary report of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance: A Preview of the International IDEA Handbook on External Voting, 2006, available on the IDEA website: www.idea.int.

States and Their Diasporas

463

ulations living abroad. Political representation of expatriate citizens remains rare. Currently, in the European Union, only three states have taken steps to establish such a parliamentary representation: Portugal, Italy and France.68 However, there now exists, at least at the European level, a recognition of different national policies towards expatriates. Thus the representatives of the 24 EU states met during the European Council meeting of 19-21 June 2003, in the context of the “Summit of European Diasporas”,69 in order to provide an overview of best practices in the constitution or maintenance of links between states and their “diasporas”. Similarly, Australia recently has set itself the objective of consolidating links with the “Australian diaspora” and has shown no reluctance to challenge its definition as a country of immigration to also consider itself as a country of emigration.70 In the domain of nationality law and in particular of dual nationality, important changes occurred during the 1960s: a growing number of newly independent states decided to recognise or at least tolerate dual nationality. However, at the same time, on 6 May 1963 a Convention of the Council of Europe was signed in Strasbourg, that aimed at a reduction in the number of cases of multiple nationalities, and the preamble to which stated “that cases of multiple nationality are liable to cause difficulties and that joint action to reduce as far as possible the number of cases of multiple nationality, as between member States, corresponds to the aims of the Council of Europe”.71 Finally, thirty years later, on 2 February 1993, an additional protocol to the same Convention foresaw the possibility, in certain circumstances, of maintaining the original nationality even in the case of voluntary acquisition of the nationality of another signatory state. Four years later, the European Convention on Nationality 68

69 70 71

See the comparative studies produced by the Council of Europe or by the European Confederation “Europeans Throughout the World”: Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam, Rapport au Conseil de l’Europe sur les liens entre les Européens vivant à l’étranger et leur État d’origine, Strasbourg, 1997. See also Democratic Rights of European Expatriates: A Comparative Study Report on the Electoral Regimes in the Country of Origin for European Expatriates and the Democratic Representation of Their Interests, Rights and Obligations to the Country of Origin and to the European Parliament, Brussels, The Europeans Throughout the World, January 2004. The Summit of European Diasporas: Summary Report and Recommendations, 30 June 2003, 2. Until 2006 the text was available on the website www.europeandiasporas.org. Graeme Hugo, Dianne Rudd, and Kevin Harris, Australia’s Diaspora: Its Size, Nature and Policy Implications, CEDA Information Paper no. 80, December 2003. Convention on the Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and on Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality, Strasbourg, 6.V.1963 http://conventions.coe.int/ Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/043.htm

464

Chapter 9

of 6 November 1997, dropped all references to the ideal of mono-nationality. It should be noted that in the intervening period, legislation tolerating dual nationality, more or less explicitly, had proliferated.72 In 2001, 93 states across the world authorised, implicitly or explicitly, a form of multiple citizenship.73 Thus, only two of the nineteen Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries of South America recognised dual nationality before the 1980s: Uruguay (1919) and Panama (1972). Over the past thirty years, eight others have taken the step, six of which in the 1990s (Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico). Of the fourteen nonhispanophone and non-lusophone countries of South and Central America, nine recognise dual nationality and of these nine, eight recognised it just after independence (between 1960 and the late 1980s).74 Similar changes have occurred on all continents, often after independence. In a certain number of cases, this increase in the recognition of dual nationality is accompanied by that of dual citizenship, i.e. the exercise of all political rights from the land of residence. As the Mexican case has recently shown, the theoretical acceptance of both by the state does not necessarily imply the practical implementation of such policies. In 1996, the Mexican Congress passed a new law accepting dual nationality, which came into force in March 1998.75 However, although the principle of dual citizenship had been provided for since the end of the 1990s, the possibility for Mexican citizens living abroad to vote at federal elections was only finally accepted by Congress in 2005 and put into effect for the first time during the presidential elections of July 2006. 72

73 74

75

For a long time studies of dual nationality were largely juridical, or occasionally historical in character. Recently, following the lead of the German sociologist Thomas Faist, and his American counterpart Peter Kivisto, a more sociological approach to the study of double nationality has developed. In addition to Thomas Faist, Jürgen Gerdes, and Beate Rieple, “Dual Citizenship as a Path-Dependent Process,” International Migration Review, vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall 2004), 913-944, see Thomas Faist and Peter Kivisto eds., Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, and, by the same authors, Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transnational Prospects. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Stanley A. Renshon, Dual Citizenship and American National Identity. Washington: Center for Immigration Studies, 2001, 45. Michael Jones-Correa, “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its Consequences for the United States,” International Migration Review, vol. 35, no. 4 (Winter 2001), 997-1029. On the historical processes that led to this law, see particularly Robert Smith, “Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization, the State and the ExtraTerritorial Conduct of Mexican Politics,” International Migration Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 297-343.

States and Their Diasporas

465

This proliferation of links between a country and its populations living abroad is not limited to the juridical domain. The new technological possibilities allow for the establishment of an advanced form of “double presence” by emphasising a particular form of link associating locality, familiarity and trans-stateness. Classical definitions of the community need to be rethought in the context of a remarkable transformation of the conditions permitting the invention or the persistence of the link over distance. If we return to the definition of the community proposed at the end of the 19th century by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, its three “pillars” that are blood, soil and spirit may henceforth exist much more easily across dispersion in space. It was precisely the “place” that symbolised for Tönnies “a truly human community in its highest form”: “Although it is basically conditioned by living together, this kind of community can persist even while people are absent from their neighbourhood, but this is more difficult than with [the community of blood]; it has to be sustained by fixed habits of getting together and by customs regarded as sacred.”76 This co-incidence between time and space also plays an essential role in the construction of a national habitus. In his book Imagined Communities, the historian Benedict Anderson emphasised the role that the diffusion of printing had played in the growth of nationalism.77 Indeed, the possibility that individuals distant and distinct from one another could share a single reading created a space of proximity and constructed bridges between minds that contributed to the synchronisation of previously dissociated temporalities. In a certain fashion, the formation of the nation-state is also the result of the construction of this co-incidence between time and space, the one and the other alike becoming national, and all distance at the heart of the territory being encompassed in a single time. Distance outside the territory on the other hand depended on other temporalities and could thus take the form of a distance with respect to the heart of the nation. If, as Anthony Giddens affirms, modernity is a disembedding of time and of space, hitherto indissociable in their local anchorings, and their recomposition at the national level,78 then late modernity – or “second modernity” in the vocabulary of Ulrich Beck – corresponds to a period when the spatial dimension becomes potentially more and more independent of the temporal dimension as a result of the development 76 77 78

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 (first German edition 1887), 204 and 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

466

Chapter 9

of means of transport, but particularly of information and communication. The consequences of this revolution for the maintenance of the national link over distance are evident. It had now become possible for those who wished to live far from their countries to remain in permanent contact, in a quasiinstantaneous manner, through the intermediary of mobile phones, electronic messaging, newsgroups, but also through gateways that were specifically intended for them, whether established by expatriates, commercially or even by the state of origin itself. Indeed, the development of policies of contact between states and the collected groups who often define themselves – and who the states themselves define – as their “diaspora” finds a privileged medium in the form of governmental sites or gateways opening on multiple topics on the internet. They establish a continuity and an instantaneity in the relations that these two positions maintain between two physical encounters.79 Quite often this relationship finds a materialisation in the creation of websites about the diaspora and databases registering nationals living abroad. These institutional sites, established by a large number of states including India, Armenia, Greece, Italy, coexist with sites conceived to promote communication between different sites in the periphery. The invention of this community is nevertheless equally manifested through the creation of places and the organisation of physical encounters between the state and its “diaspora”. We thus see a growth in the number of official meetings, at the highest level of the state, between the representatives of countries and those of national populations, or populations of national origin, living abroad. However, these encounters symbolise less the return of expatriates than the organisation of a space for discussion, for negotiation even, between the two parties, for the presence of these populations abroad and the organisation of a policy of attachment henceforth underpin fundamental issues, sometimes far beyond the simple question of dual nationality.80 The Armenian case is one of the more representative ones in this matter. The independence of the Republic of Armenia in 1991 profoundly transformed the lives of millions of people of Armenian origin: the end of the communist period and the establishment of democracy, the possibilities for visits or return, re-establishment of an independent political centre for the Armenian people. 79

80

Harry H. Hiller and Tara M. Franz, “New Ties, Old Ties and Lost Ties: The Use of The Internet in Diaspora,” New Media and Society, vol. 6, no. 6 (2004), 731-752. More generally, see Karim H. Karim ed., The Media of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2003. Note that, in the French case, the Journée des expatriés, “Expatriates Day”, held in the Senate, was only organised for the first time in March 2006.

States and Their Diasporas

467

In this context negotiation over relations between the Armenians of Armenia and Armenians abroad – who, generally, do not possess Armenian nationality – has become a fundamental element of the political life of the country as well as within Armenian organisations abroad. Five “Armenia-Diaspora” conferences were held in Yerevan in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2011, and 2014, during which representatives of the Armenian state and organisations representing Armenians living abroad discussed the evolution of the relationship between the two parties. Likewise, the break-up of the USSR, the constitution of new independent states and the presence ipso facto, on their territories, of millions of people of Russian origin, prompted the Russian government to become more closely involved with these “compatriots” (соотечественники, sootechestvenniki) – and to organise a Compatriots Congress in Moscow, 11-12 October 2001.81 Finally, in the case of India, the “Report on the Indian diaspora” submitted in 2001 called for the organisation of a holiday dedicated to Indians abroad, a day which would be the occasion for an official meeting with their representatives. The first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas82 was held in 2003 and brought together 1946 people from 63 countries. Officially the holiday falls on 9 January, anniversary of the return to India of Mahatma Gandhi in 1915, a symbol that links the presence abroad and the fight for the unity of the nation.83 The Indian example is not simply an example of the richness that spaces of encounter can provide: it is also representative of the proliferation of policies of engagement being established by a growing number of states, not only towards their national populations, but increasingly towards populations of national origin. In the “diaspora policy” engaged by Indian governments since 1998, PIOs are wholly integrated, without any real different in status from NRIs, in the definition of the “Indian diaspora”, thereby including in the very definition of the Indian nation, according to a culturalist and ethnic logic, individuals who do not possess Indian nationality. This logic, consisting in extending the national space not only beyond the borders of the territory but also beyond those of nationality, and thus of the state, is not limited to the Indian case. 81 82

83

Anne de Tinguy, La Grande Migration: La Russie et les Russes depuis l’ouverture du rideau de fer. Paris: Plon, 2004, 400-402. The expression literally means “Indian Expatriate Day”. However, the expression pravasi bharatiya is even more interesting: it literally means “former Indian”, that is, an Indian who has lost or renounced his nationality. See Ingrid Therwath, L’État face à la diaspora: stratégies et trajectoires indiennes, master thesis in political science, Sciences Po Paris, 2003, 23, note 54. The PBD is annual. For an analysis of the 2005 event, see Therwath, “Les ‘ Journées des Indiens de l’étranger’,” 212-216.

468

Chapter 9

In certain cases these policies take the form of a real or symbolic inclusion of the national presence abroad in the territorial organisation of the country. The first example of the pursuit of this idea is without a doubt the project, proposed in 1990,84 then launched in 1994, by the Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, of the idea of the “tenth Haitian department” composed of Haitians living abroad.85 If this institutionalisation failed, it nevertheless prompted emulations in Latin America, as demonstrated by the project, launched in 2002, transforming Chilians abroad into the fourteenth region of Chile,86 or again the establishment of the twentieth Uruguayan department in 2005.87

Diaspora: A Name for Expatriates If seeing the development of globalisation simply as the end of the nationstate helps us to understand why one current meaning of diaspora – that which makes of it an alternative model, acephalous, spatial but not territorial, of human organisation – seems logically to be associated with it, that does not explain the astonishing growth in the use of the term in the context of state policies regarding the maintenance of links with dispersed communities. Indeed, and the preceding developments have given us some glimpses, the process of globalisation, understood as an open spatialisation of economic, political, cultural and social relationships, equally encompasses a dynamic through which states undertake to seize – or to “embrace”, to use John Torpey’s term88 – increasingly, and more effectively, their populations living beyond the borders of the state. I wish to confine myself here to a few examples that will allow us to understand how the word diaspora gives meaning to this evolution. In a number of countries, or groups of countries, it is the term upon which representatives of state authority – governmental elites or senior civil servants – may agree to use to characterise this population of nationals, even former nationals 84

85 86

87 88

On the birth of the idea and its use during Aristide’s exile, see Jean Jean-Pierre, “The Tenth Department,” in Haïti: Dangerous Crossroads, ed. Deirdre McFadyen, Pierre Laramée, Mark Fried, and Fred Rosen (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 195-204. On this experience, see particularly Michel Laguerre, Diaspora, Politics and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 45-53. Cécilia Baeza, “Des exilés aux globe-trotters: la redéfinition du statut de l’expatrié dans la transition démocratique chilienne (1990-2006),” in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, près du cœur, 296-304. See Álvaro Portillo, “La Política migratoria del Estado uruguayo,” in Gutiérrez, Relaciones Estado-Diáspora, vol. ii, La Perspectiva de Américana latina y el Caribe, 313-327. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

States and Their Diasporas

469

or descendants of former nationals, who live abroad. The technological dimension is fundamental to state management of expatriates, including where diaspora is not, or is little used89 – as in Italy, when one speaks rather of “Italians abroad” (Italiani all’estero), but also in France, where the authorities have long appeared reticent to speak of a “French diaspora”. However, the word seems to be gaining ground, and on all continents. In France, references to the “French diaspora” are more and more frequent, including in ministerial circles.90 Diaspora figures prominently in the lexicon of states which, on all the continents, take into consideration the presence abroad of national populations or populations of national origin. Sometimes the term clearly does not reveal a coherent policy, but a differentiated attitude between nationals in the country and nationals abroad. Thus, in the context of the rise to power of LaurentDésiré Kabila in Zaire in 1997, “the term ‘diaspora’ has become an ‘in-word’ – to such an extent that it’s almost a password – if you want to make any headway in offices and official circles, or to be well received in a top-class hotel, then you’ve got to be numbered among the ‘diaspora’.” In his undertaking of conquest, Kabila called upon Congolese abroad to the detriment of those in the country who were qualified “mobutuistes”.91 This generalisation sometimes requires the authorities to provide explanations to populations who are not necessarily familiar with the term, or with its new usage. In 2008, one of the publications of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, Economic Issue of the Day, which set itself the task of “enlightening the public and other interested parties on the concepts behind certain economic issues,” published an article of four pages to explain the current meaning of diaspora. Presenting the “classic” definitions of Safran and Sheffer, it explained that “over time, the use of ‘diaspora’ has been extended to encompass ethnic or national groups of migrant origin that are not necessarily displaced by force. This broader definition includes the contemporary (modern) diaspora groups, in particular, the economic migrants or those who migrate to another country to find work. This typifies the Filipino diaspora that has emerged in the early 20th century and has multiplied in the past three decades or so.”92 89 90 91 92

On this question, see Laurie Brand, Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Speech by Christine Lagarde, Minister for Trade, to the Assemblée des Français de l’étranger, 7 September 2005, text formerly available on the ministry’s website. Tshibambe Lubowa, “The Congolese and the ‘diaspora’,” ANB-BIA Supplement, no. 387, 1 April 2000. “Diaspora: Explaining a Modern Filipino Phenomenon,” Economic Issue of the Day, vol. 8, no. 4-5, Philippine Institute for Development Studies, December 2008, 1.

470

Chapter 9

Using the word diaspora had two important advantages. First, for 20 years it had enjoyed remarkably positive connotations. In the context of debates on globalisation, uninterrupted technological progress in developing the means of reducing the effects of distance, and a shift in public opinion concerning the meaning of expatriation, it became a term in perfect affinity with the current spirit of the world in which dispersion is either esteemed, in the form of nomadism, or relativised by the increased possibilities for the maintenance of attachments. Diaspora subsequently drew strength from its very capacity to obscure the conditions of its production. Indeed, a diaspora is generally presented as being the simple sum of nationals living abroad or, in certain cases, national populations or populations of national origin living abroad. Thus understood, the term seemed unproblematic, since it was the simple expression of a statistical reality. However, far from being a simple description, the “diaspora” is in reality the product of a complex operation through which bearers of an “authorised word” – as researchers, experts, holders of executive authority, representatives of the people of emigrants – construct the entity that they claim simply to be describing.93 In this sense, this operation is emblematic of what I have called the “formative” dimension of the language (see introduction, p. 14). In recent years, the French political scientist Francesco Ragazzi has applied a similar analytical framework to diaspora that he considers to be a “speech act” producing the effects of truth, a word which “does things”.94 This aspect is particularly evident in the case of states whose authorities have only started using diaspora fairly recently to describe their expatriates and who, because they do not seem a priori to be part of the “club of diaspora states” will need to be even more persuasive in their arguments in favour of its real existence, specifically by referring to scientific definitions of the word. The role of consultants or experts, placed at the intersection of the worlds of research and of policy, is then essential, as the Australian example demonstrates. In 2004, two members of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Michael Fullilove and Chloë Flutter, authored a report on the “Australian diaspora”. Considering initially that “the use of the word diaspora to describe

93 94

See Stéphane Dufoix, “Notion, concept ou slogan? Qu’y a-t-il sous le terme ‘diaspora’?” in Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière, and Sheffer, Les Diasporas: 2 000 ans d’histoire, 53-63. Francesco Ragazzi, “The Concept of ‘Diaspora’ and the ‘Transnational Social Space’,” as well as, by the same author, “Diaspora as a Speech Act in International Politics: Who Says ‘Diaspora’ and Why?” paper presented at the annual conference of the International Studies Association, Montréal, 11 March 2004.

States and Their Diasporas

471

the community of Australian expatriates is relatively new,”95 they made it the keyword of their analysis, employing it as a synonym for the “community of Australians dispersed across the globe.”96 Drawing on the analyses of Steven Vertovec, they concluded that “In recent times, the definition has expanded to include any population that ‘originated in a land other than which it currently resides, and whose social, economic and political networks cross the borders of nation-states or, indeed, span the globe’.”97 The use of diaspora is thus possible in the case of Australians, even though Australia does not resemble other originating states of “world diasporas” since it is a peaceful, developed state, a destination for qualified migrants and whose own expatriates have not fled the country but have left to broaden their own experiences, often temporarily.98 Regardless, the particularities of the “Australian diaspora” should not prevent Australia from taking into consideration the importance of its expatriate population. The Australian geographer Graeme Hugo, researcher at the University of Adelaide, is doubtless the most active in this respect, in academia as in political decision-making circles. Since the early 2000s, he has been calling for a reworking of the unilateral perception of Australia as a land of immigration in order for its character as a land of emigration to be similarly recognised.99 He appeals to the word diaspora to support his case. In a later article, he draws on the works of Steven Vertovec, William Safran, Michèle Reis and particularly Kim Butler, from whom he borrows the four criteria (dispersion towards at least two destinations, relationship with a real or imagined homeland, a common collective identity shared by the different communities of the diaspora, as well as a persistence beyond the second generation) to demonstrate that the community of Australian expatriates not only meets these conditions but possibly a fifth, that of identification with the homeland.100 The syllogism is perfect: the definition of a diaspora presupposes the existence of criteria; the

95

96 97 98 99

100

Chloë Flutter and Michael Fullilove, Diaspora: The World Wide Web of Australians. Double Bay: Longueville Media, 2004, 3. The former is a lawyer and political scientist, the latter a specialist in economic geography and migration. They have both also worked as consultants, one as a political advisor, the other with international organisations. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Graeme Hugo, A New Paradigm of International Migration: Implications for Migration Policy and Planning in Australia, Research Paper n° 10 2003-04, Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Libraries, 2004, 2. Graeme Hugo, “An Australian Diaspora?” International Migration, vol. 44, no. 1 (2006), 129.

472

Chapter 9

Australian expatriate community meets them; therefore an Australian diaspora exists. The influence of Graeme Hugo, as well as Flutter and Fullilove, appears to be fairly strong in the Australian political circles, which seems to have adopted the idea of the “Australian diaspora” even though the relevance of the term was not even suggested in a 2005 parliamentary report on expatriates.101 Other industrialised states have made diaspora a central term in a future mechanism of inclusion of national populations at the heart of the space of the state. Between the 19 and 21 June 2003, the representatives of 24 European countries gathered together in Greece at the initiative of the Greek minister of Foreign Affairs in order to “focus attention on the importance of Europe’s diasporas, the role they can play in EU policy development, and to begin a process that will lead to stronger EU-diaspora ties.”102 Not only was this gathering of official representatives indicative of the legitimacy of usage of diasporas to describe populations living abroad, but it also engaged a process of consultation to determine “best practices”. With a view to the latter, two working groups were established: the first on the “‘internal’ diasporas”, those citizens of one European country settled in another; the second on the “‘external’ diasporas”, for European citizens living outside the borders of the Union.103 After a period of latency,104 it seems that this process has been resumed. In January 2005, a conference was held in Barcelona on the theme of the diasporas of Europe and European citizenship. Organised by the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation, it was financed by the Department of Education and Culture of the European Union within the context of a special programme on the question of European citizenship.105 Most of the papers referred to diasporas of the different countries of Europe as well as the ways in which the European Union could or should organise links with them. The definition of diaspora used as a basis for work 101

102 103

104

105

They Still Call Australia Home: Inquiry into Australian Expatriates, report of the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, Canberra, March 2005. The report is available on the Parliament of Australia website: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_ Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/ 2004-07/expats03/report/index (last accessed April 2016). The Summit of European Diasporas, 2. Ibid., 4. Three other tasks were identified: the establishment of an affiliation between these working parties and the European Commission, the redaction of national reports on the state of each “diaspora”, and an inventory of best practices in “diaspora” policy. The Council of Europe has continued to raise the question, notably in a document entitled Diaspora Cultures, Document no. 10342, Committee on Culture, Science and Education, 19 October 2004. Proceedings of the conference on Europe’s Diasporas and European Citizenship, Barcelona, 27-29 January 2005. The document used to be available on the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation website.

States and Their Diasporas

473

in the conference sessions was that provided by the French geographer Michel Bruneau: “A Diaspora is a community of migrant people who desire to keep a strong link with their cultural identity and territory of origin. […] The members of a Diaspora are members by choice. Often, they are forced immigrants due to a disaster, or had to move away for political reasons or extreme poverty. The local communities, scattered in different host-countries on a world- or continental scale, interact according to a network organisation without hierarchy.”106 At the end of the conference the participants drew up a declaration on the “Diasporas of Europe” in which these were defined as “enduring human networks and communities, whose membership is entirely voluntary” constituting “very real emotional and material resources.”107 The diversity of participants at the conference demonstrates well how different worlds interact. In addition to French and Spanish academics, there were journalists, lawyers, members of the European Commission, European deputies, as well as representatives of different organisations such as The Europeans in the World or European Citizen Action Service. In a similar vein, at the initiative of the Assemblée des Français de l’étranger, on 30 September 2008 the French minister of Foreign Affairs hosted a summit called “Europe on the Move”, the first gathering of Europeans residing outside their country of origin. The Déclaration de Paris approved by the participants insisted on the necessity for the Union to adopt a specific policy towards Europeans who had chosen to live as expatriates, and recommended the adoption of several principles and measures: “universal justice” for all Europeans, the development of a European diplomatic and consular network, the establishment of a “European advisor” in national public services, the creation of a web gateway for expatriates, the establishment of a civil and military rapid intervention force to come to the assistance of expatriates in need, the harmonisation of access to social protection, the extension of education policies by the opening of Erasmus programmes to European students living outside the EU, the recognition by Europe of the rights to individual retirement, the right to vote in national and European elections, and finally, the political recognition, by European institutions, of European expatriates.108

106 107

108

The definition is provided in English in ibid., 15. The text of the Declaration is available online at http://www.joseacontreras.net/econom/ Economia/Economia_Social_CIES/pdf/economiasocial/TheBarcelonaDeclaration_final. pdf. Paris Declaration, “For a European Policy on Europeans Resident outside Their Country of Origin,” 30 September 2008, text available on the website of the World Council of Hellenes Abroad: http://en.sae.gr/?id=15163 (last accessed April 2016)

474

Chapter 9

If the originality of such an undertaking on a European scale is to be noted, it establishes a civil definition – and a voluntary one at that – of members of a diaspora: they must be citizens of one of the EU member states. Other uses of the word diaspora by individual states draw on different definitions, since they take into consideration in people of national origin who, regardless of status, are considered part of the space of the nation. This idea appears explicitly in the project elaborated by the state of Dominica, in the West Indies, to establish both a policy regarding and an attachment to its dispersed population. Dominica is an English-speaking island, independent since 1978. In October 2004, the Dominica Academy of Arts and Sciences, submitted a report to the government on this project, in which a redefinition of the term diaspora opens up the way to a redefinition of the Dominican nation itself: A nation’s Diaspora is that part of its population that has emigrated overseas and is permanently resident in foreign countries. These emigrants may or may not hold citizenship in their respective host countries. Whether or not they do, they often seek the services of their home country, directly or through its representatives abroad (embassies, high commissions, consulates etc) in respect to their own needs and those of relatives and friends. Many of these emigrants may eventually form households involving persons from within or outside their national group, and create families of second and subsequent generation members who by extension become nationals of the “ancestral homeland”.109 As we see, nationality is not the principal criterion here: it is finally only a question of papers. This conceals a significantly more important criterion, that of belonging, which engages proximity whatever the legal status may be. Diaspora is no longer simply the name given to the citizens of a state, or of a collection of states, wishing to maintain their links with their country of origin. It becomes the name of a state-established category by which people of national origin can be included in the space of the nation. In addition to the case already mentioned of India, with the concept of PIO and the recent creation of overseas citizenship, several states have pursued similar initiatives, notably the Baltic countries which regained their independence in the early 1990s. The Latvian Diaspora Support Programme for the years 2004-2009 stated that “the

109

Dominican Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Dominica-Diaspora Policy Paper,” October 2004, available at www.da-academy.org/draft_policy.html (last accessed April 2016).

States and Their Diasporas

475

term ‘Diaspora’ describes the representatives or group of the same ethnic origin that lives outside their (ethnic) homeland”. As a consequence, “Latvian diaspora […] describes the Latvians that live outside Latvia”.110 These Latvians are thus compatriots living abroad less because they possess Latvian nationality than because they are “an integral part of the Latvian nation”.111 The cases of the republics of Ireland and Armenia are symbolic, respectively of a state wishing to strengthen its relations with the Irish abroad in the context of the establishment of a real policy on the matter, and of a new state wishing to question the role of its emigrants and former emigrants in its existence as a state. In Ireland the word diaspora became common during the 1990s, to question a fixed concept of Irish identity, based either on globalisation or on the European Union, or as a critique of the nationalist territorial visions of Ireland – on both sides of the border with Northern Ireland. Ex-president Mary Robinson played an important role in this process of esteeming the “Irish diaspora”.112 She referred to the question in two important speeches to the two chambers of the Irish parliament, the first on the day of her inauguration – 3 December 1990 – and again on 3 February 1995, in her speech “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora”: “four years ago I promised to dedicate my abilities to the service and welfare of the people of Ireland. Even then I was acutely aware of how broad that term ‘the people of Ireland’ is and how it resisted any fixed or narrow definition. One of my purposes here today is to suggest that, far from seeking to categorise or define it, we widen it still further to make it as broad and inclusive as possible.”113 This incorporation of the Irish abroad would take two distinct forms: the symbolic recognition of the national importance of the diaspora and the inclusion of this question in government policy. First, in 1998, after the signing on 10 April of the Good Friday Agreement on the political status of Northern Ireland, the Irish population endorsed, in a referendum on the 21 May, a modification of the constitution, whose Article 2 henceforth reads as follows: “It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. That is also the entitlement of all persons otherwise 110 111 112 113

Latvian Diaspora Support Programme, 2004-2009, Riga: Latvian Cabinet of Ministers, 2004, 3. Ibid., 5. Breda Gray, “The Irish Diaspora: Globalised Belonging(s),” Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no. 2 (2002), 124-125. Mary Robinson, “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora,” 2 February 1995, available at http://www. oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/addresses/2Feb1995.htm (last accessed April 2016).

476

Chapter 9

qualified in accordance with law to be citizens of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.” Moreover, from the early 1990s onwards, the Republic of Ireland undertook to establish a specific policy towards the “Irish Abroad”, as witnessed by a 2002 report: “The Irish are one of the most migrant people in the world and our education system should reflect this. We need to learn more about our Diaspora – its sources, its extent, its influences on the history of both Ireland and other States, its triumphs and its failures.”114 From report to report, the intention of developing a more inclusive policy towards the members of the “diaspora” was affirmed. Recently, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs summarized its policy by insisting on five themes: “The first [theme], Our People, takes stock of the ongoing work in pursuit of peace and reconciliation on the island of Ireland; the provision of support for Irish citizens travelling, living and working abroad; the growing engagement with the Irish diaspora; and the promotion of Irish culture abroad”.115 I have already highlighted the role that the different Armenia-Diaspora conferences played from the early 2000s onwards in the evolution of relationships between Armenians and people of Armenian origin living abroad. If a number of issues were raised during these conferences – dual nationality, the development of means of communication, economic assistance, or fiscality –, it is interesting to note the extent to which the use of the term diaspora – the translation of the Armenian word spyurk and used as such in the official translation of documents produced by these conferences – is important in these discussions. From 1999, the communities of the Armenian diaspora were unified under the name of “the Diaspora”.116 As in the Irish case, the desire to establish collaborative structures was inscribed within in the context of an all-embracing definition of the nation: “All the composants of our national entity – the Republic 114

115

116

Brian Cowen, Ireland and the Irish Abroad: Report of the Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, August 2002, 23. “The Irish Abroad” is the official term used in the report. However, diaspora also appears four times and seems to correspond to a wider perspective on Irish abroad, including those who were not born in Ireland. The Global Island: Ireland’s Foreign Policy for a Changing World, Government of Ireland, Dublin, 2015, 9. The document is available on the Department of Foreign Affairs website: https://www.dfa.ie/media/dfa/alldfawebsitemedia/ourrolesandpolicies/ ourwork/global-island/the-global-island-irelands-foreign-policy.pdf “Report of the sub-commission ‘Communication and Linkages Between Diaspora Institutions and the Republic of Armenia’,” 22-23 September 1999, available online at http://www.groong.org/ADconf/199909/reports/communication.html

States and Their Diasporas

477

of Armenia, Artsakh [the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh] and the Diaspora – are interdependent. […] Armenians are Armenian everywhere, and there is no difference as to where they are. They cannot be ‘odars’ [foreigners] in their homeland, and the Republic undertakes to overcome the Constitutional exclusion of dual citizenship, and to allow each and every Armenian to establish a full presence in his or her homeland.”117 The language is eloquent and draws us into the heart of this new paradigm of the nation – a paradigm which does not replace the classical definition of the nation-state but which is a transformation of it – in which the absence from the territory and the possession of nationality seem to function in opposite directions, the second having to adapt to the first. For other peoples and in other states (Palestine, Croatia, India, Eritrea…), even when the term has no real equivalent in the “national” language, diaspora became the generic name of the national exterior, or of the population who lives there (nationals and former or descendants of nationals alike) as well as the collected networks woven between the state and the national communities abroad – and between these different communities. The link diasporastate thus refers to the whole territory of the nation, included outside the borders. In this framework, diaspora represents a reality significantly different from that which might be deduced from its historical meaning. The message sent in 2006 by the ambassador of Grenada in the United States to his compatriots on the occasion of 7 February, the anniversary of the independence of Grenada in 1974, is quite clear in this respect: Today, more than ever, as the governments of the Caribbean Community seek to create a single market and economy, the call goes out to the population that have left their homelands, in the Caribbean to maintain and strengthen the links with their homelands. Therefore, it seems like the right moment in the history of Grenada, for its nationals abroad to reconnect with their country. However, this re-linking between the origin and host country must be a different engagement from the historical meaning of the word “Diaspora”.118 117 118

“Final Decision of the First Armenia-Diaspora Conference,” September 1999, 2. The document used to be available on the official website of the conference, but it’s not any longer. “2006 Independence Message from His Excellency Denis G. Antoine, Grenada’s Ambassador to the United States of America.” The document was accessible on the website of the Grenada Cultural and Civic Association of Southern Florida (http://www. gccasouthfla.com), but no longer. Denis G. Antoine’s 2008 message again refers to the Grenadians “living in the diaspora”.

478

Chapter 9

It is within the same logic that we need to understand the choice recently made, in April 2009, by the Turkish minister of foreign trade, Kürsad Tüzmen, during a Foreign Economic Relations Board forum, to use diaspora to describe Turks living abroad, highlighting their contribution to Turkish trade as well as the influence of Turkey. As a journalist noted, “using the word ‘diaspora’ is significant because it was likely the first time that a Turkish minister used the word to describe Turks living abroad. Analysts are all but sure to interpret these statements as a signal of increasing confidence in both Turkey’s place in the world and the country’s economic weight. In the past, the word was employed by Turkish ministers primarily to denote those expatriates around the world whose interests countered those of Turks.”119 Diaspora thus indicated the emergence of a new paradigm of the nation, one in which expatriates, whatever their nationality, were to be included in the national space. This evolution and this new form of national inclusion certainly appears no more clearly than in a speech by the Mexican president Zedillo Ponce de Leon to the Mexican Congress in May 1995: “The Mexican nation goes beyond the territory contained by its borders. Therefore, an essential element of the ‘Mexican Nation Program’ will be to promote the constitutional and legal amendments designed for Mexicans to retain their nationality, independently of the citizenship or residence they may have adopted.”120 The modifications adopted by the Mexican state in the mid-1990s in favour of expatriates have not only confirmed in the eyes of specialists the perceptible tendencies over the past years, but have also created an impression well beyond academic circles, becoming an example put forward by experts working for international organisations or for the states themselves, thus inaugurating another inclusion, that of diaspora in international discourse.

Appearance in the International Lexicon of “Best Practices” I have shown in the previous chapter that the development of the diaspora option constituted a form of synthesis between the centred and decentred visions of the concept, that is, a third model. The American lawyer Anupam

119 120

David Neylan, “Tüzmen endorses term ‘diaspora’ to describe Turks Abroad,” Today’s Zaman, 11 April 2009, available on the newspaper’s website: www.todayszaman.com. Cited in Jorge A. Vargas, “Dual Nationality for Mexicans?” Chicano-Latino Law Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (1996), 3-4, emphasis in the original. See also Renshon, Dual Citizenship and American National Identity, 36.

States and Their Diasporas

479

Chander developed a similar model, broader because less substantially economic, drawing both on the importance of the original homeland and on the persistence of expatriate communities. He defined “diaspora” as being “that part of a people, dispersed in one or more countries other than its homeland, that maintains a feeling of transnational community among a people and its homeland.”121 He identified three reasons why diasporas are today more politically and economically powerful than before: they have become economic actors because of their massive presence in the more industrialised countries, because of the possibility of maintaining links with the homeland offered by technological advances in the domains of transport and communications, and finally because of their increasing capacity to claim the right to maintain these links despite their dispersion.122 The global world of transnational links, of multiple loyalties, of mobility, cannot be described by the two principal paradigms of the world stage, whether it be the state model founded on territorial sovereignty or the cosmopolitan model founded on the unity of humanity. The “diaspora model” therefore constitutes a “third paradigm”, necessarily irreducible to the two former, since “diasporas exemplify the contemporary condition:”123 A globalized world requires a new paradigm of the relationship of the citizen to the state. The diaspora model proposes that we view that relationship as complicated and dynamic. The model would permit individuals to construct national and transnational communities of their own choosing. In this way, then, the diaspora model rejects the unitary ideology of statism in favour of an understanding of the state that respects the possibility of plural commitments and loyalties. And instead of requiring us to refashion ourselves, first and foremost, as world citizens, the diaspora model offers an internationalism that respects patriotic feelings and individual attachments to country and community-with the hope that such attachments might bind the world closer together.124 In the context of this third way between a first perspective of a diaspora oriented towards the return and a second articulated about the link without taking origins into consideration, Chander considers the mechanism of diaspora

121 122 123 124

Chander, “Diaspora Bonds,” 1020. Ibid., 1011. Ibid., 1048. Ibid., 1049-1050.

480

Chapter 9

bonds, by which governments undertake to lift their debt by appealing to the money of expatriates in the form of bonds underwritten by the state. During the 20th century a number of countries chose this option: China in the 1930s, Israel from 1951,125 India in 1991 and again in 1998, before the Philippines and Bangladesh launched their own programmes.126 Within multilateral agencies or international organisations, a consideration of the positive role that migrants might play in the economic development of the homeland is a rather recent phenomenon. It was only at the very end of the 1990s that the contributions of migrants, and in particular their financial contributions in the form of remittances, began to attract the attention of agencies.127 In 2000, the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank developed an interest in the question of the transfer of funds and a growing number of multilateral agencies subsequently also became interested. In 2003 a World Bank report entitled “Global Development Finance” contained a chapter on the role of funds transfers by migrant workers in the development of their homelands.128 The same year, in October, the World Bank, in conjunction with the British Department for International Development, organised an international conference on the transfer of funds by migrants and on the opportunities that they offered to the economies of the homeland, using the term diasporas.129 Rapidly, the parameters of the study exceeded those of the simple transfer of funds to envisage more generally the possibilities offered by emigrants and their descendants. In this connection, B. Lindsay Lowell and Stefka Gerova noted in 2004 that “while diasporas have long been studied as independent phenomena, a focus on their role in 125

126

127

128

129

The Israeli programme attracted 25 billion dollars, figure cited in Suhas L. Ketkar and Dilip Ratha, Development Finance via Diaspora Bonds: Track Record and Potential. World Bank: Policy Research Working Paper no. 4311, August 2007, 4, text available on the World Bank website. Chander, “Diaspora Bonds,” 1062. On the diaspora bonds as an integral part of a larger collection of policies towards expatriates, see Anupam Chander, “Homeward Bound,” New York University Law Review, no. 81 (2006), 60-89. On the evolution of these developments, see Hein De Haas, Engaging Diasporas: How Governments Can Support Diaspora Involvement in the Development of Countries of Origin. Oxford: International Migration Institute-Oxfam Novib, June 2006, 9-13. Dilip Ratha, “Workers’ Remittances: An Important and Stable Source of External Development Finance,” in Global Development Finance 2003. Washington: World Bank, 2003, 157-175. The Contribution of UK-based Diasporas to Development and Poverty Reduction, Report from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, April 2004.

States and Their Diasporas

481

economic development is recent” and that the mechanisms at work in this stimulation of development had rarely been elucidated.130 This now included the diaspora bonds that World Bank economists Suhas Ketkar and Dilip Ratha considered a good strategy: “Countries are expected to find diaspora bonds an attractive vehicle for securing a stable and cheap source of external finance. Since patriotism is the principal motivation for purchasing diaspora bonds, they are likely to be in demand in fair as well as foul weather.”131 Not only did most international organisations and multilateral agencies – the World Bank, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the IOM, the UN and the European Union, among others – gradually develop the idea of a positive link between migration and development, but the term diaspora rapidly came to refer collectively to expatriates. If it seems impossible to undertake a precise and complete identification of the manner in which the word imposed itself, we nevertheless need to recognise it as the result of a number of concomitant and interdependent processes: the complex conceptualisation of diaspora and its popularisation in the world of research; the transformation of the relationship with emigration through a shift from brain drain to brain gain and to the diaspora option since the mid-1990s; the search by states for solutions that would allow them not only to maintain a link with their expatriates but also to stimulate their economic development; and finally the opportunity that a new type of solution represented to the problem of economic development for international organisations and multilateral agencies, a solution that had the advantage of making economic development depend, at least partly, on the expatriates of developing countries and not simply on Western states, but also by imposing upon these states a democratic discourse through a consideration of the political rights of expatriates. Each of these processes may rest on its own logic, but the fact that they have been brought together through the intermediary of experts working for Western states or international organisations gives a redoubtable efficacy to the diffusion of diaspora: it provides them with a new analytical framework, new possibilities for population management, and thus new solutions. Once it had assumed its place among the practices recommended by these bodies, it was adopted by the socalled “emerging” states – but increasingly by Western states, too, themselves subject to the lexicon that they impose – who saw in it a means of obtaining

130

131

Lindsay B. Lowell and Stefka G. Gerova, Diasporas and Economic Development: State of Knowledge, Presentation prepared for the World Bank, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University, September 2004, 1. Ketkar and Ratha, Development Finance via Diaspora Bonds, 13.

482

Chapter 9

supplementary manna from abroad, but also as a political adaptation liable to accord them a more important international presence. This analysis is plausible, but it is not sufficient, for each of these levels interacts with the others. In particular, the growing development of “diaspora policies” in the academic world only reinforces the attractiveness of the term and of diaspora studies. Firstly, it is precisely in drawing on the works of scholars that experts “sell” diaspora to international organisations or to states. In 2000, the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) took up the typology proposed by Robin Cohen.132 In 2001, in the context of a report for the ILO, it was the works of specialists of scientific and technical networks, notably David Kaplan, that the sociologist B. Lindsay Lowell cited to describe one of the six forms of policies towards highly-skilled migrants that he identified as the “six Rs”, which he named “resourcing (diaspora) policies”.133 In the text of the report of the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora tabled in December 2001, Chapter xxiii, consecrated to the question of “other diasporas”, drew entirely on the typology and the criteria proposed by Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas.134 In 2004, Anupam Chander’s definition was taken up by Lowell and Gerova in their report on the state of knowledge on the link between diasporas and development.135 Second, it was on the basis of the link that diaspora became the privileged term. As the leaders of AFFORD wrote in 2000, “we prefer the term diaspora to migrants or ethnic minorities to emphasise the fact that we are referring to peoples formed through dispersal (for whatever reason) but who maintain a memory of and links with “home”, the place of origin.”136 Nevertheless, we should not assume that the term automatically entered the lexicon of the principal international organisations at the beginning of the 2000s. Agnieszka

132

133

134 135 136

Globalisation and Development: A Diaspora Dimension, contribution of the African Foundation for Development to the British government Globalisation and Development White Paper, May 2000, 5. The names of each of the policies in question start with the letter R: return, restriction, recruitment, reparation, retention and resourcing. B. Lindsay Lowell, Policy Responses to the International Mobility of Skilled Labour, International Migration Papers, no. 45, International Labour Office, Geneva, 2001, v. Details about these “resourcing policies” are given p. 12-16. To illustrate these policies, Lowell draws on David Kaplan, “Reversing the Brain Drain: The Case for Utilizing South Africa’s Unique Intellectual Diaspora,” Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (1997), 387-406. Meyer’s article on the diaspora option was in the same issue. Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, 301-356, particularly 303-304. Lowell and Gerova, Diasporas and Economic Development. Globalisation and Development, 3.

States and Their Diasporas

483

Weinar showed for example that the word diaspora was little present in publications of the UN and that it did not enter development policy vocabulary within the European Union until about 2005.137 On the other hand, it played a major role within certain international bodies such as the World Bank or the International Organization for Migration (IOM). It made its appearance in both the thinking and the documents of the latter at the end of the 1990s, in the context of the Return of Qualified Nationals (RQN) programme. Above all, it constituted the heart of a new programme launched by the IOM and the Organization of African Unity in 2001, MIDA (Migration for Development in Africa), in which the emphasis was no longer on the return of migrants but on the possibility of bringing the most qualified among them into contact with their homelands in order to better develop their country.138 The launch of MIDA also indicated a certain synchronisation of the use of the term in African leaders’ circles: in March 2001 a meeting of the governmental representatives of 24 African countries took place in Libreville (Gabon) in order to approve MIDA. The adoption of the term in the context of development policy had the consequence of prompting an important change in meaning: those who wished to return home were now qualified “migrants”, while those who had apparently chosen to reside elsewhere were henceforth included in the category “diaspora”.139 Even so, this integration of the philosophies of the diaspora option and of the brain gain was not accompanied by a clear definition of diaspora. The IOM sketched out a definition founded first and foremost on the existence of populations “on the fence” between their place of residence and their country of origin: There is no single accepted definition of the term “diaspora”, neither is there a legal recognition of the term which consequently has given rise to many different meanings and interpretations. For the purpose of this paper, a broad definition of “diasporas” is proposed as: members of ethnic and national communities, who have left, but maintain links with, their homelands. The term “diasporas” conveys the idea of transnational populations, living in one place, while still maintaining relations with their homelands, being both “here” and “there”. We do not capitalize the first letter to avoid the confusion with the historic Jewish or Greek Dias-

137 138 139

See Agnieszka Weinar, Diaspora as an Actor of Migration Policy. Warsaw: Center for Migration Research, 2008. Ibid., 10. Koser, “New African Diasporas: An Introduction,” 6.

484

Chapter 9 pora, and purposely use the plural to reflect the diversity of populations that can be acknowledged as diasporas.140

Dina Ionescu, a consultant to both the IOM and the OECD, took up this broad definition in a report that she wrote for the IOM the following year.141 Observing that many scholars used the expression “transnational community”, Ionescu considered that this perspective placed the emphasis on the informal and the circulatory: “the notion of ‘diaspora’ seems to better incorporate populations that are ‘settled’ abroad, people who became citizens of their host country and second-born generations. Moreover, the term ‘diaspora’ was preferred in this paper, given the widespread use of this term at policy level.”142 Not only is the emphasis placed on the efficacy of the term, but criteria of nationality, time spent abroad or place of birth are no longer essential for defining diasporas. In a recent document, the IOM attempted to specify the contours of its “diaspora terminology”, still insisting, as was already the case in 2005, on the fact that “there is no single accepted definition of the term ‘diaspora’, neither is there a legal recognition of the term”: “The term ‘diasporas’ refers to expatriate groups which, in contrast to ‘migrants’, applies also to expatriate populations abroad and generations born abroad to foreign parents who are or may be citizens of their countries of residence.”143 This practical definition is in the end fairly close to that which we find in a 2005 European Union document: “The diaspora from a given country therefore includes not only the nationals from that country living abroad, but also migrants who, living abroad, have acquired the citizenship of their country of residence (often losing their original citizenship in the process) and migrants’ children born abroad, whatever their citizenship, as long as they retain some form of commitment to and/or interest in their country of origin or that of their parents.”144

140

141 142 143 144

Engaging Diasporas as Development Partners, for Home and Destination Countries, working document presented at the “Workshop on Migration and Development. Mainstreaming Migration into Development Policy Agendas,”Geneva, IOM, 2-3 February 2005, 1. Dina Ionescu, Engaging Diasporas as Development Partners for Home and Destination Countries: Challenges for Policymakers, Geneva, IOM, 2006, 13. Ibid., 10. “Engaging Diasporas for Development: IOM Policy-Oriented Research”, IOM, 1. The document is not dated but the references suggest not earlier than 2008. “Migration and Development: Some Concrete Orientations,” communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, no. 390, 2005, 23.

States and Their Diasporas

485

In recognition of the different meanings that states might give to the term diaspora, should they wish to use it, the IOM and others imposed a specific terminology having as a goal to confront and to compare experiences, but also to elaborate, for the use of states, guidelines for good practice in their relationships with their expatriates. This dimension is particularly visible in the case of a questionnaire entitled “Policies targeting diasporas as agents for development”, sent by the IOM in 2005 to all its member states to know the existing policies aimed at their “diaspora” and in which of them were diasporas defined as “people and ethnic populations that left their homelands, individuals and/or members of organized networks and associations, maintaining links with their homelands.”145 It is generally this definition, or in any case the term diaspora itself, that certain new states, or states opening to the outside world after decades of dictatorship, have adopted for their own purposes. Desirous of developing this type of policy, they have called upon the services of university research centres or the local offices of organisations such as the IOM, as we have seen recently in Europe with Albania146 or Moldova.147 In 2007, noting the initiative launched by the African Union (AU) in favour of a closer collaboration with the “African diaspora” (see supra, Chapter vi), the Capacity Development Management Action Plan Unit of the World Bank took up the AU’s definition, according to which “the African Diaspora comprise of (sic) two categories: (i) people of African heritage who ‘involuntarily’ migrated to North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Latin-America; (ii) people of recent ‘voluntary’ migration from Africa.”148 If the report did not linger on questions of definition nor draw on the criteria proposed to outline the validity of the concept of diaspora, including that of the “African diaspora”, this expression, in the singular or in the plural, is omnipresent. Furthermore, the IOM organised numerous meetings in 2006 and 2007, baptised “Dialogues”,

145

146

147 148

The responses to these questionnaires are analysed in “Results of the Survey ‘Engaging Diasporas as Agents of Development’”, Geneva, IOM, 2005, 193. Another study analysing the responses from 17 Latin American and Caribbean states was published in Diásporas como Agentes para el Desarrollo en América Latina y el Caribe, Geneva, IOM, 2007. Centre for Social and Economic Studies and Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty, From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Mobilising Albania’s Skilled Diaspora, Report for the Albanian government, University of Sussex, April 2006. Recommendations of the Policy Seminar on Diaspora and Homeland Development, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, 10-11 April 2008. World Bank, “Concept Note: Mobilizing the African Diaspora for Development,” Capacity Development Management Action Plan Unit, 7 December 2007, 5.The text is available on the World Bank website.

486

Chapter 9

to connect African governments “with their most qualified and dynamic nationals abroad.”149 However, the popularisation of the term did not occur without its relevance, or the reality that it described, being questioned. During a debate organised in 2006 by the Second Committee of the General Assembly of the United Nations, charged with economic and financial affairs, the delegates of the member states as well as “business and development experts” raised the question of the conditions that needed to be met “so that the members of a diaspora from a developing country may play an active role in starting up the businesses that their country of origin needs to speed up their development”.150 Surprisingly, and while the document uses the term constantly, we also read the following query: “Are there really ‘diasporas’ in the ‘utilitarian’ sense that is used today to define them? Wouldn’t it be more adequate to mention what could do for their country of origin the nationals or the associations founded by nationals in the host country on cultural, linguistic or geographic bases?”151 Generally, it is not uncommon to encounter this type of terminological reticence in the literature –academic or administrative – on the question, notably as a result of the adoption of the term by states themselves: “the evolution of the word and the multiple frameworks in which it is used has made defining it in the present context a challenge given that many countries have differing understandings and interpretations of its meaning. The lack of a consensus surrounding the definition of ‘diaspora’ and the way in which to best utilise it, still presents a challenge to policy makers.”152 Another notion has recently come to light to describe the policies through which states undertake to better include expatriates in the national space: we refer to “diaspora engagement”. It seems to have emerged a few years ago, most probably between 2004 and 2006,153 and its take-up by scholars, particularly

149 150

151 152 153

“Diaspora Dialogues,” Geneva: IOM, 2007, 7. “Rôle de la diaspora dans le développement économique? Ni vache à lait ni solution miracle, répondent des délégations à la deuxième commission,” Press Release, UN General Assembly, New York, 6 October 2006, 1. The document is available on the UN website. The quotation is a translation from the French press release because, quite oddly, the English press release for the same meeting is completely different. Ibid., 1. Séguin, State, Singer, and Daar, “Scientific Diasporas as an Option for Brain Drain,” 80. In 2004, the expression occurs in a paper by Kathleen Dunn, “Diaspora Giving and the Future of Philanthropy,” 16 May 2004, for The Philanthropic Initiative; it has also been used by the COMPAS team in their study The Contribution of UK-based Diasporas to Development and Poverty Reduction, but in 2006 we come across it again in the works of

States and Their Diasporas

487

the geographer Alan Gamlen,154 who is cited in numerous recent documents using the term, has contributed to its success. Recently, drawing on Gamlen as well as on the four criteria established by Kim Butler as cited by Graeme Hugo, the young Scottish economist Alasdair Rutherford, a consultant to the Scottish government, wrote a report in 2009 on the advantages that a policy towards the Scottish diaspora might present for the country.155 After having demonstrated that the Scottish diaspora satisfied the criteria of the contemporary definition as elaborated by Butler, he undertook to identify the various dimensions through which the different sub-groups composing the diaspora could be analysed. For him they were three in number: “their link to Scotland, whether ancestral, lived or affinity, […] their potential engagement role, either business, knowledge or cultural,” and finally, “the strength and nature of their connection to Scotland, or ‘Scottish-mindedness’.”156 Thus a steadily increasing number of individuals became potential or real members of the diaspora, including those possessing no connections, either ethnic or of nationality, with the country concerned, since the diaspora was envisaged on the basis of a single link, whatever it may have been, with the latter, to the point that immigrants are incorporated into an astonishing category, that of the “reverse diaspora”.157 Moreover, Scotland is not the only state to formulate the question in such terms. About a decade ago New Zealand engaged in a process of evaluation of the capacities and the potential of its expatriates. In 2003, a study of the New Zealand economy by the Deutsche Bank suggested increasing the “global connectedness” as well as the economic growth of the country by means of a “‘targeted immigration’ and ‘diaspora policy’.”158 According to a 2004 report, “The term ‘diaspora’ is widely used in New Zealand to

154

155

156 157 158

a number of experts, practitioners and scholars: De Haas, Engaging Diasporas; Ionescu, Engaging Diasporas as Development Partners; Yevgeny Kuznetsov, “Leveraging Diasporas of Talents: Toward a New Policy Agenda,” in Kuznetsov, Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills, 221-237. He uses it in a COMPAS Working Paper in 2006 without attributing it to any particular author. See Alan Gamlen, Diaspora Engagement Policies: What Are They and What Kind of States Use Them? COMPAS, Working Paper no. 32, 2006. Alasdair Rutherford, Engaging the Scottish Diaspora: Rationale, Benefits and Challenges, Edinburgh, Scottish Government Social Research, 2009, available at http://www.gov. scot/Publications/2009/07/28161043/0. Ibid., 3. “The Reverse Diaspora is made up of individuals who have moved to Scotland and made it their home, whether on a permanent or medium-term basis.” Ibid., 4. John Bryant and David Law, New Zealand’s Diaspora and Overseas-Born Population, New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, no. 13, September 2004, 1.

488

Chapter 9

refer to the spread of New Zealanders overseas through temporary or permanent migration.”159 There again, the definition of a member of the “diaspora” is specific: “We treat a person as belonging to the New Zealand diaspora if the person was born in New Zealand but is resident in another country at the time of the other country’s census.”160 In this context of reflection on the opportunity of a particular policy we find the use of the expression “reverse diaspora” to describe “people born overseas but resident in New Zealand”. The conclusion of the report even suggests that the contribution of the diaspora could have been overestimated – for it is largely concentrated in Australia and thus within the English-speaking world – while the contribution of the “reverse diaspora” had been underestimated, for it permits New Zealand to establish links to numerous different countries.161 In this multiplication of reflections, and of state policies concerning diasporas, several bodies have recently intervened to bring together numerous actors (scholars, experts, civil servants) in an attempt to identify the “best practices”. One of these bodies, at the intersection of academia, international expertise and public policy, is the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. It is run by three geographers, Delphine Ancien, Mark Boyle and Rob Kitchin, authors between 2008 and 2009 of two studies devoted to the “diaspora strategies” of Ireland and of Scotland.162 In January 2009, they organised an international study day at the university entitled “Exploring Diaspora Strategies”, whose objectives were very clear: “To further develop ‘networks’ of policy makers, researchers and academics, for improved sharing of practice; to foster dialogue not policy transfer; to update developments in diaspora policy and thinking; to bring new countries and new people into the conversation; to reflect upon possible ways to move the policy and research agendas forward.”163 The participants at this meeting came from different environments: academics such as Alan Gamlen,

159 160 161 162

163

Ibid., 1 note 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 9-10. Mark Boyle and Rob Kitchin, Towards an Irish Diaspora Strategy: A Position Paper, NIRSA Working Paper no. 37, May 2008, available on the NIRSA website; Delphine Ancien, Mark Boyle, and Rob Kitchin, The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy: Insights and Lessons from Ireland, Scottish Government Social Research, 2009, available on the Scottish government website at http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2009/05/28141101/0 (last accessed April 2016). Mark Boyle and Rob Kitchin, Fostering Dialogues Between Diaspora Strategies, Workshop Diaspora Strategy document, 26-28 January 2009, 7.

States and Their Diasporas

489

experts from the World Bank, such as the economists Yevgeny Kuznetsov and Lev Freinkman, members of ministerial cabinets or agencies specialised in expatriates (India, Lithuania, Ireland, Jamaica), leaders of “scientific and technical diasporas” such as KEA (New Zealand) or Globalscot (Scotland). Indeed, this diversity lies at the very heart of the “diaspora strategies” undertaking, which is founded on a constant interaction between policy, research, transnational networks and multilateral agencies. A diaspora strategy is defined as “an explicit and systematic policy initiative or series of policy initiatives aimed at developing and managing relationships with a diaspora … [it] is perhaps best thought of then as an overarching framework for providing a level of coherence to the range of diaspora policies devised and implemented by a variety of agencies.”164 Diaspora strategy is then envisaged from a perspective that is both practical and systematic. Represented graphically in the form of a wheel,165 it functions “as a checklist for policy makers currently formulating and rolling out diaspora strategies.”166 Diaspora engagement, diaspora policy, diaspora strategy: these three expressions, in practice interchangeable, have given substance to an axis of autonomous reflection in international development policy circles. By way of an inventory of prior practice, through the compilation of information on current practice, by drawing on the definitions and results offered by scholars and experts, by the progressive imposition of a specific terminology in which the definition of diaspora plays a central role, by highlighting the most convincing results obtained by certain states, and finally by the transformation of these results into “good practice” able to serve as models for all other states, this policy aimed at including diaspora in the development of their “homeland” tends to prefer the adoption of diaspora not simply as a new term in the international lexicon, but as a truly global term, henceforth comprehensible by all states in this new form. In this case the word reaches it most widespread distribution, its geography knows no further limits. One of the arenas in which this global political desire was most eloquently manifested was the Global Forum on Migration and Development, an international grouping created in 2007. During the first meeting in Brussels in 2007, a round table was devoted to the question of migrant remittances. The follow164

165 166

Delphine Ancien, Mark Boyle, and Rob Kitchin, Exploring Diaspora Strategies: An International Comparison, report on the Workshop, 3-4 June 2009. The document is available on the NIRSA website, http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/nirsa. The NIRSA Diaspora Strategy Wheel and Ten Principles of Good Practice, June 2009, 1. Document available on the NIRSA website. Ibid.

490

Chapter 9

ing year, in Manilla, a round table included a session devoted to the ways in which states could allow their “diasporas” to contribute to national development. A decisive step was taken during the Forum held in Athens, 4-5 November 2009. If, as one of the working documents of the round table devoted to the role of diasporas in the management of the link between migration and development noted, the first two meetings of the Global Forum had employed a common working definition of diaspora – “individuals originating from one country, living outside this country irrespective of their citizenship or nationality, who, individually or collectively, are or could be willing to contribute to the development of this country. Descendants of these individuals are also included in this definition”167 –, the emphasis would henceforth be placed on the determination of good practice in the matter, as demonstrated the desire to frame the establishment of “diaspora engagement” by states within a unique and homogenous framework presented in the form of a “roadmap” (see Figure 10, infra, p. 491). This document was drawn up by the governments of Mexico and the Netherlands, and the latter were particularly careful never to let it be thought that this framework could be in any way constraining. The emphasis is still on the aspects of assistance and advice: “The road map will be permanently ‘under construction’ as it is applied to specific cases.”168 Even the definition of diaspora cited above as a common basis was immediately contextualised. It was specified that it “does not involve any commitment … nor does it substitute for the usual terminology” of governments, and that it “does not impose any exclusive identity to diaspora members, nor should it be interpreted as a hindrance to their full integration in the host society.”169 Even so, these caveats aimed at attenuating the impression of a policy from above should not conceal the reality of a process of terminological imposition. If the Global Forum, much as the World Bank, the IOM, the ILO or any other international organisation or multilateral agency, did not consciously wish to oblige states or other actors to engage any specific policy, or to adopt any given definition of diaspora, it nevertheless remains true that the entrance of the term into the international lexicon transformed it into a primary point of reference, an encompassing category allowing practices whose historicity is different to coexist. This had the effect of providing a framework to countries within which 167

168 169

“Engaging Diasporas and Migrants in Development Policies and Programs – Their Role? Their Constraints?” Background paper for session 1.2 of Roundtable 1, Global Forum on Migration and Development, Athens, 4-5 November 2009, 2. The document is available on the GFMD website, http://www.gfmd.org/docs/greece-2009. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 2

States and Their Diasporas

Figure 10

491

A Road Map for Diaspora Engagement.170

they could inscribe themselves if they might subsequently wish to obtain assistance of various kinds from the bodies participating in the establishment of 170

Engaging Diasporas and Migrants, 6. The original figure is in Dovelyn Rannveig Agunias ed., Closing the Distance: How Governments Strengthen Ties with Their Diasporas. Washington: Migration Policy Institute, 2009.

492

Chapter 9

this new field of public action on an international scale: the inclusion of the diaspora within the national space. This leads to two conclusions. On the one hand, one can only note the appearance, over the past two decades, of new discourses on expatriates, in which these latter now find themselves better integrated than before into the national space. These new forms of discourse on the nation, whether they rest upon an extra-territorial (limited to the holders of nationality of the countries in question) or over-state (enlarged to encompass those who are of national origin) vision, can in no way be considered as having replaced the discourse of the “national container”. They coexist with this latter. On the other hand, if it is also necessary to indicate the limits and the aporias of these new discourses, as well as the reactions that they prompt on the question of national identity of the host countries or countries of residence of migrants thus connected,171 those absent from the territory have rights, and notably the right to double presence, to what Ulrich Becks refers to as the “both/and consciousness”.172 For all that, it would doubtless be incorrect to suppose that this consciousness, this double presence, is universal, accessible to all or desired by all. The heuristic exaggerations that are double absence and double presence serve less to describe a reality than to avoid the error that would consist in proposing interior and exterior as spaces as concretely circumscribed as national and conceptual paradigms might lead us to believe, or as the bureaucratic division between domestic and foreign affairs suggest. Currently, the principle of judicial territorialisation prevails: the governmental or para-governmental agencies established to coordinate policies regarding expatriates are the responsibility of the ministry responsible for “foreign affairs”, those concerned with matters beyond the borders of the territory. Thus, national populations, or those of national origin living abroad, still see their distance from the territory take precedence over their belonging to the nation. For how long? The inclusion of policies towards expatriates within institutions concerned with internal affairs would in the end only be a materialisation and a logical consequence of current processes. The cartographies of the nation are not deterritorialising, they are re-territorialising in the sense that they are modifying their relationships with distance. Increasingly, they cross borders to provide to all citizens of the nation the totality of rights that are in theory guaranteed to them as citizens; increasingly, they are freeing

171 172

See Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, especially chapters 7, 8, and 9. Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, 57-58.

States and Their Diasporas

493

themselves from the legal frameworks of the state, such as nationality, and the states themselves are undertaking this operation in order to reconcile the requirements of their territorial modes of functioning and the advantages of an extra-territorial or over-state nation. This process has found its chosen name in diaspora, in seeking out, concealed in the multiple folds of its semantics, its most recent and most positive meaning, that by which the possibility of a community can be conceptualised, despite distance, without expectation of return, without misfortune, without the separation of space. It is thus possible to consider the existence of an elective affinity between the two phenomena without prejudging any anteriority of one over the other. Diaspora is an ancient word, but its positive uses and its application to describe a dynamic network, connected, in harmony with the country claimed as homeland by its members, have only recently appeared. The possibility of constructing relationships of proximity at a distance, by means of technologies that reduce the time required for synchronisation and the production of simultaneity, has reinforced and transformed the existence of communities that articulate the local and the global. The national, ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic or other foundations have brought them into even closer and easier contact with the authorities, state or otherwise, who progressively compose, in negotiation with the representatives of the said communities, the modalities of integration of these populations within the national space. Diaspora offers a name that is simple, short, evocative, henceforth positive, non-distant, to a collection of individuals by linking them organically to a territory, a culture, an origin, upon which they can draw, in addition to their belonging to the host society. It also allows the authorities in a growing number of states to formalise the existence of a network of expatriates that has substantial potential, economically, politically and symbolically. This approach has been given impetus by the adoption of diaspora into the lexicon of international development policy in the late 1990s. It is within the organisations and agencies in charge of these questions that, from the pens of experts and the lectures of scholars, association and states have converged, thus creating the conditions of possibility of a veritable globalisation of the term, in the form of policies and strategies whose contours are portrayed to states as so many “best practices”. If the other meanings of diaspora have not disappeared – far from it – the most recent is also the most global. In this new guise, not only has the word created its place in a growing number of languages, but it has entered into the most contemporary and most widely spread language, that of the international politico-administrative lexicon. From its point of departure in Alexandria some 2300 years ago, it has slowly diffused, pushing back frontiers, spatial as much as semantic, the former shifting at the whims of the

494

Chapter 9

latter, the multiplication of meanings and usage, even if contradictory, only bestowing it with a greater force and a greater capacity for attraction. Today it knows no limits, so widely spread that its own dispersion, in the image of other contemporary dispersions that it is intended to describe, is not one. Far from annihilation in paradox, diaspora henceforth permits the articulation of opposites.

Conclusion. Two Cats and Three Demons Insomnia kept saying its name in my head, like a family failing to say amen in unison. The more it failed, the more the collie shredded insomnia’s syllables, scattering pieces in the dark. Out of insomnia’s echolalia, out of its tearing apart in the teeth of a dog, another word was emerging, and the word was diaspora. Diaspora: as soon as it came, it began to fall apart. Diaspora’s unison broke into three sounds – die, ass, spore – falling at different speeds, in changing order, and from the sounds images fell.1 In 1895, in one of the letters that he wrote to the naval officer Edgar Karg, who he met in 1892 and whom he tried to guide through the literary world, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote the following: “The thousands of abstract concepts which overlap and penetrate one another are often like the silt that a great river deposits on its banks. When swimming in the middle, in the running water, it does not matter and it really is not worth the trouble worrying about it; it is certainly disturbing to see all these people squabbling over concepts like dogs over an old bone, and we do dare not treat all this fighting as irrelevant. Yet we should.”2 “Treat all this fighting as irrelevant.” Indeed, as we reach the end of this lengthy enquiry across the centuries in the quest for usages of the term and their evolution, one might wonder if this might not be the best thing to do. What is the use of devoting several hundred pages to the question? To demonstrate the conceptual ineffectiveness of diaspora?3 The term has now so thoroughly pervaded the contemporary vernacular – we should no doubt write “contemporary vernaculars”, so completely has it found its place both in the principal languages of the world and in numerous less widely spoken languages such as Croat, Latvian, Basque and so on –, in the academic, journalistic and political lexicons, that any attempt in this direction would seem to be marked with the stamp of vanity. Or instead to demonstrate to what extent that is has indeed become an inescapable element of scholarship concerned with globalisation, international migrations, transnationalism, as well as a key 1 Robert Hill Long, “Diaspora,” Hudson Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (Winter 1995), 602. 2 Letter from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Edgar Karg (18 July 1895), in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Les Mots ne sont pas de ce monde. Lettres à un officier de marine. Paris: Rivages Poche, 2005, 125. 3 I might note here that this was the aim of the book about diasporas that I wrote for the Que sais-je? collection in 2003 (American edition 2008).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | DOI 10.1163/9789004326910_015

496

Conclusion

cog in the wheel of state policy? Numerous articles and monographs have already tackled this task with success. So? So this work is paradoxical, almost from start to finish, and in its most essential foundations. Throughout the years, at all, or almost, of my presentations at conferences, seminars and workshops, in France as abroad, I have been asked the question, almost always the same on: what, for you, is a diaspora? And each time, I responded, either that this was not the object of my study, or more simply, that I didn’t know. From the start, I knew that this position of principle was the true preliminary to the work that I wanted to undertake. However, this position was equally suspect. By refusing to take a position, as well as by claiming that I was incapable of providing a definition of diaspora, I ran the risk of denying the interest of the term itself; but both the amount of time I had devoted to it and the incalculable number of times that I had been led to utter or write the word would give lie to such a claim. Marked by paradox, this work is also marked by doubt, a doubt that has assumed three names: incompleteness, imperfection, inanity. An individual work, it would only have been fully possible had it been a collective one. But if perhaps too onerous an undertaking for a lone scholar, in my opinion its attraction lies in a rigorous methodology that would allow it to avoid the leaps from one period to another, or from one theme to another, that are inevitably the outcome of collective undertakings, each author specialising in a particular aspect, the whole becoming very often an awkwardly linked collection of perspectives. The task undertaken here could be a life’s work, and in the end I only devoted ten years to it, interspersed with other projects. It is necessarily incomplete, from start to finish. Next, the scope of this text, attentive to the onomasiological development of diaspora, renders it fragile academically, particularly in a national and international academic context in which specialisation is the rule and in which spaces of expertise, small or large, jealously guarded or not, multiply. The obligation, imposed by the very history of usage of the term, to take into account the history – in its widest sense – of the biblical texts, of the Jewish people in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, of Judaism, of Christianity and of Protestantism, of Zionism, of slavery, of the Black movement between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, of relations between Blacks and Jews, of migrations, of ethnicity, of relations between states and their emigrants, of law, of international organisations, of disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, geography, comparative literature, philosophy, African or AfricanAmerican studies and so on, multiplies the risks. On almost every page, a specialist in such and such a question – the diffusion of the Septuagint, the Three Oaths, Arnold Toynbee’s evolution, the Moravian Brethren, Ethiopianism, the

Two Cats and Three Demons

497

thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, post-structuralism, the journal Présence africaine, the birth of cultural studies, the writings of Édouard Glissant, or Chinese or Mexican nationality law – would spot errors, omissions, approximations, shortcomings in the bibliography, hasty shortcuts. Finally, upon closer inspection, all these pages might appear as a long – a very long – footnote to the message posted on the Toks-Boy blog in January 2007 in which that West African man took note of the change in the meaning of diaspora and noted the promises that it contained within. A thousand miles from the malediction that it had borne since Antiquity, the word seemed to have rediscovered the connotations of chosen which it had enjoyed in the Greek text of the Septuagint or among the first leaders of the Christian church, praising the dispersion in this world as proof of the election of the kingdom of heaven, where the last Judgement would occur. In this light, is it worthwhile to devote so much time to demonstrating something that might be intuitively understood by all? These three demons accompanied me throughout the writing of this text. As I now come to a conclusion, it is the vertigo of dispersion that wins the day: the demonstration is fragile, the proofs rarely irrefutable, the certitudes almost inexistent. The contents are so vast that solid ground is absent every step of the way. Nevertheless, each of these demons could disappear were this work to have the good fortune of encountering the world of other scholars, French or foreign, and that certain among them bring their competencies and their specialisations to fill in the gaps, refine the analyses, add stages to its construction, or even demolish entirely several parts of the edifice. For the undeniable interest of this historical socio-semantic study is the attachment to a controversial, polysemic term whose original usage has been and continues to be modified, then diffused through a growing number of social spaces and means of communication, over a long, or very long period as is the case here, or over a shorter period. This becomes a particularly productive undertaking when the research does not content itself with identifying – this does not mean that is it without its uses, but it is partial – the first occurrences or the moments of rupture in a single corpus, or that it does not set itself the task of identifying a single and clear semantic transformation. It is even more so when the term under consideration is not only an abstract concept, but is relative to a group or to an action. Its usage is then generally formative, bringing into existence, or at the very least contributing to bringing into existence that which it pretends to be content to describe, be its power positive, allowing itself to give itself a name, or negative, in which case it is a matter of exclusion of actions, groups, territories by distinguishing them from other actions, groups, territories… This dimension of usage, through which the word does not simply denote one or

498

Conclusion

several things, but actually constructs a social reality by providing a framework to its signified, lies at the heart of historical socio-semantics. A final question, since only questions allow us to turn the page. Why tackle such a subject, so vast, so unbounded? Buy chance, of course, but also by curiosity. This curiosity is doubtless close – relatively speaking – to that which prompted Michel Foucault to deviate from the intended plan for The History of Sexuality and to tread unknown pathways, including those of the Latin and Greek languages, with which he was barely familiar; this curiosity which he described as “that which enables one to get free of oneself”: “what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?”4 Over these ten years of research I often strayed from the path, pushed forward by the search for answers to questions that were raised by texts, colleagues, students, without knowing in advance if the answers would move me forward. This search for answers drew me into a number of domains in which I was almost or entirely ignorant. Sometimes fruitful, sometimes fruitless, sometime simply raising new questions, this improvised quest from problem to problem, from one obstacle to another, from a first clue to a second, was my only real motivation. Many of the hypotheses or answers that I have offered here only arose at the moment of setting them down on paper, at the moment of putting a provisional end to it all. As to knowing whether the project of writing a history of usage of the word diaspora, having done everything possible to not impose a pre-established definition or perspective, does not finally depend, by a bitter irony and a utterly borgesian mise en abyme, on the confirmation, and the consecration even of the existence of the thing – or things – that it has been describing over the past 23 centuries, I can make no promises. The possible formativity of language doubtless imposes its own rules, to the point of simultaneously permitting the conventional state and the real state of the relationship between the word and the thing, resembling thereby the two most contradictory, most oxymoronic cats of philosophical thought: the Cheshire cat, immortalised by Lewis Carroll for its ability to appear and disappear at will, and Schrödinger’s cat who, sealed in a box, is at once living and dead. The word is invented but it exists. It describes phenomena that it has contributed to creating in a particular, recognisable form, whose multiplication contributes to its popularisation and to its own contradiction. The cat becomes obscure but its smile remains… 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. ii, The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books (first French edition 1984), 8.

Two Cats and Three Demons

499

At the temporary terminus of the journey, the dispersion of diaspora incites us to rethink the importance of origins based on the questio of etymology. The etymology of the word “etymology” itself is redolent with meaning since it invites us to identify the “true meaning” (in Greek, etumos means true, real) of a word on the basis of its primitive meaning even though it is the transformations in usage which provide us with the most realistic portrait. As the German poet and philologist August-Wilhelm von Schlegel wrote in 1827, etymology cannot limit itself to “revealing the true homeland of a certain number of words.”5 It also implies retracing the “migrations” that they undertake. Schlegel notably believed that words sometimes undergo what he called “the opposite of metempsychosis”: if this latter is characterised by the migration or a single spirit in different bodies, “on the contrary, one sees from time a word being infused with new spirit, while its body, that is the sounds that compose it, stays much the same.”6 If the migratory metaphor sometimes led him to personify words to the point of granting them a life of their own beyond the trajectory of their usage, he provides us a magnificent description of these “journeys” whose map I have rather vulgarly attempted to trace: Words have their histories just as men do. They suffer their vicissitudes: sometimes cloaked in the prestige of high dignity, at others condemned to the most vulgar tasks, they have their moments in fashion, of decline, of oblivion. But these are long-lived individuals. Often, just as we think them centuries dead, they rise up, newly invigorated. Some survive the fall of empires, and while the language to which they originally belonged has been extinguished thousands of years before, they are pronounced again with similar sounds and a comparable meaning. Words travel, they settle like colonists far from their homeland, and it is not uncommon to see them travel around the world.7

5 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, “De l’étymologie en general,” (1827), in Œuvres de M. AugusteGuillaume de Schlegel écrites en français et publiées par Edouard Böcking, vol. ii. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846, 106. 6 Ibid., 104-105. 7 Ibid., 103-104.

Bibliography 1947-1997. 50e`me anniversaire de la Revue Présence Africaine (actes du colloque de Dakar, 25-27 novembre 1997). Paris: Présence africaine, 1999. Abasiattai, Monday B. “The Search for Independence: New World Blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1787-1847.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (September 1992): 107-116. Abbadie, Jacques. A Vindication of the Truth of Christian Religion against the Objections of All Modern Opposers. Part 2. London: Printed for J. Wyat at the Rose, and R. Wilkins at the Kings Head in St Pauls Churchyard, 1698 (first edition in French, Rotterdam, 1684). Abdulkarim, Amir. “La diaspora libanaise: une organisation communautaire.” In Diasporas, edited by Michel Bruneau, 90-98. Montpellier: Reclus, 1995. Ackah, William B. Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Contradictions. Politics, Identity and Development in Africa and the African Diaspora. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Africa from the Point of View of American Negro Scholars. Paris: Présence africaine, 1958. Ackroyd, Peter R., and Christopher Francis Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. I: From the Beginnings to Jerome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Adachi, Nobuko. “Theorizing Japanese Diaspora.” In Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Future, edited by Nobuko Adachi, 1-22. LondonNew York: Routledge, 2006. Adams, Lorraine. “Armenian in Istanbul.” The New York Times, “Book Review Desk”, 21 January 2007. Adelkhah, Fariba. “Partir sans quitter, quitter sans partir.” Critique internationale, no. 19 (April 2003): 141-155. Agunias, Dovelyn Rannveig, ed., Closing the Distance: How Governments Strengthen Ties with Their Diasporas. Washington: Migration Policy Institute, 2009. Akenson, Donald A. “The Historiography of English-Speaking Canada and the Concept of Diaspora: A Sceptical Appreciation.” Canadian Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 3 (1995): 377-409. Akenson, Donald A. The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Toronto: Meany, 1993. Aleinikoff, Thomas Alexander. “Theories of Loss of Citizenship.” Michigan Law Review, vol. 84, no. 7 (June 1986): 1471-1503. Alexakis, Vassilis. La langue maternelle. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Alexandre, Monique. “Ecrits judéo-hellénistiques et Pentateuque grec.” In Le Pentateuque: La Bible d’Alexandrie, edited by Cécile Dogniez, and Marguerite Harl, 650-671. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Alizart, Mark, Stuart Hall, and Eric Macé. Stuart Hall. Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007.

502

Bibliography

Allen, James S. “The Communist Way Out.” The Crisis, vol. 42, no. 5 (May 1935). Alpers, Edward A. “Defining the African Diaspora.” », paper presented to the Center for Comparative Social Analysis Workshop, UCLA, 25 October 2001. Alpers, Edward A., and Allen F. Roberts. “What is African Studies? Some Reflections.” African Issues, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002): 11-18. Alter, Robert. Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Amselle, Jean-Loup. L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes. Paris: Stock, 2008. Anand, Dibyesh. “A Contemporary Story of ‘Diaspora’: The Tibetan Version.” Diaspora, vol. 12, no. 2 (2003): 211-229. Ancien, Delphine, Mark Boyle, and Rob Kitchin. The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy: Insights and Lessons from Ireland, Scottish Government Social Research, 2009, 50 p., document available on the Scottish government website at http://www. gov.scot/Publications/2009/05/28141101/0 (last accessed April 2016). Ancien, Delphine. Exploring Diaspora Strategies: An International Comparison, report on the Workshop, June 2009, 3-4. 39 p. The document is available on the NIRSA website, http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/nirsa. Anderson, Benedict. “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, 58-74. London: Verso, 1998. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderson, Jenny. “The Drexel Diaspora.” The New York Times, 6 February 2005. Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Ang, Ien. “Together-In-Difference: Beyond Diaspora, Into Hybridity.” Asian Studies Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (June 2002): 141-154. Ang, Ien. “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm.” Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 223-242. Ang, Ien. “Migrations of Chineseness.” Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, no. 34-35 (1993): 3-15. Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. LondonNew York: Methuen, 1985. Angenot, Marc. Ce que l’on dit des Juifs en 1889: Antisémitisme et discours social. Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1989. Angermueller, Johannes. “Qu’est-ce que le poststructuralisme français? A propos de la notion de discours d’un pays à l’autre.” Langage et société, no. 120 (2007): 17-34. Anglade, Jean. Histoire de l’Auvergne. Paris: Hachette, 1974. Angustures, Aline, and Valérie Pascal. “Diasporas et financement des conflits.” In Economie des guerres civiles, edited by François Jean, and Jean-Christophe Rufin, 495-542. Paris, Hachette, 1996.

Bibliography

503

Anteby-Yemini, Lisa. “Peaux noire, masques blancs: les immigrants éthiopiens en Israël.” Pardès, no. 44 (2008): 107-118. Anteby-Yemini, Lisa. Les Juifs éthiopiens en Israël: les paradoxes du paradis. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2004. Anteby-Yemini, Lisa, and William Berthomière. “Di[a]spositif: décrire et comprendre les diasporas.” In Les diasporas, 2 000 ans d’histoire, edited by Lisa Anteby-Yemini, William Berthomière, and Gabriel Sheffer, 9-19. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005. Anteby-Yemini, Lisa, William Berthomière, and Gabriel Sheffer, eds., Les diasporas. 2 000 ans d’histoire. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005. Anthias, Floya. “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’: Beyond Ethnicity?” Sociology, vol. 32, no. 3 (August 1998): 557-580. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 1-24. Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol Breckenridge. “Editors’ Comments: On Moving Targets.” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1989): I-IV. Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol Breckenridge. “Editors’ Comments: On Fictionalizing the Real.” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1989): I-V. Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol Breckenridge. “Editors’ Comments.” Public Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 1-4. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Dictionary of Global Culture. New York: Knopf, 1997. Arbos, Philippe. L’Auvergne. Paris: Armand Colin, 1932. Armstrong, John A. Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Armstrong, John A. “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas.” American Political Science Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1976): 393-408. Armstrong, John A. “The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union: the View of the Dictatorship.” In Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union, edited by Erich Goldhagen, 3-49. New York: Praeger, 1968. Armstrong, John A. Ideology, Politics and Government in the Soviet Union: An Introduction. New York: Praeger, 1962. Arowele, Aiyenakun P.J. Diaspora-Concept in the New Testament: Studies on the Idea of Christian Sojourn, Pilgrimage and Dispersion according to the New Testament. Theology Dissertation of the Bavarian Julius-Maximilian University, Würzburg, 1977.

504

Bibliography

Asante, Molefi Kete. “Africa and Its Diaspora: Forging the Ideas of an African Renaissance.” Contribution to the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and of the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004, 17 p. Asante, Molefi Kete. “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” In Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice, edited by James L. Conyers, 37-49. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003. Asante, Molefi Kete. “Book Review of Paul Gilroy’s Againts Race.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 6 (July 2001): 847-851. Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity. Trenton: Third World Press, 1988. Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Asante, Molefi Kete. “Afrocentricity and Culture.” In African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, edited by Molefi Kete Asante, and Kariamu Welsh Asante, 3-12. Westport, Greenwood Press, 1985. Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Chicago: African American Images, 1980. Asante, Molefi Kete, and Ama Mazama, eds., Encyclopedia of Black Studies. London: Sage, 2005. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2007 (first edition 1998). Assayag, Jackie. La mondialisation des sciences sociales. Paris: Téraèdre, 2010. Assogba, Yao. “Diaspora, mondialisation et développement de l’Afrique.” Nouvelles pratiques sociales, vol. 15, no. 1 (2002): 98-110. Astbury, Katherine, Ingrid De Smet, and Jane Hiddleston. “Introduction.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2006): 251-256. Auroux, Sylvain. La Question de l’origine des langues. Paris: PUF, 2007. Austin, Algernon. Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University, 2006. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Auwers, Jean-Marie. “Le Pentateuque d’Alexandrie et le texte massorétique: enjeux d’une confrontation.” In Dogniez, and Harl, op. cit., 610-619. Azevedo, Mario J. “Diaspora.” In Asante, and Mazama, op. cit., 216-219. Azoulay, Eliane. “Le grand voyage des musiques nègres,” Autrement, no. 49 (April 1983): 220-225. Bachofer, Ludwig. “On Greeks and Śakas in India.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 61, no. 4 (December 1941): 223-250. Back, Adina, Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, and Jack Salzman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews. New York: Jewish Museum and Braziller, 1992. Baer, Yitzhak. Galut. New York: Schocken Books, 1947 (first German edition 1936).

Bibliography

505

Baeza, Cécilia. “Des exilés aux globe-trotters: la redéfinition du statut de l’expatrié dans la transition démocratique chilienne (1990-2006).” In Loin des yeux, près du cœur: les États et leurs expatriés, edited by Stéphane Dufoix, Carine Guerassimoff, and Anne de Tinguy, 285-304. Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2010. Baghdiantz McCabe, Ina, Gelina Harlaftis, and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, 16-20th Centuries. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Bailly, Anatole. Dictionnaire grec-français. Paris: Hachette, 1910 (first edition 1894). Baker, Houston A. Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicacago Press, 1996. Baker, Lee D. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Baldwin, James. “Negroes are Anti-Semitic because They’re Anti-White.” The New York Times Magazine, 9 April 1967. Balzac, Honoré de. Louis Lambert (1832), Auckland: The Floating Press, 2011. Banon, David. “L’exil et la doctrine des trois serments chez le Maharal de Prague.” In Messianismes: variations sur une figure juive, edited by Jean-Christophe Attias, Pierre Gisel, and Lucie Kaennel, 77-91. Genève: Labor et Fides, 2000. Barakat, Halim I. “The Palestinian Refugees: An Uprooted Community Seeking Repatriation.” International Migration Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 147-161. Barker, Chris. The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2004. Barnai, Jacob. “La diffusion du mouvement sabbatéen au XVII-XVIIIème siècle.” In La société juive à travers l’histoire, edited by Shmuel Trigano, vol. iv, 309-328. Paris: Fayard, 1993. Barré, Rémi, Valeria Hernández, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, and Dominique Vinck, eds., Diasporas scientifiques: comment les pays en développement peuvent-ils tirer parti de leurs chercheurs et de leurs ingénieurs expatriés. Paris: IRD Editions, 2003 (CD-ROM edition). Barry, Kim. “Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in an Emigration Context.” New York University Law Review, vol. 81, no. 11 (April 2006): 11-59. Barthélémy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila. Leiden: Brill, 1963. Barthes, Roland. “Drama, Poem, Novel.” in Roland Barthes, Sollers Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 1987. Barthes, Roland. “Dix raisons d’écrire.” (1969) in Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes. vol. ii. Paris: Seuil, 1994, 541. Bartley, Abel A. “Development, Growth, and Transformation in Higher Education.” In A Companion to African-American History, edited by Alton Hornsby Jr., 464-475. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick-Schiller, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialised NationStates. London-New York: Routledge, 1994.

506

Bibliography

Basnage, Jacques), The History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to The Present Time, Containing TheirAntiquitie, the Religion, Their Rites, the Dispersions of the Ten Tribes in the East, and the Persecutions This Nation Has Suffered in the West, Being a Supplement and Continuation of the History of Josephus. London, 1708 (first edition in French: Rotterdam, 1706-1707). Bastide, Roger. “Continuité et discontinuité des sociétés et des cultures afro-américaines.” (1970), Bastidiana, no. 13-14 (January-June 1996): 77-88. Bastide, Roger. The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 (first French edition 1960). Bastide, Roger. Sociology of Mental Disorder. New York: David McKay, 1972 (first French edition 1965). Bastide, Roger. African Civilisations in the New World. London: Hurst, 1971 (first French edition 1967). Bastide, Roger. “Le mythe de l’Afrique noire et la société de classe multiraciale.” Esprit, vol. 26, no. 266 (October 1958): 401-413. Basu, Biman. “Figurations of ‘India’ and the Transnational in W.E.B. Du Bois.” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 2 (2001): 221-241. Bauböck, Rainer. “Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism.” International Migration Review, vol. 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 700-723. Bauböck, Rainer. Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Aldershot: Elgar, 1994. Bauböck, Rainer, Eva Ersbøll, Kees Groenendijk, and Harald Waldrauch, eds. Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European States. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, 2 vol. Baumann, Martin. “A Diachronic View of Diaspora, The Significance of Religion and Hindu Trinidadians.” In Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, edited by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan, and Carolin Alfonso, 170-188. London- New York: Routledge, 2004. Baumann, Martin. “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison.” Numen, no. 47 (2000): 313-337. Baumann, Martin. “What you Always Wanted to Know About the Origins and Usage of That Word Diaspora.” 1998, no longer online. Baumann, Martin. “Shangri-La in Exile: Portraying Tibetan Diaspora Studies and Reconsidering Diaspora(s).” Diaspora, vol. 6, no. 3 (1997): 377-404. Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006 (first German edition 2004). Beck, Ulrich. “The Truth of Others. A Cosmopolitan Approach.” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3 (2004): 430-449.

Bibliography

507

Becker, Howard. “Constructive Typology in the Social Sciences.” American Sociological Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1940): 40-55. Bein, Alex. The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990 (first German edition 1980). Bein, Alex. “The Origin of the Term and Concept ‘Zionism’.” Herzl Yearbook, vol. ii, New York: Herzl Press, 1959, 1-27. Bell, Howard H. “Negro Nationalism: A Factor in Emigration Projects, 1858-1861.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 47, no. 1 (January 1962): 42-53. Bell, Howard H. “The Negro Emigration Movement, 1849-1854: A Phase of Negro Nationalism.” The Phylon Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1959): 132-142. Bell, J. Bowyer. A Time of Terror: How Democratic Societies Respond to Revolutionary Violence. New York: Basic Books, 1978. bell hooks. “Postmodern Blackness.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1990), available on the journal’s website at: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue. 990/hooks.990. bell hooks. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. Ben Gourion, David. “Text of Ben-Gurion’s Address Before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.” The New York Times, 8 January 1961. Ben-Israel, Hedva. “Debates with Toynbee: Herzog, Talmon, Friedman.” Israel Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 79-90. Ben Israel, Menasseh. The Hope of Israel (1650). Oxford-New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004. Ben Rafael, Eliezer, and Yitzhak Sternberg, eds., Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (dis)Order. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Ben Yehouda, Nachman. The Massada Myth: Collective Memory and Myth-Making in Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Bennett, George. Olam haneshamoth, or a view of the intermediate state, as it appears in the records of the Old and New Testament; the apocraphal [sic] books; in heathen authors; and the Greek and Latin fathers. London: W. J. and J. Richardsons, 1800. Bennett, Lerone Jr. “Pan-Africanism at the Crossroads.” Ebony, vol. 29, no. 11 (September 1974): 148-160. Bensoussan, Georges. Un nom impérissable: Israël, le sionisme et la destruction des Juifs d’Europe. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Benveniste, Emile. “Civilisation: A Contribution to the history of the word.” in Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971 (first French edition 1966), 289-296. Berking, Helmuth. “‘Ethnicity is Everywhere’: On Globalization and the Transformation of Cultural Identity.” Current Sociology, vol. 51, no. 3-4 (May-July 2003): 248–264.

508

Bibliography

Berlinerblau, Jacques. Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Berman, Paul, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments. New York: Delacorte Press, 1994. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics. Durham- London: Duke University Press, 2001. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 2 (2006): 161-179. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Jacques Henri. Studies of Nature (1784), vol. i, London: Printed for J. Mawman et al., 1801. Berthomière, William, and Christine Chivallon. “Introduction. Diaspora: ferveur académique autour d’un mot.” In Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain, edited by William Berthomière, and Christine Chivallon, 15-23. Paris: Karthala-MSHA, 2006. Berthomière, William, and Christine Chivallon, eds., Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain. Paris: Karthala-MSHA, 2006. Berzelius, Jons Jakob. Nouveau système de minéralogie. Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, 1819. Beverton, Raymond J.H., and Sidney Holt. On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations. London: Chapman and Hall, 1993 (first edition 1957). Bethel, Kathleen E. “Afrocentricity and the Arrangement of Knowledge.” in Conyers, Afrocentricity and the Academy, op. cit., 50-65. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 291-322. London: Routledge, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Third-Space.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 207-221. London: Lawrence et Wishart, 1990. Bhagwati, Jagdish N. In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bhagwati, Jagdish N. “Borders Beyond Control.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 82, no. 1 (JanuaryFebruary 2003): 98-104. Bhagwati, Jagdish N., ed., Taxing the Brain Drain. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976, 2 vol. Bhagwati, Jagdish N. “The United States in the Nixon Era: The End of Innocence.” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 25 (1972): 41-44. Bhagwati, Jagdish N., and John Douglas Wilson. “Income Taxation in the Presence of International Personal Mobility: An Overview.” In Income Taxation and Inter-

Bibliography

509

national Mobility, edited by Jagdish N. Bhagwati, and John Douglas Wilson, 3-39. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1989. Bhagwati, Jagdish N., and Milind Rao. “Foreign Students Spur US Brain Gain.” The Wall Street Journal, 31 August 1994, “Black scholarly group changes name.” Bay State Banner (Boston), vol. vi, no. 9 (12 November 1970). Bickerman, Elias J. “The Septuagint as a Translation.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, no. 28 (1959): 1-39. Bienstock, Gregory. The Struggle for the Pacific. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937. Bilimoria, Purushottama. “Transglobalism of Self-Exiled Hindus: The Case of Australia.” Religion Compass, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 2007): 305–328. “Biographie du frère Jean-Adam Fuchs.” Journal de l’Unité des frères, vol. 15 (February 1850): 45-54. “Biographie du frère Jean-Adam Fuchs, suite et fin.” Journal de l’Unité des frères, vol. 15 (April 1850): 106-117. Birnbaum, Pierre. “De l’errance à l’État: la figure du Juif errant, de part et d’autre du Rhin.” In Pierre Birnbaum, Sur la corde raide: parcours juifs entre exil et citoyenneté. Paris: Flammarion, 2002, 83-95. Birnstiel, Eckart, ed. (with Chrystel Bernat), La Diaspora des Huguenots: les réfugiés protestants de France et leur dispersion dans le monde (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001. Blackett, Richard. “Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 62, no. 1 (January 1977): 1-25. Blalock, Hubert Jr. Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations. New York: John Wiley, 1967. Blanchard, Pascal, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron, eds., Paris Noir: Présence afroantillaise dans la capitale. Paris: Hazan, 2001. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (first French edition 1959). Blaschke, Jochen. “Die Diaspora der Kurden in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 16, no. 3 (1991): 85-93. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992 (first French edition 1949). Blondheim, David Simon. “Les échos du judéo-hellénisme. Etude sur l’influence de la Septante et d’Aquila sur les versions néo-grecques des Juifs.” Revue des études juives, no. 78 (1924): 1-14. Blyden, Edward W. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967 (first edition 1887). Blyden, Edward W. From West Africa to Palestine. Freetown: T. J. Sawyer, 1873.

510

Bibliography

Boas, Franz. “Kinship of Language a Vital Factor in the War.” The New York Times, 3 January 1915. Boas, Franz. “Instability of Human Types.” In Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26-29, 1911, edited by Gustav Spiller, 99-103. London: P. S. King and Son, 1911. Boas, Franz, and Ruth Benedict. General Anthropology. Boston: D.C Heath & Co, 1938. Bobichon, Philippe. Justin martyr. Dialogue avec Tryphon. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2004, 2 vol. Bobo, Jacqueline, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel, eds., The Black Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. Bokanowsky, Hélène. “French Literature in Algiers.” Books Abroad, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1945): 125-130. Bolle, Jacques. “Die afrikanischen Mythen in der Diaspora.” Internationales Afrika Forum, vol. 2, no. 12 (December 1966): 534-539. Boltanski, Luc. The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (first French edition 1982). Bonacci, Giulia. Exodus! L’histoire du retour des Rastafariens en Ethiopie. Paris: Scali, 2008. Bonacich, Edna. “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 5 (October 1973): 583-594. Bonny, Yves. Sociologie du temps present: modernité avancée ou postmodernité? Paris: Armand Colin, 2004. Borchard, Edwin M. “Basic Elements of Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1913): 497-520. Bordes-Benayoun, Chantal. “Projet editorial.” Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés, no. 1 (2nd semester 2002): 7-9. Bordes-Benayoun, Chantal. “Revisiter les diasporas.” Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés, no. 1 (2nd semester 2002): 11-21. Bordes-Benayoun, Chantal, and Dominique Schnapper. Les mots des diasporas. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2008. Bordes-Benayoun, Chantal, and Dominique Schnapper. Diasporas et nations. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. Bordes-Benayoun, Chantal, and Dominique Schnapper. “Diaspora.” In Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, edited by Sylvie Mesure, and Patrick Savidan, 272-274. Paris: PUF, 2006. Borges, Jorge Luis. “On the Classics,” (1952), New York Review of Books, vol. 15, no. 3, 13 August 1970. Bornhausen, Karl. “The Present Status of the Protestant Church in Germany.” The Journal of Religion, vol. 3, no. 5 (September 1923): 501-524.

Bibliography

511

Bornstein, Georges. “The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish and Irish Nationalisms at the Turn of the Century.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005): 369-384. Boschetti, Anna, ed., L’espace culturel transnational. Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2010. Bost, Ami. Histoire ancienne et moderne de l’Eglise des Frères de Bohême et de Moravie depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: L.R. Delay, 1844. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 145 (2002): 3-8. Bourdieu, Pierre. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. “Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without a Subject.” Social Forces, vol. 34, no. 1 (1967): 162-212. Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly, no. 118 (July 1916): 86-97. Bouvier, Jean, and Henry Germain-Martin. Finances et financiers de l’Ancien Régime. Paris: PUF, 1964. Bovet, Félix. Le Comte de Zinzendorf. Paris: Grassart, 1860, 2 vol. Boyarin, Daniel. “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion.” Representations, no. 85 (2004): 21-57. Boyarin, Daniel. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 693-725. Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Boyle, Mark, and Rob Kitchin. Towards an Irish Diaspora Strategy: A Position Paper. NIRSA Working Paper no. 37, May 2008, 16 p., available on the NIRSA website: http: //www.nuim.ie/nirsa. Boyle, Mark. Fostering Dialogues Between Diaspora Strategies. Workshop Diaspora Strategy document, 26-28 January 2009, 14 p. Brackman, Harold David. “‘A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension’: Nazi AntiSemitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.” American Jewish History, no. 88 (2000): 53-93. Brackman, Harold David. Ministry of Lies: The Truth behind the Nation of Islam’s ‘The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews’. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994. Brackman, Harold David. Farrakhan’s Reign of Historical Error: The Truth behind The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1992.

512

Bibliography

Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Braham, Peter, and Aldo Zargani. “Diaspora.” In Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture, edited by Guido Bolaffi, 73-76. London: Sage, 2003. Brand, Laurie A. Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Braude, Benjamin. “Cham et Noé. Race, esclavage et exégèse entre islam, judaïsme et christianisme.” Annales HSS, vol. 57, no. 1 (January-February 2002): 93-125. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, eds., Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Bréal, Michel. Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning. London: William Heinemann, 1900 (first French edition 1897). Bredbenner, Candice. A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage and the Law of Citizenship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Brenner, Frédéric. Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, 2 vol. Breton, Raymond, and Pierre Savard, eds., The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1982. Britton, Celia M. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Brochard, M.J. “Etymologie.” In Le Robert. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. i, edited by Alain Rey, 1338-1440. Paris: Le Robert, 1998. Brock, Lisa. “Questioning the Diaspora: Hegemony, Black Intellectuals and Doing International History from below.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 24, no. 2 (1996): 9-12. Brooks, Joanna. “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy.” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197-216. Brooks, Joanna, and John Saillant, eds., “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. Brotz, Howard, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999 (first edition 1966). Brotz, Howard. “Negro ‘Jews’ in the United States.” Phylon, vol. 13, no. 4 (4th trimester 1952): 324-337. Brown, Oscar C. “What Chance Freedom.” The Crisis, vol. 42, no. 5 (May 1935): 134-137, 149 and 155. Brown, Robert A., and Todd C. Shaw. “Separate Nations: Two Attitudinal Dimensions of Black Nationalism.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 64, no. 1 (February 2002): 22-44. Brown, Scot. Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Brubaker, Rogers. “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 28, no. 1 (January 2005): 1-19

Bibliography

513

Brubaker, Rogers. “Accidental Diasporas and External ‘Homelands’ in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present.” Political Science Series no. 71, Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS), Vienna, October 2000, 19 p. Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Brubaker, Rogers. “L’éclatement des peuples après la chute des empires.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 98 (1993): 3-19. Brubaker, Rogers. “The Russian Diaspora and Non-Russian Nationalism.” Paper presented at the American Sociological Association annual conference, Cincinnati, 13-16 August 1991. Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. “Beyond ‘Identity’.” Theory and Society, vol. 29, no. 1 (2000), 1-47. Bruder, Edith. “Tribues perdues d’Israël en Afrique. La rencontre des Africains avec le judaïsme, jalons historiques.” Pardès, no. 44 (2008): 39-53. Bruneau, Michel. “Les mots de la diaspora grecque: société, État et diaspora.” In Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière, and Sheffer, Les Diasporas, op. cit., 79-89. Bruneau, Michel. Diasporas et espaces transnationaux. Paris: Anthropos, 2004. Bruneau, Michel, ed., Diasporas. Montpellier: Reclus, 1995. Bruneau, Michel. “Espaces et territoires de diasporas.” In Bruneau, Diasporas, op. cit., 5-23. Brunhes, Jean. “Du caractère propre et du caractère complexe des faits de géographie humaine.” Annales de Géographie, vol. 22, no. 121 (1913): 1-40. Brunn, Stanley. “The Internationalization of Diasporas in a Shrinking World.” In Les réseaux des diasporas, edited by Georges Prévélakis, 259-272. Paris: L’HarmattanKYKEM, 1996. Bryant, John, and David Law. New Zealand’s Diaspora and Overseas-born Population, New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, no. 13, September 2004, 12 p. Burckhardt, Guido. Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine. Gotha: Besser, 1866. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Kim D. “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse.” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 2 (2001): 189-219. Butler, Kim D. “From Black History to Diaspora History: Brazilian Abolition in AfroAtlantic Context.” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 125-139. “Calendar.” The New York Times, “New Jersey Weekly Desk”, 21 January 2007. Callot, Jean-Pierre. L’Arménie. Paris, PUF, 1959. Campbell, Anthony F., and Mark O’brien, eds., Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2000. Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

514

Bibliography

“CAN de handball: les Lions peaufinent leur préparation.” Cameroon Tribune, 4 February 2010. Cannon, J. Alfred. “Re-Africanization: The Last Alternative for Black America.” Phylon, vol. 38, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1977): 203-210. Capone, Stefania. Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde. Religion, ethnicité et nationalisme noir aux États-Unis. Paris: Karthala, 2005. Caputo, John D. “A Community without Truth: Derrida and the Impossible Community.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 26, no. 1 (1996): 25-37. Carrington, Charles. The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Carroll, Robert P. “Deportation and Diasporic Discourses in the Prophetic Literature.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 63-85. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Carson, Claybourne Jr. “Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement.” In Jews in Black Perspectives: A Dialogue, edited by Joseph R. Washington, 113-131. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1984. Cartey, Wilfred G. “Earth Flow in Zionism and Negritude.” Negro Digest, vol. 17, no. 10 (August 1968): 54-62. Casevitz, Michel. “D’Homère aux historiens romains: le grec du Pentateuque alexandrin.” In Dogniez, and Harl, op.cit., 636-649. Casevitz, Michel. Le Vocabulaire de la colonisation en grec ancien. Étude lexicologique: les familles de κτίζω et de οἰκέω-οἰκίζω. Paris: Klincksieck, 1985. Cassirer, Ernst. “Language and the Construction of the World of Objects.” (1932) In Ernst Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919-1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Castles, Stephen, and Alasdair Davidson. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. London: Macmillan, 2000. Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza. The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. A Journey to the End of the Night. New York: New Directions, 2006 (first French edition 1932). Centlivres, Pierre. “Portée et limites de la notion de diaspora.” CEMOTI, no. 30 (2nd semester 2000): 5-12. Centre for Social and Economic Studies and Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty. From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Mobilising Albania’s Skilled Diaspora, Report for the Albanian government, University of Sussex, April 2006. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Rreview Press, 2000 (first French edition 1955).

Bibliography

515

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “A Small History of Subaltern Studies.” In A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz, and Sangeeta Ray, 467-485. Malden: Blackwell, 2005 (first edition 2000). Chaliand, Gérard, and Jean-Pierre Rageau. Penguin Atlas of Diasporas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 (first French edition 1991). Challenor, Herschelle S. “African Studies at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” African Issues, vol. 30, no. 2 (2002): 24-29. Chambers, Ian, ed., Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1999. Chander, Anupam. “Homeward Bound.” New York University Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1 (2006): 60-89. Chander, Anupam. “Diaspora Bonds.” New York University Law Review, vol. 76, no. 4 (September 2001): 1005-1099. Chaney, Elsa. “Migrant Workers and National Boundaries: The Basis for Rights and Protections.” In Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits, edited by Peter G. Brown, and Henry Shue, 37-77. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981. Chaney, Elsa. “Foreword: The World Economy and Contemporary Migration.” International Migration Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 204-212. Chandramohan, Balasubramanyam. “Diasporic Writing.” In Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, edited by John Charles Hawley, 144-150. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Chaparro, Fernando, Hernán Jaramillo, and Vladimir Quintero. Role of Diaspora in Facilitating Participation in Global Knowledge Networks: Lessons of Red Caldas in Colombia, Report for the World Bank Knowledge for Development Program, Bogota, 2004, 27 p. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel. La tradition sociologique de Chicago. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Charbit, Denis. Qu’est-ce que le sionisme? Paris: Albin Michel, 2007. Charbit, Denis, ed., Sionismes: Textes fondamentaux. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998. Chaumont, Jean-Michel. La Concurrence des victimes: génocide, identité, reconnaissance. Paris: La Découverte, 1997. Chaunu, Pierre. La Civilisation de l’Europe des Lumières. Paris, Arthaud, 1971 Chauvier, Stéphane. Du droit d’être étranger: essai sur le concept kantien d’un droit cosmopolitique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Chazan, Naomi. “The Fallacies of Pragmatism: Israeli Foreign Policy Toward South Africa.” In Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, op. cit., 148-181. Chekuri, Christopher, and Himaddep Muppidi. “Diasporas Before and After the Nation: Displacing the Modern.” Interventions, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003): 45–57. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, ed., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London-New York: Routledge, 1996. Chesneaux, Jean. L’Asie orientale aux xixe et xxe siècles: Chine, Japon, Inde, Sud-Est asiatique. Paris: PUF, 1966

516

Bibliography

Cheung, Gordon C.K. “Chinese Diaspora as a Virtual Nation: Interactive Roles between Economic and Social Capital.” Political Studies, no. 52 (2004): 664–684. Chevannes, Barry. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse (N.Y.): Syracuse University Press, 1995. Cheyette, Bryan. “Diasporas of the Mind: British-Jewish Writing Beyond Multiculturalism.” In Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, edited by Monika Fludernik, 45-82. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Chireau, Yvonne. “Black Culture and Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, 1790-1930, an Overview.” In Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, edited by Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch, 15-32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 15-32. Chireau, Yvonne, and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds., Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Chivallon, Christine. “’Black Atlantic’ revisited: une lecture de Paul Gilroy pour quelques prolongements vers le Jazz.” L’Homme, no. 187‐188 (2008): 343‐374. Chivallon, Christine. “Retour sur la ‘communauté imaginée’ d’Anderson: essai de clarification théorique d’une notion restée floue.” Raisons politiques, no. 27 (2007): 131-172. Chivallon, Christine. “Diaspora noire des Amériques: une réflexion conduite à partir de la notion de ‘lien transétatique’.” Autrepart, no. 38 (2006): 39-61. Chivallon, Christine. The Black Diaspora of the Americas: Experiences and Theories out of the Caribbean. Kingston-Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011 (first French edition 2004). Chivallon, Christine. “La diaspora noire des Amériques. Réflexions sur le modèle de l’hybridité de Paul Gilroy.” L’Homme, no. 161 (2002): 51-74. Chivallon, Christine. “Présence antillaise au Royaume-Uni.” Hommes et migrations, no. 1237 (May-June 2002): 62-69. Chivallon, Christine. “D’un espace appelant forcément les sciences sociales pour le comprendre.” In Logiques de l’espace, esprit des lieux. Géographies à Cerisy, edited by Jacques Lévy, and Michel Lussault, 299-317. Paris: Belin, 2000. Chivallon, Christine. “Les pensées postmodernes britanniques ou la quête d’une pensée meilleure.” Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 43, no. 119 (September 1999): 293-322. Chivallon, Christine. “Fin des territoires ou nécessité d’une conceptualisation autre?” Géographie et cultures, no. 31 (1999): 127-138. Chivallon, Christine. “La géographie britannique et ses diagnostics sur l’époque postmoderne.” Cahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 43, no. 118 (April 1999): 97-119. Chivallon, Christine. Espace et Identité à la Martinique. Paysannerie des mornes et reconquête collective 1840-1960. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998.

Bibliography

517

Chivallon, Christine. “Du territoire au réseau: comment penser l’identité antillaise.” Cahiers d’études africaines, vol. 37, no. 148 (4th trimester 1997): 767-794. Chivallon, Christine. “De quelques préconstruits de la notion de diaspora à partir de l’exemple antillais.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 13, no. 1 (1997): 149-160. Chivallon, Christine. “Repenser le territoire, à propos de l’expérience antillaise.” Géographie et cultures, no. 20 (1996): 45-54. Chivallon, Christine. “Les espaces de la diaspora antillaise au Royaume‐Uni: limites des concepts socioanthropologiques.” Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, no. 68‐69 (1995): 198‐210. Chivallon, Christine. “Deux notions pour comprendre l’expérience sociale de l’espace: réseaux sociaux et territoires.” Cahiers de la Maison de la recherche en sciences humaines de Caen, no. 3 (June 1994): 73-90. Chivallon, Christine. Tradition et modernité dans le monde paysan martiniquais: approche ethno-géographique. Dissertation thesis in Geography, Université Bordeaux III, 1992. Cho, Lily. “The Turn to Diaspora.” Topia, no. 17 (2007): 11-30. Choulant, Ludwig. History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration in Its Relation to Anatomic Science and the Graphic Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920 (first German edition 1852). Christian, Mark A. “Black Atlantic.” In Asante, and Mazama, op. cit., 116-118. Clark, Kenneth B. The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Clark, Kenneth B. “Candor about Negro-Jewish Relations: A Social Scientist Charts a Complex Social Problem.” Commentary, vol. 1, no. 4 (February 1946): 8-14. Clarke, John Henrik. “The African Heritage Studies Association: Some Notes on the Conflict with the African Studies Association (ASA) and the Fight to Reclaim African History.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 6, no. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1976): 5-11. Clarke, John Henrik et allii, eds., Black Titan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. Clary, Françoise. “Du déterminisme moral au pragmatism: les choix ambigus de W. E. B. Du Bois.” Cercles, no. 4 (2002): 177-192. Claval, Paul. “Diasporas and Politics: An Overview.” In Prévélakis, Les réseaux des diasporas, op. cit., 433-444. Clegg, LeGrand H. II. “Who Were the First Americans?” The Black Scholar, vol. 7, no. 1 (September 1975): 32-41. Clegg, LeGrand H. II. “The Beginning of the African Diaspora: Black Men in Ancient and Medieval America?” (2 parts) A Current Bibliography on African Affairs, vol. 2, no. 11 (November 1969): 13-32, and vol. 2, no. 12 (December 1969): 13-34.

518

Bibliography

Clement of Alexandria. “Exhortation to the Heathen.” In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. II, edited by Alexander Roberts, and James Donaldson, 171-206. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Clifford, James. On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Clifford, James. “Indigenous Articulations.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 468-490. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Current Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994): 302-338. Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 96-116. New York-London: Routledge, 1992. Clifford, James. “Notes on Travel and Theory.” Inscriptions, no. 5 (1989), available on the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies website: http://ccs.ihr.ucsc.edu/inscriptions/ volume-5/james-clifford/. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Clifford, James. Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Cobb, Charlie. “Africa Notebook: Views on Returning ‘Home’.” Black World, vol. 21, no. 7 (May 1972): 22-37. Cohen, Abner. “Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas.” In L’évolution du commerce africain depuis le xixe siècle en Afrique de l’Ouest, edited by Claude Meillassoux, 266-281. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Cohen, Abner. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Cohen, Jim, and Jade Lindgaard. “De l’Atlantique noir à la mélancolie postcoloniale: entretien avec Paul Gilroy.” Mouvements, no. 51 (September-October 2007): 90-101. Cohen, Norman J. “Shekhinta ba-Galuta: A Midrashic Response to Destruction and Persecution.” Journal for the Study of Judaism, no. 13 (1982): 147-159. Cohen, Phil. “Rethinking the Diasporama.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 1 (1999): 3-22. Cohen, Phil, ed., New Ethnicities, Old Racisms. London: Zed Books, 1999. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2008 (first edition 1997). Cohen, Robin. “Solid, Ductile and Liquid: Changing Notions of Homeland and Home in Diaspora Studies.” QEH Working Paper Series, no. 156 (October 2007), 17 p. Cohen, Robin. “‘Diaspora’: Changing Meanings and Limits of the Concept.” In Berthomière, and Chivallon, Les diasporas dans le monde contemporain, op. cit., 39-48.

Bibliography

519

Cohen, Robin. “Diaspora.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, 3642-3645. Cohen, Robin. “Diasporas and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challengers.” International Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (1996): 507-520. Cohen, Robin. “Rethinking ‘Babylon’: Iconoclastic Conceptions of the Diaspora Experience.” New Community, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995): 5-18. Cohen, Robin. “The Diaspora of a Diaspora: The Case of the Caribbean.” Social Science Information, vol. 31, no. 1 (1992): 159-169 Cohen, Robin. Labour and Politics in Nigeria. London: Heinemann, 1974. Cohen, Shaye J.D., and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., Diasporas in Antiquity. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. Cole, Johnnetta B. “Black Studies in Liberal Arts Education.” In Bobo, Hudley, and Michel, The Black Studies Reader, op. cit., 21-33. Coleman, D.C. “G.R. Hawke on-What?” The Economic History Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (May 1971): 260-261. Coleman, D.C. “An Innovation and Its Diffusion: The ‘New Draperies’.” The Economic History Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (December 1969): 417-429. Colloque sur l’art nègre (1er festival mondial des arts nègres, Dakar, 1-24 avril 1966). Paris: Présence africaine, 1967. Collyer, Michael. “Diasporas à la française: Recent Francophone Contributions to the Literature.” Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 1 (2006): 101-107. “Connecticut’s Diaspora.” The New York Times, “Connecticut Weekly Desk”, 21 January 2007. “Colonialism and Nationalism in Africa and Europe.” Past and Present, no. 24 (April 1963): 65-74. Conforti, Yitzhak. “Alternative Voices in Zionist Historiography.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2005): 1-12. Conner, Walker. “The Impact of Homelands upon Diasporas.” In Modern Diasporas in International Politics, edited by Gabriel Sheffer, 16-45. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Conrad, Earl. “Yesterday and Today.” Chicago Defender, 14 April 1945. Contee, Clarence G. “Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress of 1919.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 57, no. 1 (January 1972): 13-28. Contee, Clarence G. “The Encyclopedia Africana Project of W. E. B. Du Bois.” African Historical Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1971): 77-91. Contee, Clarence G. “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana.” The Crisis, vol. 77, no. 9 (November 1970): 275-279. The Contribution of UK-based Diasporas to Development and Poverty Reduction, Report from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, April 2004, 43 p.

520

Bibliography

Conyers, James L., ed., Afrocentricity and the Academy: Essays on Theory and Practice. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. “Réflexions comparées sur l’historiographie africaniste de langue française et anglaise.” Politique africaine, no. 66 (Juin 1997): 91-100. Corbin, Alain. Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXème siècle, 1845-1880. Limoges: Presses universitaires de Limoges, 1999 (first edition 1975). Corm, Georges. “La diaspora libanaise (entretien).” Hérodote, no. 53 (April-June 1989): 84-100. Cornelius, Wayne A. Mexican Migration to the United States (with Comparative Reference to Caribbean-basin Migration): The State of Current Knowledge and Recommendations for Future Research. San Diego: Center for United States-Mexican Studies, 1979. Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti, of the Free People of Colour in the United States, Together with the Instructions to the Agent Sent Out by President Boyer. New York: Mahlon Day, 1824. Council of Europe. Diaspora Cultures. Document no. 10342, Committee on Culture, Science, and Education, 19 October 2004. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Nation, History, and the Idea of Cultural Origin in Melville Herskovits.” Diaspora, vol. 10, no. 1 (2001): 29-51. Coupland, Reginald. Welsh and Scottish Nationalism. London: Collins, 1954. Cowen, Brian. Ireland and the Irish Abroad. Report of the Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, August 2002, 75 p. Crampton, Jeremy W., and Stuart Elden, eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Crawford, Michael, ed., Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Study of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1955. Crummell, Alexander. The Relation and Duties of the Free Colored Men in America to Africa. Hartford: Press of Case, Lockwood and Company, 1861. Cuche, Denys. “Roger Bastide et ‘l’Ecole de Chicago’.” Bastidiana, no. 53-54 (JanuaryJune 2006): 23-60 Cuche, Denys. “Diaspora.” Pluriel Recherches, no. 8 (2001), 14-23. Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. London: n.p., 1787. “Current Katrina Quotations.” Associated Press, 2 September 2005. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Bibliography

521

Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 (first French edition 2003). Dabag, Mihran, and Kristin Platt, eds., Identität in der Fremde. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1993. Dain, Bruce. “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Racial Discourse in the United States.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 14, no. 3 (December 1993): 139-161. Darras, Joseph Epiphane. Histoire générale de l’église depuis le commencement de l’ère chrétienne jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Librairie Louis Vivès, 1855. Dash, J. Michael. Édouard Glissant. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. David, Robert, and Manuel Jinbachian, eds., Traduire la Bible hébraïque: de la Septante à la Nouvelle Bible Segond. Montréal: Médiaspaul, 2005. Davidson, Basil. Which Way Africa? The Search for a New Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 (first edition 1964). Davidson, Basil. “Book Review.” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (August 1965): 304-306. Davidson, Basil. The African Past: Chronicles from Antiquity to Modern Times. Boston: Little Brown, 1964. Davidson, Basil. “Book Review.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 345 (January 1963): 170-171. Davidson, Basil. “The African Personality.” In Africa: A Handbook to the Continent, edited by Colin Legum, 447-451. London: Anthony Blond, 1961. Davies, William David. “Reflections about the Use of the Old Testament in the New in Its Historical Context.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 74, no. 2 (1983): 105-136. Davies, William David, and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2 The Hellenistic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Davis, Colin. “Diasporic Subjectivities.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (2006): 335-348. Dayal, Samir. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 46-62. De Crom, Dries. “The Letter of Aristeas and the Authority of the Septuagint.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 17, no. 2 (2008): 141-160. De Haas, Hein. Engaging Diasporas: How Governments Can Support Diaspora Involvement in the Development of Countries of Origin, Oxford, International Migration Institute and Oxfam Novib, June 2006, 112 p. De Lange, Nicolas. “Sem et Japhet. Les Juifs et la langue grecque.” Pardès, no. 12 (1990): 90-107. De Palma, Anthony. “What Was Once Theirs.” The New York Times, “Week in Review Desk”, 21 January 2007. Debré, François. Les Chinois de la diaspora. Paris: Olivier Orban, 1976.

522

Bibliography

Decraene, Philippe. Le panafricanisme. Paris: PUF, 1959. Defoe, Daniel. The Political History of the Devil. Containing his Original. A State of His Circumstances. His Conduct, Public and Private. Birmingham: printed by C. Earl, 1772 (sixth edition). Delacroix, Christian, François Dosse, and Patrick Garcia, eds., Historicités. Paris, La Découverte, 2009. Delany, Martin R. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993 (first edition 1852). Delcor, Mathias. “The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hellenistic Period.” In Davies, and Finkelstein, The Cambridge History of Judaism, op. cit., 409-503. Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004 (first French edition 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 1983 (first French edition 1962). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia, 1994 (first French edition 1991). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (first French edition 1980). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 (first French edition 1972). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rhizome. Paris: Minuit, 1976. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. London: The Athlone Press, 1987 (first French edition 1977). Delumeau, Jean. Une histoire du paradis, vol. 2 Mille ans de bonheur. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Delumeau, Jean. History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. New York: Continuum Books, 1995 (first French edition 1992). Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 (first French edition 1978). Delumeau, Jean. Naissance et affirmation de la Réforme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965. Democratic Rights of European Expatriates: A Comparative Study Report on the Electoral Regimes in the Country of Origin for European Expatriates and the Democratic Representation of Their Interests, Rights and Obligations to the Country of Origin and to the European Parliament. Brussels: The Europeans Throughout the World, January 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge, 2006 (first French edition 1993). Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 (first French edition 2001).

Bibliography

523

Derrida, Jacques. “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum.” Le Monde, 19 August 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2001 (first French edition 1967). Derrida, Jacques. “Lyotard and Us.” parallax, vol. 6, no. 4 (2000): 28–48. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other, Or The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 (first French edition 1996). Derrida, Jacques. Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 (first French edition 1992). Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (first French edition 1972). Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. London: Athlone Press, 1981 (first French edition 1972). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 (first French edition 1967). Derrida, Jacques, and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Devi, Mahasveta. “Draupadi.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2 (1981): 381-402. Dewitte, Philippe. Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919-1939. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. “Diaspora.” In Appiah, and Gates, The Dictionary of Global Culture, op. cit., 178-179. “Diaspora: Explaining a Modern Filipino Phenomenon.” Economic Issue of the Day, vol. viii, no. 4-5 (December 2008), Philippine Institute for Development Studies, 4 p. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. Paris: Imprimerie nationale-Julliard, 1994. Dictionnnaire Quillet de la langue française en 4 volumes. Paris: Quillet 1975. Dieckhoff, Alain. “La question de la culture nationale dans le sionisme.” In Le temps de l’État: mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Birnbaum, edited by Bertrand Badie, and Yves Déloye, 203-222. Paris: Fayard, 2007. Dieckhoff, Alain. The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel. London: Hurst & Company, 2003 (first French edition 1993). Diminescu, Dana. “Le passage par l’écran: ou l’émergence de nouvelles frontières.” In Actes du colloque Les frontières de l’Europe, 263-274. Bucarest: Ed. Universitatii, 2007. Diner, Hasia R. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977. Diouf, Mamadou, ed., L’historiographie indienne en débat. Colonialisme, nationalisme et sociétés postcoloniales. Paris, Karthala-Sephis, 1999. Dirlik, Arif. “Intimate Others: [Private] Nations and Diasporas in an Age of Globalization.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2004): 491-502.

524

Bibliography

“Dispersion.” In A cyclopædia of Biblical literature originally edited by John Kitto, 3rd edition greatly enlarged, improved and edited by William Lindsay Alexander, 680-682. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1865-66. Dixon, Chris. African Americans and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Doellinger, Johann Josef Ignaz von. Origine du christianisme. Paris: Debécourt et Hachette, 1842 (first German edition 1833-1835). Dogniez, Cécile, and Marguerite Harl eds., Le Pentateuque: la Bible d’Alexandrie. Paris: Gallimard, 2002 (first edition 2001). Dominican Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Dominica-Diaspora Policy Paper.” October 2004, available at www.da-academy.org/draft_policy.html. Don-Yehiya, Eliezer. “The Negation of Galut in Religious Zionism.” Modern Judaism, no. 12 (1992): 129-155. Dorès, Maurice. La Beauté de Cham: mondes juifs, mondes noirs. Paris: Balland, 1992. Dorival, Gilles. “La traduction de la Torah en grec.” In Dogniez, and Harl, Le Pentateuque, op. cit., 565-581 Dorival, Gilles, Marguerite Harl, and Olivier Munnich, eds., La Bible grecque des Septante: du judaïsme hellénistique au christianisme ancien. Paris: Cerf, 1994 (first edition 1988). Dorival, Gilles, and Olivier Munnich, eds., “Selon les Septante”: hommage à Marguerite Harl. Paris: Cerf, 1995. Dosse, François. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 (first French edition 2007). Drachler, Jacob, ed., Black Homeland, Black Diaspora: Cross Currents of the African Relationship. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1975. “Draft Concept Paper.” First Meeting of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, 2004, 20 p. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Drimmer, Melvin. “Thoughts on the Study of Slavery in the Americas and the Writing of Black History.” Phylon, vol. 36, no. 2 (1975): 125-139. Dubarle, André-Marie. Judith. Formes et sens des diverses traditions, vol. II Textes. Rome: Institut biblique pontifical, 1966. Dubois, Jean, et. al. Dictionnaire du français contemporain. Paris: Larousse, 1966. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 (first edition 1903). DuBois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward the Autobiography of the Race Concept. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 (first edition 1940).

Bibliography

525

DuBois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth,” In The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day, 31-76. New York: Humanity Books, 2003 (first edition 1903). DuBois, W.E.B. W.E.B DuBois Speaks. Speeches and Addresses (edited by Philip S. Foner), 2 vol., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970. DuBois, W.E.B. The Negro. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 (first edition 1915). DuBois, W.E.B. “Opinion of W.E.B DuBois.” The Crisis, vol. 28, no. 1 (May 1924): 7-12. DuBois, W.E.B. “The Negro Race in the United States of America.” In Spiller, Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, op. cit., 348-364. DuBois, W.E.B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” Atlantic Monthly, no. 80 (August 1897): 194-198. Dubnow, Simon. Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958. Dubnow, Simon. “Diaspora.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (dirigée par Edwin R.A. Seligman et Alvin Johnson), New York, The Macmillan Company, 1930-1935 (1931 pour le volume V Danton-Exile), p. 126-130. Dufoix, Stéphane. “Diaspora.” In Dictionnaire de l’immigration, edited by Smaïn Laacher, 160-164. Paris: Larousse, 2012. Dufoix, Stéphane. Diasporas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 (first French edition 2003). Dufoix, Stéphane. “Le champ de l’épars. Naissance et histoire du ‘genre diasporique’.” La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, no. 7 (September-October 2008): 39-44. Dufoix, Stéphane. “Diaspora and Nationalism.” In Nations and Nationalism. A Global Historical Overview, vol. iv, edited by Guntram H. Herb, and Dave Kaplan, 1364-1378. London: ABC-Clio, 2008. Dufoix, Stéphane. “Diasporas.” In Encyclopedia of Globalization, edited by Roland Robertson, and Jan Aart Scholte, 311-316. New York, Routledge, 2007. Dufoix, Stéphane. “W.E.B Du Bois: Race et ‘diaspora noire/africaine’.” Raisons politiques, no. 21 (2006): 97-116. Dufoix, Stéphane. “Notion, concept ou slogan? Qu’y a-t-il sous le terme ‘diaspora’?” In Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière, and Sheffer, Les diasporas, op. cit., 53-63. Dufoix, Stéphane. Politiques d’exil. Hongrois, Polonais et Tchécoslovaques en France après 1945. Paris, PUF, 2002. Dufoix, Stéphane. “L’objet-diaspora en questions.” Cultures et Conflits, no. 33-34 (Spring-Summer 1999): 147-163. Dufoix, Stéphane, Carine Guerassimoff, and Anne de Tinguy, eds., Loin des yeux, près du cœur. Les États et leurs expatriés. Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2010. Dumont, Gérard-François. “Diasporas et valeurs républicaines en France.” In Prévélakis, Les réseaux des diasporas, op. cit., 355-372.

526

Bibliography

Dunn, Kathleen. “Diaspora Giving and the Future of Philanthropy.” The Philantrophic Initiative, 16 May 2004, formerly available online. Dyboski, Roman. “Poland and the Problem of National Minorities.” Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, vol. 2, no. 5 (September 1923): 179-200. Dziewanowski, Marian Kamil. Poland in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Malden: Blackwell, 1995 (first Italian edition 1993). Easton, Hosea. A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Conditions of the Colored People of the United States, and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them. Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837. Edmondson, Locksley. “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora: Some International Implications.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 164-210. Edmondson, Locksley. “Black Roots and Identity: Comparative and International Perspectives.” International Journal, no. 34 (Summer 1979): 408-429. Edmondson, Locksley. “Africa and the African Diaspora: Interactions, Linkages and Racial Challenges in the Future World Order.” In Africa in World Affairs: The Next Thirty Years, edited by Ali Mazrui, and Hasu H. Patel, 1-21. Lewes: Julian Friedmann Publishers. Edmondson, Locksley. “The Internationalization of Black Power: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” Mawazo, no. 1 (December 1968): 16-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text, vol. 19, no. 66 (Spring 2001): 45-73. Egan, Greg. Diaspora. London: Orion/Millenium, 1997. Eisen, Arnold M. Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Elbaz, Mikhaël. “Minorités d’intermédiaires, sous-économies et judéités.” In Les Juifs et l’économique: miroirs et mirages, edited by Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, and PierreJacques Rojtman, 345-354. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1992. Elukin, Jonathan M. “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no. 4 (1992), 603-630. Ember, Melvin, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures around the World. 2 vol. New York: Kluwer-Plenum, 2005. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2003 (first édition 1789).

Bibliography

527

Ernst, Robert. “Negro Concepts of Americanism.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 1954), 206-219. Escudier, Alexandre. “‘Temporalisation’ et modernité politique: penser avec Koselleck.” Annales HSS, vol. 64, no. 6 (November-December 2009): 1269-1301. Esman, Milton J. “Diasporas and International Relations.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 333-349. Esman, Milton J. “The Chinese Diaspora in South-East Asia.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 130-163. Essien-Udom, E.U. Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Europe’s Diasporas and European Citizenship, International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation, Barcelona, 27-29 January 2005. Euskadi munjduan eraikitzen, Actes du 2ème Congrès mondial des communautés basques, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Editions du gouvernement basque, 2000, Ewald, Heinrich. Geschichte des Volkes Israel. 7 vol. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1843-1859. Fabre, Geneviève. Le théâtre noir aux États-Unis. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1982. Fabre, Geneviève, and Klaus Benesch, eds., African Diasporas in the New and Old World: Consciousness and Imagination. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Fabre, Michel. La Rive noire: De Harlem à la Seine. Paris: Lieu commun, 1985. Fahrmeir, Andreas. Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of A Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Fahrmeir, Andreas. Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States 1789-1870. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000. Faist, Thomas, and Peter Kivisto. Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transnational Prospects. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Faist, Thomas, and Peter Kivisto, eds., Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. Faist, Thomas, Jürgen Gerdes, and Beate Rieple. “Dual Citizenship as a PathDependent Process.” International Migration Review, vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 913-944. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986 (first French edition 1952). Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove, 1967 (first French edition 1964). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965 (first French edition 1961). Faubion, James D., ed., Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. ii, New York: New Press, 1998.

528

Bibliography

Fauvelle-Aymar, François-Xavier. “Les Juifs, la traite des esclaves et l’histoire des ÉtatsUnis: Étude d’un courant antisémite au sein de la communauté noire américaine dans les années 1990.” Sources, no. 13 (Spring 2002): 62-75. Fauvelle-Aymar, François-Xavier. “L’affaire Black Athena (1987-2001).” Pour l’histoire des sciences de l’Homme, no. 22 (Fall 2001): 15-21. Fauvelle-Aymar, François-Xavier, Jean-Pierre Chrétien, and Claude-Hélène Perrot, eds., Afrocentrismes: l’histoire des Africains entre Egypte et Amérique. Paris: Karthala, 2000. Fay, Robert. “Afrocentrism.” In Appiah, and Gates, Africana, op. cit., 45. Febvre, Lucien. Lettres à Henri Berr. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Febvre, Lucien. “Honneur et Patrie”. Paris: Pocket, 2001 (first edition, 1996). Febvre, Lucien. Pour une histoire à part entière, Paris, SEVPEN, 1962. Feldestein, Ariel L. Ben-Gurion, Zionism and American Jewry, 1948-1963. London-New York: Routledge, 2006. Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Ferro, Marc. “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary.” Slavic Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (September 1971): 483-512. Ficquet, Eloi, and Lorraine Gallimardet. “‘On ne peut nier longtemps l’art nègre’: enjeux du colloque et de l’exposition du Premier Festival mondial des arts nègres de Dakar en 1966.” Gradhiva, no. 10 (2009): 135-155. Field, James A. “Transnationalism and the New Tribe.” International Organization, vol. 25, no. 3 (1971): 353-372. Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Touchstone, 2002 (first American edition 2001). Fisher, Miles Mark. “The Search for a Homeland.” In Black Brotherhood: Afro-Americans and Africa, edited by Okon Edet Uya, 3-40. Lexington: Heath, 1970. Fitzgerald, David. “Rethinking Emigrant Citizenship.” New York University Law Review, vol. 81, no. 11 (April 2006): 90-116. Flutter, Chloë, and Michael Fullilove. Diaspora: The World Wide Web of Australians. Double Bay: Longueville Media, 2004. Földes, Béla. “The Criminal.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 69, no. 3 (September 1906): 558-576. Ford, Nick Aaron. Black Studies: Threat or Challenge? Port Washington-London: Kennikat Press, 1973. Fornet, Ambrosio. “The Cuban Literary Diaspora and Its Contexts: A Glossary.” Boundary 2, vol. 29, no. 3 (2002): 91-103. Fortune, Timothy Thomas. “The Negro’s Place in American Life at the Present Day.” In The Negro Problem, 211-234. New York: James Pott and Company, 1903.

Bibliography

529

Fossaert, Robert. “Devenir et avenir des diasporas.” Hérodote, no. 53 (April-June 1989): 158-168. Foster, Herbert J. “The Ethnicity of the Ancient Egyptians.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (December 1974): 175-191. Foucault, Michel. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (first French edition 2001). Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002 (first French edition 1966). Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits. vol. i. Paris: Gallimard, 2001 (first edition 1994), 2 vol. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. i: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 (first French edition 1976). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. ii, The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books (first French edition 1984). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995 (first French edition 1975). Foucault, Michel. “Orders of Discourse.” Social Science Information, vol. 10, no. 2 (1971): 7-30, (first published in French in 1970) Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” (1967) In Transforming the Hermeneutical Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, edited by Gayle L. Ormiston, and Alan D. Schrift, 59-67. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces” (1967). Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27. Foucault, Michel. “Distance, Aspect, Origin.” (1963). In The Tel Quel Reader, edited by Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack, 97-108. New York: Routledge, 1998. Francke, Kuno. Personality in German Literature before Luther. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916. Francke, Kuno. “Mediaeval German Mysticism.” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1912): 110-120. Frank, Gelya. “Melville J. Herskovits and the African and Jewish Diasporas: Race, Culture and Modern Anthropology.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 8, no. 2 (2001): 173-209. Frank, Gelya. “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, vol. 99, no. 4 (1997): 731-745. Frankel, Jonathan. “La ‘Diaspora’ et la fragmentation de la pensée politique juive à l’époque moderne.” Raisons politiques, no. 7 (2002): 79-102. Fraser, C. Gerald. “Scholar Activism Urged on Blacks.” The New York Times, 12 April 1971. Frazier, Edward Franklin. The Negro in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Fredrickson, George M. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

530

Bibliography

Freedman, Maurice. Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. London: Athlone Press, 1966. Freedman, Maurice. “Sociology in and of China.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 1962): 106-116. Freedman, Maurice. “Immigrants and Associations: Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Singapore.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 3, no. 1 (October 1960): 25-48. Freedman, Maurice. “Jews, Chinese, and Some Others.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1959): p. 61-70. Freedman, Maurice, ed., A Minority in Britain: Social Studies of the Anglo-Jewish Community. London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co, 1955. Fresco, Nadine. La mort des Juifs. Paris, Seuil, 2008. Frey, Sylvia, and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Frick, Robert. “Not Verheissung und Aufgabe der Diaspora nach dem biblischen Zeugnis. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Frage der eschatologischen Bestimmtheit der Kirche.” Monatsschrift für Pastoraltheologie, no. 32 (1936): 261-272. Friedmann, Daniel. “Qui étaient les Falachas?” Pardès, no. 44 (2008): 97-105. Friedmann, Daniel, with Ulysses Santamaria. Les enfants de la Reine de Saba: les juifs d’Ethiopie, histoire, exode, integration. Paris: Métailié, 1994. Frund, Arlette. Ecritures d’esclaves: Phillis Wheatley & Olaudah Equiano figures pionnières de la diaspora africaine américaine. Paris: Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2007. Fustel de Coulanges, Numa. The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (first French edition 1864). Fustel de Coulanges, Numa. Questions historiques. Paris: Hachette, 1893. Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Gabaccia, Donna R. “Was There an Italian Diaspora?” In Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity (Proceedings from a two-day symposium held November 16-17, 2002 at Dickinson College), 17-30. The Clarke Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Contemporary Issues, novembre 2003. Gabaccia, Donna R., Italy’s Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press, 2000. Gafni, Isaiah M. Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Gaillard, Jacques, and Anne-Marie Gaillard. “Fuite des cerveaux, retours et diasporas.” Futuribles, no. 228 (February 1998): 25-49. Gaillard, Jacques, and Jean-Baptiste Meyer. “Le brain drain revisité: de l’exode au réseau.” In Coopérations scientifiques internationales, edited by Jacques Gaillard, 331-347. Paris: Orstom, 1996.

Bibliography

531

Gaillard, Jacques, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, and Bernard Schlemmer. “Nouvelle approche des migrations scientifiques internationals.” Chroniques du Sud, no. 15 (1995): 59-72. Gamlen, Alan. “The Emigration State and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination.” Political Geography, no. 27 (2008): 840-856. Gamlen, Alan. “Diaspora Engagement Policies: What are they, and what kinds of states use them?” COMPAS Working Paper, Oxford, 2006, 31 p. Garliet, René. Les Maîtres de la brousse. Kinshasa: Editions La grue couronnée, 1976. Garnet, Henry Higland. The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race: A Discourse Delivered at the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, NY, Feb. 14 1848. Troy: Steam Press of J.C. Kneeland and Co, 1848. Garriaud-Maylam, Joëlle. “Un pays pionnier: la représentation politique des expatriés en France.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 105-127. Garriaud-Maylam, Joëlle. Qu’est-ce que l’Assemblée des Français de l’étranger? Paris: L’Archipel, 2008. Garriaud-Maylam, Joëlle. Rapport au Conseil de l’Europe sur les liens entre les Européens vivant à l’étranger et leur État d’origine, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1997, 26 p. Gary-Tounkara, Daouda. “Encadrement et contrôle des migrants par le régime militaire au Mali, 1968-1991.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 147-162. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-63.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 568 (March 2000): 203-219. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation and African-American Culture, 1892-1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Gauvin, Lise. “L’imaginaire des langues: entretien avec Édouard Glissant.” Études françaises, vol. 28, no. 2-3 (1992): 11-22. Geanakoplos, Deno John. Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaelogan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman Chuches. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Geanakoplos, Deno John. Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Geiss, Emmanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974 (first German edition 1968). Gellner, Ernest. “Nationalism.” Theory and Society, vol. 10, no. 6 (November 1981): 753-776. Gellner, Ernest. Saints of the Atlas. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. George, Pierre. Géopolitique des minorités. Paris, PUF, 1984. George, Pierre, ed., Dictionnaire de la géographie. Paris: PUF, 1984 (3rd edition).

532

Bibliography

George, Pierre. Les migrations internationales. Paris: PUF, 1976. George, Pierre. Dictionnaire de la géographie. Paris: PUF, 1970. George, Pierre. Géographie de la population. Paris: PUF, 1965. George, Pierre. Introduction à l’étude géographique de la population du monde. Paris: PUF, 1951. Gershenhorn, Jerry. Melville Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Gesenius, Heinz Friedrich Wilhelm. Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament (1812) Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Giddens, Anthony. Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985. Gilbert, Pierre, ed., Dictionnaire des mots contemporains. Paris: Le Robert, 1980. Gilley, Sheridan. “The Garibaldi Riots of 1862.” The Historical Journal, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 1973): 697-732. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Gilroy, Paul. “Diaspora.” Paragraph, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 1994): 207-212. Gilroy, Paul. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, Cultural Studies, op. cit., 187-198. Gilroy, Paul. “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At…: The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification.” Third Text, no. 13 (Winter 1991): 3-16. Gilroy, Paul. “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 111-136. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Gilroy, Paul. Racism, Class, and the Contemporary Cultural Politics of “Race” and “Nation”, PhD Dissertation, Contemporary Centre of Cultural Studies, Birmingham, 1986. Girodet, Jean. Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Bordas, 1976, 2 vol. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Bibliography

533

Glevarec, Hervé, Eric Macé, and Eric Maigret, eds., Cultural Studies. Anthologie. Paris: Armand Colin, 2008. Glick, Leonard B. “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation.” American Anthropologist, vol. 84, no. 3 (1982): 545-565. Glick-Schiller, Nina. “Transborder Citizenship: An Outcome of Legal Pluralism within Transnational Social Fields.” In Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, edited by Franz von Benda-Beckmann; Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Anne Griffits, 27-49. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Glick-Schiller, Nina, and Georges Fouron. “Transnational Lives and National Identities: the Identity Politics of Haitian Immigrants.” In Transnationalism from Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith, and Luis Guarnizo, 130-161. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Glick-Schiller, Nina, and Georges Fouron. “‘Everywhere we go, We are in danger”: Ti Manno and the Emergence of a Haitian Transnational Identity.” American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 2 (May 1990): 329-347. Glick-Schiller, Nina, and Peggy Levitt. “Haven’t We Heard This Somewhere Before? A Substantive View of Transnational Migration Studies by Way of A Reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald.” Center for Migration and Development, Princeton University, January 2006, available on the CMD website: www.cmd.princeton.edu/papers/wp0601.pdf. Gliozzi, Giuliano. Adam et le Nouveau Monde. La naissance de l’anthropologie comme idéologie coloniale : des généalogies bibliques aux théories raciales (1500-1700). Paris: Théétète, 2000. Glissant, Edouard. Philosophie de la Relation. Paris; Gallimard, 2009. Glissant, Edouard. Mémoire des esclavages. La fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. Paris: Gallimard – La Documentation française, 2007. Glissant, Edouard. Esthétique: une nouvelle région du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Glissant, Edouard. La Cohée du lamentin (Poétique V). Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Glissant, Edouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 2002 (first edition 1981). Glissant, Edouard. Faulkner, Mississippi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 (first French edition 1996). Glissant, Edouard. Traité du Tout-Monde (Poétique IV). Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 (first French edition 1990). Glissant, Edouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989 (first French edition 1981). Glissant, Edouard. L’intention poétique. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Glissant, Edouard. Les Indes. Paris: Seuil, 1965.

534

Bibliography

Glissant, Edouard. “Culture et colonisation: l’équilibre antillais.” Esprit, (April 1962): 588-595. Glissant, Edouard. Soleil de la conscience. (Poétique I). Paris: Seuil, 1956. Globalisation and Development: A Diaspora Dimension. Contribution of the African Foundation for Development to the British government Globalisation and Development White Paper, May 2000, 21 p. Glover, Terrot Reaveley. The World of the New Testament. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Gold, Roberta S. “The Black Jews of Harlem: Representation, Identity, and Race, 1920-1939.” American Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2 (June 2003): 179-225. Gold, Steven J. The Israeli Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002. Goldenberg, David. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Goldring, Maurice, and Piaras Mac Einri. “La diaspora irlandaise.” Hérodote, no. 53 (April-June 1989): 169-183. Goldschmidt, Henry. “Jews and Others in Brooklyn and its Diaspora: Constructing an Unlikely Homeland in a Diasporic World.” In Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity, op. cit., 43-54. Gomez, Michael. “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (November 2004): 175-194. Gopal, Priyamvada. “Reading Subaltern History.” In Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, 139-161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gordon, Edmund T., and Mark Anderson. “The African Diaspora: Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no. 445 (Summer 1999): 282-296. Gordon, Lewis R., and Jane Anna Gordon, eds., A Companion to African-American Studies. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Gottmann, Jean. “La généralisation des diasporas et ses conséquences.” In Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, op. cit., 21-28. Goulbourne, Harry, and John Solomos. “The Caribbean Diaspora: Some Introductory Remarks.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 27, no. 4 (July 2004): 533–543. Gouraige, Ghislain. La Diaspora d’Haïti et l’Afrique. Ottawa: Editions Naaman, 1974. Gourgouris, Stathis. “The Concept of Diaspora in the Contemporary World.” In Baghdiantz-McCabe, Harlaftis, and Pepelasis Minoglou, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, op. cit., 383-390. Gowan, Donald E. “The Beginnings of Exile-Theology and the Root ‘glh’.” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 87, no. 2 (1975): 204-207. Graetz, Heinrich. Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig: Leiner, 1853-1876, 11 vol.

Bibliography

535

Grant, Colin. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gray, Breda. “The Irish Diaspora: Globalised Belonging(s).” Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no. 2 (2002): 123-144. Green, Nancy L. “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept.” American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 307-328. Green, Nancy L. “The Politics of Exit: Reversing the Immigration Paradigm.” The Journal of Modern History, no. 77 (2005): 263-289. Green, Nancy L. “Juifs et Noirs aux États-Unis. La rupture d’une ‘alliance naturelle’”, Annales E.S.C., 42(2), mars-avril 1987, p. 445-464. Green, Nancy L., and François Weil, eds., Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007 (first French edition 2006). Grégoire, Henri (abbé). Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs. Metz: Claude Lamort, 1789. Greilsammer, Ilan. La Nouvelle histoire d’Israël: essai sur une identité nationale. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Gross, Jane. “In Throes of a Diaspora, Two Families Bind.” The New York Times, “National Desk”, 6 September 2005. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. New York-London: Routledge, 1992. Gruen, Erich S. Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Guedj, Pauline. “What’s my original name ?: changement de nom, trasnationalisation et revendications identitaires dans le nationalisme noir états-unien.” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2010, available online: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/59182. Guedj, Pauline. “Afrocentrismes américains: histoire, nationalisme noir et pratiques sociales.” Civilisations, vol. lviii, no. 1 (2009): 9-20. Guedj, Pauline. Le chemin du Sankofa: religion et identité “akan” aux États-Unis. Dissertation thesis in ethnology, Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre, 2006, 2 vol. Guerassimoff, Carine. “Limites floues, frontières vives: la Chine et les ‘Chinois d’outremer’.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 61-78. Guerassimoff, Carine. L’État chinois et les communautés chinoises d’outre-mer. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Guérin, Daniel. “Un futur pour les Antilles?” (Part 1) Les Temps Modernes, vol. 11, no. 121 (January 1956): 961-1008 Gueye, Abdoulaye. “De la diaspora noire: enseignements du contexte français.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 22, no. 1 (2006): 11-33. Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

536

Bibliography

Guilhaumou, Jacques. “L’analyse de discours du côté de l’histoire. Une démarche interprétative.” Langage et société, no. 121-122 (September-October 2007): 177-187. Guilhaumou, Jacques. Discours et événement: l’histoire langagière des concepts. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2006. Guilhaumou, Jacques. Sieyès et l’ordre de la langue: l’invention de la politique moderne. Paris: Kimé, 2002. Guilmoto, Christophe, Yves Charbit, et Madhavan Palat. “Le cycle migratoire tamoul, 1830-1950.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 1 (1991): 123-150. Gutiérrez, Carlos Gonzalez. “Introducción: de estados y diasporas.” In Relaciones Estado-Diáspora, vol. i: Aproximaciones desde cuatro continentes, edited by Carlos Gonzalez Gutiérrez, 11-21. Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrua, 2006. Gwimmer, W. “Deutschland und die innere Mission.” In Germania: Die Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der deutschen Nation, vol. i. Leipzig: Avenarius & Mendelssohn, 1851: 415-432. Ha-Am, Ahad. “The Negation of Diaspora.” (1909) In The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, edited by Arthur Hertzberg, 270-277. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1997 (first edition 1959). Ha-Am, Ahad. “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem.” (1897), In Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, edited by Hans Kohn, 66-89. New York: Schocken Books, 1962. Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity – an incomplete project.” (1981) In Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 3-15. London: Pluto Press, 1985. Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Philo of Alexandria: A Thinker in the Jewish Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2012 (first French edition 2003). Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Jerusalem against Rome. Leuven: Peeters, 2006 (first French edition 1990). Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. “Qui utilisait la LXX dans le monde juif?” In Dogniez, and Harl, Le Pentateuque, op. cit., 582-593. Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Histoire de la langue hébraïque: des origines à l’époque de la Mishna. Paris-Leuven: Peeters, 1995. Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Flavius Josephus: Eyewitness to Rome’s First-Century Conquest of Judaea. New York: Macmillan, 1993 (first French edition 1989). Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. L’hébreu: 3 000 ans d’histoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992. Haines, Joseph Harry. Chinese of the Diaspora. London: Edinburgh House Press for the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission & Evangelism, 1965. Hall, Raymond L. Black Separatism in the United States. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1978. Hall, Stuart. “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad.” Small Axe, no. 6 (September 1999): 1-18

Bibliography

537

Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall, and Paul Du Gay, 1-17; London: Sage, 1996. Hall, Stuart. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual. An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen.” In Chen, Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues, op. cit., 485-503. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theroretical Legacies.” In Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, Cultural Studies, op. cit., 277-294. Hall, Stuart. “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” (1992) In Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues, op. cit., 468-478. Hall, Stuart. “The Meaning of New Times.” In New Times, edited by Stuart Hall, and Jacques Martin, 16-133. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Black Film, British Cinema, edited by Kobena Mercer, 27-31. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.” In Identity: The Real Me, 44-46. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Framework, no. 36 (1989): 68-81 Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Hall, Stuart, and Paddy Whannel. The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson Educational, 1964. Hamilton, Ruth Simms, ed., Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing: MSU Press, 2006-2007, 2 vol. Handlin, Oscar, Milton Himmelfarb, and Charles E. Shulman. “Ben Gurion Against the Diaspora. Three Comments.” Commentary, vol. 31, no. 3 (1961): 193-202. Hansen, Randall. “Le droit de l’immigration et de la nationalité au Royaume-Uni: des sujets aux citoyens.” In Nationalité et citoyenneté en Europe, edited by Patrick Weil, and Randall Hansen, 71-93. Paris: La Découverte, 1999. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Harding, Vincent. “Toward the Black University.” Ebony, vol. 25, no. 10 (August 1970): 156-159. Harding, Vincent. “New Creation of Familiar Death?” Negro Digest, vol. 18, no. 5 (March 1969): 9-14. Harding, Vincent. “Some International Implications of the Black University.” Negro Digest, vol. 17, no. 5 (March 1968): 34-38. Harl, Marguerite. “Le rôle du grec dans la diffusion de la Bible.” In Dogniez, and Harl, Le Pentateuque, op. cit., 531-543. Harl, Marguerite. “La Bible d’Alexandrie dans les débats actuels sur la Septante.” In La double transmission du texte biblique: études d’histoire du texte offertes en hommage à Adrian Schenker, edited by Yohanan Goldman, and Christoph Uehlinger, 7-24. Fribourg: Editions de l’Univ. de Fribourg, 2001.

538

Bibliography

Harl, Marguerite. “‘Et il rassemblera les ‘dispersions’ d’Israël’: une note sur le pluriel de διασπορά dans le psaume 146(147), 2b.” Cahiers de Biblia Patristica, no. 4 (1993), 281-290. Harris, Joseph E. “Expanding the Scope of African Diaspora Studies: The Middle East and India, A Research Agenda.” Radical History Review, no. 87 (Fall 2003): 157-168. Harris, Joseph E. “African Diaspora Studies: Some International Dimensions.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 24, no. 2 (1996): 6-8. Harris, Joseph E., ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington: Howard University Press, 1993 (first edition 1982). Harris, Joseph E. The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Harris, Joseph E. “Introduction to the African Diaspora.” In Emerging Themes of African History, edited by Terence O. Ranger, 147-151. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968. Harris, Joseph E. “The International Congress on African History, 1965.” African Forum, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1966): 80-84. Harris, Marvin, and Charles Wagley. Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Harris, Robert L. Jr. “The Intellectual and Institutional Development of Africana Studies.” In Bobo, Hudley, and Michel, The Black Studies Reader, op. cit., 15-20. Hart, John Fraser. “The Changing Distribution of the American Negro.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 50, no. 3 (September 1960): 242-266. Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 (first French edition 2003). Hastings, Deborah. “Katrina’s Diaspora, Thrown to the Winds and Longing for Home.” Associated Press, 31 August 2005. Hauberg, Clifford A. Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974. Haüy, René-Just. Traité de minéralogie, vol. iv. Paris: Louis, 1801. Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben. La science du judaïsme. Paris: PUF, 1995. Hawke, G.R. “D. C. Coleman on the Counterfactual History of the New Draperies.” The Economic History Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (May 1971): 258-259. Hayes, Floyd W. iii. “Before Columbus.” Black World, vol. 22, no. 9 (July 1973): 4-22. Hebdige, Dick. “Reggae, Rastas & Rudies.” In Hall, and Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals, op. cit., 135-155. Helly, Denise. “Diaspora: un enjeu politique, un symbole, un concept?” Espace populations sociétés, no. 1 (2006): 17-31. Helweg, Arthur W. “The Indian Diaspora: Influence on International Relations.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 103-129.

Bibliography

539

Hendricks, Glenn. The Dominican Diaspora: From the Dominican Republic to New York City, Villagers in Transition. New York-London: Teachers College Press for the Center for Education in Latin America, 1974. Henry, James. Sketches of Moravian Life and Character, Comprising a General View of the History, Life, Character, and Religious and Educational Institutions of the Unitas Fratrum. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1859. Henry-Valmore, Simonne. “Vol au-dessus d’une diaspora.” Autrement, no. 49 (April 1983): 18-28. Hernandez-Alvarez, José. “The Movement and Settlement of Puerto Rican Migrants within the United States, 1950-1960.” International Migration Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 40-52. Hersak, Emil, and Milan Mesic. “L’espace migratoire de Yougoslavie: historique des migrations yougoslaves.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990): 27-64. Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1941. Herskovits, Melville J. “The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem.” American Anthropologist, vol. 32, no. 1 (January-March 1930): 145-155. Herskovits, Melville J. The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928. Hertzberg, Arthur, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1997 (first edition 1959). Herzl, Theodor. A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question (1896). New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1917 (3rd edition). Herzog, Johann Jakob, ed., The Protestant Theological and Ecclesiastical Encyclopedia, vol. ii. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1860. Hess, Moses. Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism (1862). New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1918. Hettlage, Robert. “Diaspora: Umrisse einer soziologischen Theorie.” Österreichische Zeitsschrift für Soziologie, vol. 16, no. 3 (1991): 4-24. Hill, Freddye. “The Nature and Context of Black Nationalism at Northwestern in 1971.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (March 1975): 320-336. Hill, Mozell C. “The All-Negro Communities of Oklahoma: The Natural History of a Social Movement: Part i.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 31, no. 3 (July 1946): 254-268. Hill, Robert A. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983-1995, 9 vol. Hill, Robert A. “Black Zionism: Marcus Garvey and the Jewish Question.” In African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, edited by Vincent P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil (Genna Rae), 40-53. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

540

Bibliography

Hill, Robert A. “Before Garvey: Chief Alfred Sam and the African Movement, 1912-1916.” In Pan-African Biography, edited by Robert A. Hill, 57-77. Los Angeles: African Studies Center, 1987. Hill, Robert A. “Jews and the Enigma of the Pan-African Congress of 1919.” In Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, op. cit., 55-82. Hill, Robert A., and Barbara Bair. “Introduction.” In Marcus Garvey. Life and Lessons. A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, edited by Robert A. Hill, and Barbara Bair, xv-lxii. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Hiller, Harry H., and Tara M. Franz. “New Ties, Old Ties and Lost Ties: The Use of The Internet in Diaspora.” New Media and Society, vol. 6, no. 6 (2004): 731-752. Hine, Darlene Clark. “Frontiers in Black Diaspora Studies and Comparative Black History: Enhanced Knowledge of our Complex Past.” The Negro Educational Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (July 2001): 101-108. Hite, Roger W. “Voice of a Fugitive: Henry Bibb and Ante-Bellum Black Separatism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1974): 269-284. Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive (1642). In The Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. ii, edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or, The matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651. Hockett, Charles F., and Robert Ascher. “The Human Revolution.” Current Anthropology, vol. 5, no. 3 (June 1964): 135-168. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Les mots ne sont pas de ce monde: lettres à un officier de marine. Paris: Rivages Poche, 2005. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’. Christianity Unveiled, Being, an Examination of the Principles and Effects of the Christian Religion. New York: Columbian Press, 1795 (first edition in French 1756). Hornsby, Alton Jr., ed., A Companion to African-American History. Malden; Blackwell, 2005. Horton, James “Africanus” Beale. West African Countries and Peoples (1868). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969. Hovanessian, Martine. “La notion de diaspora: usages et champ sémantique.” Journal des anthropologues, no. 72-73 (1998): 11-29. Howe, Stephen. Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso, 1998. Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. “Afterword: Brief Meditation on Diaspora Studies.” Modern Drama, vol. 48, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 428-439.

Bibliography

541

Huang, Yunte. “Writing Against the Chinese Diaspora.” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 145-146. Huet, Sylvestre. “Les utopies technologiques se sont effondrées.” Libération, 18 December 2001. Huggins, Nathan J., Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox, eds., Key Issues in the AfroAmerican Experience. New York: Harcourt Brave Jovanovitch, 1971, 2 vol. Hughes, Everett C. “The Industrial Revolution and the Catholic Movement in Germany.” Social Forces, vol. 14, no. 2 (December 1935): 286-292. Hugo, Graeme. “An Australian Diaspora?” International Migration, vol. 44, no. 1 (2006): 105-133. Hugo, Graeme. A New Paradigm of International Migration: Implications for Migration Policy and Planning in Australia. Commonwealth of Australia: Department of Parliamentary Services, Research Paper no. 10 2003–04 (March 2004), 83 p. Hugo, Graeme, Dianne Rudd, and Kevin Harris. Australia’s Diaspora: Its Size, Nature and Policy Implications. CEDA Information Paper no. 80 (December 2003), 88 p. Hume, David. “Of National Characters.” (1748) In David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 119-129. London: Printed for A. Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1758. Hunter, John M. “Geophagy in Africa and in the United States: A Culture-Nutrition Hypothesis.” The Geographical Review, vol. 63, no. 2 (April 1973): 170-195 Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Hutton, James E. A History of Moravian Missions. London: Moravian Publication Office, 1922. Hutton, James E. A History of the Moravian Church. London: Moravian Publication Office, 1902. Hyung-Chan, Kim, ed., The Korean Diaspora: Historical and Sociological Studies of Korean Immigration and Assimilation in North America. Santa Barbara-Oxford: Clio Press, 1977. Ifrah, Lionel. Sion et Albion: Juifs et puritains attendent le Messie. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006. Ikonomu, Theodor. “Editorial.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 16, no. 3 (1991): 3. Ikonomu, Theodor. “Europas griechische Diaspora.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 16, no. 3 (1991): 94-113. Imbs, Paul, ed., Le Trésor de la langue française. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1979. Ingham, John N., and Lynne B. Feldman, eds., African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993. “Institute of the Black World: Prospectus.” Negro Digest, vol. 19, no. 5 (March 1970): 20-24.

542

Bibliography

International Organization for Migration. Diaspora Dialogues. Geneva: IOM, 2007, 60 p. International Organization for Migration. Diásporas como Agentes para el Desarrollo en América Latina y el Caribe. Geneva: IOM, 2007, 40 p. International Organization for Migration. Engaging Diasporas as Development Partners, for Home and Destination Countries. Workshop discussion paper, Workshop on Migration and Development: Mainstreaming Migration into Development Policy Agendas (2-3 February 2005). Geneva: IOM, 12 p. International Organization for Migration. Engaging Diasporas for Development: IOM Policy-Oriented Research. Geneva: IOM, s.d., 13 p. Ionescu, Dina. Engaging Diasporas as Development Partners for Home and Destination Countries: Challenges for Policymakers. Geneva: IOM, 2006, 85 p. Iorga, Nicolae. Brève histoire de la petite Arménie: l’Arménie cilicienne. Paris: Gamber, 1930. Irele, Abiola Francis. Négritude et condition africaine. Paris: Karthala-Sephis, 2008. Irele, Abiola Francis. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Irele, Abiola Francis. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Irele, Abiola Francis. Les origines de la Négritude à la Martinique: Sociologie de l’œuvre poétique d’Aimé Césaire. Thesis. Paris, 1966. Irele, Abiola Francis. “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism.” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (October 1965): 321-348. Irenaeus. Five Books of S. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons: Against Heresies, edited by John Keble, Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1872. Irwin, Graham W., ed., Africans Abroad: A Documentary History of the Black Diaspora in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean During the Age of Slavery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Jackson, John Archer. “The Irish in Britain.” Sociological Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (1962): 5-16. Jackson, John L. Jr. “All Yah’s Children: Emigrationism, Afrocentrism, and the Place of Israel in Africa.” Civilisations, vol. lviii, no. 1 (2009): 93-112. Jacotot, Pierre. Eléments de physique expérimentale, de chimie et de minéralogie: suivis d’un abrégé d’astronomie à l’usage des lycées. Paris: Crapart, 1804. Jaffrelot, Christophe, and Ingrid Therwath. “Le Sangh Parivar et la diaspora hindoue en Occident: Royaume-Uni, États-Unis et Canada.” Questions de recherche, no. 22 (October 2007), 70 p. Jászi, Oskar. The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929.

Bibliography

543

Jean-Pierre, Jean. “The Tenth Department.” In Haïti: Dangerous Crossroads, edited by Deirdre McFadyen, Pierre Laramée, Mark Fried, and Fred Rosen, 195-204. Boston: South End Press, 1995. Johnson, Guy B. “Negro Racial Movements and Leadership in the United States.” The American Journal of Sociology, 43(1), juillet 1937, p. 57-71. Johnson, Marion. “Review of Caravans of Kola.” African Economic History, no. 11 (1982): 202-205. Johnson, Sylvester A. The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004. Johnston, Harry Hamilton. The Negro in the New World. (1910) New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969. Johnston, Robert H. “The Great Patriotic War and the Russian Exiles in France.” Russian Review, vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1976): 303-321. Jones, LeRoi. “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music).” In LeRoi Jones, Black Music. New York: W. Morrow, 1967, 180-211. Jones-Correa, Michael. “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its Consequences for the United States.” International Migration Review, vol. 35, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 997-1029. Joutard, Philippe. “La diaspora des Huguenots.” Le Monde Dimanche, 28 October 1979. Joyaux, George J. “On African Literature.” African Studies Review, vol. 15, no. 2 (September 1972): 307-318. Le Juif errant: un témoin du temps. Paris: Adam Biro and Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, 2001. Kahn, Robert M. “The Political Ideology of Martin Delany.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (June 1984): 415-440. Kaké, Ibrahima Baba. Combats pour l’histoire africaine. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1982. Kaké, Ibrahima Baba. Les Noirs de la diaspora. Libreville: Editions Lion, 1978. Kaké, Ibrahima Baba. Mémoire de l’Afrique: la diaspora noire. Paris: Casterman, 1976. Kant, Immanuel. Project for a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. London: Printed by S. Couchman for Vernor and Hood, 1796 (first German edition 1795). Kant, Immanuel. Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique. (1798) Paris: Vrin, 2008. Kant, Immanuel. “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” (1786) In Emmanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 163-175. Kaplan, David. “Reversing the Brain Drain: the Case for Utilising South Africa’s Unique Intellectual Diaspora.” Science, Technology and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (July-December 1997): 387-406. Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2002 (first edition 1982). Karim, Karim H., ed., The Media of Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2003

544

Bibliography

Karni, Michael, ed., Finnish Diaspora. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981. Karnoouh, Lorraine. “‘Gusano’, ‘balsero’, ‘marielito’, ‘cubanoamericano’: réflexions sur la question migratoire cubaine.” In Dynamiques migratoires de la Caraïbe, edited by André Calmont, and Cédric Audebert, 63-76. Paris: Karthala, 2007. Kashiwazaki, Chikako. “Jus Sanguinis in Japan: The Origin of Citizenship in a Comparative Perspective.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 39, no. 3 (1998): 278-300. Kastoryano, Riva. “Vers un nationalisme transnational: redéfinir la nation, le nationalisme et le territoire.” Revue française de science politique, vol. 56, no. 4 (August 2006): 533-553. Kastoryano, Riva. “L’intégration politique par l’extérieur: la communauté juive de Turquie.” Revue française de science politique, vol. 42, no. 5 (1992): 786-801. Kattsoff, Louis O. “The Definition of a Situation: The Jew in America.” Social Forces, vol. 27, no. 4 (May 1949): 461-464. Katz, Jacob. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000 (first edition in Hebrew 1958). Katz, Steven, ed., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. iv: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kedourie, Elie. “Who Is a Jew.” Commentary, vol. 85, no. 6 (June 1988): 25-30. Kelley, Robin D.G. “How the West Was One: On the Uses and Limitations of Diaspora.” The Black Scholar, vol. 30, no. 3-4 (2000): 31-35. Kennedy, Randall. “Finding a Proper Name to Call Black Americans.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 46 (Winter 2004-2005): 72-83. Kenny, L.M. “The United Nations and the Palestine Question: Efforts at Peacemaking.” International Journal, vol. 28, no. 4 (1973): 766-783. Ketkar, Suhas L., and Dilip Ratha. Development Finance via Diaspora Bonds: Track Record and Potential. World Bank: Policy Research Working Paper no. 4311, August 2007, 21 p. Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Peggy Levitt. “Constructing Transnational Studies.” In The Transnational Studies Reader, edited by Sanjeev Khagram, and Peggy Levitt, 1-18. New York: Routledge, 2008. Khalidi, Walid. “A Palestinian Perspective on the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 35-48. Kilson, Martin. “From the Birth to a Mature Afro-American Studies at Harvard, 1969-2002.” In Gordon, and Gordon, A Companion to African-American Studies, op. cit., 59-75.

Bibliography

545

Kilson, Martin. “Blacks and Neo-Ethnicity in American Political Life.” In Glazer, and Moynihan, Ethnicity, op. cit., 236-266. Kilson, Martin, and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. King, Kenneth. “James E.K. Aggrey: Collaborator, Nationalist, Pan-African.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 1969): 511-530. Kirby, E. Stuart. “The Anatomy of Hongkong.” Far Eastern Survey, vol. 18, no. 10 (May 1949): 114-116. Kirschke, Amy. “Du Bois, The Crisis, and Images of Africa and the Diaspora.” In Fabre, and Benesch, African Diasporas in the New and Old World, op. cit., 239-262. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Spaces of Dispersal.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994): 339-344. Kitchin, Donald K., John Lewis, and Karl Polanyi, eds., Christianity and the Social Revolution. New York: Scribner, 1936. Klehr, Harvey. The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010. Kokot, Waltraud, Khachig Tölölyan, and Carolin Alfonso, eds., Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research. London-New York: Routledge, 2004. Kolossov, Vladimir, Tamara Galkina, and Mikhaïl Kouibychev. “La géographie des diasporas et les communautés arménienne, juive, grecque de l’ex-URSS.” In Bruneau, Diasporas, op. cit., 132-150. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 (first German edition 1979). Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Koselleck, Reinhart. L’Expérience de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1997. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Social History and Conceptual History,” (1986) Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1989), 308-325. Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crises: The Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988 (first German edition 1959). Koser, Khalid, ed., New African Diasporas. London- New York: Routledge, 2003. Koser, Khalid. “New African Diasporas: An Introduction.” In Koser, New African Diasporas, op. cit., 1-16. Koser, Khalid. “Mobilizing New African Diasporas: An Eritrean Case Study.” In Koser, New African Diasporas, op. cit., 111-123. Krieg-Planque, Alice. La Notion de formule en analyse du discours. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2009. Krieg-Planque, Alice. “Purification ethnique”: une formule et son histoire. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2003.

546

Bibliography

Kriegel, Annie. Les Juifs et le monde moderne: essai sur les logiques d’émancipation. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Krings, Matthias. “Diaspora: historische Erfahrung oder wissenschaftliches Konzept? Zur Konjunktur eines Begriffs in den Sozialwissenschaften.” Paideuma, no. 49 (2003): 137-156. Krings, Matthias. Siedler am Tschadsee. Hausa-Migranten und die Aneignung lokaler Ressourcen in ländlichen Nigeria, PhD dissertation in philosophy and historical sciences, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, 2002. Kube-McDowell, Michael P. The Quiet Pools. New York: Ace Books, 1990. Kubijovyč, Volodymyr E., and Ernest J. Simmons. Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia. Toronto: Ukrainian National Association, 1963. Kulu, Hill. “Policy towards the Diaspora and Ethnic (Return) Migration: An Estonian Case.” GeoJournal, vol. 51, no. 3 (July 2000): 135-143. Kung, S.W. Chinese in American Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems and Contributions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Kuznetsov, Yevgeny. “Leveraging Diasporas of Talents: Toward a New Policy Agenda.” In Diaspora Networks and the International Migration of Skills: How Countries Can Draw on Their Talents Abroad, edited by Yevegeny Kuznetsov, 221-237. Washington: World Bank Institute, 2006. Lacoste, Yves. “Géopolitique des diasporas.” Hérodote, no. 53 (April 1989): 3-12. Lafleur, Jean-Michel. Le Transnationalisme politique et l’État. Thesis in political science, University of Liège and Sciences Po Paris, May 2008. Lafleur, Jean-Michel. Le Transnationalisme politique: pouvoir des communautés immigrées dans leurs pays d’accueil et pays d’origine. Louvain: Bruylant-Academia, 2005. Laguerre, Michel. Diaspora, Politics and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Lainé, Agnès. “Eve africaine? De l’origine des races au racisme de l’origine.” In FauvelleAymar, Chrétien, and Perrot, Afrocentrismes, op. cit., 103-123. Laitin, David D. “Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Nationality in the PostSoviet Diaspora.” European Journal of Sociology, vol. xxxvi (1995): 281-316. Lall, Marie-Carine. India’s Missed Opportunity: India’s Relationship With the NonResident Indians. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Lambert, Edwige. “Ex-île.” Autrement, no. 49 (April 1983): 173-180. Lampe, G.W.H. A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968 (first edition 1961). Landau, Jacob M. “Diaspora and Language.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 75-102. Landes, Ruth Schlossberg. “Negro Jews in Harlem.” Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 9, no. 2 (1967): 175-189.

Bibliography

547

Lange, Johann Peter. The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ: A Complete Critical Examination of the Origin, Contents, and Connection of the Gospels. vol. vi. New York: T. & T. Clark, 1864, Langley, Jabez Ayodele. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Lapeyronnie, Didier. L’Individu et les minorités: la France et la Grande-Bretagne face à leurs immigrés. Paris: PUF, 1993. Lapierre, Nicole. Causes communes: des Juifs et des Noirs. Paris: Stock, 2011 Lapierre, Nicole. “W.E.B. Du Bois, le ‘problème’ noir et la ‘question’ juive.” Revue des sciences sociales, no. 42 (2009): 104-110. Lapin, Hayim. “The Origins and Development of the Rabbinic Movement in the Land of Israel.” in Katz, The Cambridge History of Judaism, op. cit., 206-229. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. New York: Schocken Books, 2003 (first edition 1972). Larès, Micheline. “Arnold J. Toynbee et la religion de l’Ancien Testament.” Revue de l’histoire des religions, vol. 184, no. 2 (1973): 159-208. Larkin, Emmet. “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75.” The American Historical Review, vol. 77, no. 3 (June 1972): 625-652. Larousse du XXe siècle. Paris: Larousse, 1929, 6 vol. Latchford, Carol. “Diaspora?” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2004): 164-166. Latvian Diaspora Support Programme, 2004-2009” Riga: Latvian Cabinet of Ministers, 2004, 13 p. Laurens, Henry. La Question de Palestine. vol. i: 1799-1922 L’invention de la Terre sainte. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Lauretis, Teresa de. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Lazarus, Neil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Le Déaut, Roger. “The Targumim.” In Davies, and Finkelstein, The Cambridge History of Judaism, op. cit., 563-590. Le Déaut, Roger. “La Septante, un targum?” In Etudes sur le judaïsme hellénistique. Paris: Cerf, 1984: 147-195. Le Rider, Jacques. Nietzsche en France: de la fin du XIXème siècle au temps présent. Paris: PUF, 1999. Lee, Rose Hum. The Chinese in the United States of America. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960. Lee, Rose Hum. “The Chinese Abroad.” Phylon, vol. 17, no. 3 (3rd trimester 1956): 257-270. Lee, Rose Hum. The City: Urbanism and Urbanization in Major World Regions. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1955.

548

Bibliography

Lee, Rose Hum. “The Decline of Chinatowns in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 5 (March 1949): 422-432. Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: New Republic and Basic Books, 1996. Legum, Colin. Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide. London-Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1962. Legum, Colin, ed, Africa: A Handbook to the Continent. London: Anthony Blond, 1961. Legum, Colin. “The Roots of Pan-Africanism.” In Legum, Africa, op. cit., 452-462. Lehmann, Hartmunt, and Melvin Richter, The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, Washington D.C: German Historical Institute, 1996. Lemarchand, René. “Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa: Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1972): 68-90 Lengyel, Emil. “German Emigré Literature.” Books Abroad, vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1938): 5-8. Léonas, Alexis). L’Aube des traducteurs. De l’hébreu au grec: traducteurs et lecteurs de la Bible des Septante (IIIe siècle av. J.-C. – IVe siècle apr. J.-C.. Paris: Cerf, 2007. Léopold Sédar Senghor et la revue Présence Africaine. Paris: Présence africaine, 1996. Le Robert, dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Le Robert, 1985, 9 vol. Levitt, Peggy, and Rafael de la Dehesa. “Transnational Migration and the Redefinition of the State: Variations and Explanations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (July 2003): 587–611. Lewis, Earl. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 3 (1995): 765-787. Liauzu, Claude. Histoire des migrations en Méditerranée occidentale. Bruxelles: Complexe, 1996. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940 (first edition 1843). Lie, John. “Diasporic Nationalism.” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies, vol. 1, no. 3 (2001): 355-362, Liebenthal, Walter. “Chinese Buddhism During the 4th and 5th Centuries.” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 11, no. 1 (1955): 44-83. Liebman, Charles S. Pressure without Sanctions: the Influence of World Jewry on Israeli Policy. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977. Lindholm Schulz, Helena (with Julianne Hammer). The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. London: Routledge, 2003. Liss, Julia E. “Diasporic Identities: The Science and the Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1894-1919.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 2 (May 1998): 127-166.

Bibliography

549

Locke, Alain, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. London: Printed for C. and J. Rivington et al., 1824. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; with Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding (1690). vol. ii, London: Printed for Allen & West, 1795. Lohrentz, Kenneth P. “Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo, and the Seventh Day Baptists in Northern Nyasaland, 1910-12.” The Journal of African History, vol. 12, no. 3 (1971): 461-480. Long, Robert Hill. “Diaspora.” Hudson Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 602. López, Adalberto. “Literature for the Puerto Rican Diaspora.” Caribbean Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 5-11, and vol. 6, no. 4 (1973): 41-46. Lossouarn, Olivier Vincent. Les Bretons dans le monde. Paris: John Didier, 1969. Lovejoy, Paul E. Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700-1900. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980. Lovejoy, Paul E. “The Role of the Wangara in the Economic Transformation of the Central Sudan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” The Journal of African History, vol. 19, no. 2 (1978): 173-193. Lovejoy, Paul E. “The Kambarin Beriberi: The Formation of a Specialized Group of Hausa Kola Traders in the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of African History, vol. 14, no. 4 (1973): 633-651. Lovejoy, Paul E., and Stephen Baier. “The Desert-Side Economy of the Central Sudan.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 8, no. 4 (1975): 551-581. Lowell, B. Lindsay. Policy Responses to the International Mobility of Skilled Labour, International Migration Papers, no. 45, Geneva, International Labor Office, 2001, 43 p. Lowell, B. Lindsay, and Stefka G. Gerova. Diasporas and Economic Development: State of Knowledge, Presentation prepared for the World Bank, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University, September 2004, 34 p. Lubczyk, Hans. “Die Diaspora im alten Testament.” Lebendiges Zeugnis, 2-3-4 (October 1966): 5-17. Lubowa, Tshibambe. “The Congolese and the ‘diaspora’.” ANB-BIA Supplement, no. 387, 1st April 2000. Lubrano, Gina. “Choosing What Goes on Page One.” The San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 September 2005. Lurbe, Pierre. “Introduction,” In John Toland, Raisons de naturaliser les Juifs (1714), edited by Pierre Lurbe, Paris: PUF, 1998. Lust, Johan. “Exile and Diaspora. Gathering from Dispersion in Ezekiel.” In Lectures et relectures de la Bible. Festschrift P.-M. Bogaert, edited by Jean-Marie Auwers, and André Wénin, 99-122. Louvain: Presses de l’Université de Louvain, 1999.

550

Bibliography

Luther, Martin. Works of Martin Luther. vol. I. Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Company, 1915. Ly Tio Fane Pinéo, Huguette. La Diaspora chinoise dans l’Océan indien occidental. Aix en Provence: Greco-Océan indien, 1981. Lyman, Stanford. “The Chinese Diaspora in America, 1850-1943.” In The Life, Influence and the Role of the Chinese in the United States, 1776-1960: Proceedings of the National Conference Held at The University of San Francisco ( July 10-12, 1975). San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1976: 128-146. Lyman, Stanford. The Asian in the West. Reno: University of Nevada System, 1970. Lynch, Hollis R. “A Black Nineteenth-Century Response to Jews and Zionism: The Case of Edward Wilmot Blyden, 1832-1912.” In Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, op. cit., 42-54. Lynch, Hollis R., ed., Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden. London: Frank Cass, 1971. Lynch, Hollis R. “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World, Before 1862.” In Black Brotherhood: Afro-Americans and Africa, edited by Okon Edet Uya, 41-62. Lexington: Heath, 1970. Lynch, Hollis R. Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Lyon, Peter. “On Diasporas – the Jewish, the British and Some Others: A Note.” In The Diaspora of the British, 72-80. London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1982. Lyotard, Jean-François. “D’un trait d’union.” (1993) In Jean-François Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 2000, 135-152. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 (first French edition 1983). Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 (first French edition 1979). Lyotard, Jean-François. “Judicieux dans le différend.” In Jacques Derrida, Vincent Descombes, Garbis Kortian, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean-Jacques Nancy, La Faculté de juger. Paris: Minuit, 1985, 195-236. Ma Mung, Emmanuel. La Diaspora chinoise: géographie d’une migration. Paris: Ophrys, 2000. Ma Mung, Emmanuel. “Non-lieu et utopie: la diaspora chinoise et le territoire.” In Bruneau, Diasporas, op. cit., 163-173. Ma Mung, Emmanuel. “Dispositif économique et ressources spatiales: éléments d’une économie de diaspora.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 8, no. 3 (1992): 175-194. Macartney, Carlile Aylmer. Problems of the Danube Basin. Cambridge: The University Press, 1942. Macartney, Carlile Aylmer. National States and National Minorities. Londres: Oxford University Press, 1934.

Bibliography

551

Mafeje, Archie. “The Diaspora and Africanity.” Contribution to the First Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004. Magloire-Danton, Gérarde. “Anténor Firmin and Jean Price‐Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism.” Small Axe, no. 18 (September 2005): 150–170. Mahaffy, John Pentland. Greek Life and Thought from the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest. London: Macmillan, 1896. Mahroum, Sami, and Paul de Guchteneire. “Editorial.” International Journal on Multicultural Societies, vol. 8, no. 1 (2006): 1-3. Maier, Emanuel. “Torah as Movable Territory.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 65, no. 1 (March 1975): 18-23 Maine de Biran. Journal (1816) vol. i. Neufchâtel: Editions H. Gouhier, 1954. Malcolm X. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (edited by George Breitman). London: Secker & Warburg, 1966 (first American edition 1965). Malvezin, Laurent. “Diaspora, A Much Abused Word: Interview with Wang Gungwu.” Asian Affairs, no. 14 (Winter 2000-2001), available online at www.asian-affairs. com/Diasporas/wanggungwu.html. Mandelbaum, Michael, ed., The New European Diasporas: National Minorities and Conflict in Eastern Europe. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2000. Mandelbrot, Benoît. Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977 (first French edition 1975). Manning, Patrick. “Africa and the African Diaspora: New Directions of Study.” Journal of African History, vol. 44 (2003): 487-506. Marable, Manning. “Black Fundamentalism: Farrakhan and Conservative Black Nationalism.” Race & Class, vol. 39, no. 4 (1998): 1-22. Marcadé, Jacques. “L’émigration portugaise.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990): 133-145. Marcus, Jacob R. The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew. Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1934. Mardorossian, Carine. “From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy.” Small Axe, vol. 13, no. 30 (October 2009): 12-24. Marienstras, Richard. “On the Notion of Diaspora.” In Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation States, edited by Gérard Chaliand, 119-125. London: Pluto Press, 1989. Marienstras, Richard. “The Near and the Far: the Calvin Affair and the Status of Foreigners under James I of England.” In Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, 99-125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (first French edition 1981). Marienstras, Richard. Etre un peuple en diaspora. Paris: Maspero, 1975. Maritain, Jacques. Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’un nouveau chrétien. Paris: Aubier, 1939.

552

Bibliography

Markowitz, Fran. “Ending the Black Diaspora? Soul Citizenship, the Black Hebrews and the State of Israel.” In Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière, and Sheffer, Les Diasporas, op. cit., 311-320. Marks, Carole. Farewell – We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Marr, Wilhelm. Der Sieg des Judentums über das Germanenthum. Von nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet. Bern: Rudolph Costenoble, 1879. Martin, Ben L. “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83-107. Martin, Denis-Constant. “Au-delà de la post-colonie, le Tout-Monde?” In La situation postcoloniale, edited by Marie-Claude Smouts, 135-169. Paris, Presses de SciencesPo, 2007. Martin, Denis-Constant. “Le pain de maïs et le levain africain: la dialectique du mythe et de l’innovation dans les relations entre l’Afrique et les Amériques noires.” Politique africaine, no. 15 (October 1984): 4-23. Martin, Tony. “Black Studies, Wellesley College.” In Asante, and Mazama, Encyclopedia of Black Studies, op. cit., 160-165. Martin, Tony. “Pan-Africanism, 1441 to the 21st Century. Building on the Vision of Our Ancestors.” Paper presented to the First Meeting of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora, Dakar, 6-9 October 2004, 36 p. Martin, Tony. “Garvey and Scattered Africa.” In Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, op. cit., 441-447. Martin, William, and Michael West. “The Ascent, Triumph, and Disintegration of the Africanist Enterprise, USA.” In Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Meaning and Study of Africa, edited by William Martin, and Michael West, 85-122. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Martiniello, Marco. L’Ethnicité dans les sciences sociales contemporaines. Paris: PUF, 1995. Massenzio, Marcello. La passion selon le Juif errant. Paris: L’échoppe, 2006. Mathurin, Owen. Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origins of the Pan-African Movement. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976. Matsuoka, Atsuko, and John Sorenson. Ghosts and Shadows: Construction of Identity and Community in an African Diaspora. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Mattelart, Armand, and Erik Neveu. Introduction aux Cultural Studies. Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Mattelart, Armand, and Erik Neveu. “Cultural studies’ stories. La domestication d’une pensée sauvage?” Réseaux, vol. 14, no. 80 (1996): 11-58. Maupas, Stéphanie. “Osman M. F., pêcheur somalien devenu pirate ‘parce que la mer est vide’.” Le Monde, 20 May 2009. Mauro, Tullio de, ed. Grande Dizionario italiano dell’uso. vol. ii. Turin: UTET, 2000.

Bibliography

553

Mayer, Ruth. Diaspora: Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2005. Mazrui, Ali. “Africa and the Black Diaspora: The Future in Historical Perspective.” International Journal, vol. 30 (1974-1975): 569-586. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Diaspora in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. McKeown, Adam. “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 2 (May 1999): 306-337. McLaurin, Ronald de. The Political Role of Minority Group in the Middle East. New York: Praeger, 1979. McMartin, Sean. “Music for One Hand Only.” Phylon, vol. 30, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1969): 197-202. McMillan, Lewis K. “The Negro Forty-Ninth State in the Light of the Jewish National Home.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 9, no. 2 (April 1940): 144-153. Médam, Alain. “Diasporas.” In Métissages: de Arcimboldo à Zombi, edited by François Laplantine, and Alexis Nouss, 205-207. Paris: Pauvert, 2001. Médam, Alain. “Diaspora/Diasporas. Archétype et typologie.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 9, no. 1 (1993): 59-64. “Meeting of Experts on the Definition of the African Diaspora.” Addis-Ababa, 11-12 April avril 2005, “Meeting of Experts on the Definition of the African Diaspora,” Addis Ababa, 11-12 April 2005, text available on the website of the South African Ministry of Cooperation (dirco.gov.za). Meillet, Antoine. La méthode comparative en linguistique historique. Paris: Champion, 1925. Meillet, Antoine. “Comment les mots changent de sens.” L’Année sociologique, vol. 9 (1905-1906): 1-38. Mélèze Modrzejewski, Joseph. “How to be a Jew in Hellenistic Egypt?” In Diasporas in Antiquity, edited by Shaye J.D. Cohen, and Ernest S. Frerichs, 65-92. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993, p. 65-92. Mendoza, Martha. “Katrina Diaspora Is Unprecedented.” Associated Press, 10 September 2005. Mercer, Kobena. “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain.” In Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 53-66. Merton, Robert K., and Elinor Barber. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 (first Italian edition 2002). Métraux, Alfred. “Le culte vodou en Haïti.” Revue de Paris (August 1953): 119-129. Métraux, Alfred. “L’Afrique vivante en Haïti.” In Haïti: poètes noirs. Paris: Seuil, 1951: 13-21.

554

Bibliography

Métraux, Alfred, and Pierre Verger. Le Pied à l’étrier: correspondance 1946-1963. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1993. Meyer, Eric. “La diaspora indienne à Ceylan, XIXè-XXè siècles.” L’Histoire, no. 18 (1979): 6-14. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste. Human Resource Flows from and between Developing Countries: Implications for Social and Public Policies, Report for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), the International Organization for Migration and the Institute for Future Studies, March 2008, 40 p., available on the UNRISD website: www.unrisd.org. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste. “Savoirs, diasporas et identités projectives.” Hermès, no. 40 (2004): 350-354. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste. “Diasporas: concepts et pratiques.” In Diasporas scientifiques: comment les pays en développement peuvent-ils tirer parti de leurs chercheurs et de leurs ingénieurs expatriés, edited by Rémi Barré, Valeria Hernández, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, and Dominique Vinck (Paris: IRD Editions, 2003), on CD-ROM. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste. “Network Approach versus Brain Drain: Lessons from the Diaspora.” International Migration, vol. 39, no. 5 (2001): 91-108. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste, and Jorge Charum. “La ‘fuite des cerveaux’ est-elle épuisée? Paradigme perdu et nouvelles perspectives.” Cahiers des sciences humaines, vol. 31, no. 4 (1995): 1003-1019. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste. “Se agoto el brain drain? Paradigmo perdido y nuevas perspectivas.” Integracion, Ciencia y Tecnologia, no. 1 (1994): 47-54. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste, Jorge Charum, Dora Bernal, Jacques Gaillard, José Granes, John Leon, et al. “Turning Brain Drain into Brain Gain: the Colombian Experience of the Diaspora Option.” Science, Technology and Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (July-December 1997): 285-315. Meyer, Jean-Baptiste, and Jean-Paul Wattiaux “Diaspora Knowledge Networks: Vanishing Doubts and Increasing Evidence.” International Journal on Multicultural Societies, vol. 8, no. 1 (2006): 4-24. Michael-Titus, Constantin. In Search of a Hungarian Diaspora. Upminster: Panopticum Press, 1979. Michalon, Bénédicte. “Les Aussiedler, une migration parmi tant d’autres: contingnces géopolitiques et désethnicisation de la loi d’immigration en Allemagne.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, op. cit., 165-182. Milikowsky, Chaim. “Notions of Exile, Subjugation and Return in Rabbinic Literature.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 265-296. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Milkias, Paulos, and Getachew Metaferia, eds., The Battle of Adwa: Reflections on Ethiopia’s Historic Victory Against European Colonialism. New York: Algora, 2005.

Bibliography

555

Miller, John C. “The Emigrant and New York City: A Consideration of Four Puerto Rican Writers.” MELUS, vol. 5, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 82-99. Minogue, Kenneth. Nationalism. London: Batsford, 1967. Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006. Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora.” Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996): 421-447. Muret-Sanders enzyklopädisches English-Deutsches und Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch. Berlin-Schöneberg: Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905. Mitchell, Katharyne. “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 15, no. 5 (1997): 533-553. Monnier, Raymonde. Républicanisme, patriotisme et Révolution française. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Moore, Richard B. The Name “Negro”: Its Origins and Evil Use. Baltimore, Black Press, 1992 (first edition 1960). Morandi, Carlo. “Per una storia degli itaniani fuori d’Italia (A proposito di alcune note di A. Gramsci).” Rivista storica italiana, no. 3 (1949): 379-384. Moreno Vega, Martha. “Interlocking African Diaspora Cultures in the Work of Fernando Ortiz.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 31, no. 1 (September 2000): 39-50. Morgenstern, Arie. “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840.” Azure, no. 12 (Winter 2002): 71-132. Morin, Edgar. Les Sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur. Paris, Seuil-Unesco, 1999. Morin, Edgar. Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris, Seuil, 1973 Morris, Milton D. “Black Americans and the Foreign Policy Process: The Case of Africa.” The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 1972): 451-463. Morsell, John A. “Status, Problems and Functions of Negro Leadership.” The Crisis, vol. 69, no. 9 (November 1962): 522-532. Morvran Goblet, Yann. Political Geography and the World Map. New York: Praeger, 1955. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African-American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism 1850-1925. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Mosse, Georges L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Moya, José C. “Diaspora Studies: New Concepts, Approaches, and Realities?” Paper presented at the Congress of the Social Science History Association, Chicago, 18-21 November 18-21, 2004. Mudimbe, Valentin Y., ed., The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

556

Bibliography

Mumford, Lewis. Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. Munnich, Olivier. “Le texte du Pentateuque grec et son histoire.” In Dogniez, and Harl, Le Pentateuque, op. cit., 594-609. Münz, Rainer, and Rainer Ohliger. “Introduction.” In Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants: Germany, Israel, and Post-Soviet Successor States in Comparative Perspective, edited by Rainer Münz, and Rainer Ohliger, 3-17. London: Cass, 2003. Mveng, Engelbert. “Signification africaine de l’art.” In Colloque sur l’art nègre (1er festival mondial des arts nègres, Dakar, 1-24 avril 1966). Paris: Présence africaine, 1967, 7-22. Myers, David. Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Myers, David. “History as Ideology: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur, Zionist Historian ‘Par Excellence’.” Modern Judaism, vol. 8, no. 2 (May 1988): 167-193. Myres, John L. “A History of the Pelasgian Theory.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, no. 27 (1907): 170-225. Myres, John L. “The Making of Modern Archaeology.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 10, no. 47 (February 1907): 317-319. Myres, John L., and K.T. Frost. “The Historical Background of the Trojan War.” Klio, no. 14 (1915): 446-467. Ndiaye, Ndioro. “Rôle des pouvoirs publics tant dans les pays d’origine que dans les pays de destination,” speech by the Deputy Director-General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Migration and Development Seminar, Brussels, 13 March 2006, formerly available on the IOM website. Ndiaye, Pap. “Présence africaine avant “Présence Africaine”: la subjectivation politique noire en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres.” Gradhiva, no. 10 (2009): 64-79. Ndiaye, Pap. La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008. Neher-Bernheim, Renée. Histoire juive de la Révolution à l’État d’Israël: faits et documents. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Neusner, Jacob. How Important Was the Destruction of the Second Temple in the Formation of Rabbinic Judaism? Lanham: University Press of America, 2006. Neusner, Jacob. The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2004 (first edition 1996). Neusner, Jacob. Judaism When Christianity Began, A Survey of Belief and Practice. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Neusner, Jacob. The Emergence of Judaism: Jewish Religion in Response to the Critical Issues of the First Six Centuries. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000. Neusner, Jacob. “Exile and Return as the History of Judaism.” in Scott, Exile, op. cit., 221-237.

Bibliography

557

Neusner, Jacob. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Neusner, Jacob, and Allan J. Avery-Peck, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Judaism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Neveu, Catherine. Communauté, nationalité et citoyenneté. De l’autre côté du miroir: les Bangladeshis de Londres. Paris: Karthala, 1993 Neveu, Erik. “Les voyages des Cultural Studies.” L’Homme, no. 187-188 (2008): 315-342. Neylan, David. “Tüzmen endorses term ‘diaspora’ to describe Turks Abroad,” Today’s Zaman, 11 April 2009, available on the newspaper’s website: www.todayszaman.com Nicolet, Claude. L’Idée républicaine en France, 1789-1924. Paris: Gallimard, 1994 (first edition 1982). Nietzsche aujourd’hui?. Paris, UGE, 1973, 2 vol. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, all too Human (1878). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Fragments posthumes. Paris, Gallimard, 1982 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (1886). New York: Vintage, 1966. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Wisdom (1882). New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day (1881). New York: MacMillan, 1911. The NIRSA Diaspora Strategy Wheel and Ten Principles of Good Practice, June 2009, 7 p., document available on the NIRSA website. Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Re-imagining the Diaspora: History, Responsibility, and Commitment in an Age of Globalization.” Dialectical Anthropology, no. 31 (2007): 127-141. Noiriel, Gérard. “Socio-histoire d’un concept: les usages du mot ‘nationalité’ au XIXe siècle.” Genèses, no. 20 (October 1995): 4-23. Noiriel, Gérard. La Tyrannie du national: le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793-1993. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991. Nordau, Max, Degeneration. London: Heinemann, 1895 (first German edition 1892). Norman, Edward. “Zionism.” Phylon, vol. 1, no. 4 (4th trimester 1940): 337-343. Norris, Christopher. Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1982. Nossiter, Adam. “New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size.” The New York Times, “National Desk”, 21 January 2007. Noth, Martin. Deuteronomistic History. Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1990. Nouveau Petit Robert, Paris, Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1994. “Nouvelles de la Diaspora”, Journal de l’Unité des Frères, 4, novembre 1839, p. 369-371.

558

Bibliography

Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston-New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Olender, Maurice. The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 (first French edition 1989). Ong, Aihwa. “Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics among Transnational Chinese.” Interventions, vol. 5, no. 1 (2003): 82–100. Ong, Aihwa. “On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora.” positions, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993): 745-778. Onwauchi, P. Chike. Black Ideology in the African Diaspora. Chicago: Third World, 1975. Onwauchi, P. Chike. “African Peoples and Western Education.” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 41, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 241-247. Onyewu, Nicholas D.U. “The Teaching of African Politics.” Black World, vol. 19, no. 10 (August 1970): 37-48. Opinions of the Principal Officers of the Executive Departments and Other Papers Relating to Expatriation, Naturalization and Change of Allegiance. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. Orlinski, Harry. “The Septuagint and Its Hebrew Text.” In Davies, and Finkelstein, op. cit., 534-562 Osborne, Peter, and Lynne Segal. “Culture and Power: Interview with Stuart Hall.” Radical Philosophy, no. 86 (November-December 1997): 24-41. østergaard-Nielsen, Eva. “International Migration and Sending Countries: Key Issues and Themes.” In International Migration and Sending Countries: Perceptions, Policies and Transnational Relations, edited by Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, 3-30. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ottley, Roi. The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955. Outlaw, Julius. “‘Nous sommes un peuple africain’. Les Afro-Américains et l’Afrique.” Politique africaine, no. 15 (October 1984): 24-33. Paden, John N., and Edward W. Soja, eds., The African Experience. Final Report, African Curriculum Project. Evanston: Program of African Studies, 1968-1969, 3 vol. Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1972 (first edition 1955). Palmer, Colin. “The African Diaspora.” Black Scholar, vol. 30, no. 3-4 (2000): 56-59. Palmer, Colin. “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 85, no. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 2000): 27-32. Palonen, Kari. “The History of Concepts as a Style of Political Theorizing: Quentin Skinner’s and Reinhart Koselleck’s Subversion of Normative Political Theory.” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 1, no. 1 (July 2002): 91-106.

Bibliography

559

Pamphile, Léon D. Haitians and African Americans. A Heritage of Tragedy and Hope. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001 Pan, Lynn. Sons of the Yellow Emperor. London: Mandarin, 1990. Parfitt, Tudor. “The Developement of Fictive Israelite Identities in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific (17th-21th c.).” Diasporas. Histoire et sociétés, no. 5 (2nd semester 2004): 49-56. Parfitt, Tudor. The Lost Tribes of Israel. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002. Paris Declaration. “For a European Policy on Europeans Resident outside Their Country of Origin.” 30 Septembre 2008, 6 p., text available on the website of the World Council of Hellenes Abroad: http://en.sae.gr/?id=15163. Park, Robert E. Race and Culture. Glencoe: Free Press, 1950. Park, Robert E. “The Career of the Africans in Brazil.” In Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942, XI-XXI. Park, Robert E. “The Nature of Race Relations.” In Race Relations and the Race Problem: A Definition and An Analysis, edited by Lewis C. Copeland, Allison Davis, S.J. Holmes, Charles S. Johnson, Robert E. Park, Edward B. Reuter, Everett V. Stonequist, Edgar T. Thompson, Rupert B. Vance, and W. Lloyd, 3-45. Durham: Duke University Press, 1939. Park, Robert E. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man.” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 33, no. 6 (May 1928): 881-893. Parry, Clive. British Nationality Law and the History of Naturalisation. Milan, Giuffrè, 1954. Passeron, Jean-Claude. Sociological Reasoning: A Non-Popperian Space of Argumentation. Oxford: Bardwell, 2013 (first French edition 1991). Passeron, Jean-Claude. “Mort d’un ami, disparition d’un penseur.” In Travailler avec Bourdieu, edited by Pierre Encrevé, and Rose-Marie Lagrave, 17-90. Paris: Flammarion, 2003. Patterson, David. Hebrew Language and Jewish Thought. London: Routledge, 2005. Patterson, Orlando. “Rethinking Black History.” Africa Report, vol. 17, no. 9 (NovemberDecember 1972): 29-31. Patterson, Orlando. “Twilight of a Dark Myth.” The Times Litterrary Supplement, 16 September 1965, 805-806. Pease, William H., and Jane H. Pease. “The Negro Convention Movement.” in Huggins, Kilson, and Fox, vol. i, op. cit., 191-205. Pennington, James W.C. A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People. Hartford: L. Skinner, 1841. Pennybacker, Susan D. “The Universal Races Congress, London Political Culture, and Imperial Dissent, 1900 –1939.” Radical History Review, no. 92 (Spring 2005): 103-117.

560

Bibliography

Peretz, Don. “Arab Refugees: A Changing Problem.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 41, no. 3 (April 1963): 558-570. Perry, Jeffrey. “Hubert Henry Harrison.” in Harlem Renaissance Lives from the American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 242-244. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Perspectives nouvelles sur l’histoire africaine (textes présentés par Engelbert Mveng), Paris, Présence africaine, 1971. Petit Robert 1. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1987. Phillips, Earl. “The Egba at Abeokuta: Acculturation and Political Change, 1830-1870.” The Journal of African History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1969): 117-131. Pichot, André. Histoire de la notion de vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Pierson, Donald. Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. Philipson, Robert. “Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, vol. 50, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 17-34. Pieke, Frank. “Chinese Globalization and Migration to Europe,” UC San Diego, Working Paper no. 94, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, March 2004, accessible on the E-scholarship website: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gv6w1bj. Piguet, Marie-France. Classe: histoire du mot et genèse du concept des Physiocrates aux Historiens de la Restauration. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996. Pike, Kenneth. Language in Relation to A Unified Theory of Human Behaviour. La Haye: Mouton, 1954. Pina-Guerassimoff, Carine, and Eric Guerassimoff. “The ‘Overseas Chinese’: The State and Emigration from the 1890s through the 1990s.” In Green, and Weil, Citizenship and Those Who Leave, op. cit., 245-264. Pinto, Louis, ed., Le Commerce des idées philosophiques. Paris: Editions du Croquant, 2009. Pinto, Louis. Les Neveux de Zarathoustra: la réception de Nietzsche en France. Paris: Seuil, 1995 Plamenatz, John. “Two Types of Nationalism.” In Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of An Idea, edited by Eugène Kamenka, 23-36. London: Edward Arnold, 1976. Planson, Gaoud, and Erwan Koshaneg. Histoire de la nation bretonne. Paris: La Table ronde, 1977. Plutarch. Plutarch’s Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. vol. ii. Cambridge: Press Of John Wilson and Son, 1874. Pocock, John. The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Poliakov, Léon. The History of Anti-Semitism. vol. i. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974 (first French edition 1956).

Bibliography

561

Pomerantz, Gregory, and Alexis Koriakov. “Man without an Adjective.” Russian Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (July 1971): 219-225. Poole, Thomas G. “What Country Have I? Nineteenth-Century African-American Theological Critiques of the Nation’s Birth and Destiny.” The Journal of Religion, vol. 72, no. 4 (October 1992): 533-548. Portillo, Álvaro. “La política migratoria del Estado uruguayo.” In Gutiérrez, Relaciones Estado-Diáspora, vol. ii, op. cit., 313-327. Portnoff, André-Yves. “Les diasporas scientifiques et techniques modèlent l’avenir.” Futuribles, no. 210 (June 1996): 57-59 Porton, Gary. “The Idea of Exile in Early Rabbinic Midrash.” In Scott, Exile, op. cit., 249-264. Presner, Todd Samuel. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. London: Routledge, 2007. Prévélakis, Georges, ed., Les Réseaux des diasporas. Paris: L’Harmattan-KYKEM, 1996. Price, Richard, and Sally Price. The Roots of Roots or How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Price, Tanya Y. “The Return: Slave Castles and the African Diaspora.” In Conyers, Afrocentricity and the Academy, op. cit., 187-198. Price, William Hyde. The English Patents of Monopoly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913. Pries, Ludger. “New Migration in Transnational Spaces.” In Migration and Transnational Spaces, edited by Ludger Pries, 1-35. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672). London: Walthoe et al., 1729. Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Rabkin, Yakov M. A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. London: Zed Books, 2006. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora.” In The State of Asian America, edited by Karine Aguilar-San Juan, 219-233. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Postcoloniality and The Boundaries of Identity.” Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 4 (Fall1993): 750-771. Ragazzi, Francesco. “Le cas croate. La ‘diaspora’ comme programme politique.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 305-322. Ragazzi, Francesco. “The concept of ‘diaspora’ and the ‘transnational social space’.” Paper presented at the “Diaspora and Transnationalism: Conceptual, Theoretical and Methodological Challenges” conference, Florence, 10-11 April 2008, 21 p. Ragazzi, Francesco. “Diaspora as a speech act in international politics: who says “diaspora” and why?” Paper presented at the annual conference of the International Studies Association, Montréal, 11 March 2004, 19 p.

562

Bibliography

Rajak, Tessa. Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancien Jewish Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ram, Uri. “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur.” History and Memory, vol. 7, no. 1 (1995): 1-24. Ramsay, William M. The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911. Ranger, Terence O., ed., Emerging Themes of African History. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968. Ratha, Dilip. “Workers’ Remittances: An Important and Stable Source of External Development Finance.” In Global Development Finance 2003, 157-175. Washington: World Bank, 2003. Raulin, Anne. “Minorités intermédiaires et diasporas.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 1 (1990): 163-169. Ravitzky, Aviezer. Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Rawidowicz, Simon. “On the Concept of Galut.” (1943) In Simon Rawidowicz, Israel, the Ever-Dying People and Other Essays. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1986, 96-117. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. Exil et souveraineté: judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale. Paris: La Fabrique, 2007. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. “Jewish Memory between Exile and History.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 97, no. 4 (2007): 530-543. Recommendations of the Policy Seminar on Diaspora and Homeland Development, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, 10-11 April 2008. Record, Wilson. “The Negro Intellectual and Negro Nationalism.” Social Forces, vol. 33, no. 1 (October 1954): 10-18. Redkey, Edwin S. “The Flowering of Black Nationalism: Henry McNeal Turner and Marcus Garvey.” In Huggins, Kilson, and Fox, Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol. ii, op. cit., 107-124. Redkey, Edwin S. “Bishop Turner’s African Dream.” The Journal of American History, vol. 54, no. 2 (September 1967): 271-290. Reichel, Edward H. Historical Sketch of the Church and Missions of the United Brethren, Commonly Called Moravians. Bethlehem: J. and W. Held, 1848. Reis, Michele. “Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on ‘Classical’ and ‘Contemporary’ Diaspora.” International Migration, vol. 42, no. 2 (2004): 41-60. Relation d’Eldad le Danite, voyageur du IXème siècle (traduite et présentée par E. Carmoly), Paris, Librairie orientale de Mme Dondey-Dupré, 1838. Renan, Ernest. Histoire du peuple d’Israël. vol. iv (1893). In Ernest Renan, Œuvres complètes. vol. vi, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1953.

Bibliography

563

Renshon, Stanley A. Dual Citizenship and American National Identity. Washington: Center for Immigration Studies, 2001. Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, December 2001, available online at http://www.indiandiaspora.nic.in “Report of the sub-commission ‘Communication and Linkages Between Diaspora Institutions and the Republic of Armenia’,” 22-23 September 1999, available online at http://www.groong.org/ADconf/199909/reports/communication.html “Results of the Survey ‘Engaging Diasporas as Agents of Development’”, Geneva, IOM, 2005, Revel, Judith. “La pensée verticale: une éthique de la problématisation.” In Le courage de la vérité, edited by Frédéric Gros, 63-86. Paris: PUF, 2002. Rey, Alain. “Révolution”: histoire d’un mot. Paris: Gallimard, 1989, 319-334. Richter, Melvin. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Ricoeur, Paul. Parcours de la reconnaissance. Paris: Stock, 2004. Robbins, Bruce. “Some Versions of U.S. Internationalism.” Social Text, vol. 14, no. 45 (Hiver 1995): 97-123. Robin, Régine. “Autobiographie et judéité chez Jacques Derrida.” Études françaises, vol. 38, no. 1-2 (2002): 207-218. Robinson, Mary. “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora.” Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas, 2 February 1995, available online at http://www.emigrant.ie/emigrant/historic/ diaspora.htm. Rochebouët, Béatrice de. “Les Français en commando à Bruxelles.” Le Figaro, 20 January 2006. Röhrig, Hermann-Josef. “Gustav-Adolf-Werk – Diaspora aus evangelischer Sicht.” In Diaspora: Zeugnis von Christen für Christen. 150 Jahre Bonifatiuswerk der deutschen Katholischen, edited by Günter Riße, and Clemens A. Kathke, 81-100. Paderborn: Bonifatius Verlag, 1999. Röhrig, Hermann-Josef. “Diaspora in römisch-katholischer Sicht.” Die evangelische Diaspora (Jahrbuch des Gustav-Adolf-Werks), no. 62 (1993): 81-100. Röhrig, Hermann-Josef. Diaspora-Kirche in der Minderheit. Leipzig: St Benno-Verlag, 1991. Rojas, Fabio. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. “Rôle de la diaspora dans le développement économique? Ni vache à lait ni solution miracle, répondent des délégations à la deuxième commission.” Press Release, UN General Assembly, New York, 6 October 2006. The document is available on the UN website. Rose, Arnold. Race Prejudice and Discrimination: Readings in Intergroup Relations in the United States. New York: Knopf, 1951.

564

Bibliography

Rose, Peter. “Book Review.” Social Forces, no. 52 (December 1973): 306-307. Rosoli, Gianfausto. “La crise des relations entre l’Italie et le Brésil: la grande naturalisation (1889-1896).” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, no. 2 (1986): 69–90. Rossignol, Lorraine. “Les Ouïgours divisent l’Allemagne.” Le Monde, 20 May 2009. Rouleau, Eric. “The Palestinian Quest.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 53, no. 2 (January 1975): 264-283. Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism.” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 8-23. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Essay on the Origin of Languages.” (1781). In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998, 289-332. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract (1762). London-Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1913. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1754). London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1761. Roux, Jean-Paul. L’Islam en Asie. Paris: Payot, 1958. Ruby Patterson, Tiffany. “Diaspora and Beyond: The Promise and Limitations of Black Transnational Studies in the United States.” In Berthomière, and Chivallon, Les Diasporas dans le monde contemporain, op. cit., 125-133. Ruby Patterson, Tiffany, and Robin G. Kelley. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” African Studies Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 11-45. Ruhlen, Merritt. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. New York: Wiley, 1994. Rutherford, Alasdair. Engaging the Scottish Diaspora: Rationale, Benefits and Challenges. Edinburgh: Scottish Government Social Research, 2009, 32 p., available online at http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2009/07/28161043/0. Rutherford, Jonathan, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Ryan, W.J.L. “Some Irish Population Problems.” Population Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (November 1955): 185-188. Sachs-Villatte enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch der franzözischen und deutschen Sprache, vol. iii, 2nd part (Deutsch-Franzözisch), Berlin-Schöneberg: Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1880. Safran, Alexandre. Israël et ses racines. Paris: Albin Michel, 2001 (first edition 1980). Safran, William. “The Jewish Diaspora in Comparative and Theoretical Perspective.” Israel Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 36-60. Safran, William. “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas.” In Kokot, Tölölyan, and Alfonso, Diaspora, Identity and Religion, op. cit., 9-29.

Bibliography

565

Safran, William. “Recent French Conceptualizations of Diaspora.” Diaspora, vol. 12, no. 3 (2003): 437-441. Safran, William. “Comparing Diasporas: A Review Essay.” Diaspora, vol. 8, no. 3 (1999): 255-291. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83-99. Safran, William. “Ethnic Diasporas in Industrial Societies: A Comparative Study of the Political Implications of the ‘Homeland’ Myth.” In Les Étrangers dans la ville. Le regard des sciences sociales, edited by Ida Simon-Barouh, and Pierre-Jean Simon, 163-177. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990. Safran, William. “Islamization in Western Europe: Political Consequences and Historical Parallels.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 485 (May 1986): 98-112. Safran, William. “The Mitterrand Regime and Its Policies of Ethnocultural Accommodation.” Comparative Politics, vol. 18, no. 1 (October 1985): 41-63. Sahoo, Ajaya Kumar, and Brij Maharaj. Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007, 2 vol. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994 (first edition 1993). Said, Edward W. “Foreword.” In Guha, and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, op. cit., V-X. Said, Edward W. “Traveling Theory.” In Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Faber, 1983, 226-247. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Saila, Saul B. “A Study of Winter Flounder Movements.” Limnology and Oceanography, vol. 6, no. 3 (July 1961): 292-298. Saint-Arnaud, Pierre. L’Invention de la sociologie noire aux États-Unis d’Amérique: essai en sociologie de la connaissance scientifique. Paris: Syllepse, 2003. Saint Augustine. The City of God. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1909. Saint Augustine. The Confessions. Garden City: International Collectors Library, 1876. Saint Clair Drake, and John Gibbs. Black Folk Here and There. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies (UCLA), 1987 and 1990., 2 vol. Saint Clair Drake. “The Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective.” The Black Scholar, vol. 7, no. 1 September 1975: 2-13. Saint Clair Drake. “African Diaspora and Jewish Diaspora: Convergence and Divergence.” In Washington, Jews in Black Perspectives, op. cit., 19-41. Saint Clair Drake. “Some Observations on Interethnic Conflict as One Type of Intergroup Conflict.” Conflict Resolution, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1957): 155-178.

566

Bibliography

Saint Clair Drake, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1945. Salmon, Yosef. “Les émigrations traditionnelles vers la Palestine (1740-1880).” In La société juive à travers l’histoire, vol. iv, edited by Shmuel Trigano, 123-138. Paris, Fayard, 1993. Salzbrunn, Monika. “World Society, Transnationalism and Champs Migratoires: Reflections on German, Anglo-Saxon and French Academic Debates.” In The Making of World Society: Perspectives from Transnational Research, edited by Remus Anghel, Eva Gerharz, Gilberto Rescher, and Monika Salzbrunn, 75-100. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008. Samers, Michael E. “Diaspora Unbound: Muslim Identity and the Erratic Regulation of Islam in France.” International Journal of Population Geography, no. 9 (2003): 351–364. Samuel, Maurice. The Professor and the Fossil: Some Observations of Arnold Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956. San Juan, Epifanio Jr. Toward Filipino Self-Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. San Juan, Epifanio Jr. “Interrogating Transmigrancy, Remapping Diaspora: The Globalization of Laboring Filipinos/as.” Discourse, vol. 23, no. 3 (2001): 52-74. San Juan, Epifanio Jr. From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Sanders, Daniel. Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1860. Sanbar, Elias. “La diaspora palestinienne (entretien avec Yves Lacoste).” Hérodote, no. 53 (April-June 1989): 70-83. Sandifer, Durward V. “A Comparative Study of Laws Relating to Nationality at Birth and to Loss of Nationality.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 29, no. 2 (April 1935): 248-279. Sanguin, André-Louis. “Les diasporas et leurs trajectoires dans les grandes métropoles canadiennes: le cas de Montréal.” In Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, op. cit., 409-432. Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2009 (first Israeli edition 2008). Saramago, José. All the Names. London: The Harvill Press, 2000 (first Portuguese edition 1997). Sarolea, Charles. “The Tragedy of the Russian Diaspora.” Contemporary Review, no. 126 (July-December 1924): 301-307. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, 5 vol., Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981-1993 (first French edition 1971-1972). Sartre, Jean-Paul. Black Orpheus, Paris: Présence africaine, 1976 (first French edition 1948).

Bibliography

567

Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Sassen, Saskia. “Formal and Informal Associations: Dominicans and Colombians in New York.” International Migration Review, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 314-332. Satzewich, Vic. The Ukrainian Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002. Saunier, Pierre-Yves. “Transnational.” In The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, edited by Akira Iriye, and Pierre-Yves Saunier, 1047-1055. Basingstoke, PalgraveMacmillan, 2009. Sayad, Abdelmalek. The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004 (first French edition 1999). Sayad, Abdelmalek. “La naturalisation, ses conditions sociales et sa signification chez les immigrés algériens en France.” Gréco 13, recherches sur les migrations internationales, no. 3 (1981): 23-46. Schaaf, Ludwig. Die evangelische Brüdergemeine, geschichtlich dargestellt. Leipzig: J.F. Gleditsch, 1825. Schäfer, Peter. Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Schaff, Philip. History of the Apostolic Church: With a General Introduction to Church History. New York: T&T. Clark, 1853 (first German edition 1851). Schlegel, August Wilhelm von. “De l’étymologie en général,” (1827), in Œuvres de M. Auguste-Guillaume de Schlegel écrites en français et publiées par Edouard Böcking, vol. ii. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846, 103-141. Schmidt, Francis. La Pensée du Temple. De Jérusalem à Qoumrân: identité et lien social dans le judaïsme ancien. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Schmidt, Karl Ludwig. “Diaspora.” In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. ii, edited by Gerhard Kittel, 98-104. Grand Rapids: W.M.B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964 (first German edition 1933). Schmitter-Heisler, Barbara. “Sending Countries and the Politics of Emigration and Destination.” International Migration Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 469-484. Schnackenburg, Rudolf. “Gottes Volk in der Zerstreeung.” In Rudolf Schnackenburg, Schriften zum neuen Testament. Munich: Kösel, 1971, 321-336. Schnapper, Dominique. “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept,” Diaspora, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 225-254. Schniedewind, William M. How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 (first Israeli edition 1957). Schulze, Christian Ferdinand. Von der Entstehung und Einrichtung der evangelischen Brüdergemeinde. Leipzig: J.C. Reyher, 1822.

568

Bibliography

Schuyler, George S. “The Separate State Hokum.” The Crisis, vol. 42, no. 5 (May 1935): 135 and 148-149. Schweinitz, Edmund de. The History of the Church known as the Unitas Fratrum or the Unity of the Brethren. Bethlehem (PA): Moravian Publication Concern, 1901 (first edition 1885). Schweinitz, Edmund de. “Moravian Church.” in Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia: A Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge; With Numerous Contributions from Writers of Distinguished Eminence in Every Department of Letters and Science in the United States and in Europe, vol. iii, 615-616. New York: A.J. Johnson & Son, 1875-1878. Schweinitz, Edmund de. The Moravian Manual: Containing an Account of the Protestant Church of the Moravian United Brethren or Unitas Fratrum. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1859. Scott, James M., ed. Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Scott, James M. “Exile and the Self-Understanding of Diaspora Jews in the GrecoRoman Period.” In Scott, Exile, op. cit., 173-218. Scott, William. “Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict 1934-1936.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 63, no. 2 (April 1978): 118-134. Scott, William. “Rabbi Arnold Ford’s Back-to-Ethiopia Movement: A Study of Black Emigration, 1930-1935.” Pan African Journal, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 191-202. The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews: Volume One, Nation of Islam, Historical Research Department, 1991. Séguin, Béatrice, Leah State, Peter A. Singer, and Abdallah S. Daar. “Scientific Diasporas as an Option for Brain Drain: Re-Circulating Knowledge for Development.” International Journal of Biotechnology, vol. 8, no. 1-2 (2006): 78-90. Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein. “Les paradoxes de la régénération révolutionnaire: le cas de l’Abbé Grégoire.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 321 (2000): 69-90. Seton-Watson, Robert. Britain and the Dictators: A Survey of Post-War British Policy. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Seton-Watson, Hugh. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1977. Sevitch, Benjamin. “W.E.B. Du Bois and Jews: A Lifetime of Opposing Anti-Semitism.” The Journal of African American History, no. 87 (Summer 2002): 323-337. Shack, William A. “Ethiopia and Afro-Americans: Some Historical Notes, 1920-1970.” Phylon, vol. 35, no. 2 (2nd trimester 1974): 142-155. Shah, Prakash. “Diasporas as Legal Actors: Implications for Established Legal Boundaries.” Non-State Actors and International Law, no. 5 (2005): 153-165.

Bibliography

569

Shain, Yossi. Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the U.S. and Their Homelands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shapiro, Karl. “Decolonization of American Literature.” Negro Digest, vol. 14, no. 12 (October 1965): 54-71. Sheffer, Gabriel. “The Politics of Ethno-National Diasporas.” In Anteby-Yemini, Berthomière, and Sheffer, Les Diasporas, op. cit., 125-135. Sheffer, Gabriel. “A Profile of Ethno-National Diasporas.” In Baghdiantz McCabe, Harlaftis, and Pepelasis Minoglou, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, op. cit., 359-370 Sheffer, Gabriel. Diaspora Politics. At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Sheffer, Gabriel. “From Diasporas to Migrants – from Migrants to Diasporas.” In Münz, and Ohliger Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants, op. cit., 17-31. Sheffer, Gabriel. “Defining Ethno-National Diaspora.” Migration, no. 33-34-35 (2002): 69-92. Sheffer, Gabriel. “A Nation and its Diaspora: A Re-Examination of Israeli-Jewish Diaspora Relations.” Diaspora, vol. 11, no. 3 (2002): 331-358. Sheffer, Gabriel. “Whither the Study of Ethnic Diasporas? Some Theoretical, Definitional, Analytical and Comparative Considerations.” In Prévélakis, Les Réseaux des diasporas, op. cit., 37-46. Sheffer, Gabriel. “The Emergence of New Ethno-National Diasporas.” Migration, no. 28 (1995): 5-28. Sheffer, Gabriel. “Ethnic Diasporas: A Threat to Their Hosts?” In International Migration and Security, edited by Myron Weiner, 263-285. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. Sheffer, Gabriel. “A New Field of Study: Modern Diasporas in International Politics.” in Sheffer, Modern Diasporas in International Politics, op. cit., 1-15. Sheffer, Gabriel, ed. Modern Diasporas in International Politics. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Shelbie, Tommy. “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black Political Solidarity.” Political Theory, vol. 31 no. 5 (October 2003): 664-692. Shepperson, George. “African Diaspora: Concept and Context.” In Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, op. cit., 46-53. Shepperson, George. “Introduction.” In Kilson, and Rotberg, The African Diaspora., op. cit., 1-10. Shepperson, George. “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora.” In Ranger, Emerging Themes of African History, op. cit., 152-176. Shepperson, George. “The African Diaspora – or the African Abroad.” African Forum, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 1966): 76-93. Shepperson, George. “Pan-Africanism and ‘pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes.” Phylon, vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter 1962): 346–358.

570

Bibliography

Shepperson, George. “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism.” The Journal of African History, vol. 1, no. 2 (1960): 299-312. Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958. Shmueli, Efraïm. “The Jerusalem School of Jewish History (A Critical Evaluation).” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, no. 53 (1986): 147-178. Shotwell, James T. The History of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Shuval, Judith T. “Diaspora Migration: Definitional Ambiguities and a Theoretical Paradigm.” International Migration, vol. 38, no. 5 (2000): 41-57. Sideri, Eleni. “The Diaspora of the Term Diaspora: A Working-Paper of a Definition.” Trans-text(e)s Transcultures, no. 4 (2008): 32-47. Simon, Emmanuelle. “Une exportation du New Age en Afrique?” Cahiers d’études africaines, vol. xliii, no. 172 (2003): 883-898. Simon, Gildas. Géodynamique des migrations internationales. Paris: PUF, 1995. Simon, Gildas. “Les diasporas maghrébines et la construction européenne.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990): 97-105. Simon, Gildas, and Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux. “Une Europe communautaire de moins en moins mobile?” Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 7, no. 2 (1991): 41-61. Singer, Merrill. “Symbolic Identity Formation in an African American Religious Sect: The Black Hebrew Israelites.” In Chireau, and Deutsch, Black Zion, op. cit., 55-72. Skinner, Elliott P. “The Dialectic Between Diasporas and Homelands.” In Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, op. cit., 17-45. Skinner, G. William. “What the Study of China Can Do for Social Science.” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 4 (August 1964): 517-522. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Small, Mario L. “Departmental Conditions and the Emergence of New Disciplines: Two Cases in the Legitimation of African-American Studies.” Theory and Society, no. 28 (1999): 659-707. Smart, Ninian. “The Importance of Diasporas.” In Gilgul: Essays on Transformation, Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions, edited by Shaul Shaked, David Shulman, and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, 288-297. Leiden: Brill, 1987. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Smith, Anthony D., ed. Nationalist Movements. London: Macmillan, 1976. Smith, Anthony D. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth, 1971.

Bibliography

571

Smith, Robert. “Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization, the State and the Extra-Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics.” International Migration Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 297-343. Smith, Robert. “Reflections on Migration, the State and the Construction, Durability and Newness of Transnational Life.” In Migration and Transnational Spaces, edited by Ludger Pries, 187-219. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Smothers, Ronald. “Black Studies Get ‘New Lexicon’.” The New York Times, 10 March 1973. Smouts, Marie-Claude, ed., La situation postcoloniale. Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2007. Sölken, Heinz. Afrikanische Dokumente zur Frage der Entstehung der hausanischen Diaspora in Oberguinea. Berlin: Augustin, 1939. Sorre, Maximilien. Rencontre de la géographie et de la sociologie. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1957. Sorre, Maximilien. Les Migrations des peuples: essai sur la mobilité géographique. Paris: Flammarion, 1955. Sorre, Maximilien. Les fondements de la géographie humaine: essai d’une écologie de l’homme. Paris: Armand Colin, 1947. Sourani, Jamal. “Palestine Refugees.” The New York Times, 29 September 1965. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu. “Citizenship and Identity: Living in Diasporas in Post-War Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–15. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Sparks, H.F.D. “Jerome as Biblical Scholar.” In Ackroyd, and Evans, The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. i, op. cit., 510-541. Spector, Ivar. “Contemporary Russian Literature: Katayev, Tolstoy, Sholokhov.” The English Journal, vol. 32, no. 6 (June 1943): 295-302. Spiller, Gustav, ed., Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26-29, 1911. London: P. S. King and Son, 1911. Spiro, Peter J. “Perfecting Political Diaspora.” New York University Law Review, vol. 81, no. 11 (April 2006): 207-233. Spitzer, Leo. “Book Review.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 4 (1980): 733-736. Spitzer, Leo. Essays in Historical Semantics. New York: Vanni, 1968. Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 3, no. 1 (September 1942): 1-42. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “In response. Looking Back, Looking Forward.” In Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalynd Morris, 227-236. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

572

Bibliography

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World.” Textual Practice, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 245-269. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London-New York: Routledge, 1990. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New YorkLondon: Methuen, 1987. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985: 330-363. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on WidowSacrifice.” Wedge, no. 7-8 (1985): 120-130, republished under the title “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” Yale French Studies, no. 62 (1981): 154-184. Starobinski, Jean. Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple. New York: Zone Books, 2003 (first French edition 1999). Staub, Michael E. “‘Negroes are not Jews’: Race, Holocaust Consciousness, and the Rise of Jewish Neoconservatism.” Radical History Review, no. 75 (1999): 3-27. Steiger, Wilhelm. Der erste Brief Petri mit Berücksichtigung des ganzen biblischen Lehrbegriffs ausgelegt. Berlin: Ludwig Dehmigte, 1832 (first edition 1831). Steiner, George. No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996. London: Faber, 1996. Stemberger, Günther. “The Formation of Rabbinic Judaism, 70-640 CE.” In Neusner, and Avery-Peck, The Blackwell Companion to Judaism, op. cit., 78-92. Sternhell, Zeev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998 (first Israeli edition 1995). Stewart, George. The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle of Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933. Stoianovitch, Traian. “Land Tenure and Related Sectors of the Balkan Economy, 1600-1800.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1953): 398-411. Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu. Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi, vol. v. Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1817. Stratton, Jon. Coming out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities. London: Routledge, 2000. Strauss, Gerhard Friedrich A. Helon’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem. London: Mawman, 1824 (first German edition 1820). Strong, James, ed., Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Vendor: Hendrickson Publishers, 1890.

Bibliography

573

Stryker, Sheldon. “Social Structure and Prejudice.” Social Problems, vol. 6, no. 4 (Spring 1959): 340-354. Stuiber, Alfred. “Diaspora.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. iii. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1957, 972-982. Suarez, Virgil. “Diaspora.” Queen’s Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 1 (2000), 154. The Summit of European Diasporas: Summary Report and Recommendations, 30 June 2003, 9 p. Taguieff, Pierre-André. La Judéophobie des Modernes: des Lumières au Jihad mondial. Paris, Odile Jacob, 2008. Taguieff, Pierre-André. Le Sens du progrès: une approche historique et philosophique. Paris: Flammarion, 2004. Taguieff, Pierre-André. Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion. Faux et usages d’un faux. Paris: Berg-international/Fayard, 2004 (first edition 1992). Tara Schwartz, Stephanie. “The Concept of Double Diaspora in Sami Michael’s Refuge and Naim Kattan’s Farewell, Babylon.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 30, no. 1 (2010): 92-100. Tatla, Darshan Singh. The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood. London: UCL Press, 1999. Taylor, Alan R. “Zionism and Jewish History.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1972): 35-51. The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: Embracing Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology and Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Biography from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1908-1914, 13 vol. They Still Call Australia Home: Inquiry into Australian Expatriates, report of the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, Canberra, March 2005. The report is available on the Parliament of Australia website at http://www.aph.gov.au/ Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/ Completed_inquiries/2004-07/expats03/report/index. Thayil, Jeet. “Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 42, no. 2 (November 2006): 125-128. Therwath, Ingrid. “Les ‘Journées des Indiens de l’étranger’: le gouvernement face à la diaspora », In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 205-220. Therwath, Ingrid. L’État face à la diaspora. Stratégies et trajectoires indiennes, PhD Dissertation in political science, IEP Paris, 2007. Therwath, Ingrid. L’État face à la diaspora. Stratégies et trajectoires indiennes, Master thesis in political science, IEP Paris, 2003. Thom, René. Paraboles et catastrophes. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. Thompson, Edward P. The Making of the British Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963.

574

Bibliography

Thompson, Vincent B. Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness and Leadership in the Americas (From Slavery to the 1920s). Trenton & Asmara: Africa World Press, 2000. Thompson, Vincent B. “Leadership in the African Diaspora in the Americas Prior to 1860.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (September 1993): 42-76. Tillman, Seth. “Israel and Palestinian Nationalism.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 46-66. Tinguy, Anne de. “La Russie et les ‘compatriotes’ de l’étranger: hier rejetés, demain mobilisés?” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 183-204. Tinguy, Anne de. La Grande migration: La Russie et les Russes depuis l’ouverture du rideau de fer. Paris: Plon, 2004. Tölölyan, Khachig. “Diasporas and Disciplinarity Today.” In Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity, op. cit., 2-15. Tölölyan, Khachig. “Diasporama.” Diaspora, vol. 9, no. 2 (2000): 309-310. Tölölyan, Khachig. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.” Diaspora, vol. 5, no. 1 (1996): 3-36. Tölölyan, Khachig. “The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface.” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (1991): 3-7. Tintori, Guido. “L’Italie et ses expatriés: une perspective historique.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 79-104. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 (first German edition 1887). Topalov, Christian. La Naissance du chômeur, 1880-1910. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Toth, Judit. “Entre politique étrangère et politique intérieure. La ‘politique de diaspora’ de la Hongrie.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 221-237. Toynbee, Arnold J. Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. vol. xii. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. vol. vii, London: Oxford University Press, 1954. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. vol. vi, Londres: Oxford University Press, 1939. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. vol. v, London: Oxford University Press, 1939. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. vol. iv, London: Oxford University Press, 1939. Toynbee, Arnold J. “Pioneer Destiny of Judaism.” Issues, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 1-14. Toynbee, Arnold J. “Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis.” International Affairs, vol. 15, no. 1 (January-February 1936): 26-56.

Bibliography

575

Triaud, Jean-Louis. “Les agents religieux islamiques en Afrique tropicale: réflexions autour d’un theme.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (1985): 271-282. Trigano, Shmuel. “La figure biblique de Ham.” Pardès, no. 44 (2008): p. 9-16. Trigano, Shmuel. L’E(xc)lu: entre Juifs et chrétiens. Paris: Denoël, 2003. Trigano, Shmuel, ed. La Société juive à travers l’histoire. Paris: Fayard, 1993, 4 vol. Trolliet, Pierre. “Peut-on parler d’une diaspora chinoise?” In Bruneau, Diasporas, op. cit., 151-162. Trolliet, Pierre. La Diaspora chinoise. Paris: PUF, 1994. Tromp, Johannes. “The Ancient Jewish Diaspora: Some Linguistic and Sociological Observations.” In Religious Communities in the Diaspora: New Perspectives on Past and Present, edited by Gerrie Ter Haar, 13-35. Leuven: Peeters, 1998. Tuquoi, Jean-Pierre. “Aux Comores, un référendum permet au président de prolonger son mandat.” Le Monde, 20 May 2009. Turner, W. Burghardt, and Joyce Moore Turner, eds., Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings, 1920-1972. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 (first edition 1988). Tuttle, William M. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970. “Une nouvelle culture noire dans un monde nouveau: entretien avec Manuel Zapata Olivella.” Politique africaine, no. 15 (October 1984): 84-90. Uran, Steve. “Les paradoxes de l’identité juive: réflexions sur le musée Beth Hatefutsoth.” Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 61 (1980): 52-60. Uzoigwe, Godfrey N. “A Matter of Identity: Africa and Its Diaspora in America Since 1900, Continuity and Change.” African and Asian Studies, no. 7 (2008): 259-288. Uya, Okon Edet, ed., Black Brotherhood. Afro-Americans and Africa, Lexington: Heath, 1970 Valenti, Suzanne. “The Black Diaspora: Negritude in the Poetry of West Africans and Black Americans.” Phylon, vol. 3, no. 4 (1973): 390-398. Valière, Michel. “Diaspora.” In Dictionnaire de l’altérité et des relations interculturelles, edited by Gilles Ferréol, and Guy Jucquois, 89-91. Paris: Armand Colin, 2003. Van den Berghe, Pierre L. “The African Diaspora in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.” Social Forces, vol. 54, no. 3 (March 1976): 530-545. Van den Berghe, Pierre L., ed. Intergroup Relations: Sociological Perspectives. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Van den Berghe, Pierre L. “Asians in East and South Africa.” In Pierre Van den Berghe, Race and Ethnicity. New York: Basic Books, 1970, 276-303. Van Hear, Nicholas. New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. London: UCL Press, 1998. Van Unnik, Willem Cornelis. Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora in der hellenistisch-römischen Zeit. Leiden: Brill, 1993.

576

Bibliography

Vansina, Jan. “Long-Distance Trade-Routes in Central Africa.” The Journal of African History, vol. 3, no. 3 (1962): 375-390. Vargas, Jorge A. “Dual Nationality for Mexicans?” Chicano-Latino Law Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (1996): 1-58. Vassallo, Carmel. “Maltese Entrepreneurial Networks.” In Baghdiantz-McCabe, Harlafis, and Pepelasis Minoglou, Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, op. cit., 124-144. Vassallo, Carmel. “The Maltese Entrepreneurial Networks from the Seventeenth Century Onwards: A Review of the Work Done so Far.” Paper presented at the Thirteenth International Economic History Congress, Buenos Aires, 22-26 July 2002, available online on Academia.edu at the following address: https://www.academia.edu/ 868419/The_Maltese_Entrepreneurial_Networks_from_the_seventeenth_century_ onwards_A_review_of_the_work_done_so_far. Venturas, Lina. “État grec et diaspora: des ‘émigrés’ à l’‘hellénisme œcuménique’.” In Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, op. cit., 239-259. Vertovec, Steven. “Diaspora.” In Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, edited by Ellis Cashmore, 106-107. London-New York: Routledge, 2004. Vertovec, Steven. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge, 2000. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen, eds., Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Cheltenham: Elgar, 1999. Villard, Oswald Garrison. “The Need of Organization.” In Proceedings of the National Negro Conference 1909: New York, May 31 and June 1. New York: National Negro Conference, 1909, 197-206. Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement. San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972. Viton, Albert. “Permanent Minorities: A World Problem.” Antioch Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1941): 474-487. Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. In The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biography, edited by John Morley. New York: E.R. DuMont, 1901. Voltaire. La Bible enfin expliquée. Geneve, s.n., 1776. Von Laue, Theodore H. “Transubstantiation in the Study of African Reality.” African Affairs, vol. 74, no. 297 (October 1975): 401-419. Votaw, Clyde Weber. “The Septuagint Greek Version of the Old Testament.” The Biblical World, vol. 16, no. 3 (1900): 186-198. Voting from Abroad: The International IDEA Handbook. IDEA and Instituto Federal Electoral (Mexico City), 2007, document available online on the IDEA website: http: //www.idea.int/publications/voting_from_abroad/upload/Voting_from_abroad. Wacquant, Loïc. “De la ‘terre promise’ au ghetto: la grande migration noire-américaine, 1916-1930.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 99 (September 1993): 43-51. Waldinger, Roger, and David Fitzgerald. “Transnationalism in Question.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 109, no. 5 (March 2004): 1177-1195.

Bibliography

577

Walker, Clarence. We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Walker, Eric. A History of South Africa, London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1935 (first edition 1928). Walsh, James J. The World’s Debt to the Irish. Boston: The Stratford Company, 1926. Walter, Xavier. Avant les grandes découvertes: une image de la Terre au XIVème siècle. Le voyage de Mandeville. Paris: Alban, 1997. Walters, Ronald. “The Future of Pan-Africanism.” Black World, vol. 24, no. 12 (October 1975): 4-18. Wang, Gungwu. “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” Inaugural address to the Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University, Canberra, February 1999, published in Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu, edited by Gregor Benton and Hong Liu, 157-177. London: Routledge, 2004. Wang, Gungwu. “The Problems with (Chinese) Diaspora.” In Benton, and Liu, Diasporic Chinese Ventures, op. cit., 49-60. Wang, Gungwu. China and Chinese Overseas. Singapour: Times Academic Press, 1991. Washington, Booker T. The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery, vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909. Washington, Booker T. The Future of the American Negro. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1899. Washington, Joseph R., ed., Jews in Black Perspectives: A Dialogue. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1984. Wauthier, Claude. L’Afrique des Africains: inventaire de la négritude. Paris: Seuil, 1964. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Springfield, G & C. Merriam Company, 1913. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged, Londres, Bell & Sons Ltd, 1961. Weigand, Friedrich Ludwig Karl. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Gieβen: Richter, 1881 (first edition 1873). Weil, Patrick. How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1791. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008 (first French edition 2000). Weinar, Agnieszka. Diaspora as an Actor of Migration Policy. Working Paper 37/95. Warsaw: Center for Migration Research, 2008, 30 p. Weinberg, David. Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1996. Weiner, Myron. “Labour Migrations as Incipient Diasporas.” In Sheffer, Modern Diasporas, op. cit., 47-74. Weingrod, Alex, and André Lévy. “Paradoxes of Homecoming: the Jews and Their Diasporas.” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 691-716.

578

Bibliography

Weisbord, Robert G. Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-American. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973. Weisbord, Robert G., and Richard Kazarian Jr. Israel in the Black-American Perspective. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. Weiss, Nancy J. “Long-Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement: The Contribution of Jews to the NAACP and the National Urban League in the Early Twentieth Century.” In Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, edited by Cornel West, and Jack Salzman, 123-152. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. West, Cornel, and Jack Salzman, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Weston, Edward. Diaspora. Some Reflections upon the Question Relating to the Naturalization of Jews, Considered as a Point of Religion. London: Jacob Robinson, 1754. Wettstein, Howard. “Coming to Terms with Exile.” In Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, edited by Howard Wettstein, 47-59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Whalen, Carmen Theresa, and Victor Vázquez-Hernández, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. “When is a Black Man not an African?” Black World, vol. xxiii, no. 11 (September 1974): 100. Wieviorka, Michel. L’Espace du racisme. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Wilkinson, D. H. “The Random Element in Bird ‘Navigation’.” Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 29, no. 4 (December 1952): 532-560. Wilks, Ivor. “The Transmission of Islamic Learning in the Western Sudan.” In Literacy in Traditional Societies, edited by Jack Goody, 162-97. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Williams, Michael. “Pan-Africanism and Zionism: The Delusion of Comparability.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (March 1991): 348-371. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. London-New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Williams, Robert, ed., Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. Saint Louis: Institute of Black Studies, 1975. Willmott, William E. “The Overseas Chinese Today and Tomorrow: A Review Article.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer 1969): 206-214. Willmott, William E. “Congregations and Associations: The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 11, no. 3 (June 1969): 282-301.

Bibliography

579

Wilson, Carlton. “Conceptualizing the African Diaspora.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 17, no. 2 (1997): 118-121. Winer, Georg Benedikt. Biblisches Realwörterbuch zum Handgebrauch für Studirende, Candidaten, Gymnasiallehrer und Prediger. Leipzig: C.H. Reclam, 1838 (first edition 1833). Wintz, Cary D., ed., African American Political Thought 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph. Armonk (N.Y.): M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Wirth, Louis. “Types of Nationalism.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 41, no. 6 (May 1936): 723-737. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Wirth, Louis. “Education for Survival: The Jews.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 48, no. 6 (May 1943): 682-691. Woods, Leonard. “United Brethren’s Society.” Literary and Theological Review, no. xii (December 1836): 596-614. World Bank. “Concept Note: Mobilizing the African Diaspora for Development.” Capacity Development Management Action Plan Unit, 7 December 2007, 91 p. The text is available on the World Bank website: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ INTDIASPORA/General/21686696/conceptnote.pdf. Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In Gordon, and Gordon, A Companion to African-American Studies, op. cit., 106-118. Wiener, Leo. An Interpretation of the Russian People. New York: McBride, Nast & Company, 1915. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History.” In Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, edited by Benjamin R. Gampel, 3-22. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Yuval, Israël Jacob. Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Yuval, Israël Jacob. “The Myth of the Jewish Exile From the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship.” Common Knowledge, vol. 12, no. 1 (2006): 16-33. Yuval, Israël Jacob. “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism.” In The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, edited by David Myers, and David B. Ruderman, 77-87. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

580

Bibliography

Zeitlin, Solomon. “Judaism as a Religion: An Historical Study: VI. Galuth: Diaspora.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (1943): 207-241. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic.” African Affairs, vol. 104, no. 414 (2005): 35-68. Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “The African Academic Diaspora in the United States and Africa: The Challenges of Productive Engagement.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24, no. 1 (2004): 265-278. Zernike, Kate, and Jodi Wilgoren. “In Search of a Place to Sleep, and News of Home.” The New York Times, 31 August 2005. Zerubavel, Yael. “The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Massada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors.” Representations, no. 45 (Winter 1994): 72-100. Ziegler, Jean. Le Pouvoir africain, éléments d’une sociologie politique de l’Afrique noire et de sa diaspora aux Amériques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. Zimmermann, Ekkart. Political Violence, Crises and Revolutions: Theories and Research. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983. Zongo, Bouraïman. “La problématique diaspo à l’Université de Ouagadougou ou les paradoxes d’une identité nationale burkinabé.” In “Immigration et identité nationale”: une altérité revisitée, edited by Séverine Dessajan, Nicolas Hossard, and Elsa Ramos, 123-140. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Zumthor, Paul. Babel ou l’inachèvement. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Zipperstein, Steven. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Index of Names Abbadie (Jacques) 82 Abbott (Robert) 228 Abdulkarim (Amir) 372 Adachi (Nobuko) 394 Ahasverus 85, 86 Akenson (Donald) 232, 418, 420, 422 Akiva (Rabbi) 55, 57 Alexander (Charles) 220 Ali (Noble Drew) 221 Alkalai (Judah) 70 Allen (Richard) 190, 198 Alpers (Edward) 232, 244, 266, 428–431 Althusser (Louis) 348 Anand (Dibyesh) 395, 396 Ancien (Delphine) 488, 489 Anderson (Arthur) 222 Anderson (Benedict) 317–320, 465 Anderson (Mark) 431 Ang (Ien) 357, 358, 360, 426 Angenot (Marc) 104 Anteby-Yemini (Lisa) ix, 32, 33, 217, 218, 378, 470 Anthias (Floya) 419, 420 Antiochus IVth (King) 54 Antonio de Montezinos 85 Appadurai (Arjun) 319, 353–355, 357–359, 378, 387–390, 419, 445, 453 Appignanesi (Lisa) 317, 356 Aquila 66, 67, 77 Arbos (Philippe) 154 Aristeas 50–52 Aristide (Jean-Bertrand) 414, 468 Armstrong (John) ix, 170, 172, 360, 386 Armstrong (Louis) 237 Arowele (Aiyenakun) 36, 40, 41, 46, 53, 60, 62, 64, 71 Asante (Molefi Kete) 181, 273, 274, 276, 277, 281, 282 Ascher (Robert) 153, 154, 417 Assogba (Yao) 436 Athanasius 74 Auroux (Sylvain) 83 Austin (John) 13, 14, 274 Azarya (Victor) 421 Azevedo (Mario) 277

Baer (Yitzhak) 32, 120, 121 Baird (Keith) 260 Baldwin (James) 251, 258, 267, 313 Balfour (Arthur James, Lord) 117, 207, 208 Baltes (Paul) 388 Balzac (Honoré de) 6, 23 Barber (Elinor) 7, 8 Barthes (Roland) 284, 292, 295, 296, 300, 302, 348 Basil of Caesarea 74 Basnage (Jacques) 105, 106 Bastide (Roger) 234–236, 241, 244, 265, 323, 346 Bataille (Georges) 295, 296, 348 Bauböck (Rainer) 449, 453, 455 Baumann (Martin) ix, 3, 33, 40, 71, 232, 244, 347, 387, 390 Bayrou (François) 416, 417 Beachey (R.W.) 244, 265 Beck (Ulrich) 433, 450, 465, 492 Ben Gal (Ely) 130 Ben Gurion (David) 126 ben Zakai (Johanan) 54, 55 Ben-Rafaël (Eliezer) ix, 16 Benjamin of Tudela 84 Bennett (George) 101, 102 Bennett (Lerone Jr.) 269 Benveniste (Emil) 4, 27, 28 Berking (Helmuth) 433 Berlusconi (Silvio) 459 Bernal (Martin) 274, 275, 461 Berr (Henri) 4 Berthomière (William) ix, 29, 32, 33, 217, 378, 388, 419, 431, 435, 436, 470 Beverton (Raymond) 153 Bhabha (Homi) 319, 356, 359, 360, 378, 419, 423 Bhagwati (Jagdish) 439, 440 Bickerman (Elias) 39, 51 Bienstock (Gregory) 146 Bilimoria (Purushottama) 398 Birnbaum (Nathan) ix, 104, 105, 107, 114, 286 Blanchot (Maurice) 284, 296, 297 Blaschke (Jochen) 346, 347 Blaustein (Jacob) 124, 125

582 Bloch (Joseph Samuel) 112 Bloch (Marc) 4 Blyden (Edward Wilmot) 185, 187, 193, 194, 198, 200, 201, 204, 220, 224, 226, 246, 328 Boas (Franz) 138, 161, 211, 212, 233 Bordes-Benayoun (Chantal) 2, 29, 369, 377, 378, 382, 424 Borges (Jorge Luis) 15, 27 Borstein (George) 201, 202 Bourdieu (Pierre) 13, 14, 282, 295, 301, 374 Boyarin (Daniel) 68, 133, 360, 361 Boyarin (Jonathan) 68, 133, 361 Boyer (Jean-Pierre) 197 Boyle (Mark) 488, 489 Brah (Avtar) 360, 362–364, 419 Brawley (Benjamin) 249 Braziel (Jana Evans) 389 Bréal (Michel) 4 Breckenridge (Carol) 353–355, 357, 359, 387 Brenner (Frédéric) 287 Briggs (Cyril) 222 Brooks (Joanna) 190, 223 Brown (Oscar C.) 223 Brubaker (Rogers) 2, 232, 398, 400, 401, 404, 405, 421 Bruneau (Michel) ix, 32, 154, 156, 344, 371, 375, 378, 441, 473 Brunhes (Jean) 138, 139 Brunn (Stanley) 373 Brunner (Otto) 9 Bunche (Ralph) 249 Burgess (Ernest) 214, 235 Burrell (Benjamin E.) 218 Butler (Kim) 424, 431, 437, 471, 487 Calderon (Nissim) 421 Calmann-Lévy (Dora) 101, 120, 209, 407, 447 Campbell (Robert) 198 Camus (Albert) 238 Caputo (John) 287 Carmichael (Stokely) 248, 250, 258 Carrington (Charles) 160 Carroll (Lewis) 35, 498 Cartey (Wilfred G.) 267 Casevitz (Michel) 29, 39 Cassirer (Ernst) 12 Cayton (Horace) 227, 235

Index of Names Céline (Louis-Ferdinand) 312 Césaire (Aimé) 220, 236–238, 267, 305, 306, 311, 313 Chakrabarty (Dipesh) 304, 359 Chaliand (Gérard) 30, 33, 273, 345, 346, 348, 369 Chamberlain (Joseph) 116 Chander (Anupam) 30, 31, 479, 480, 482 Charum (Jorge) 440, 441 Chatterjee (Partha) 359 Chaumont (Jean-Michel) 181 Chen (Kuang-Hsing) 316–318 Cheung (Gordon) 397 Cheyette (Bryan) 33 Chivallon (Christine) ix, 29, 182, 183, 232, 236, 259, 270, 274, 306–308, 316, 319, 328, 329, 368, 374–376, 378, 388, 402, 419, 431, 435, 436 Choulant (Ludwig) 103 Chow (Rey) 389, 419 Christian (Mark A.) 282 Christin (Olivier) 9 Clark (Donald) 166 Clary (Françoise) 225 Claudel (Paul) 312 Claval (Paul) 373 Clegg (LeGrand H. II) 260, 264 Clement of Alexandria 62, 74 Clifford (James) ix, 163, 329, 342, 343, 357–364, 378, 386–390, 419, 420, 436 Cohen (Abner) 157, 158 Cohen (Phil) 419 Cohen (Robin) ix, x, 2, 29, 30, 145, 172, 174, 329, 342, 344, 364–366, 379–381, 387–389, 396, 420, 421, 453, 482 Coke (Edward) 86 Comenius 78, 79 Conner (Walker) 173, 175, 340, 351 Conrad (Earl) 227, 228 Conze (Werner) 9 Coquery-Vidrovitch (Catherine) 158, 273 Corbin (Alain) 155 Cronon (E. David) 214, 216, 219, 223 Crummell (Alexander) 198, 204–207 Cuffee (Paul) 192 Cugoano (Ottobah) 186 Curtin (Philip) 158, 159 Cusset (François) 283, 292, 302

Index of Names Cyril of Alexandria Cyrus (King) 50

74

Damas (Léon) 267 Damasus I (Pope) 72 Darras (Joseph) 101 Dash (J.M.) 306, 313 David (Christian) 79 Davidson (Basil) 240, 241, 262, 447 Dayal (Samir) 435 De la Dehesa (Rafael) 456 Delany (Martin) 193, 195–198 Deleuze (Gilles) 17, 283–285, 293–302, 304, 310, 313, 431 Delumeau (Jean) 82, 86, 87, 140 Demetrius (King) 54 Demetrius the Chronographer 51 Depestre (René) 245 Derrida (Jacques) 283–287, 292–304, 313, 314, 320, 348, 356 Devi (Mahasweta) 303 Diagne (Blaise) 208 Diner (Hasia) ix, 209, 213, 216 Dinur (Ben Zion) 120–122, 124 Diop (Alioune) 236 Diop (Cheikh Anta) 259, 260, 265, 273, 312, 313 Dirlik (Arif) 438 Doellinger (Johan Josef Ignaz) 101 Douglass (Frederick) 196, 198, 201, 204 Douglass (William A.) 403 Drachler (Jacob) 244 Dreyfus (Alfred) 108 Drimmer (Melvin) 245, 246 Dubnow (Simon) 2, 34, 112–115, 132, 142–146, 148, 153, 160, 166, 234, 271, 330, 333, 360, 366, 388 DuBois (William Edward Burghardt) 219 Easton (Hosea) 187 Eban (Abba) 150, 349 Edmondson (Locksley) 175–177 Edwards (Brent Hayes) ix, 3, 231, 232, 237, 246, 428, 435 Eichmann (Adolf) 124, 126 Einstein (Albert) 267 Eisen (Arnold) 32, 58, 125, 127, 130 Eldad ha-Dani 84

583 Eleazar 50–52 Eliasberg (Mordecai) 119 Ellington (Duke) 237 Epicurus 32, 37, 38, 41, 89 Equiano (Olaudah) 189 Esman (Milton) 173, 175 Eusebius 65, 72, 74 Eusebius Hieronymus (Saint Jerome) Eusebius of Caesarea 65, 74 Ewald (Heinrich) 106

72

Fanon (Frantz) 238, 239, 262, 305, 306, 313 Fard (Wallace D.) 221 Farrakhan (Louis) 182, 222, 275, 281 Faulkner (William) 310, 312 Febvre (Lucien) 4, 5, 28 Fels (Samuel) 210 Fisher (Miles Mark) 190, 193 Fletcher (Giles) 85 Flutter (Chloë) 470–472 Földés (Béla) 137 Ford (Arnold Josiah, Rabbi) 218 Ford (Nick Aaron) 259 Fornet (Ambrosio) 397 Fortune (Timothy Thomas) 202 Fossaert (Robert) 345 Foucault (Michel) 28, 283–285, 287–291, 294–301, 303, 304, 313, 314, 317, 326, 329, 348, 498 Fouron (George) 414 Francke (Kuno) 136 Frank (Gelya) 211–214 Frazier (Franklin) 213, 214, 235, 263 Freedman (Maurice) 146–148, 160, 165, 175 Freinkman (Lev) 489 Freud (Sigmund) 123, 298 Frey (Sylvia) 188, 190 Frick (Robert) 36 Fullilove (Michael) 470–472 Fustel de Coulanges (Numa) 3, 4 Fyfe (Christopher) 192, 262, 264 Gabaccia (Donna) ix, 160, 380, 381, 396 Gafni (Isaiah) 59 Gaillard (Anne-Marie) 439, 441 Gaillard (Jacques) 439–441 Galkina (Tamara) 372 Gamlen (Alan) ix, 456, 457, 462, 487, 488

584 Gandhi 467 Gandillac (Maurice de) 297 Garnet (Henry Highland) 187, 191, 194, 197 Garvey (Marcus Mosiah) 169, 181, 191, 199, 214–222, 224, 228, 246, 251, 267, 427 Geiger (Abraham) 106 Gellner (Ernest) 169, 240 Gennadius Scholarius 74, 75 George of Poděbrady 78 George (Pierre) 156 Gerova (Stefka) 480–482 Ghosh (Amitav) 360 Giddens (Anthony) 446, 465 Gide (André) 238, 295 Gilman (Daniel Coit) 203 Gilroy (Paul) ix, 225, 270, 280–282, 313, 316, 318, 319, 322–330, 333, 342, 343, 357, 359–362, 366, 368, 374–376, 378, 386–390, 419, 420, 431, 437 Girard (René) 302 Girodet (Jean) 98 Glazer (Nathan) 251, 263 Glick-Schiller (Nina) 387, 414, 453, 455 Glissant (Edouard) 272, 306–313, 322, 324, 375, 497 Gold (Steven) ix Goldmann (Nahum) 130, 131 Goldschmidt (Henry) 1, 405 Gomez (Michael) 225 Gordon (Aaron David) 110, 111, 118 Gordon (Edmund) 431 Gottmann (Jean) 372, 373 Goulbourne (John) 393 Gouraige (Ghislain) 270 Gourgouris (Stathis) 439 Graetz (Heinrich) 106 Gramsci (Antonio) 160, 303, 304, 314 Green (Nancy) ix, 258, 448, 454 Grégoire (Henri-Baptiste, Abbé) 86, 94 Gregory of Nyssa 74 Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm) 94 Guattari (Félix) 17, 284, 285, 293–296, 300, 310, 312, 313, 431 Gueye (Abdoulaye) 269, 270, 272 Guha (Ranajit) 304, 305, 356, 359 Guilhaumou (Jacques) 10, 11 Guttman (Emmanuel) 173 Gwimmer (W.) 103

Index of Names Ha-am (Ahad) 112–115 Habermas (Jürgen) 354 Hall (Prince) 190 Hall (Stuart) ix, 270, 314, 316–322, 328, 333, 342, 343, 356, 357, 359, 360, 365, 374, 386, 387, 419, 420, 437 Hamartolos (George) 74 Hamilton (Ruth Simms) 266 Hannerz (Ulf) 387, 453 Harding (Vincent) 267, 268 Harl (Marguerite) 2, 38–41, 45, 49–53, 66 Harris (Joseph) 233, 243, 244, 265, 266, 346 Harris (Robert Jr.) 254 Harrison (Hubert Henry) 222, 223 Hart (John Fraser) 201, 228 Hauberg (Clifford) 163 Haüy (René-Just) 100 Hayes (Floyd W. III) 268 Helweg (Arthur W.) 175, 351 Herman (Mordecai, Rabbi) 217 Hernández-Alvarez (J.) 163 Herodotus 30, 31, 187, 191 Herskovits (Melville J.) 211–214, 233, 246, 248, 256, 263, 265, 281 Herzl (Theodor) 105, 107, 108, 110, 116–118, 199–202, 216 Herzog (Jacob) 96, 150 Hess (Moses) 106, 107, 109, 110, 118, 267 Hettlage (Robert) ix, 346–348 Hill (Robert) 181, 208, 209, 215, 216, 219, 495 Hine (Darlene Clark) 432 Hobbes (Thomas) 90, 91 Hobsbawm (Eric) 305 Hockett (Charles) 153, 154, 417 Hodgkin (Thomas) 240 Hody (Humphrey) 51 Hofmannsthal (Hugo von) 495 Hoggart (Richard) 314, 374 Holbach (Paul Henri Dietrich d’) 93 Holly (James T.) 197 Holt (Sidney) 153, 202, 211 hooks (bell) 279–282 Horowitz (Dan) 173, 175 Horton (James “Africanus”) 247 Hovanessian (Martine) ix, 377, 378 Howe (Stephen) 255 Hu-Dehart (Evelyn) 418 Hughes (Everett) 140

Index of Names Hughes (Langston) 237 Hugo (Graeme) 6, 463, 471, 472, 487, 495 Hume (David) 92 Hunter (John) 263 Hus (Jan) 78 Hutton (James) 78, 80 Ikonomu (Theodor) ix, 346, 347 Ionescu (Dina) 484, 487 Irele (Francis Abiola) ix, 232, 236, 242, 243 Irenaeus 52, 82 Irwin (Graham) 244 Isocrates 31 Jászi (Oszkár) 137 Jeffries (Leonard) 275 Jennings (Thomas L.) 194 John Chrysostom 74 Johnson (John H.) 266 Johnson (Marion) 159 Johnston (Harry Hamilton) 136, 247 Jones (Absolom) 190 Jones (LeRoi) 252, 325 Josephus (Flavius) 51–53, 106 Jost (Isaac Markus) 106 Joutard (Philippe) 140 Joyce (James) 288 Justin Martyr 62, 63, 74 Kabila (Laurent-Désiré) 469 Kaké (Ibrahima Baba) 239, 270–272 Kalischer (Zvi Hirsch) 70, 118, 119 Kant (Immanuel) 90, 91, 285, 288, 294 Kaplan (David) ix, 440, 482 Karenga (Maulana) 181, 252, 264, 273 Karnoouh (Lorraine) 414 Kattsoff (Louis) 167, 168 Kedrenos (George) 74 Kelley (Robin G.) 429, 431 Kenny (L.M.) 161 Keohane (Robert) 168 Ketkar (Suhus) 480, 481 Kilson (Martin) ix, 195, 199, 226, 243, 244, 246, 250, 256, 263, 264 King (Martin Luther) 248, 251, 254, 267, 313 Kirby (E. Stuart) 146 Kitchin (Rob) 142, 488, 489 Klossowski (Pierre) 297

585 Kolossov (Vladimir) 372 Kook (Abraham Yitzhak Hacohen, Rav) 120 Koselleck (Reinhart) 5, 9–11, 111 Koser (Khalid) 380, 381, 461, 483 Kouibychev (Mikhaïl) 372 Kraus (Karl) 138 Kung (S.W.) 146 Kuznetsov (Yevgeny) 441, 487, 489

119,

Lacan (Jacques) 284, 302, 314, 348 Lacoste (Yves) 344–346, 348, 369 Lacroix (Bernard) 9 Laguerre (Michel) 421, 468 Lam (Wifredo) 312 Landau (Jacob) 173, 175 Landrin (Xavier) 9 Lange (Johann Peter) 102 Lapeyronnie (Didier) 374 Latchford (Carol) 402 Le Rider (Jacques) 110, 295, 297 Leavis (Frank Raymond) 314 Lee (Rose Hum) 145, 146 Leenhardt (Maurice) 358 Legum (Colin) 240, 241, 262 Lehman (Herbert H.) 210 Leiris (Michel) 312 Lemoine (Maurice) 272 Lengyel (Emil) 141 Lévi-Strauss (Claude) 298 Lévinas (Emmanuel) 286 Levitt (Peggy) ix, 453, 456 Levy (André) 133 Lewis (Bernard) 264 Lie (John) 434, 438 Lilienblum (Moshe Lev) 107, 108 Lincoln (Abraham) 197, 214 Locke (Alain) 213, 237, 246 Locke (John) 91, 92, 134 Lopez (Adalberto) 163 Lovejoy (Paul) 158, 159 Lowell (Lindsay B.) 480–482 Lubrano (Gina) 411 Lukacs (Georg) 324 Lynch (Hollis R.) 194, 198, 200, 201, 220 Lyon (Peter) 11, 97, 160, 172 Lyotard (Jean-François) 284–287, 291, 292, 295, 297, 300, 312, 313

586 Ma Mung (Emmanuel) 368, 371–373, 378, 441 Macartney (Carlile Aylmer) 137, 138 Maddox (Alton) 182 Mafeje (Archie) 332 Maine de Biran (Pierre) 89 Malraux (André) 312 Man (Paul de) 302, 303 Mandelbrot (Benoît) 291, 292, 312 Manning (Patrick) ix, 158, 432 Mannur (Anita) 389 Marcus Aurelius 291 Margate (David) 190 Marienstras (Richard) 33, 86, 172, 173, 351, 352, 378, 388 Marley (Bob) 312 Marrant (John) 190 Mars (Jean-Price) 212, 246 Martin (Tony) 275, 427 Marx (Karl) 294, 298, 304, 314 Matta (Roberto) 312 Mazama (Ama) 181, 277, 282 Mazrui (Ali) 177, 261, 262 McCabe (Edward) 222, 395, 439 McKay (Claude) 234, 237 McKeown (Adam) 29, 30 McMillan (Lewis) 223 Médam (Alain) 370, 375, 378 Meillassoux (Claude) 158 Meillet (Antoine) 4 Mendelsohn (Moses) 70 Menelik II (King) 199 Mercer (Kobena) 316, 318, 319, 343, 359–361, 389 Merton (Robert K.) 7, 8, 145 Métraux (Alfred) 236, 241 Meyer (Jean-Baptiste) 440–443 Michelet (Jules) 89 Milikowsky (Chaïm) 59 Miller (John) 163 Miller (Kelly) 210 Minogue (Kenneth) 169 Mishra (Sudesh) 2, 174, 176, 340–343, 421 Mitchell (Katharyne) 419, 434 Moore (Richard Benjamin) 231, 253 Morin (Edgar) 154, 417 Morris (Milton) 247 Morsell (John A.) 228

Index of Names Moschus (John) 87 Mounier (Emmanuel) 238 Moya (José) ix, 2, 424 Moynihan (Daniel) 251, 263 Muhammad (Elijah) 221, 222, 224, 251 Mumford (Lewis) 136 Münz (Rainer) 30 Myres (John Linton) 135, 136 Nardal (Jeanne and Paulette) 238 Nathan of Gaza 109 Nebuchadnezzar (King) 35, 93 Neusner (Jacob) 55, 57, 58, 67, 69 Neveu (Catherine) 374 Newton (Huey) 248 Nietzsche (Friedrich) 1, 28, 288, 291, 295–301, 326 Nkrumah (Kwame) 223, 229 Nordau (Max) 107, 110, 118 Norris (Christopher) 314 Nossiter (Adam) 410 Nye (Joseph) 168, 256 Ohliger (Rainer) 30 Olivella (Manuel Zapata) 272, 427 Ong (Aihwa) 357, 360, 426, 436 Origen 65, 66, 74, 82 Østergaard-Nielsen (Eva) ix, 456, 460 Ottley (Roi) 228 Paden (John) 256, 257 Padmore (George) 216, 229 Palmer (Colin) 428, 430, 432 Palonen (Kari) 10 Pan (Lynn) 357 Park (Robert) 144, 145, 214, 233–235, 239, 241 Parnell (Charles Stewart) 202 Passeron (Jean-Claude) 24, 282, 295, 374 Patterson (Orlando) ix, 316 Patterson (Tiffany Ruby) 419, 429, 431 Pennington (James W.C.) 187, 191 Perlow (Aaron) 112 Perse (Saint-John) 312 Petachiah of Regensburg 84 Philo of Alexandria 51, 53 Photios 74 Pierson (Donald) 233–235 Pinsker (Leo) 105, 107, 108, 116

Index of Names Pinto (Louis) 295, 297, 301, 404 Plato 12, 31, 294 Plutarch 31, 32, 38, 89 Pocock (John) 8, 10 Podhoretz (Norman) 258 Pomerantz (Gregory) 166, 167 Pompey 54 Ponce de Leon (Zedillo) 478 Pound (Ezra) 312 Prévélakis (Georges) 370–373, 378, 441 Price (Tanya) 281 Price (Thomas) 246, 323 Ptolemy I 50 Pufendorf (Samuel) 89, 90 Radhakrishnan (Rajagopalan) 358, 360, 389, 437 Ragazzi (Francesco) ix, 421, 470 Rageau (Jean-Pierre) 30, 273, 345, 346, 348, 369 Rai (Shirin) 380 Ramsay (William) 62 Rao (Milind) 439 Ratha (Dilip) 480, 481 Raulin (Anne) ix, 369, 370 Rawidowicz (Simon) 32, 111, 125 Raz-Krakotzkin (Amnon) 68, 69, 122, 123 Reichel (Edward) 103 Reis (Michèle) 29, 471 Renan (Ernest) 101 Rendtorff (Franz) 37, 38 Reubéni (David) 84 Rex (John) 365 Rey (Alain) 6, 27, 98 Richter (Melvin) 10, 94 Robert (Paul) 98 Robinson (Mary) 475 Rojas (Fabien) 249, 250, 256, 266 Rokyzan 78 Roman (Charles Victor) 202, 203 Rose (Peter) 263 Rosenwald (Julius) 210, 249 Rotberg (Robert) 226, 243, 244, 246, 256, 263, 264 Rotschild (Lionel Walter, Lord) 208 Rouleau (Eric) 162 Roumain (Jacques) 267 Rousseau (Jean-Jacques) 90, 91, 286

587 Rushdie (Salman) 305, 354, 357 Rutherford (Alasdair) 487 Rutherford (Jonathan) 320, 356 Safran (William) ix, 70, 118, 174, 342, 343, 351–353, 357, 360, 361, 364–367, 370, 377, 378, 381, 387, 389, 390, 394, 418, 419, 421–424, 469, 471 Said (Edward) 123, 302–305, 313, 324, 358, 359 Saila (Saul B.) 153 Saillant (John) 190 Saint Augustine 64, 65, 82, 83, 88 Saint Clair Drake (John Gibb) 181, 183, 188, 227, 235, 264–266, 324, 360 Sam (Alfred) 215 Samuel (Maurice) 149 San Juan (Epifanio Jr.) 358, 398, 399 Sanders (Daniel) 94 Sanguin (André-Louis) 373, 374 Sapir (Jacob) 84 Sarkissian (Kourken) 349 Sarolea (Charles) 140–142, 144 Sartre (Jean-Paul) 24, 238 Satzewich (Vic) 162, 380, 381 Saunders (Prince) 197 Saussure (Ferdinand de) 348 Sayad (Abdelmalek) 450–452 Schaff (Philip) 96, 102 Schiff (Jacob) 210 Schlegel (August-Wilhelm von) 499 Schmidt (Karl Ludwig) 2, 36–38, 64, 106 Schmitter-Heisler (Barbara) 454 Schnapper (Dominique) 2, 29, 33, 341, 368, 378, 382, 423, 424 Schrödinger (Erwin) 498 Schulz (Helena Lindholm) 161, 380, 381 Schweinitz (Edmund of) 78, 80, 96 Seale (Bobby) 248 Segalen (Victor) 312 Selassie (Haile) 218, 219, 316 Senghor (Lamine) 237 Senghor (Leopold Sédar) 237–240, 267 Seton-Watson (Hugh) 171, 172 Seton-Watson (Robert) 141, 142 Shafak (Elif) 409 Shah (Prakash) 397 Shapiro (Karl) 266, 267

588

Index of Names

Sheffer (Gabriel) ix, 16, 32, 33, 97, 127, 173–177, 217, 342, 343, 346–348, 351, 352, 360, 364, 366, 367, 369–373, 375, 377, 378, 386–390, 418, 419, 421, 469, 470 Shepperson (George) 226, 232, 233, 242–247, 262, 264–266, 271, 315, 323 Shuval (Judith) 29, 394 Simmel (Georg) 144 Simon (Emmanuelle) 277 Simon (Gildas) 369, 370 Simon (Pierre-Jean) 351 Simon-Barouh (Ida) 351 Simondon (Gilbert) 293 Simpson (George Eaton) 154, 264 Singhvi (Laxmi Mall) 459 Skinner (Elliott P.) 266, 351 Skinner (G. William) 147 Skinner (Quentin) 8, 10 Smart (Ninian) 343, 344, 348, 419 Smelser (Neil) 388 Smith (Anthony D.) 169, 170 Smith (Robert) 456, 464 Snowden (Frank Jr.) 264 Soja (Edward) 256 Solomos (John) 313, 393 Sophocles 31 Sorre (Maximilien) 155, 156, 160 Sourani (Jamal) 161 Soysal (Yasemin) 425 Spener (Philip Jacob) 80 Spitzer (Leo) 8, 246 Spivak (Gayatri Chakravorty) 302–305, 329, 356, 358, 359 Stael (Madame de) 89 Starobinski (Jean) 6, 17, 23 Steiner (George) 23, 133 Sternberg (Yitzhak) ix, 16, 421 Stoberg (Friedrich Leopold) 100 Stuiber (Alfred) 2, 37 Supervielle (Jules) 312 Symeon the new Theologian 74 Symmachus 66, 67, 77 Syncellus (George) 74 Talon (Brigitte) 272 Tatla (Darshan Singh) Taylor (John F.) 201 Tertullian 65

380, 381

Thelwell (Mike) 254 Theodoret 74 Theodotion 66, 77 Theophilus of Alexandria 82 Thom (René) 292 Thomas (William) 235 Thompson (Edward P.) 305, 314, 374 Thucydides 30, 31 Todorov (Tzvetan) 302 Tölölyan (Khachig) ix, 31, 340, 341, 347–351, 353, 357, 360, 378, 383, 388–390, 411, 416, 417, 419, 422, 423 Torpey (John) 468 Toynbee (Arnold) 142, 148–153, 160, 166, 496 Turner (Henry McNeal) 199, 215 Uran (Steve) ix, 130 Uya (Okon Edet) 193, 194, 247 Vajpayee (Atal Bihari) 459 Valley (Eli) 127, 128 Van den Berghe (Pierre) 161, 175, 263 Van Hear (Nicholas) 380, 425 Van Unnik (Wilem Cornelis) 37, 38, 40, 41, 53, 71 Vassallo (Carmel) 394 Vertovec (Steven) 2, 172, 344, 379–382, 387, 388, 419, 471 Villani (Arnaud) 17 Vivès (Valence Luis) 51, 101 Voltaire 92, 93 Wade (Abdulaye) 331–333 Walker (Clarence) 275, 427 Walker (David) 192–194 Walpole (Sir Horace) 7 Walters (Ronald) 269 Walvin (James) 429 Wang (Gungwu) 398–400 Warburg (Felix) 12, 210, 252 Washington (Booker T.) 203–205, 214–216, 239 Weber (Max) 39, 446 Weigand (Friedrich Ludwig Karl) 94 Weil (François) ix, 315, 446, 448, 449, 454 Weinar (Agnieszka) 483 Weiner (Myron) 173, 175 Weingrod (Alex) 133

Index of Names West (Dorothy) 237 Weston (Edward) 99 Whitfield (James Monroe) 197 Wieviorka (Michel) ix, 374 Wilkins (Roy) 86, 228 Wilkinson (D.H.) 153 Wilks (Ivor) 157, 158 Willems (Emilio) 235 Williams (Henry Sylvester) 200 Williams (Raymond) 314, 374 Wilson (Carlton) 232, 243, 430 Wirth (Louis) 146, 168, 235 Wittgenstein (Ludwig) 12, 13, 285 Wood (Betty) 188, 190 Woods (Leonard) 103 Woodson (Carter Goodwin) 249, 252 Wynter (Sylvia) 254

589 X (Malcolm)

221, 251, 252, 313

Yacine (Kateb) 312 Yerushalmi (Yosef Hayim) 69, 87, 120, 121 Yohanan (Rabbi) 65 Young (Robert) 191 Yuval (Jacob) 65, 68, 120, 190 Zedekiah (King) 35 Zedong (Mao) 460 Zeleza (Paul Tiyambe) 429–431 Zevi (Sabbataï) 87, 109, 112, 121 Ziegler (Jean) 244 Zinzendorf (Nicolas) 78–80, 100, 102, 103 Zumthor (Paul) 82 Zunz (Leopold) 106