How to Read a DiasporaBrent
Edwards Abstract: What does it mean to read a diaspora? Clearly, to ask such a question is not only to ask what a diaspora is—and how it is written—but also to ask, what is it to read? If diaspora first of all involves a certain “dispersal,” a moving-out in time and in space, then reading a diaspora would seem to have to involve a moving-out as well: a scattered embrace of scattering, as it were. I take up these questions in the midst of a remarkable rush to appropriate the term, in a variety of disciplines, to a variety of ends. Here I will consider what it is to read a diaspora in only one arena, with regard to only one of the so-called new diasporas, the African diaspora, which as Khachig Tölölyan has argued, may be marked by a particular “exceptionality” in its formation. |