This module will examine theoretical understandings of diaspora, its relationship with associated ideas such as migration, cosmopolitanism and
transnationalism, and its significance as an analytical tool for understanding modern social and cultural
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formations. It centres on the analysis of the cultural and social concomitants of transnational migration and diaspora in the post-colonial world.
Whilst issues such as globalisation, the international division of labour and the state remain important to this, the emphasis throughout the module
is upon the lived experience: the ways in which different people experience and make meaningful migration, displacement, and difference. Here,
‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are key phrases. Crucially too, we shall be investigating the implications of large scale movement for academic
as well as more popular understandings of ‘culture.’ Theoretical perspectives on migration and migrant communities have changed radically in the
last twenty to thirty years, moving from consideration of ‘assimilation’, ethnic minorities and multi-culturalism, to contemporary debates
concerning cultural hybridity, ‘borderlands’ and the trope of ‘mobilities.’
Recent research on diasporic communities has focused on the politics of identity, the experience of place and the meanings of ascribed ethnicity.
Rather than being fixed, bounded and homogeneous, diasporas are perceived to be changing, contested and hybrid. However, a growing number of social
researchers are now concerned with understanding cultural identity as neither fixed essence nor utterly contingent and fragmented. More
specifically, there has been a reassessment of questions concerning sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity, age and ‘race’ in relation to broader
questions of culture, nation, and multilocal spaces of belonging. Diverse identifications intersect with other categorisations of everyday life and
they are contextually contingent.
What are the theoretical and methodological implications of diasporic cultures and peoples? What might a ‘post-modern’ approach involve and what
perspectives might this bring to questions of culture and place? What are the implications of this sense of constant impermanence, displacement,
flux, fragmentation and change? How are places constructed, remembered and narrated by diasporic groups? Furthermore, how is diaspora used as a
theoretical concept to challenge fixed understandings of identity and
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place? How do we account for the sense of migrancy and at times exile that diasporas experience? How are multiple, hybrid, new and symbolic
identifications negotiated, (re) produced, (re) constructed and translated in everyday life? What is the role of virtual diasporas and how is the
agency of digital diasporic communities understood in the age of information technology? What are the implications of diasporic consciousness in
articulating identities and the politics of identity?
Suggested module core theme structure
� Introduction to theories of diasporas and migration
� Space, identities and transnationalism
� Identities in diaspora
� Creative/Interactive learning workshop: diasporas and film � Re-thinking home and beloning in mobility
� Ethnicity and the racialisation of diasporic communities � Exile and ‘integration’
� Gender, ‘race’, class and the global city
� Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and hybridity
� Moving beyond mobilities and diasporas
� Deterritorialisation, Displacement and the Search for Belonging
� Diasporic Ageing & Sexualities
� Citizenship and Social Justice: A critical de/construction of diasporas � Creative/Interactive learning workshop: presentations and debates
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