The Mellon Fellowship Program is designed to explore, test and refine the concept of diaspora in contemporary usage, a term that, despite its existence for almost two millennia and current extraordinary expansion, still resists clear definition. We are soliciting applications for Postdoctoral Fellows whose work addresses the conceptual complexity of the term and seeks to advance our understanding of the phenomena to which it refers, both through a theoretical examination of the concept as such and via the ways in which its use in the Humanities for the study of diasporic cultures, communities, arts and literatures can help to bring analytic coherence to the term.

“Diaspora” derives from the Greek diaspeirein, “to scatter” or disperse. Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War uses the term to describe the destruction of the city of Aegina, the result of which was the uprooting, scattering and exile of its population across the Hellenic world. A wider and more durable use derived from its appearance in the Greek translation of the Torah known as the Septuagint. It occurs in Deuteronomy (28:25) to narrate the coerced scattering of Jews from Jerusalem into Babylonian exile (in Hebrew, galut), both as an event and as a punishment for sin, thus over-laying the concept with a traumatic origin and burdened future. When joined to the notion of a desire to return to the lost homeland the use of diaspora to describe the experience of dispersion became paradigmatic, signifying not only exile, but an alienated and often oppressed state of being that, however perduring, would one day be redeemed by return and the reconstitution of the lost, originary land of dwelling, the image of which is preserved through collective memory and ritual practice. It was this sense that later was applied to the Armenians, the African Diaspora and a wide range of comparable uses, which have served to inflect the idea of diaspora in a variety of ways.

Diaspora is also employed metaphorically to characterize alien residents, political refugees, and ethnic and racial minorities, thus adding to the already overly rich stew of referants. Perhaps the one common thread that runs through the various definitions of 'diaspora' is that of 'de-territorialized identities.' The concept of 'de-territorialized' identities seems to have arisen as a means to evade the risk of essentializing racial, ethnic or minority identities by theorizing hybridized ones, but almost by definition must posit a residual core identity that is nonetheless subject to the splitting implied by the very condition of diasporic existence. As a conceptual device, the idea of 'de-territorialized identity' seems to reflect the recognition that in the context of a world increasingly marked by migrations, cultural as well as economic globalization, allegiance and hence identity are constantly being redefined. Yet it also provides an analytical framework that allows scholars to talk about these processes from a global perspective, one independent of the nation-state as the framing unit of discussion.

The proliferation of meanings and uses that the term “diaspora” is currently experiencing has produced such rapidly changing discursive and semantic domains that Khachig Tololyn suggests that it is “in danger of becoming a promiscuously capacious category that is taken to include all the adjacent phenomena to which it is linked but from which it actually differs in ways that are constitutive, that in fact make a viable definition of diaspora possible.” Moreover, the tendency to combine the social and historical processes that are constitutive of a diaspora and the cultural meanings that such a position produces generates a tension at the heart of the concept. Clearly the time has come to attempt to bring order to the concept of diaspora, whose growing discursive popularity and expanding use in academic circles suggests that it possesses a certain intellectual and affective power that endows it with a utility whose precise significance is not easily grasped.

By bringing together scholars from diverse fields and disciplines in the Humanities, we hope to probe the concept of “diaspora” by submitting it to a series of internal and comparative questions: what is the conceptual core of the idea of “diaspora” and how can it be applied across time and space; what makes displacement “diasporic” in contrast to migrations of all kinds, whether forced or voluntary; what is the role of collective memory and social ritual in sustaining a perceived sense of connection to the lost homeland, even after ten or more generations of life “elsewhere?” How is “diaspora” differentially experienced by various peoples and does that difference derive from the nature of the people, the kind of diaspora in which they participate, or the reception they find in the receiving countries? That is to say, under what conditions are diasporic identities allowed or able to flourish?

Can cultural artifacts – music, art, folkways, rituals, languages and religions—operate as substitutes for and thereby support disaggregated and/or hybrid identities in the world of diasporic formations?; to what extent might such cultural productions, alone, be the bearers of displaced identities or must they be accompanied by the continuing use of the language of origin to achieve their full effects; indeed, what is the role of language as a vehicle of identity and does creolization and/or bilingualism necessarily diffuse its significance? Can imagined communities operate with the force of historically generated ones, and what role do they play in the expanding transnational circuits of a globalizing world? These are some of the questions that we will seek to answer in a comparative fashion, by appointing scholars whose work addresses them both in theory and in practice, that is, in the research they undertake that bears on and conceptually controls the concept of “diaspora.”