Diasporas

This short essay explores the modern disciplinary application of the term ‘diaspora’ to non-Jewish and non-Christian people, that was first undertaken within African studies as early as1965, when George Shepperson spoke of the enforced expatriation of Sub-Saharan Africans through the colonial slave trade as the African Diaspora, accompanied by a longing to return to the homeland. It further focuses on how African Diaspora subsumed the global dispersion of Africans throughout history, and the consequent emergence of a cultural identity based on origin and social condition. In particular, it discusses how, as the term took off, it also became applied within Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, in order to investigate migrant groups with regard to their socio-economic position and the range of tolerance and repression they faced in multiethnic states. Diaspora came to be understood in its social and political relations to homeland and the hosting nation-state and culture.