Kevin Kenny*

The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean? 

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived outside the biblical land of Israel.”

A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement, Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion.

Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group that moves from one place to another.

The key period of expansion in the usage of diaspora was the half-century after World War II. The reasons are not hard to find. During the era of decolonization, globally scattered populations of African origin forged new transnational bonds of solidarity. Migrant and ethnic communities of Asian origin (e.g., ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Vietnam or South Asians in East Africa) were expelled from their adopted countries. Global migration assumed a massive new scale. And the international recognition of refugees brought new attention to involuntary migration in particular.

With the proliferation of usage, inevitably, came a decline in coherence. Diaspora is now virtually a synonym for “migration” and “ethnic group”—two related but distinct terms that duplicate the basic bifurcation in the dictionary definition. And because diaspora is now used so broadly, it has lost its analytical bite.

Over the last generation, sociologists and political scientists have responded to this conceptual confusion by constructing elaborate typologies concerning the origins, scale, nature, and character of diasporas. Their goal is clarify, once and for all, which kinds of migration and ethnic group count as diasporic, and which do not.

But typologies have some obvious drawbacks.They can be arbitrary: Who gets to decide on the criteria? Conversely, they can be over-inclusive, with all forms of population movement lumped together under the ecumenical umbrella of diaspora. Between the two extremes lies the checklist approach: Tick off seven out of ten requirements and your group qualifies as diasporic. But if these requirements belong to different orders of experience—some concerning the process of migration and others the lives of migrants abroad—comparison between diasporas becomes impossible. The result is incoherence.

In the end, trying to pin the term diaspora down under a single, fixed definition is futile. Yet leaving its meaning entirely open-ended drains the term of analytical value. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

For historians, the solution is to reframe the question. Instead of seeking a definitive answer to the timeless and static question “What is a diaspora?” we can examine evidence to determine how and why people use the idea in specific times and places.

Approached in this way, diaspora is neither a process nor a thing, but an idea that people use to make sense of the world created by migration. But what kinds of people? Scholars like us? Policy makers and governments? Or migrants in their everyday lives? In other words, is diaspora a category of analysis or a category of practice? The answer is that it is both.

Diaspora is not simply a construct that scholars use to analyze the social, cultural, or political world. It is also an idea that migrants use to make sense of their everyday experience and that governments deploy for political and economic purposes.

As an idea, diaspora has three overlapping elements that vary in relevance depending on the historical circumstances. These can be labeled as follows: relocation, connection, and return. It should be added that people do not necessarily need to use the word “diaspora” to think about migration issues within this framework.

The first element is relocation. If diaspora meant the same thing as migration, both words would not be necessary. The idea of diaspora allows us to distinguish between migration in general and particular forms of migration. Diaspora has its greatest explanatory power when applied to involuntary migration—involving, for example, slavery, famine, or genocide.

The second element is connection. When the members of a migrant community in a given country of settlement involve themselves in the affairs of their homeland, they may or may not begin to see themselves as a diaspora. This form of interaction, after all, is commonplace. But when the connections in question involve not only the homeland, but also a web of globally scattered communities, they assume a multipolar rather than a unilinear form. The interrelated communities can then be seen as nodes within a diasporic network or web.

The third and final element of diaspora is return. Every conception of diaspora features a homeland, whether real or imagined. Return to this homeland can be literal, as in the Zionist movement, but it is more often metaphorical or spiritual. The great majority of African-descended people in the Americas, for example, could never hope to move literally to Africa. But this very fact helps explains the cultural and political potency of their desire to do so.

Relocation, connection, return: These are the three elementary aspects that make up the idea of diaspora. Together they constitute a powerful framework for thinking about migration.

Kevin Kenny is Professor History at Boston College. He is author of Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

So how do we public scholars bridge that gap? How do we produce work that can speak both to academics and general readers? For me, the answer lies, at least in part, in a two-pronged approach: in my Introduction I explicitly address these questions for fellow academics, arguing that we scholars need to do more to bring our shared knowledge to broader public audiences; and then my three main chapters represent case studies in that approach, that is, efforts to write about subjects currently of interest to academic historians in such a way that will also enlighten a broader audience.

As I take the next steps with the project, seeking spaces and conversations where I can share its ideas, I continue to consider these questions, and to work on finding a voice and approach that can speak to different communities. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject and, of course, on the book!

Ben Railton is associate professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (University of Alabama Press, 2007). He maintains the daily AmericanStudies blog (http://americanstudier.blogspot.com).

Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis Island immigration station. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943. 

Where did these federal restriction laws come from? While episodes of immigration control at the federally run landing stations might sound familiar to people interested in United States history, immigration policy before Ellis Island and Angel Island is not so well known, even to American historians.

Some of the roots of American immigration control can be traced back to earlier immigration laws in seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute passengers and foreign paupers. While New York and Massachusetts were most successful in institutionalizing immigrant exclusion (denial of admission), the Bay State went further by implementing policies for deporting immigrant paupers already in the state. These state policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law that developed from the late 19th century onward.

As important as the succession of law from state to federal levels was how state officials enforced immigration control. In Massachusetts, for example, officials made little distinction between noncitizens and naturalized citizens in deporting Irish immigrant paupers. Immigrants were also deported without necessary court warrants, thus illegally. In criticizing the manner of removal in the state, a Boston newspaper declared in 1855 that humans were being sent from Massachusetts to the other side of the Atlantic with less formality and documentation than “the sending of a tub of butter, or a barrel of apples, from Fitchburg to Boston.”

The deportation of citizens, the coercive treatment of undesirable foreigners, and the inhumanity associated with removal proceedings all characterized the implementation of later federal immigration law, especially when it came to Asians and Mexicans.

Hidetaka Hirota is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99 (March 2013), winner of the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.