Colonialism and Diaspora

1
Colonialism and Diaspora

• Lecture Outline
• 1. Defining Diaspora in a New World Context
• 2. Diaspora Experience and the Problem of
  Identity
• - Blackness as invisibility (normalizing gaze
• and the social imaginary)
• - Blackness as double-consciousness

2
Definition of Diaspora

• Greek verb to disperse dia (through) and
  speirein (sow/scatter)
• The migration of a community through forced or
  self-willed exile and the efforts of that
  community to recreate home in new geographic
  spaces
• Diaspora implies exile or bondage and the promise
  of return.

3
Definition of Diaspora

• Galut
• - exile or bondage
• Golah
• - a relatively stable
• community in exile

4
Diaspora
past
present
future
Citizenship
History
Promise of Return
5
Stuart Hall

• The paradox is that it was the uprooting of
• slavery and transportation and the insertion
• into the plantation economy (as well as the
• symbolic economy) of the Western world that
• unified these peoples across their
• differences, in the same moment as it cut
• them off from direct access to their past
• (Cultural Identity and Diaspora 227).

6
Frantz Fanon

• Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But
  in my own
• case I knew that these statements were false. . .
  Yet it was
• always the Negro teacher, the Negro doctor. . .
  .if the physician
• made a mistake it would be the end of him and of
  all who came
• after him. What could one expect, after all, from
  a Negro
• physician? As long as everything went well, he
  was praised to
• the skies, but look out, no nonsense under any
  conditions! The
• black physician can never be sure how close he is
  to disgrace
• . . . No exception was made for my refined
  manners, or my
• knowledge of literature, or my understanding of
  the quantum
• theory (117).

7
Frantz Fanon

• And so it is not I who make a meaning for
  myself, but it is the meaning that was already
  there, pre-existing, waiting for me (134).
• The white world, the only honorable one, barred
  me from all participation. A man was expected to
  behave like a man. I was expected to behave like
  a black manor at least a nigger (114).

8
W.E.B Du Bois

• One ever feels his two-ness,--an
• American, a Negro two souls, two
• thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two
• warring ideals in one dark body, whose
• dogged strength alone keeps it from
• being torn asunder (Souls of Black Folk
• 11).

9
Arnold Rampersad

• Another way of seeing these two souls
• surely is as a contest between memory
• and amnesia. American culture demands
• of its blacks amnesia concerning slavery
• and Africa, just as it encourages amnesia
• of a different kind in whites (Slavery
• and the Literary Imagination 307).

10
W.E.B. Du Bois

• as I face Africa I ask myself what is it
  between
• us that constitutes a tie I can feel better than
  I can
• explain? Africa is, of course, my fatherland. Yet
  
• neither my father nor my fathers father ever saw
  
• Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for
• itone thing is sure and that is that since the
• fifteenth century these ancestors of mine and
  their
• other descendants have had a common history
• have suffered a common disaster and have one
• long memory (Dusk of Dawn 117).

11
Stuart Hall

• as well as the many points of similarity, there
  
• are also critical points of deep and significant
• difference which constitute what we really are
• or rathersince history has intervenedwhat
• we have become. We cannot speak for very
• long, with any exactness, about one experience,
• one identity without acknowledging its other
• sidethe ruptures and discontinuities which
• constitute, precisely, the Caribbeans
• uniqueness (Cultural Identity and Diaspora 225)