Theorising Diaspora: Nationalist Discourse in Shaping Diasporic Subjects

Identities of individuals or communities undergo waves of changes and modifications of the constituents of the embodiment they are represented. Diasporic subjects play a crucial role in the process of identifying the individuals as well as the communities since they reintroduce new perspectives to approach allegiances and categorisations. The paper debates the diaspora from a theoretical perspective focalising the role of the positionality of the bearers in participating in the construction of the diasporic apprehension in light of the nationalist discourse. It probes the dispersion and detachment of the diasporic subject and the probations of developing diverse identity allegiances while associating themselves with a group or community. It presents different strategies of the individuals in reconnecting to an embodiment of articulations. The very particular elements by which one can distinguish a diasporic subject from those of the others are, themselves, open to restructuring and reformulating. Diasporic identities are not the only variable that goes through the process of development and re-articulation that introduces new aspects to the entity of diaspora. As much as the reformulations that are made to the subjects themselves, what makes up their beings is affected by changes in perspectives toward them. Therefore, the process of re-enunciation contributes to adding new dimensions to the fundamental characteristics that make them distinctive rather than simply reproducing different viewpoints on the subjects and changes to what establishes them.


INTRODUCTION
The essentialist discourse of identity inclines to postulate identity as having an objective and permanent core, which is inherent in and defines individuals.In his essay, Aronowitz contends that "the older theories tended to posit 'society' and the 'individual' as fixed".(Aronowitz, 1995) According to this view, individuals are believed to have an unchanging defining faculty, a core quality or an essence that makes possible their classification within certain definite categories.Examples of these essences are gender, race, nationality, or ethnicity.These qualities, as is obvious, are often conspicuous and external.Amin Maalouf furthers this idea of the identification that is based on external factors; "Identity is in the first place a matter of symbols, even of appearances".(Maalouf, 2001) These external factors allow members of the same 'tribe' to both recognize each other, and the 'Other'.
Stuart Hall further reflects on the idea of an old discourse of identity that brought forth an understanding of identity as determined in a world marked by effective changes.By invoking the notion of the Cartesian subject, Hall emphasises the domination of a fixed perspective on identity in Western philosophy.(Hall, Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities, 1997) Moreover, authenticity worked as a defence strategy against the relentless changes that are coming about in the world.Hall suggests that the traditional discourses of identity "contain(s) the notion of the true self, some real self inside there, hiding inside the husks of all the false selves that we present to the rest of the world.It is a kind of guarantee of authenticity."(Hall, Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities, 1997) The traditional logic of identity, therefore, considers the return to an authentic culture, a certain determined and determining origin, a defining feature of the individual.It also determines our perception of both the "inside and the outside, of the self and other, of the individual and society, of the subject and the object" (Hall, Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities, 1997), in a steadily determined set of principles.It classifies the entities within a certain group with which they consort, and to whose ethics they adapt.Hall remarks that these categories, which are inscribed within what he calls collective identities fix the essentialist discourse and perception of the self.The way subjects think of themselves has been constructed and cemented through these collaborative identities.These significant collective social identities contributed to preserving the logic of the identification in place that emerged quite certain at the very beginning of the debate.

The "Unhomely Identity Construction" between duality and locality.
The essentialist discourse of identity, as has already been thoroughly discussed, tends to associate the individual's identity with an invariable central dissimilarity, which advocates a self-held in the universe, wherein the difference is not brooked and even more dangerously, considered as a menace to the cohesion of the entity's identity.However, the modern discourses of identity all tend to go against the essentialist conception of identity set-up and formation that views the subjects' identities as unified and homogeneous bodies that could be combined under one broader sense of identification.Still, this does not entail that the anti-essentialist views observe and defend the presence of these identities in absolute unframed and disconnected interrelations with the characteristics that make up an entity in opposition to others.Chris Barker notes that the: anti-essentialist position … points us to the political nature of identity as a production ….directs us to the possibility of multiple, shifting, and fragmented identities that can be articulated in a variety of ways" (Chris, 2000) Identity, thus, is constructed discursively and is open to alteration of space, time and usage.It is a criticism of the structuralist determination of the set-up and the historicity of its scrutiny which is grounded in a substantial part on binarism and the certainty in the prospect of arriving at a secure acquaintance through the projecting of variances within constructions.The unknowability and indeterminacy of the subject and the impossibility of fixation on certain identities result in what Stuart Hall terms a 'crisis of identity'.The subject is no longer regarded as having an anchor in race, ethnicity or nationality, as all these concepts have been decentred vigorously through "a variety of interdisciplinary areas, all of them … critical of the notion of an integral, originary and unified identity."(Hall, Who needs 'identity'?, 1996) A new understanding of the concept of identity, thus, emerges to the surface jeopardising any claims to oneness or originality to interrogations of relativism and reductionism.Hall accentuates the fragmented nature of identity in modern times and how it has come to be understood as something unfixed and ever-changing.He argues that: … identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions.They are subject to a radical historicization and are constantly in the process of change and transformation.(Hall, Who needs 'identity'?, 1996) What is important to note here is the idea that identity is not given but made; it is not already there; it is constructed through a number of discourses, practices, and positions.The postcolonial version of modernity seeks to empower and reaffirm the identity of the oncecolonised and embed the postcolonial subject with a sense of active agency.This is mainly where the postcolonial theory differs from postmodernism; the former empowers subjects; the latter undermines them.Childs and Williams comment on the process stating that: Post-colonial texts are also recuperative.As well as revisiting and revising history, like postmodernism, are interested in relearning the role of the colonized as agent and combatant, as the historical subject that postmodernism undermines.(Childs & Williams, 2013) While postmodernism is concerned with decentring liberal humanism's notions of the individual and progress, postcolonialism is much more concerned with the idea of an alienated subject.It is evident that the postmodern narrative of identity as an impossibility is not opposed to the postcolonial notion of "alienation".Homi Bhabha takes the problem of agency as a collective narrativization of the enquiry of identity formation.He goes on to develop a different kind of modernity, postcolonial modernity that he recognizes as a site for proclaiming cultural differences and agency: The power of the postcolonial translation of modernity rests in its performative, deformative structure that does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition, or transpose values 'cross-culturally'.The cultural inheritance of slavery or colonialism is brought before modernity, not to resolve its historic differences into a new totality, nor to forego its traditions.It is to introduce another locus of inscription and intervention, another hybrid, 'inappropriate' enunciative site, through that temporal split […] for the signification of postcolonial agency.Differences in culture and power are constituted through the social conditions of enunciation: the temporal caesura, which is also the historically transformative moment, when a lagged space opens up in-between the intersubjective 'reality of signs … deprived of subjectivity' (Bhabha H. K., 1994) The postcolonial critics aim at affirming and centralising a postcolonial identity.It is clear that the reason behind the preference of many postcolonial theorists to conceive identity formation post-structurally, rather than relying on the postmodern critique of modernity.The decentring of the subject and the rendering transparent the different conditions of the formation of subject positions has been a prominent goal in postcolonial theory.Hall scrutinises the dilemma proving that the gap created between the unattained subjectivity is what allows for the intervention and presence of newly dimensional aspects in the formation of the identity.Thus, bearing all the background notions that have articulated themselves either in the discourses brought by the colonised or those existing with the 'natives', the process of building up identities is manifested, as well, in the created space that allows for the cultural enunciation that produces transformative legacies.Appropriating Foucault's notion of discourse and discursive practices allows Said to analyse the discourse of Orientalism in relation to all the discursive practices surrounding it.He ardently opposes the idea of the 'essential Orientality of the orient" and proposes that the idea of the Orient as such is a construct: [Yet] what gave the Oriental's world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West" (Said, Orientalism, 1977) Along with the power relationship, mastery of knowledge as well as its advocation results in producing a whole range of characterisations that set the Rest as determined subjects through the gaze of the producers of the discourse.Determinism in this sense is the focal point the postcolonial theorists oppose and criticise fervently to set a counter-discursive knowledge and representation.Conversely, the debate that has been disquieting the production of the notions in postcolonial theory is setting up a body of knowledge, that can stand against or analogous to the colonial discourses, based on the determinant perspectives and finite toward the subjectivity of postcolonial agents.
Potentially, the struggles for belonging that many people in diasporic collectivities involve themselves in have dramatically subverted the centrality of any essentialist claims to fixed homes or origins.It may well be argued that diasporic formations, together with their consciousness of difference and dislocation/ location, hardheartedly destabilise the ideal of a homogeneous nation.The latter aspires to articulate nation identities through congealing subjects to territories, to supply an original conception of home and belonging.Newly emerged identities originally from previously colonised territories result in reorienting the perspectives that approach identity formation and debating the aspects that decide on the individual's categorisation and belonging.Diasporic subjects have forced themselves into the literature of identifications and manifest their legacies in being set as an entity that would be viewed and dealt with based on specific norms and basic references.Before the discussion that will be painstakingly administered, providing a methodological overview of 'Diaspora', as a notion, and its dimensional conceptions from different angles should be anteriorly established.
Diaspora is the term often used today to describe practically any population which is conceived 'de-territorialised' or 'transnational'; that is, which has originated in a land other than which it currently exists, and whose social, economic and political systems traverse the borders of nation-states or, indeed, bridge the globe.These 'minorities' have grown in number as well as in awareness of their present situation which renders their positionalities distinguished within a given society.The participation of its individuals, as well as group advocates, would help in broadening the sense of belonging to lately constructed identities that have gained features that can be neither part of the culture they originated from nor even those they host them.In recent years, intellectuals and activists from within these populations have progressively begun to employ the term 'diaspora' to define themselves.James Clifford notes, 'Diasporic language [which] appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse.'(Clifford, Further Inflections: Toward Ethnographies of the Furture, 1994) The use of the term as a reference to a process of identification of a certain group of individuals would suggest the requirement of defining it and limiting its scope to be allowed into the stream of theory and be denotative to a system through which both works of literature, as well as individual, can fit into and identify themselves under the scope the diasporic theory would provide.Diaspora became a tendency for academic discussions in the early 1990s extending itself through various fields of studies creating a new tone of criticism to what the world has been facing as an emerging phenomena.Among the strategies that diasporic discourses provide to academia is going beyond the bipolarity in viewing the world and conflicting zones between adversary poles to set new perspectives in debating geographical, cultural and political borders.Owing to its subjects who have effectively performed in generating belonging conceptualisations, the introduction to a new age of reshaping the gaze toward the concepts, 'origins' as well as affiliations has been well represented by a flow of literature that has strived to produce allegiances and classifications.Stuart Hall offers important insights regarding diaspora, ethnicity and identity: [D]iaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other peoples into the sea.This is the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing form of 'ethnicity.' ... The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.(Hall, Cultural identity and diaspora, 1990) The view above provides an overview of the conceptualisation of identity in the diasporic situation.Individuals are viewed through the lens of difference that characterises the presence of these entities outside of their borders.It highlights the new perspective that the diasporic subjects are introduced in the modern times; a sense of a choice to move instead of a forceful fleeing or immigration.Based on the given condition of the diasporic subject, Hall stresses the continuity of meaning production to the subjects that belong to the same category entitled diasporic.Brah Avtar corroborates Hall's stance underlining the diasporic situation is a site of translocation where it imagines itself through inspired spatial rearrangements of maps of locations and displacement to become migratory space or space-information.It negates by so the hegemonic make-up of meanings and confinement within authoritative identifications on the entities that belong to a certain group.It manifests itself in the evanescence of fixed boundaries recreating by so itself through transnational solidarity.Therefore, meanings that once have been associated and affiliated with how nations are perceived are gone beyond those they have been related to and identified as; specifically, those of race, class, and ethnicity.In Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Brah comments on the bringing forth of meanings through the new introduction of diasporic groups: Diaspora space is the intersectionality of diaspora, border, and dis/location as a point of confluence of economic, political, cultural, and psychic processes.It is where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed; where the permitted and the prohibited perpetually interrogate; and where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptibly mingle even while these syncretic forms may be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition.(Brah, 1996) The fixity and determination of meaning that once nations claim and associate the groups that belong to them to be called nationalist based on a certain process of hegemonic categorisation is put into debate and re-evaluation the moment part of these groups moved toward a wider spectrum and a space where meaning cannot be forced on the individuals; instead, meaning that a group can associate with has gained a sense of multiplicity and diversity.The belonging and affiliations are negotiated and decided on instead of being internalised unconsciously or imposed forcefully.Diasporic subjects have developed cultural consciousness through the migrated subjects, they not only encounter and interact with new cultures, but they have recognised deeply the cultural, religious, and historical belongings they have originated.This meaning they once have given to their identities or have developed unconsciously in their nations has gained extra dimensions to be questioned and reshaped to a broader sense of belonging.A deconstruction from a falsified unity of the community diasporic subjects once have been part of opposes a view toward unity and affiliation of diasporic entities who form a minority group regardless of how diverse and contradictory their characterisations would be.In other words, Individuals, who have realised to what extent they have been controlled and defined decisively by the advocates of the nations they have belonged/ belong to, seek affiliations and classifications the moment they cross the borders.Classifications they might decide on based on mutuality and consent.Diasporic subjects along with their counterpart of the so-called "natives" have a rooted understanding of the representational power of their cultural elements on the construction of their being.However, they long to establish a body of identifications that set them bound to a group given that the positionality they represent the moment they are in diaspora differs from that they once existed in.Priorly, it was debated that within one nation, there are possibilities of multiple characteristics of groups that might be discarded and excluded from the list of identifying strategies while building up a nation-state identity.The process that might result from the endeavour of the diasporic subjects in establishing their identified entities within an imagined community might not be that easy to contain or limited as far as what makes each individual or ethnicity different from the other part.The mutual milieu of ethnic multiplicity and environments of diaspora collided with the dominant discourse which gives off cultural consciousness.Baumann stresses the following vision stating: heightened awareness that one's own life, as well as the lives of all others, are decisively shaped by culture as a reified heritage.... an awareness that whatever one, or anyone, does and thinks is intrinsically and distinctively culture-bound, and defined both in relation to one's own culture and the cultures of others.(Bauman, 1995) However, diasporic subjects tend to deconstruct the presence of the discourses they have been controlled by while being determined to create counter-perspectives through which they can demonstrate their beings.By so, would not diaspora, itself, stand as a hegemonic discourse that might force meanings and identities onto those who constitute it?The awareness that any utterance produced by a subject reflects the cultural belonging they originated from since no act, language, ritual, or opinion can be freed from a background that constitutes it and causes its presence.It is not only individuals who travel; it is their rites, prevalent cultures, methods of festivity, remonstrations, sports, entertainments and postulations; and with these their conception of the power structure, respect and disgrace, customary ritualistic gift exchange as well as religious and astral ideas about God and human existence.Thus, the moment diasporic subjects would opt to develop their own identification scopes, they would not be able to trespass the boundaries that have anteriorly establish their beings.Said probes the dichotomy diasporic subjects are located in vis-à-vis claiming their identities which are mainly dispersed and dislocated.Though Said views the situation as a result to the modern world situation and that it goes hand in hand with the developments the world goes through, he approaches the identity of the dispersed subjects as a void affiliation since it leans on no culture to make up its own.He states in "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile": The fact of migration is extraordinarily impressive to me: that movement from the precision and concreteness of one form of life transformed or transmuted into another [...] And then of course the whole problematic of exile and immigration enters into it, the people who simply don't belong in any culture; that is the great modern, or, if you like, post-modern fact, the standing outside of cultures.(Said, The mind of Winter: reflections on Life in Exile, 1984) Indeed, subjects are to be located "out of space" and non-cultural relatedness since they would be occupying a space that does not stand as a backbone to their original culture and cannot smoothly settle itself within a wider scope of representations which is the culture of the host territories.Regardless of how far migrants change or cross borders, they always stay secluded and ruptured both from the place they immigrated to or they have come from.However, Diasporic subjects do not set up their identities based only on the group they have been part of; rather, the process and further preliminary aspects they will encounter in the host spaces, themselves, play a vital role in the progress of their identities.Dufoix notes on the method of understanding diasporic subjects declaring that: The arts of memory, the dialects of place, the affective economies of dispersal, the ethnographies of nostalgia, the intersubjectivities of social identity, and the citational practices that ground senses of cultural particularly outside the homeland (…) along with social categories and identities (…) are all crucial for understanding diasporas.(Dufoix, 2008) Diasporic subjects accumulated their unfixed beings based on aspects of the cultures they were associated with and the new cultures and representations they interacted with.The understanding of their cultures, then, would be problematic to locate, identify as well as be represented.Translocation of culture, the dislocation of transnational relocation of habitual representative conducts of existing, revering and celebrating from one country to another, dislocation might be seen as a deviation.A stance to unknown names or set of norms which have never occurred to a subject but has to be comprised by them as it embodies itself as identification of who one could be/ is the moment they are identified as part of the presented identity.Hall imparts that "Boundaries of difference are continually repositioned in relation to different points of reference."(Hall, Cultural identity and cinematic representation, 1989) In other words, the more alternatives that comprise the foundation of the subjects, regardless of how diverse and oppositional they might resemble, the are portion that results in the whole that is approached as a diasporic subject.The presence of these multiple-dimensional visions towards an identity deepens the gap between a located culture that is held by the diasporic subjects since determination and fixity would be unachievable if not impossible to attain.
The range of definition of diasporic subjects would expand multiply and a fixity of providing a limited conceptualisation of the group would be demanding if not inaccessible.In chapter one, the debate was about the possibility of creating a defined subject whose aspects can be determined and limited.It resulted in the unattainable possibility of forming identities that can have the same point of access and a final terminal to what constitutes it given that the minorities along with the dominant discourses participate in the attempt of finalising the overall image of the identity formation.The discussion goes on to come up with a final assumption that negates and opposes the manipulation of nation-state building processes as there might not be any possibility of rendering a certain group by nationalist conception when some aspects of the same community are excluded the moment the identification is to be formed.Diasporic identifications fall into the same lineal trajectory in developing a conception of its elements of identification.The argument, herein, does not seek to figure out an essentialist approach in observing the diasporic subjects who can be arranged under a list of characteristics that might be reflective of the subject and their experiences.Rather, the problem is the possibility of drawing a line of limitation that might at least allow elements that can be confined within the same categorisation to be translatable.Theorising diasporic experiences, subjects and literature would result in leading it to spaciousness and capaciousness that renders the conceptualisation of the study to be reprehension and unacademic.
For a diaspora to occur out of the dispersion of a certain population enormous conditions have to be met among which can be the period they have experienced dispersal, conciliating with the host location as well as forming a mythical conception about a homeland that is tightly related to the hope for a return.To view the above-mentioned criteria, there would be a need to examine them in depth to approximate the image of the essential pillars that can make an entity be viewed as diasporic.The associated discrepancy of responses to the homeland and the host nation is a criterion through which subjects can be involved in the process of labelling the group or the individual as a diasporic.The number of responses they have to deliver in associating what makes a characteristic of his identity their native or host one and how it can be validated into the new dimensional aspects of the newly adopted identity in the diaspora.The persistent dialogic negotiation of meanings that the subject holds throughout their identity formation period contributes to redefining their subjects and enunciating new perspectives on their identities.Another element that proves the progress of diasporic subjects is their participation in formulating and setting the pillars of identity representational features.The growth of class division and struggle within a given diaspora alongside the affiliation of an elite group of cultural and political agents advocates the notions of diasporic groups associated with categorisations that would set them distinguished from other groups.This participation helps in the consciousness-raise of these groups in learning more and deciphering well what sets them unique while being paralleled to differences they interact with within the host cultures.Stirred by the image of glorifying the nation and the mythical incarnations nationalists provide to the homeland and the spread of the need to maintain its God-given figure to the motherland, diasporic subjects reintroduce the same notion of myth in forming the relationship that ties the individual to their nation-natal.They reinforce different forms of material and sensitive venture in an imaginary idyll of the homeland.Shackleton views diaspora as a "migrancy in terms of adaptation and constructionadaptation to changes, distractions and transformations, and the construction of new forms of knowledge and ways of seeing the world."(Shackleton, 2008) The accumulation of meanings would be due to the number of encounters and interactions the diasporic subjects would succeed in practising various and multi-layered.The shift in the positionality and the dislocated status individuals in diaspora experience emulate in creating alternative readings to the world they are part of.Davies observes the extent to which the location manifests itself in developing the consciousness of the diasporic being imparting that these identities would enunciate their positionalities regardless of how different it is to the variety of discourses existing.She states that: The politics of location brings forward a whole host of identifications and associations around concepts of place, placement, displacement; location, dislocation; memberment, dismemberment; citizenship, alienness; boundaries, barriers, transportations; peripheries, cores and centres.It is about positionality in geographic, historical, social, economic, and educational terms.It is about positionality in society based on class, gender, sexuality, age, and income.It is about relationality and how one can access, mediate or reposition oneself, or pass into other spaces given certain other circumstances.(Davies, 1994) It can be concluded, henceforth, that it is not the existence of a subject within a certain territory which is considered as host be it either a forced or chosen refuge from their original native countries.Davies stresses the importance and the relevance of the participation that reflects the positionality the diasporic subject occupies.Only through their positionalities, it can be decided how integrated they are in the participation of identity formation of diasporic subjects.It is not about the presence of these subjects in newly hosted lands that makes them diasporic, rather, it is how much they invest in creating their identities within these territories given all the differences and counter-discourses they innately possess and the ones they inevitably encounter while in diasporic settings.The decision on the meaning and definition of a diasporic subject is multi-dimensional and broader in providing an approximation to the phenomenon which leads to reformulating the result that diasporic subjects hold an identity that cannot differ from those of national ones as it necessitates numerous fundamental backbone pillars to set them eminent.Diasporic identities are not the only variable that goes through the process of development and re-articulation that bring forth newly introduced aspects to the entity of diaspora, the very specific elements through which one can differentiate between diasporic subjects of the others are, themselves, open to restructuring and reformulating.What constitutes their beings receive as much of the alterations of the perspectives toward them as the reformulations that are effected on the subjects themselves.Thus, the process of re-enunciation does not only reproduce different views on the subjects and changes what establishes them; rather, it participates in providing new dimensions in the core aspects that set them unique.

The illusion of returnness and simultaneity in the diasporic consciousness.
The diasporic subject stands as a problematic category in modern times in terms of definition and approximation of what makes who they are and in limiting the categorisations themselves through which they can be identified.In constructing their identities and features of what distinguish them from the rest; if there could be a possibility of calling the diasporic a homogeneous group whose opposites are represented who stand with their fixed identifications diverging with so those possessed by the diasporic subjects, the contradiction that proves itself in such process is that of diversity and somehow contradictory core figures that are originally and innately related to the diasporic subject before they depart from their homeland.Moreover, the endeavour of creating the diasporic identity is put under lenses of scrutiny that strain the experiences they go through in the course of their identity development.Diasporic subjects tend to enhance the feeling and value of homeland relatedness and connectedness which internalises the power of "original" abidances in the fixation of their identities.The myth of the return home traces back to the initial experiences of the diasporic identities glorifying the homeland belonging and tightly holding to the formation of their identities which converges with those of the ancestors regardless of their locations' suggestive meanings and resistance strengthening procedures.Orality, for example, was amalgamated with principled pronouncements and endorsements for enduring the ordeals of dispersion that were increasingly to be put down and further distributed through different methods of illustration.Additionally, substantial matters also derived to be endowed with the essence of the homeland and become the conveyors of the nontextual incarnations of memory.Different generations related to diasporic representations perceive the bond to their ancestors' homeland differently depending on their rank of the generation and on the discourses they have produced or resisted in generating the sense of belonging.In attempting to address the experiences that diasporic subjects have been through, no justice would be given to any of the groups since different and various situations occurred throughout history which makes the rendering of these subjects expansive.Should it refer to the Syrian or Lebanese first migrations to the American societies back in the late nineteenth century whose following generations knew innumerable situations and complications in developing their societies which fluctuated from a certain age to another?Would it locate itself to the forced movements of the sub-Saharian African groups who had no chance of manifesting themselves but by fleeing their motherland and finding refuge in elsewhere territories, they would label "home" later?Could it refer to those political, cultural and religious emancipationists in the Arab world who chose to belong not only to another territory away from home utilizing movement but also seeking another identity and alternative affiliations to write about "home" from a dislocated or tans-located positionality claiming a split, marginalised, minor and transnational identity?Might it be revolved around the experiences of third or fourth generations of migrated subjects who have no direct relatedness to the homeland as they have never experienced being "home" and maybe have developed and possessed fully the "host"/ "home" territories affiliated characteristics which set them alike to those advocates of the host cultures, features and representations?Vertovec reinforces the above-mentioned perspective by stating that: These meanings refer to what we might call 'diaspora' as a social form, 'diaspora' as a type of consciousness, and 'diaspora' as a mode of cultural production.By way of but a few respective examples, it is further suggested that these rather different meanings each have a certain utility for conceptualising, interpreting and theorising processes and developments affecting South Asian religions outside of South Asia.(Vertovec, 1997) Vertovec suggests that diasporic experience should be regarded by equally structural; historical condition, and agential; the meaning held and practices conducted by social actors.The scope of limiting the group of diasporic subjects as has been probed suggests to what extent it is wideranging and unrestricted since it contains different nations, histories, territories, cultures, languages, rituals, religions as well as political displays.Defining a diasporic entity cannot discard these basic foregrounds since they effectually work in designing the defined diasporic subject.
The "return" is an elusive mental construction and vision that is spread among and preserved by the bearers of diasporic status since it does not adhere to any factual basics or call for origins.The origins to which these entities would either; reclaim after they have opted and adopted other aspects of identity borrowed or accepted from the host cultures or renounce an identity they have chosen to comport with, or were initially intermingled with the same "host" culture's fundamental representations.A return to what exactly; to a culture, religion, language, rituals, or territory.Return itself would be a disquieting concept concerning the diaspora, does it entail that the bearer of the so-called "original" culture is interested in adopting back the same aspects of the original homeland culture or any other articulative sign of homeland?Is it a return to once unaccepted political discourses and marginalisation of ethnic groups?Is it a return to an identity they could not manage to create satisfactorily in the host territories or a loss of the identity the moment they realise their ambivalent statuses between the original and past identity and present unassimilated situations?Regardless of how prosperous a group of people, or an individual, would be in a diasporic situation, the sense of going back to the motherland and gaining back the original aspects of what makes them part of a whole culture.The sense of guilt and rupture are dominant realisations that diasporic subjects live by and tend to go beyond emphasising the sense of trespassing the borders reversely.Fragmentation and fraction realities of the diasporic subjects urge them to seek the roots of their ancestors and align with the uncompromising features of the homeland.The transformation they experience, while they are away from the identity that has constituted their beings, leads them to be positioned in a state of discontinuity and in-betweenness.A discontinuity since they fail to reproduce and generate new fields of articulation to their original identity which leaves it stagnant and unmoveable in their psyches.Such a realisation pushes them to feel a sense of guilt towards their ineffective productivity vis-à-vis their nation-natal and identity constructional process.As far as in-betweenness is concerned, diasporic subjects substantiate their torn relatedness to either side of their identity constructive pole since they view themselves as carriers of dualistic alignment to cultures that formulate them.The diasporic understanding of their positionality within the scope of definition tends to retrieve back what they once either forcefully or deliberately give up as a determined identity of "home".Du Bois states that "One ever feels his two-nessan American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings."(Du Bois, 1994) The individual who seeks a return cannot do without his existing newly adopted identity in the diaspora while they cannot repossess the same old being they once enjoyed fully.They, therefore, develop a sense of duality of response to both sides at the same time or using the term "double consciousness" as used by Du Bois.The simultaneity of a migrated subject is nothing but an illusion.The transnational crossing; be it physically or imaginatively, denies any subject the sense of belonging to the nation-natal and "home".The diasporic reminiscence for home is correspondingly a site of diaspora identity politics.This home longing is not essentially identical to wanting to return to a physical place since not all diasporas withstand a creed of homecoming.The sense would be related to gaining back aspects of the "authentic" or "original" identities that could stem from those who belong to the mother nation's representational figures.Earlier in this text, it was agreed that the sense of "authenticity" and "originality" is barely achievable within a nation itself with all the attempts in shaping and constructing its configurations to match those of individuals as well as groups that belong to them.This result would request the desire that occupies diasporic subjects in stressing the importance of yearning for a return and the possibility of regression to the initial state of being of their ancestors.In her article "Muslim women: Negotiations in the third Space" which appeared in the Journal of Women in Culture and Society named Sign, Shahnaz braces this vision by viewing that: Hybridized individuals, caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation, erasing any claims for inherent cultural purity, inhabit the rim of an 'in-between reality' marked by shifting psychic, cultural, and territorial boundaries.(Khan, 1998) Shahnaz develops the in-betweenness conceptualisation of the diasporic subject as a shift in their vision at different perspectives through which they can reconstruct their identities and set themselves away from any tightly and reflective allegiances to their mother-land connectedness.Indeed, the diasporic situation opens up a new space, an area of transformation and change where we can no longer accept a factual or natural account of history and culture, nor simply seek to retrieve a hidden authentic identity.[which allows as well to] begin to unravel the ordering and structuring of dominant cultural codes so that we may better utilize the locations we occupy as sites of resistance -spaces where critical positioning, or a process of identification, articulation, and representation can occur.(Borsa, 1990) Borsa imparts the very critical role of the positionality of the diasporic subject by which they can build up their identities only if they employ their locations as standing points of resistance that will practise its legacies in forming any occurrences that would be enlisted as a categorising pillar of the diasporic subjects.She highlights the role that can be played by the diasporic subjects' positionality in formulating newly emerged identities through which they can articulate their beings and reflect on the essence of their make-up.The social universe of transnationalism is neither dual nor determined at the moment of relocation; on the contrary, it is an extensive and increasingly empowering new ethical relationship in an entrée space as transnational migrants originate themselves ontologically and experientially in their places of settlement but without desolating home.The illusion of simultaneity withstands them in their journey.It is both recommendable and appropriate that diasporic subjects negotiate their identity constructions by opposing or aligning the dominant discourses which can render them, diasporic subjects, minority, less-presented, unvoiced; the moment they remain silent and nonparticipant.
Diasporic subjects encounter various circumstances both in the host culture and back in their "original" homeland.If the diasporic subject has established their positionality when they settle in the host country adapting all the representations they possess in the host, they tend to go through the same process of adaptation and recognition the very first encounters they might have with once named their counterparts in the homeland.In other words, the religious, cultural, as well as linguistic incarnations would be traced with a sense of loss after they intermingled and interacted with foreign terrestrial representations.That sense of loss manifests itself when the diasporic subjects would be considered as bearers of an estranged culture that does not reflect the ones they have initially constructed and internalised.One may recall here the words of Edward Said in his Out of Place, where the disorder of 'unhomeliness' has permitted them to surpass the constringed definitions of the 'home' and the acquainted affiliations of identity: Now it doesn't seem important or even desirable to be 'right' and in place (right at home, for instance).Better to wander out of place, not to own a house, and not ever to feel too much at home anywhere, especially in a city like New York, where I shall be until I die.(Said, Out of Place, 1999) Giving the methodical process of exclusions and inclusions that national identity advocates strengthen and circulate, these diasporic subjects would be seen as a threat and misrepresentation to the aural culture that is enlisted in the national discourses.Diasporic entities, then, go through the process of exclusion from the so-called national representatives as they do not possess and reflect the essence of what constitute the nation.Diasporic subjects do not only face such identity denial from the elites, advocates, as well as people who belong to their nation-natal, their dispersed situation occurs when they are faced with the same rejection from the host cultures' nationalist representatives, as well.Portes et al. state that above all, nationalism is a social and cultural movement that leaves its mark on the scattered regions where immigrants settle through means that are geographical in nature, ethical, and inventive referring to the ongoing presence of the nationalist doctrines and core elements in the process of the making of identities; especially those of diaspora.(Portes, Guarnizo, & Landlot, 1999) Since these subjects could not and would not devoid their list of identifications from the nationalist representations, they are always doomed in tracing boundaries between what makes them nationalist of their homelands, which is mostly unachievable the moment they have been dispersed from their native lands, and what renders them estranged in the gaze of the nationalists of the host territories.Therefore, migrants become perfect scapegoats for national torment, which is perceived as consequential from external forces; by envisioning the guilt onto the Other, the nation self is preserved.However, the mission of diasporic studies and diasporic entities is to search for framing the scope of the identity that can resist the 'silencing' and the 'Othering' which are dominantly occupying the discourses existing.Through such emancipatory longing, diasporic consciousness issued to establish a sense of reference to the diasporic belonging subjects.How has its social form been perceived and what distinguishes it from other discourses?To what extent would such participations in developing a literature of diasporic identification be labelled an emerged consciousness of the diasporic identity and diasporic orientation?
Diasporic experience has gained a wide-ranging social category which can be articulated in its social relationships, and economic and political tensions.The diasporic social dimension mostly finds its refuge in historical and geographical ties.Migrations that were either forceful or voluntary tended to result in reciprocal relationships between the migrated subjects and their homelands.These ties are strengthened by the geographical and historical allegiances the diasporic subject maintains toward their homeland.The sense of bound does not only represent itself in terms of land and specific events, but it also goes beyond it to spiritual and mythical incarnations those territories and historical insights suggest as essential meanings to the diaspora in general.The circumstances that hinder the diasporic subjects from fully being integrated into the host cultures or the unwillingness of some sorts of communities to be subjected to total assimilation pave the way to reshaping of positionality these entities would occupy vis-à-vis the newly encountered cultural representations.Such standing points would replace them in an alienated, excluded, and different positionalities which by the gaze of the inferior versus superior, dominant versus hegemonic, or powerful versus dependent, would crown the interconnectedness or disconnectedness of the societal presence in the host lands.Robin Cohen develops this sense stating transnational bonds no longer have to be cemented by migration or by exclusive territorial claims.In the age of cyberspace, a diaspora can, to some degree, be held together or re-created through the mind, through cultural artefacts and through a shared imagination.(Cohen, Diasporas and the nation-state: from victims to challengers, 1996) He points out the identification of diaspora stands as a bridge between the local and the global.Henceforth, these minorities would seek to establish their communities, "imagined" ones, despite being out of entities that fail to be homogeneously identical as they stemmed from diversity, scatteredness, as well as fracture.Developing solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of foundation or even those of varied backgrounds who share the same apprehensions and the same objectives.The purpose of aligning with these groups; regardless of how incompatible they might look, is to achieve the maintenance of the conscious collective identity.These to-be-established identities are always manifested as mythically visualised realities that provide their legacies through the creation of bounds with certain geographical boundaries or historically glorified events, icons, and glories.Werbner comments on the positionality that is conformed to the interests of the diasporic subjects when residing inbetween the scopes of diaspora situation: Such symbolic complexes evolve, are hybridised, creolized, revitalised, and transferred by transnational migrants in both their attempts to construct credibility coalitions and in their conflicting battles for authority and distinction as they proceed across borders and establish themselves locally in shared practice and performance.(Werbner, 2002) Diasporic subjects dispose, by their formed collective identities, to articulate their stances and their core aspects of what set them unique and approachable to transcend to the institutionalised community which can replace the significance of being scattered and fragmented to being a reference and a solid backbone to the articulation of their positionality either in the host nations or nation-natal terms or belongings.Furthermore, diasporic groups tend to form economic unions that strengthen their unity and bond.The economic accomplishments of specific groups are brought about from the communal assembling of properties, extended kinship and co-ethnic employability and investments in services and industries that are based on the sense of native group members.These strategies draw the bounds between these communal relations much stronger and more prosperous.They do not relate them horizontally at the level of the economy; rather, they are more about generating, fixing and spreading the notions of diasporic identities which can be preliminary ethnic-based or broadly reflective of the diasporic representation in a trans-national and transcultural sense.Nevertheless, the image that the diasporic groups and communities echo a sense of harmony and homogeneity providing that they might be diversified and divergent in their origins and interests does not always render the situation that diasporic circumstances go through.Some of these entities would represent a multiplicity of interactivity vis-à-vis their nations of origin.Some of them would represent a sense of loyalty to the cultures, religions, languages or rituals of their motherland origins; whereas, other groups would tend to represent a conflicting comportment towards those incarnations.Some of these groups would be much influenced by the arenas and positionalities they occupy while others would not possess as powerful pressures: culturally, religiously, linguistically or even politically.Cohen comments that 'Awareness of their precarious situation may also propel members of diasporas to advance legal and civic causes and to be active in human rights and social justice issues.'(Cohen, Rethinking 'Babylon': Iconoclastic conceptions of the diasporic experience, 1995) Migrants may be weighty performers, or co-operative associations may be prevailing pressure assemblies, in the national politics of their host countries as well as in the international political grounds, usually provoked by their interest in the political dilemma of a country of origin.Diaspora has gained a deeper consciousness in putting a greater emphasis on describing a variety of experiences, state of mind and sense of identity.This mosaic incarnation of identity which has seen several modifications and newly introduced means of articulations within the recent last decades, these articulations, are mostly perceived as representations of paradoxical or dual positionalities.Such consciousness can be viewed as "dual" which is doubly connected; once to the exclusions and discrimination experiences that can be classified as negative or inclusions and affiliations to their original cultures and effectiveness in playing a role in the host cultures which leaves them with some room to reshape not only their identities; rather, what constitute their identities as well in terms of characteristics applied.Concerning diasporic individuals' awareness of decentred affixations, of being simultaneously 'home away from home' or 'here and there'.Similarly, Clifford proposes that "The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there.... [It is] the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here)."(Clifford, Diasporas, 1994) This consciousness of multi-dimensional, local and worldly, redevelops the sense of belonging these entities realise about the territories they reside in.Changes that occur in the representations bring forth a sense of using Hall's concept of 'imaginary coherence', or Anderson's 'imagined community' that seemingly shares the same roots and itineraries.Intensified by the consciousness of multidimensional local representations, the 'fractured memories' of diaspora consciousness give rise to a multiplicity of histories, 'communities' and selves.Nonetheless, instead of being embodied as a kind of split discrepancies, such diversity is being delimitated by diasporic individuals as a source of adjustive assets.
The diasporic significant role in cultural, linguistic, economic and communal bringing forth of suggestive meanings based on their positionalities that have manifested a multiplicity of representations and implications to the diasporic identity vision.However, there is another ultimate source of identification that diasporic communities and groups intensify as its role can never be devalued or discarded in the process of one's identity.Religious discourses constitute an inevitable source of identity representational pillars which are used consciously or unconsciously by the advocates of the given positionality to stimulate and touch upon a fundamental figure of reference.This occurs through a specific kind of self-questioning triggered by situations of 'diaspora' related to religious pluralism.The diasporic consciousness developed through the religious background representations has seen various methods and destabilising periods as, though it has gained an incomparable amount of influence than other incarnations of the diasporic identity, still, it has been perceived as a source of disquieting and discomfort.The political religious indulgence in decision making throughout the world provided much room for the religious discourses that originated from the nation-natal or those that have been stemmed from the conditions encountered in the host countries.The power that has been gained through these discourses has not only helped in the development of these identities in deciphering more about the religious cultures of their homelands, but they have also opened up other dimensional visions toward the host cultures relationship in transporting the concerns of their religious affiliations to other lands which they would name "home" and which deserves to be a duplicate to the mythical land those religious texts would incarnate.These discourses have stemmed from scholars who have never experienced diasporic experiences or those who have been forced to experience it due to their unaccepted and unwelcomed provisions vis-à-vis the religious identity that should be dominant.Still, the believer may now be in a position of having to rationalize and justify elements of belief and practice to members of other faiths.In these ways, we must even speak of 'religious diaspora consciousness'.
The return, as has been clearly and unquestionably proved, tends to be a discursive practice through which diasporic subjects would circulate and enforce a meaning to the homeland allegiances.It is also the power of being interconnected the moment a community is unified and works cooperatively to defend their positionality and their presence in comparison to the already existing discourses and established identities.The diasporic subjects are caught in the in-betweenness and dislocation the very initial moments they debate their occupied standing points.The pursuit the diasporic identities long for has to do with gaining back an authentic incarnation of their beings by which they can assume a determined identity that can be viewed as a counterpart to other already set identities.However, the moment such endeavours occur, the individuals as well as groups run into the discrepancies of the difficulty of reintroducing these aspects of cultures into existence as they are, themselves, unachievable and mythically used by the bearers of the identity advocates.Diaspora situations necessitates a fixation of one's identity through which they can be referred to and can be distinguished from the others; however, such exploratory search does not terminate fruitfully to diasporic representational references, elites and discourses, as they are not in themselves original and authentic.Thus, the limitations of one's identity and their need to develop enlisted categories of their identities meets unfortunate results as they rely on a body that fights and long for the determination of its borders and boundaries which cannot itself provide a back-up formulation in referring to the diasporic identities.However, different positionalities, the role each individual, group, and community; giving the effectiveness in providing new dimensional, updated participative, and ever-changing involvement, serve in the process of the identity development of the diasporic subjects.The realisation of diasporic subjects of the importance of setting themselves a body of identifications and a list of categories through which they can be approached is what have urged them to negotiate and participate in developing these identity distinctions; yet, there are other reasons which push them to such endeavour which is that of the impossibility in being part and participants of the identities they are associated with either in homeland or those in host cultures.This section is finalised with a recapitulation of the participatory actions that diasporic subjects work on to create their set-free identities and develop a body of implacable characteristics in the list of their identity constructions, which has to do with the historical, cultural, economic, and religious incarnations as pillars of what constitute their identities.The process of developing a diasporic identity cannot discard the role of national discourses by which the latter's identity can be constructed in light of what the former has provided as backbone pillars of approaching identity.The national ideological positionality can always be rendered as a part of the process of the diasporic identity representation.The role of the ideological backgrounds and national affiliations of these diasporic entities themselves serve the purpose of developing an identity that goes hand in hand with what the body of philosophy they belong to offers.That is to say, a domestic national concern back home could be effectively participating in the process of creating a diasporic identity regardless of how interactive or relevant it would be in the host culture.Suffice to indicate and assume that the host culture has espoused the diasporic subject, one would proclaim that the concerns those individuals, groups or communities are troubled with is going certainly to be part and parcel of the whole make-up of their culture.Therefore, meaning that was once preoccupying the diasporic subjects, who assume a split and dislocated identity, would be directed to a wider scope of representations and cut-edges answers since they would be set in a broader level and wider range of meaning articulations.
4. "Home" departure and the engagement in diasporic nationalist literature.Diasporic subjects who migrated to new locations and experienced new modes of articulating their beings managed to gain new forms in approaching the national identities that they had established back in their homeland.Diasporic subjects are, also, those successive generations whose identities have been mostly developed within the host countries but, still, have alignments to the formulations of the identity their ancestors or their counterparts in their homeland hold.The consciousness of these Diasporic subjects of their transnational identities comes due to their search to establish an identity of their own that has taken different forms and demanding processes to be achieved.The question that might be striking at this level is if diasporas are the archetypal communities of the transnational moment, then when has transnationalism become understood as a distinct phenomenon in the first place?
Nationalism, since its composition and its initial attempts to establish its discourses and doctrines, has determinedly engaged in developing the formulation of a nation by which any individual, group, or community under its territories, cultures, languages, rituals, religions, and ethnicities can associate themselves to it.Nationalism has unshakably functioned in building up the national identities of these entities; so that, they can be set illustrious to the other who can notwithstanding preserve a certain level of identicalness to the same group they are part of.The depth of perception of one's identity, which has gained its status owing to the nationalists' attempts to develop the sense of belonging to a body of identifications; that are unique and representative of the essence of what makes them subjects of a certain group of other than others, and which gives them the feeling of being connected and related to all what a nation can be demonstrative of, has prepared them to construct the sense of possession of a national identity.The perception of national belonging an individual would internalise back home, if they are newly engaged in a diasporic situation, would manifest itself clearly when different nations can confront one another in cross-borders or when the national entity interacts with the nationalist anomalies that have already been established in the individuals or groups of the host culture.In a diasporic situation, the conception of the nation takes different forms and meanings due to the newly updated interactions one's identification of a nation would set analogous to.Day and Thompson refer to diaspora situation affirming that: Terms such as 'transnational', 'supranational', 'supraterritorial', and 'deterritorialization' are used with increased frequency to describe the flows of goods, ideas, communications and people across national borders.It is not just cross-border movement that prompts theorists to refer to these flows as 'transnational'.More specifically, it is the sense that through this movement that connection with the place of origin is transformed, even if not necessarily entirely lost.(Graham & Thompson, 2004) In modern times, the notion of the nation might not be valid in defining it the classically orthodox way since the globalised state of being that the world has been going through has reshaped the conceptualisation of the nation.The nation has been trans-formed, trans-figured, trans-lated, trans-located, and trans-cultured receiving, by so, novice and additional understanding of the term and the essence of a national identity.Nationalism has become internationally and globally embodied since domestic national subjects have traversed the boundaries embracing their definitions of a nation and hesitantly or adoptively approving new ones that were counter-discursive to what have represented their own national identities.
Transnationalism has become the new criterion that would define the belonging of transcultural and translocated diasporic subjects.Homi Bhabha's construction of the term hybrid to describe the situation of the diasporic subjects is deduced mainly from Bakhtin's theories in his Dialogic Imagination, which sees identities and cultures as formed and established in what Bhabha calls the "Third Space," a place in-between.(Bhabha H. , 1994) The movements the world has experienced throughout the recent decades brought forth genuine reasons to urge the reshaping and rereading of the national belonging techniques and methods of assimilating groups under the umbrella term of a nation which is entirely united and identical.Newcomers to the host lands with their new affiliative norms and discernments to a nation have forced a radical modification in the national identity.Thus, nations worldwide, today, are readjusting their lists of national appellative catalogues in identifying subjects who can go under the name of a nation they represent.The classical view towards nationalism has always been attributed to the sense of unity and identicalness that bring together all society's variations under the same categorisations.Graham Day and Andrew Thompson borrowed such a traditional perspective on the role that nationalist advocates play in building up the notion of the nation.They emphasise the production of these identities based on the mass production and spread of the notion starting from educational system to the public means of information circularity stating: Scholars of nationalism routinely attribute a leading role in the formation of national identity to the state.Though nationalism does not require sovereign political institutions to flourish, nevertheless the state has played a vital role in fashioning national identity as a mass public culture, through its managements of the education system and, in the twentieth century, publicly controlled broadcasting.(Graham & Thompson, 2004) The state plays a role in the spread of the nationalist doctrines and regularities so that they can broaden the validity and integration of their sovereignty over the people who belong to the same nation they rule.However, according to Day and Thompson, nationalism does not need the state the same way the former does since nationalism can successfully prosper and widely diffuse itself based on the legitimacy that is inherently assumed.They, as well, highlight the importance of the modern canals in gaining this authenticity of the achievements of national identity that facilitates its prevalent dissemination.However, Day and Thompson would view the national construction in much broader sense the moment they compare the actors of the nation-state builders at the sense of transnational ones who brought forth a different new perspective of what makes a nation.They state that: These writers variously argue that while national governments remain significant actors, they are no longer the principal form of governance or authority.For example, a wide range of transnational actors now play important roles in global politics, including multinational corporations, global social movements and transnational bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.(Graham & Thompson, 2004) The lens of concentration would experience a shift in the source of developing a perspective about the nation-building process.The modern discrepancies widely opened up different views about the nation-state construction.Idiosyncratic and monolithic views towards the nation categorisations would receive alternative backbone pillars in establishing the nation.The crossborder development, the emergence of new identifying methods, or, even, the generation of new forms of identities help in the newly set identities.The movements of native residents to new lands; forceful or deliberate migration, and the identity realisations that stemmed from such dislocations and displacements would probe the presence of diasporic conceptions and the necessity to deal with novel dimensions that would take place in the society.In a jointedited book entitled Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, Cohen and Fischer comment on the notion of home as a harmonious group which is deeply rooted in the concept of diaspora and the meaning that once was given to home has found its traces in the diasporic situation.Home which has geographical and historical references has manifested itself in the diasporic conception of the identities; thus, the view towards one's identity always finds its connections to one's natal community and territory.(Cohen & Fischer, Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, 2019) Clifford underlines the construction of the notion of home stating that: People have, for many centuries, constructed their sense of belonging, their notions of home, of spiritual and bodily power and freedom, along a continuum of sociospatial attachments.These extend from local valleys and neighbourhoods to denser urban sites of encounter and relative anonymity, from national communities tied to a territory to affiliations across borders and oceans.(Clifford, Mixed Feelings, 1998) However, when identities are represented from a different angle and are located in a muchaltered realities, they tend to gain additional and diversified realisations to the notion of identity and home.Clifford continues declaring that: In these diverse contact zones, people sustain critical, non-absolutist strategies for survival and action in a world where space is always already invaded.These competencies can be redeemed under a sign of hope as "discrepant cosmopolitanisms."But it is a chastened hope associated more with survival and the ability to articulate locally meaningful, relational features than with transformation at a systemic level.(Clifford, Mixed Feelings, 1998) Clifford draws attention toward the sabotage the newly introduced identities in the novice spaces experience.They might struggle not to be discouraged and eliminated in participating in the national fabrication of the national identity.The unrelenting objective to attain economic and social accomplishment and the inclination for the community and the homeland result out of the inconsistent amalgamation of provincialism and transnationalism, which stands undeniably as an alteration between devotional and denial detachment that symbolizes the functioning of diasporic lives.A situation that might put the national subjects in an increasingly heterogeneous and plural world disclaiming by so the unity and homogeneity of the national conception.For Bauman, the state has less need for the nation, because success in the global economy depends on the attractiveness of the country to global capital, and not on national cohesion.(Bauman , 2000) The interest would be shifted to contain other dimensions instead of national ones.The economy could manifest itself confirmatively as the circle of identification might go beyond the identity concerns to economic apprehensions.The Arminian-American scholar of Diaspora Studies, Tölölyan, warns of an ending result if viewing diaspora as a possibility of doing without the home-attached core elements adopting new dimensions of the home state that is much broader and wider and the role of the elites who promote the cultures that are to be adopted by the diasporic subjects.He raises the question of the ideological allegiances and agendas these elites aside by and defends.He states that: Diaspora studies are in danger of becoming a servant to global political forces, as anthropology was once in danger of serving imperialism.The multi-sided politicization of diasporas is due to many factors.As diasporic social formations are consolidated, their own new elites and political entrepreneurs aspire to become leaders, brokers of influence and intermediaries of the diasporas' relations with the governments of their new countries of settlement, as with the governments of former homelands.(Tölölyan, 2019) The risk that diaspora studies would be exposed to is the possibility of being used and manipulated by its elites in order to create out of it a certain category that would fit the positionality these agents would be occupying.At this level, diaspora would be approached from its in-betweenness and split positionality which can be rendered by the power of the elites who advocate it.However, according to James Clifford, diaspora studies attempt to develop a sense of authenticity that is going to set distinguished from other discourses since it is based on the culture of the homeland.He states in Diasporas that: The diasporic discourse and history currently in the air would be about recovering non-Western, not-only-Western, models of cosmopolitan life, nonaligned transnationalities struggling within and against nation-states, global technologies, and markets _ resources for a fraught coexistence.(Clifford, Diasporas, 1994) For Clifford, diasporic discourses are to be neutral from any other discourses that can stand by itself assuring a list of doctrines that are generated from its core situations and that are not imposed or suggested by any foreign disciplines outside of it.The diasporic elites tend to search for a suitable embodiment of the diasporic studies that would match the circumstances and the ideologies that are reflective of the diasporic concerns and the diasporic subjects' interests.He adds in his Mixed Feelings that the diasporic movements have brought about massive change to the issues of identification and identity formations since they originated from radically opposing backgrounds.He comments on their journeys imparting that: Discrepant cosmopolitanisms guarantee nothing politically.They offer no release from mixed feelings, from utopic/ dystopic tensions.They do, however, name and make more visible a complex range of intercultural experiences, sites of appropriation and exchange.These cosmopolitical contact zones are traversed by new social movements and global corporations, tribal activists and cultural tourists, migrant worker remittances and e-mail.Nothing is guaranteed, except contamination, messy politics and more translation.(Clifford, Mixed Feelings, 1998) Home departure and moving to new spaces whereabout the subjects who have been established back home would create new forms of identities that are related to either their original homeland catalogues of being associated to an identity or the possibility of being assimilated to the new categories that are represented by the host cultures incarnations of the identity.The departure that could take the form of, forced or deliberate one, or newly experienced or being born in diasporic situations, has resulted in the formation of new identities; that are both created out of the tendency of developing an identity of one's own based on the interactions that such identities have gone through or the possibility of developing an authentic identity which is based on the original manifestations of the homeland configurations.Day and Thompson refer to the influence of globalisation in generating new conceptions of identities or shaking the already established notions and cornerstone foundations of national identities declaring: For this reason, it is not surprising that globalization excites considerable interest among social theorists in general and, increasingly, scholars of nationalism.If globalization transcends mental as well as physical, barriers, then surely it must have consequences for the idea of the nation, and for national identity.(Graham & Thompson, 2004) Regardless of any form the identity construction would take, no one can deny that the newly emerged identities are to be endowed with novice scopes in viewing themselves given that the experiences that have gone through fluctuate much from those they have been living back home or even in the host cultures.Thus, not only the identities of the diasporic subjects would be the ones that are exposed to alterations and modifications, but the host and homeland cultural articulations of identity would be influenced by such a move which causes a sense of a continuous modification of the original, host and diasporic cultures.Based on Hall's observation of the identity construction process claiming that, Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a "production," which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term "cultural identity" lays claim.(Hall, Cultural identity and diaspora, 1990) It would be nonsensical to consider any identity that has experienced all of these modifications to be seen in its objective and unified sense of constructing identities in a linear method.These identities should be viewed with caution and selectiveness so that they can be embraced into a specific culture reflecting by so particular identifying aspects of a giving culture.These identities can never be seen only through lists of aspects over which one can classify them as members of a certain group or to be discarded from it since they do not hold some of the characteristics that the group represent.Rather, these identities can be manifested in different manners of articulation.Literature is one of the canals one can approach these identities.One can decipher the allegiances of a writer or a character within a text through the articulative means of reference.To what extent can literature existing be classified as diasporic and what are the elements that prove its participation in developing the Diasporic literature?In other words, is there a literature itself labelled diasporic?Why should literary classification involve literature of the Third World as diasporic Literature?
Arab diasporic literature or a subfield of the "Third World Literature" which is related to writers whose nation-natal is Arab territories has seen three main periods through which it has developed and evolved along with the presence of these Arabs in host countries.Needless to rewind over the reasons that pushed them or caused them to create a category of the sort.Layla Al Maleh, who is an associate professor of English Literature at Kuwait University and director of the Comparative Literature Graduate program, in her edited voluminous book entitled Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, emphasises on the three main periods that Arab Diasporic writing has flourished in and established itself a literature of its own.She highlighted on the three phases and limited them to a span of time stating: "Mahjar (early-twentieth-century émigrés in the USA); the Europeanised aspirants of the mid-1950s; and the more recent hybrids, hyphenated, transcultural, exilic/diasporic writers of the past four decades or so who have been scattered all over the world."She further debated the confronting situations these diasporic subjects encounter at the time they were establishing their own identities.She states that the early Arab migrants "came from backgrounds of poverty and even illiteracy and worked their ways up to elitist literary circles; furthermore, they were able, as has already been stated, to preserve a happy balance between East and West, home/host country;" Whereas the generation that preceded them; mainly from fifties of the twentieth century were characterised by being "from elite backgrounds and worked assiduously to embrace the identity of the European 'Other', thus typifying the traumas and excruciating experiences of the culturally 'colonized'" she further indicates that this generation were doomed and subjected to "to face rejection by metropolitan power but having cut their moorings to their country of origin, they had no choice but to embrace their own alienation and estrangement."Al Maleh describes the generation that follows as the "the least homogeneous", she specifies the generation that has experienced diasporic situations starting from the seventies as either "thosesecond-, third-, even fourthgeneration hyphenated Arabswho were born and raised on the no longer foreign soil of their immigrant forebears" or those "who were new immigrants working out of an experience of transculturation."(Al Maleh, 2009) What are the possibilities of national ideological presence in the literature of the third world literature and national ideological presence in the composition of the writers who are enlisted as Arab diasporic writers.If it is assumed that all Arab diasporic writers would write their "Homes", which is a crystal embodiment of the national allegiances as a main concern of their writings, then what room would be given to those who write about diversified issues that are disquieting the diasporic subjects, still they might not be related to "home" or might not discuss national ideologies neither imbeddedly or perceptibly.However, the question that might be striking, herein, is what is a nation to one's articulations.If the nation can be rendered in whatsoever one can produce as an expression debating by so their positionalities and their relationships to "home".A nation, which is an inseparable part of one's culture, the latter that none can voice themselves without relying on the presence of culture in their utterances.Thus, one's productions regardless of it being directed to writing home or writing personalised issues and concerns cannot render them writing but their nations.The debate that might not be acceptable is when all the literature that is written by diasporic writers, Third World Literature, all of it, is written as an allegory to the nation or by so one specifies their concerns only around the nation and the formulation of the nation in their psyches.Aijaz Ahmad negates such conception and provides evidence from the literature written by a writer from the so-called "Third World", which he does not accept as a terminology to be used to describe a certain group by so since there are contradictory and divergent aspects name a group by "Third" or "First", he persistently declares that: Since Jameson defines the so-called third world in terms of its "experience of colonialism and imperialism," the political category that necessarily follows from this exclusive emphasis is that of "the nation," with nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology; and, because of this privileging of the nationalist ideology, it is then theoretically posited that "all third-world texts are necessarily ... to be read as ... national allegories."The theory of the "national allegory" as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory which permeates the whole of Jameson's own text.(Aijaz, Jameson's rhetoric of otherness: and the 'National Allegory', 1987) Ahmad dissents with Jameson's misconception concerning 'third world literature' that all third world texts are necessarily allegorical, and in a very specific way they are to be read as what could be named national allegories.According to Aijaz, Jameson neglects all other discomforting concerns and day-to-day realities that a diasporic and Third Worldist literary writer live and compose main part of their productions.He emphasises on the conception and stresses that nationalism and the dialects of constructing a nation is not the pivotal concern that diasporic writer can write about.There are other aspects that can enunciate their concerns and through it one can arrive at their perception of the nation rather than being fully devotees to the notion of nation and nationalism in their literary productions.Aijaz further adds that does not accept that: nationalism is some unitary thing, always progressive or always retrograde.What role any given nationalism would play always depends on the configuration of the class forces and sociopolitical practices which organize the power block within which any particular set of nationalist initiatives become historically effective.That position cuts against inflations and implies at least two things.It recognizes the actuality, even the necessity, of progressive and revolutionary kinds of nationalism, and it does not characterize nations and states as coercive entities as such.(Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1992) The positionality of the diasporic writer that they can assume is what reflects the power of discourses they diffuse.The nationalist discursive practice a text might contain can render more than just the calling for a national identity through aspects included in the text, rather, it might prevail other levels of identifications to a nation and the evolvement of the national identity that can be representative of their positionality ranking vis-à-vis a nation and national discourses.Aijaz discerns another logic misconception that Jameson fell into which is that of colliding between two deviating concepts; "national allegory" and "collectivity".In Jameson's text, the latter comments on the texts of the "Third World" literature as a national allegory stating: All third-world texts are necessary, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western types of machinery of representation, such as the novel.(Jameson, 1986) Jameson, himself in his text changed the term national allegory to experience of collectivity claiming: ... the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.(Jameson, 1986) Jameson, following the logic of Aijaz, puts by so the two terms as convergent and synonymous which are, indeed, not the case.National allegories or national incarnations in a literary text can be one of the aspects of the text but it can never occupy the whole text's concern or be the point of convergence in the diasporic writer's conception of their literatures.Collectivity or collective experience can never be minimised to the national concerns only as if the individuals and groups' interests have never taken place except with the presence of colonisation or the manifestation of constructing or negotiating the meanings of the nation.(Aijaz, Jameson's rhetoric of otherness: and the 'National Allegory', 1987) Franz Fanon has not gone far from this conception when he debates the possibility of hiding the concerns that go hand in hand with the issues of the subjects and camouflaging or obscuring them with nationalistic issues and interests.There should be a precise spotting light shed on the interests that govern the concerns of the subjects that are part of their daily-lived matters and future projections amalgamated by the interests that can revolve around the national absorption.Anne McClintock refers to Franz Fanon's perspective stating that: Franz Fanon's prescient warnings against the pitfalls of the national consciousness are nowhere more urgent than now in South Africa.For Fanon, nationalism gives vital expression to a popular memory of shared suffering and shared refusal.At the same time, he is fully aware of the attendant risks of concealing and thereby exacerbating, the very real contradictions within the strategic collectivity of nationalism -conflicts of class, gender, ethnicity, regional and generational difference.Nationalism contains the very real risk of projecting the denial of difference onto a conveniently abstracted "collective will".(McClintock, 1991) Although the notion of Jameson, which views literary text of the "Third World" are to be considered as allegories of national concerns, has received a wide acceptance in the European literary circle, postcolonial and diasporic critiques discarded the validity of the notion as a descriptive norm to the literature of the Third World, so to speak, conditions.If the literature of third world is to be seen from this angle, it will lose its diversity in highlighting personalised stances that a piece of literature would provide and cannot be part of the whole body of literature that cannot be seen but in its collectivity.It does not do any justice if all the literary productions, that probe personalised experiences and add the scope of literature by newness and novelty; either of interests or styles, is seen but in its overall perspective and deny its participation in the making-up of the body of literature.Literature cannot be read by being categorised as the literature of the first world or the literature of the second or third world giving where the literature is stemmed from; its author, conditions of the writing, the ideology of the author and the audience it prioritises.It is not based on the economic or political allegiances of the nation where one can write from.What if there is a first world subject who can sound as part of the second or third Worldist when they write their imaginative world or "authentic" daily life matter, since they find themselves utterly expressive with this mode of expression or they can be well represented when they are articulating their stances from the standing point of the group they are not part of.There is no production of literary text that stands as a crystal reflection of a national identity as such which is manifested by the elements that constitutes the conceptualisation of its writer.Firstly, there is no national identity as such that can be reflective in one's utterance if the national identity itself can be accumulated in a body of identification that makes it available to be approached.Second, no conceptualisation of the national identity can be seen as a totality collection of identifications by a subject since a national identity is wider and more conclusive than being rendered in a text of literature.Said comments on the writing of the diasporic texts suggesting that: Novels, therefore, are aesthetic objects that fill gaps in an incomplete world: they satisfy a human urge to add to reality by portraying (fictional) characters in which one can believe.…I … consider the institution of narrative prose fiction as a kind of appetite that writers develop for modifying realityas if from the beginningas a desire to create new or beginning fictional entity while accepting the consequences of that desire.
Every novel is at the same time a form of discovery and also a way of accommodating discovery, if not to a social norm, then to a specialized "novelistic" reading process.(Said, Beginnings Intention and Method, 1975) So, literature or any utterance cannot be an end in itself and can barely provide a final perspective about a certain topic.The writing is a process of generating new methods and thoughts through which one can maximise their grasp of the item read about, which, itself, is a tool that one can use to be able to decipher the elements they are reading.It is a recurring circle where the objective itself the tool and vice versa.By reading a fictitious and "authentic" text we discover the worlds that have been put under scrutiny as well as one reads them to accrue tools of how to decipher the same exact world.To relate it to the main discussion, by reading the diasporic text, one does not only read the content that revolves around the world of the diaspora subject and learn more about their endeavours; rather, the text, at hand, plays the role of provider of the knowledge, according to the author as well as how much the reader brings toward the text as innate and prior knowledge and techniques, which decides on the approximation of meaning in a given time.Having stated this, it could be possible to probe the possibility of the meaning of the same text in a different time or a different context when the same text is read by the same reader but not with the same conditions or expectancies.The text, thus, is procreative and can never be seen as an end in itself.It always generates meanings regarding the readings and experiences exerted on it by its readers.(Hall, Cultural identity and diaspora, 1990) Differences produce representations the moment one paves the way to the other.The representations are not fixed meanings but they are grounds for negotiating and re-establishing them.This method of binarism strikes heavily on the meaning construction; an absence or presence of an element necessitates a certain reaction and particular result which can only exist at the very exact time these opposing or compositional elements interact with one another.However, should the process of producing meaning always be seen in such binarism?Isn't it going to reduce the possibilities in creating alterative meanings to the same exact element avoiding putting them in a similar trajectory in providing its meaning?In an article entitled "A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference", Rutherford deliberates the concept of binarism in devising meaning of a given aspect of the identity stating: Binarism operates in the same way as splitting and projection: the centre expels its anxieties, contradictions and irrationalities onto the subordinate term, filling it with the antithesis of its own identity; the Other, in its very alienness, simply mirrors and represents what is deeply familiar to the centre, but projected outside of itself.It is in these processes and representations of marginality that the violence, antagonisms and aversions which are at the core of the dominant discourses and identities become manifest -racism, homophobia, misogyny and class contempt are the products of this frontier.(Rutherford, 1990) Defining and providing meaning leads to the process of gain and loss.Deciding on the dominant and subordinate discourses can provide a preliminary phase of the meanings that is gained by the dominant discourse over the dependent one since the latter is manipulated by the former and the decision on what to include from what to discard is always decided on by the dominant discourses.Loss of meaning go to the comparison that both parts accept in rendering the overall meaning that is longed for.By comparing and trying to develop a meaning to either sides of the meaning providers, there is a loss and gain of the meaning vis-à-vis the elements to be newly introduced to the concept or to be taken away from it.Concerning Rutherford, he further articulates that binarism and the sense of comparison in developing meaning to a certain articulation is a doomed process which stands as a field of resistance of the subordinate over the hegemony of the dominant discourses.She assumes: But it is in its nature as a supplement to the centre that the margin is also a place of resistance.The assertion of its existence threatens to deconstruct those forms of knowledge that constitute the subjectivities, discourses and institutions of the dominant, hegemonic formations.It is here, where power relations and historical forces have organised meaning into polar opposites that language becomes a site of struggle.Even as difference is pathologised and refused legitimacy, new terms and new identities are produced on the margins.Those early assertions 'Black is Beautiful', 'Sisterhood is Powerful' and 'Gay Pride' break the logic of the otherness of binarism.(Rutherford, 1990) Marginalisation and undermining identities have never been a way to silence or erase, though it has been the ultimate goal of the hegemonic discourses throughout historical realities, the individual or the group on whom or which such power was exerted.Despite the insistency of the power representative in effacing the presence of minorities; be it in the homeland by the nationalists to empower the national identity and to prove to what extent it is the dominant and the only structure that one should abide by, or by the host culture's nationalist advocates as a method in preserving their transmissible national affiliations; or, even, by those empowered minorities that took control and managed to expand their discourses over other minorities stating that theirs would be the dominant and any other minority should be associating to them, these minorities, groups, communities or individuals manage to fight back and maintain their identities regardless of all the attempts exerted on them.

CONCLUSION
Diasporic subjects generate alternative meanings to the national identity not only in the one they possess but also in the homeland and host terrestrial national identities.The departure of these subjects helps in making a radical change in all parts that are related to it.The definitions of "home", "culture", "language", "rituals", "religion", as well as "politics" take different other dimensions of meanings since they have been subjected to different modifications and alternative norms of approachability.Thus, meanings that one can associate with the diasporic subjects should take into consideration the multiplicity of interactions and connections they have experienced while forming their identities.National identities that strive to find their roots in the identification of the diasporic subjects are themselves an integral part of the development of identity constructions.Nations that have developed their idiosyncratic means and conception of identity representation have been going through different changes in the meaning they provide to their identities and conceptions they have developed for themselves.Bearing that each nation has deeply inserted and invested the national identity incarnations in its patriots, these nations strain all means possible to keep ropes of relationships with these subjects that decided to depart from their homelands freely or forcefully.The ties that they work hard in tightening and strengthening do not necessarily show the extent to which these nations are clinging to their subjects for the sake of patrimony and nationhood.Rather, it is broadly about a lot of other dimensional aspects than the two previously noted ones; economy, politics and history could be crowning these agendas of holding to the national subjects of a certain nation by the nation's advocates.Diasporic subjects' departure from their homelands and the endeavours of national identities; an attempt to develop identities in general that includes the national identity which does not entail that they were mainly developing the national identity uniquely and separately, have occupied most of the concerns of the diasporic subjects' interests both in their realities as well as their imaginative worlds, literature.The concerns; such as home belonging, historical development, language adequacies, cultural allegiances, religious righteousness, as well as political correctness, are the dominant aspects and representative issues that occupy most of the literature of the diasporic subjects and writers.Are the concerns of diasporic subjects the exact same nature and rely on the shared experiences and inadequacies overlooking the specificities of individuals, groups, gender, politics, class, religion, and cultural backgrounds?Affinities and finite decisions on what a diasporic narrative is like can never represent the study itself and cannot reflect the deepness it has been formulated as such.Diasporic studies try not to fall into the dichotomies of binarisms, oversimplifications, and essentialisms.Therefore, diasporic studies go beyond the trivialities of borrowing from other studies and work in developing basic representations to the study based on the concerns and discussions that stem from specificities that the studies regard as typical to the representation of the diasporic situation.In "Diasporas", Clifford raised one of the concerns that diasporic studies might find itself reproducing or developing unconsciously while they establish the body of their literature and narratives.He questions: Diasporic experiences are always gendered.But there is an easy tendency for theoretical accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, to talk of travel and displacement in unmarked ways, thus, normalising male experiences.... When diasporic experience is viewed in terms of displacement rather than placement, travelling rather than dwelling, and disarticulation rather than rearticulation.Then the experiences of men will tend to be predominate.Specific diaspora histories, coterritories, community practises, dominations and contact relations may then be generalized into gendered postmodern globalisms, abstract nomadologies.(Clifford, Diasporas, 1994) Clifford probes the discourse of diasporic studies and their mission in setting their identifying literatures highlighting the possibilities of coming up with texts that can be mainly about writing back and reconstructing what has already been established as dominant knowledge and discourse.According to him, if this would be the role of diasporic experiences, then, the study would not be resonant and would not play the role it has existed for; generating a literature of their own and an identification to the body of their experiences.Clifford addresses the studies of diaspora in general, the concern of the thesis at hand is to decipher the struggle and endeavour the female Arab writers in establishing a literature of their own and how it can validate the concerns of the female subject or writer in presenting their positionalities in the journey of creating a literature of their own.How gendered are the diaspora experiences in the literature produced by female writers?What are the concerns that dominate the diasporic female writer in the Arab world?Is it possible that the diasporic Arab female writings can be set in a categorical itemised literature distinguished from any other literature existing?
Hall summarises the discussion by claiming: This second sense of difference challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation and show how meaning is never finished or completed but keeps on moving to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings, which, as Norris puts it elsewhere, 'disturb the classical economy of language and representation'.Without relations of difference, no representation could occur.But what is then constituted within representation is always open to being deferred, staggered, or serialised.