Reflexivity in Diaspora

As indicated at the outset, in order for a diaspora to constitute itself, or be constituted, the diasporic community must become aware of its difference from other collectives in the‘diaspora space’. Thus, Khachig Tölölyan views di-aspora as

a process of collective identification and form of identity, marked by ever-changing differ-ences that chart the shifting boundaries of certain communities hierarchically embedded as enclaves with porous boundaries within other, larger communities. […] The diasporic com-munity sees itself as linked to but different from those among whom it has settled;

even- Reinold Schmücker,“Versuch über die Bedeutung des Nachdenkens über das Recht für die Theorie der Literatur,”inWert und Wahrheit in der Rechtswissenschaft: Im Gedenken an Gerhard Sprenger, ed. Annette Brockmöller, Stephan Kirste, and Ulfrid Neumann (Stuttgart: Steiner,

):–.

 Nigel E. Simmonds,“Reflexivity and the Idea of Law,”Jurisprudence.():–,.

 Simmonds,“Reflexivity and the Idea of the Law,”.

tually, it also comes to see itself as powerfully linked to, but in some ways different from, the people in the homeland as well.⁴⁷

This is true of personal identity no less than of collective identity:“I am only a person to the extent that I know myself to be one, and in exactly the same way, a group–whether it be a tribe, race, or nation–can only be itself to the degree in which it understands, visualizes, and represents itself.”⁴⁸Ernest Renan’s fa-mous description of the nation as“un plébiscite de tous les jours”seems perti-nent, as does Hugh Seton Watson’s classic resigned‘definition’that a nation ex-ists“when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.”⁴⁹Stuart Hall, too, emphasises the self-reflexive element in the ‘procedural’ conception of diasporic identity:

“Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”⁵⁰All these definitions confront the reflexive paradox of the imagined community–they stress that it is a community that imaginesitselfinto existence. Jan Assmann has described col-lective identity as a“reflexive form of social belonging,”and he points out its constitutive relationship to cultural identity, which“correspondingly entails con-scious participation in or recognition of a specific culture”:“By making people conscious of a particular, shared situation, belonging can be changed into homo-geneity and the mass can be transformed into a collectively acting ‘subject’

whose capacity for action will be tied to its identity.”⁵¹ This applies beyond the tribal, ethnic, and national collectives of antiquity that Assmann discusses to the genesis of diasporic identity. Avtar Brah has stressed this reflexive nature of ‘diaspora’concerning“the historically variable forms of relationality within and between diasporic formations”:“It is about relations of power that similar-ise and differentiate between and across changing diasporic constellations. In other words, the concept of diaspora centres on the configurations of power

 Tölölyan,“Contemporary Discourse,”–. Cp. Khachig Tölölyan,“Diaspora Studies.

Past, Present and Promise,” International Migration Institute Oxford Working Papers 

():.

 Jan Assmann,Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination(Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP,):.

 Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations, States.An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism(London: Methuen,):.

 Stuart Hall,“Cultural Identity and Diaspora,”in Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel, Anita Mannur (Malden, MA, Oxford et al.: Blackwell,):–,. Sim-ilarly, Kim Butler considers diaspora“as a framework for the study of a specific process of com-munity formation”(“Defining Diaspora,”).

 Assmann,Cultural Memory,.

which differentiate diasporas internally as well as situate them in relation to one another.”⁵² Diaspora thus demands the reflexion on self, other, and the‘diaspora space’where these categories meet and trouble each other. The role of narratives in connection with such reflexive negotiations of identity is well-known. Wolf-gang Müller-Funk explains:

[O]nly narratives are able to create collective identities, which are based on narrating com-munities, on groups of readers, who become storytellers at the same time. This kind of nar-rative always tells a story about who we are and who we are not. On an individual level, it creates a narrative unity of life. On a collective level, it suggests–in an act of abstraction and imagination–the‘life’of a nation, the history of a movement, a group etc.⁵³ This constitutes a parallel with the law, of course–as Robert Cover and others have argued, the way in which we impose normative force on“a state of affairs […] is the act of creating narrative.”⁵⁴Legal narratives project model states that provide orientation, and the same is true of those ideal states projected by the collective imagining itself. But Müller-Funk, like Hall, includes in his definition not only collectives, but also individuals, and I believe it is very important to at-tend to this dual dimension of‘diasporic identity,’which has a collective and a personal aspect, just as‘a diaspora’is a collective that is made up of individuals who, depending on contingent circumstances, may be more or less free to per-ceive themselves as part of that collective. As Avtar Brah has shown, moreover, diasporic identity intersects with other social and personal positionings such as gender, race, caste and class, all of which need to be interrogated and pro-blematized in their relation to the idea of a“stable and essential [diasporic]

identity.”⁵⁵ Personal identity, then, might be described with Jürgen Straub as an individual’s paradoxical ambition for a unity or harmony of all of its differ-ences, which can never be realised through synthesis of these differences.⁵⁶On the in-achievability of this ambition for unity rests the character of “identity

 Avtar Brah,Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities(London, New York: Routledge,

):.

 Wolfgang Müller-Funk,The Architecture of Modern Culture(Berlin: De Gruyter,):–

.

 Robert M. Cover,“The Supreme Court,Term–Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Har-vard Law Review():–,.

 Brah,Cartographies,.

 Jürgen Straub,“Identität,”in Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Friedrich Jaeger, Burkhard Liebsch, Jörn Rüsen, Jürgen Straub (Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler, ): –

,.

as a‘production’which is never complete, always in process, and always consti-tuted within […] representation”which Stuart Hall speaks of.⁵⁷

The negotiation of diasporic identities is framed in what has been described as the‘diasporic imaginary’and occurs through the reflexive processes that are inherent in those modes of collective representation attached to it, which apart from art include such elements as historical narratives about groups and places, myths, symbols, iconographies, and other social practices and behaviours.⁵⁸ However, diasporics do not only imagine ‘their’ diaspora emically or through self-study. It is also created by observers outside the community. These observers may include other actors in the diaspora space, both in the host and home coun-tries and outside of both, including“those who are constructed and represented as indigenous”⁵⁹as well as national and international policy-makers, media, and academics, among others. Khachig Tölölyan cautions that the academic observ-er’s presence will affect the observed system, as it were:

theoretical conceptions, specialized terminologies, acknowledged and unacknowledged disciplinary interests and intentions, a will to knowledge, and a variety of methodologies combine to reformulate diasporas. Living diasporas are objects of knowledge that can, how-ever, react: they talk back, not only to the way they are represented in media and the ad-ministrative-juridical languages of administration, but also to disciplinary, scholarly dis-courses. They become simultaneously objects of knowledge and cosubjects.⁶⁰

In academic diaspora studies, reflexivity is thus central not only through the common demand for methodological reflexion and through the personal trajec-tories that frequently induce scholars to engage with the topic of diaspora in the first place, but also through the interaction that occurs between scholars and their subjects.

If I assume, then, that diasporic identity is the product of reflexive commun-ity formation processes, I mean by this not only the collective’s self-reflexion in the Andersonian sense of its self-imagining, but also the individual’s self-con-scious positioning vis-à-vis that collective and all the others that are available as potential sites of identification. Identity is sociogenic in the double sense de-scribed by Jan Assmann in that it produces collectives as much as it is produced

 Hall,“Cultural Identity,”.

 Vijay Mishra,The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (Lon-don, New York: Routledge,); Nabeel Zuberi,“Diaspora,”inThe Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory , ed. Michael Ryan (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,): –,

.

 Brah,Cartographies,.

 Tölölyan,“Contemporary Discourse,”.

by them.⁶¹ Such self-conscious positioning through representation takes the shape of narratives, and these narratives are precarious attempts at manifesting that ambition for unity. They feed into the narrator’s self-image: as I imagine my-self as this person or that, I not only become that person (if my attempt at auto-narration succeeds in convincing myself), but I will then be the person who im-agined themselves to be that person and who then moved on and had to confirm or‘live’that identity. The collectives vis-à-vis which I imagined myself are simi-larly changed in the process as I position myself in relation to them. Again, this is the process of the Hofstadterian, or Gödelian, strange loop that produces iden-tity. This observation, I concede, is perhaps too general to be of great value in

‘defining’diasporic identity–it applies to all collective identities, and perhaps the only specifically diasporic aspect to this is the relative importance of differ-ence, since the diasporic subjectandthe diasporic collective will experience an emphasis on difference in the construction of their identity, either voluntarily and actively or passively by imposition from outside.

A diasporic individual’s, and community’s, identity and autonomyas dia-sporicis reflexive in the same sense as literary texts and the law relate to them-selves. Like the law and literature, diasporic identity, too, is representative and reflective of the contingent historical circumstances that produce it. A reference to some‘institutional’framework of diasporicity may exist: certainly, it is pro-duced by theorists of diaspora both in academia and among policy-makers. It can also be foregrounded in diasporans’, and diasporas’, solidarity for each other in the face of a perceived common threat, e.g., by legislation. The fourth category of meta-hermeneutic reflexivity appears more pronounced in the dia-spora imaginary than in the law, at least: diasporic identity can be conceived of as reflexive of human‘being in the world’by the metaphorical proposition thatUlysses so memorably makes, of man as the eternal wanderer and of life as a journey:

The paradoxical combination of localism and transnationalism, the fierce aspiration to ach-ieve economic and social success and the willingness to sacrifice for the community and the homeland, indeed the oscillation between loyalty and skeptical detachment that char-acterizes the performance of diasporic lives, is […] an example of the way everyone, includ-ing nationals, will have to live in an increasinclud-ingly heterogeneous and plural world.⁶²

 Assmann,Cultural Memory,.

 Tölölyan,“Diaspora Studies,”.

In that sense, perhaps informed by an ambition that, were it not for the negative connotations of the terms, might be called‘humanist’or‘universalist,’diaspora studies undertakes to be the study of the human predicament at large.