Diaspora Identities: Hybridity and New Ethnicities
Diaspora vs. Migrant Identities
It is more accurate to talk about ‘diaspora identities’ rather than ‘migrant identities’; not all of those who live in a diaspora, or share an emotional connection to the ‘old country’, have experienced migration. All diasporas are differentiated, heterogeneous, contested spaces, even as they are implicated in the construction of a common “we”. Differences of gender, race, class, religion, and language make diaspora identities dynamic and shifting, open to repeated construction and reconstruction, contestation, and change.
New Ethnicities
In ‘New Ethnicities’, Stuart Hall considers the ways in which members of the black British diaspora have represented themselves in response to the ‘common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain’. He identifies two separate yet overlapping phases or moments.
- In the first, the term ‘black’ was used as a way of uniting people of different ethnic or racial backgrounds and organizing them into communities of resistance. This served two purposes:
- First, it raised the question of rights of access to representation by black writers and artists.
- Second, it enabled the stereotypical and derogatory representations of black people at large to be contested by positive images of the black community, often through the coherence of an essentialized black subject who typified black experience in general.
- In the second moment, these unifying modes of representation become contested from within the black community, as individuals begin to question the existence and purpose of believing in an essential black subject. Diasporic black identities are presented instead as multiple and mobile, with their own inner tensions. Black artists and writers no longer work on behalf of the black community, because that composite community cannot be easily homogenized. The work they produce cannot be celebrated simply because it comes from the diaspora. Instead, more critical and conflictual responses become possible.
Hall’s essay demonstrates that these different responses to the experience of living in diaspora are simultaneously possible. It is not wise to make generalizations about a typical ‘migrant perspective’ or a ‘diaspora experience’.
Hybridity
The concept of hybridity has proved very important for diaspora peoples, and indeed many others too, as a way of thinking beyond exclusionary, fixed, binary notions of identity based on ideas of rootedness and cultural, racial, and national purity. Hybrid identities are never total and complete in themselves. Instead, they remain perpetually in motion.
Roots vs. Routes
New modes of identity which depend upon reconsidering the mobile and perilous ‘in-between’ positions as a site of excitement, new possibilities, and even privilege are emerging. To live as a migrant may evoke the pain of loss and of not being firmly rooted in a secure place, but it is also to live in a world of immense possibility with the realization that new knowledge and ways of seeing can be constructed out of myriad combinations of the ‘scraps’; knowledge which challenge the authority of older ideas of rootedness and fixity. Migrants may not have secure roots which fix them in a place, in a nation, or an ethnic group; rather they must continually plot for themselves itinerant cultural routes which take them, imaginatively as well as physically, to many places and into contact with many different peoples. This forges a shifting relationship between past, present, and future, one that does not presume an even, continuous passage through time but which re-constellates these different moments. The grounded certainties or roots are replaced with the transnational contingencies of routes.