Diaspora and Multiculturalism

Diaspora commonly refers to different kinds of migrant groups who have left their homeland but who continue to share a religious, ethno-national, or national identity. Since the mid-1980s, and through the 1990s, diaspora has expanded in meaning, to include more groups of people and placing more importance to the non-center and hybridity as central to diasporic identities. Asylum-seekers, refugees, exiles, forced migrants, immigrants, expatriates, guest workers, trading communities, and ethnic communities of various kinds, have come to be described as in diaspora or as tokens of a single diaspora. Some scholars have tried to retain a sense of consistency to a word, described as stretched to the point of potential irrelevance. The inequities of a liberal multiculturalism arise not from its weak commitment to difference but from its even stronger vision of national cohesion. Multicultural ideologies thus serve to reinforce liberal regimes through which nostalgia for an authentic past becomes an important driving force behind the construction of citizenship and political subjectivity.