CONTRATOS DE TRANSPORTE AÉREO

Introduction

Diaspora studies is in the midst of a protracted conceptual crisis. A vast array of syntheses and critiques of the field have emerged over the last two decades (Anthias, 1998; Brubaker, 2005; Mitchell, 1997; Tölölyan, 2007), responding with caution to the proliferation in academic interest in diasporas and the uncritical application of the term to numerous empirical cases. These critical responses highlight a dissatisfaction with the way in which diaspora has been stripped of its conceptual rigour. It has been reduced to a buzzword that is used to represent diverse forms of transnational movement and transnational identity (Brubaker, 2005; Safran, 2005). Diaspora literature polarises: forms of transnational being are either defined by their a) ‘rootedness’, in a shared place of origin, or b) ‘routedness’, towards an emergent, hybrid, and transgressive identity (Safran, 2001; Cheyette, 2013).

Scholars such as Mitchell (1997) and Alexander (2017) have questioned the prominence of particular epistemological perspectives being applied to the study of the ‘diasporic condition’, whereby accounts of diasporic subjectivity are increasingly articulated in abstract forms of analysis, removed from situated political and economic relations. These perspectives raise important questions for

critical engagement with the diaspora concept. What, for instance, does this emphasis on transnationalism and transcendence say about the grounded realities of life in the diaspora? What can this notion of a diasporic subjective condition tell us about these grounded realities, and about the productive potential of resettlement? Or, in other words, what does the diaspora concept tell us about life outside of the homeland that concepts of transnationality cannot?

This chapter explores how diasporic communities are conceptualised in the critical social sciences, focusing particularly on those that have experienced forced displacement (as opposed to voluntary migration). The chapter steers a path through the conceptual crisis by drawing on the critical and distinctive qualities of diaspora, and particularly those that remain under-utilised in the social and spatial sciences. It will be argued that diaspora has been blurred and distorted by the specific political and paradigmatic approaches that dominate diaspora scholarship. Research into the phenomenon of diaspora is therefore enriched when it does not limit itself to these norms. In fact, when these perspectives are put to one side, it becomes clear that the field of diaspora studies has yet to take sufficient account of the emplaced conditions and concerns of diasporic communities. In broad terms, this means the concept must relinquish its transnational ties that essentialise and homogenise aspects of the so-called diasporic condition. Instead, diaspora must be understood as a plurality, and diaspora scholarship needs to pay closer attention to the specificities and contingencies of place-based diasporic subjectivity.

Deploying a geographical lens, this chapter identifies a multiplicity of emplaced concerns centred around the places in which diasporic life is lived and experienced. A focus on place and emplacement helps us move beyond the entrenched crisis within diaspora scholarship, and grounds the concept of diaspora in the specificities and contingencies of localised diasporic experience. In doing so, this chapter sets the scene for the empirically driven work that is to come in later chapters, which investigate the diasporic experience of a Palestinian- Jordanian community in Jana’a neighbourhood, in the city of Zarqa.

The De-Territorialised Subject

Diaspora has proved a flexible and ambivalent concept capable of reflecting a broad range of subjective positions in relation to diasporic life, tied to experiences of transnational displacement, movement and resettlement. But it is the position of the de-territorialised subject that has come the closest to defining the ‘diasporic condition’, both historically and in the contemporary academy. Diaspora as a concept has long been synonymous with the fate of Jews following the forced exodus from the Land of Israel (Safran, 2005). The Jewish experience is widely acknowledged as the “epistemological source” of diaspora and, accompanied by the African diaspora, “enjoys pride of place in the pantheon of diaspora studies” (Zeleza 2005, p.36). In more recent years, a de-territorialised notion of diasporic life has been a core element of postcolonial theory; challenging territorial loyalties and presenting displacement as an epistemology and source of ‘political radicalism’ (Giri 2005, p.216). In particular, diaspora and postcolonialism merge to counter hegemonic understandings of race, empire and nation, “while opening up new and better avenues of sociality and belonging at the margins of these formations” (ibid.). An emphasis on de-territorialisation in each of these areas implies only a limited appreciation for place in our understanding of diasporic life. In relation to the ‘archetypal’ Jewish experience, several scholars have noted how it is abstract space and text - rather than places - that become sites of hope, resistance and belonging in the diaspora (Mitchell, 1997). The perceived permanence of de-territorialisationmeans that it is movement that serves as place, and allows for transnational solidarities to form (Steiner, 1985; Medam, 1993). In the absence of territorial belonging, the Torah has long been a central part of Jewish diasporic life, described as both a ‘portable Temple’ (ibid., p.64) and a ‘portable fatherland’ (Safran 2005, p.44). Boyarin (2015) argues that territorial homelands can be rendered obsolete when replaced by transnational cultural connections. In the Jewish context it is the Babylonian Talmud3_{, rather than the}

3 _{“Arguably the most important Jewish text” (Rubenstein 2005, p.1), the}

Land of Israel, that produces the Jewish diaspora and constitutes ‘home’ and allows disparate territories to be considered part of the same locale. He writes, “bonds of language, religion, culture and a sense of a common fate impregnate such a transnational relationship to give to it an affective, intimate quality” (ibid., p.4). Reflecting on Boyarin’s work, Lieber (2017, p.267) states that in the diaspora “multiple geographic (and textual) centres coexist simultaneously and in parity, through centuries and across continents”. Despite the relatively modern phenomena of Jewish movements that have sought the re-territorialisation of the diaspora, most notably through Zionism, Wistrich (2016, p.136) reminds us that such territorial claims have been widely criticised within diasporic Jewish communities:

“Religious critics […] feared Zionism above all as a ‘heretical’ secular movement. They saw it as an alarming challenge to the authority of the Torah and […] to the prevailing self-definition of Jewry as primarily a religious community. […] As for Reform Jews, especially in Germany, Britain, and the United States, Zionism to them seemed like a reactionary retreat into a parochial and narrow nationalism”.

De-territorialisation has been even more hotly contested in the context of the black (sometimes ‘African’) diaspora. The “nearly hegemonic” framework known as the ‘Middle Passage Epistemology’ (MPE), referring to the most intense period of the transatlantic slave trade, grounds black identities in a “shared geographical as well as historical trajectory” (Afful 2016, p.558). Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) is perhaps the most influential work of this tradition, using the journeys across the Atlantic to position black subjects (and black culture) in relation to globalising processes of industrialisation and modernisation. Critics of MPE have taken issue with the implications of this de-territorialised subjectivity, creating its own myth of origin around the journey and disrupting a more historicised reading of the past, particularly regarding life before the middle passage (Dayan, 1996). However, there is metaphorical value in de-territorialisation that proves

Babylonian Talmud was compiled during the 5th-7th centuries CE in the diaspora, in Sasanian Mesopotamia (ibid.).

particularly compelling for thinking in diasporic terms, as it encourages us to think through commonalities as well as through difference, and to tie subjectivity to political economic processes (McKittrick, 2006). In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy provides an interesting interplay between the materialities of the middle passage and their metaphorical value. It is not necessarily the formative experience of the journey that de-territorialises the diasporic subject. Rather, it is the materialities of the journey itself that encourage us to think in transnational, de-territorialised terms.

Exiled intellectuals have long played a prominent role in reinforcing the importance of the de-territorialised subject to the diasporic condition. While the introductory chapter highlighted both the power and the limitations of this discourse in the Palestinian context, it is worth noting that the lines between ‘exilic’ and ‘diasporic’ subjects have been blurred irrespective of empirical case. In Diasporas of the Mind, Cheyette (2013) takes a similar view to Gilroy, expressing the need to think metaphorically in order to explore commonalities across disparate geographies and examines how Jewish, black and postcolonial exilic intellectuals have understood the ‘diasporic condition’. Frantz Fanon (1961), Hannah Arendt (1971), Salman Rushdie (1991) and Edward Said (2001), among others, have all produced influential contributions to the idea of the elusive, de- territorialised subject. As Cheyette states, diaspora literature occupies a range of positions that nevertheless emphasise forms of de-territorialisation: often either a historicised notion of diaspora as “a timeless exile”, or diaspora as a collection of “emergent transnational and post-ethnic identities” (ibid., p.xiii).

Exiled intellectuals often speak from a position of privilege, relative to the displaced community they come to represent. The “comprador intelligentsia, postcolonial critic, and progressive exile” (Nesbitt 2002, p.70) all occupy compromised positions in this regard. These exilic positions tend to reflect narrow, external interests or specific, contemporary theoretical paradigms; they may be crafted for particular audiences; or they may espouse a politics of liberation and structural transformation (ibid., pp.73-4). Rarely, it seems, can the exiled

intellectual write diaspora in a way that reflects the everyday experiences of the majority of those in the community. When Dionne Brand (2001) says that her home is in poetry rather than place, or when Gayatri Spivak (1990, p.37) remarks “one is always on the run […]. I think it’s important for people not to feel rooted in one place”, it is difficult to see how these perspectives reflect the broader diasporic experience. In the exilic intellectual we encounter two problems linked to the conceptualisation of diaspora. The first lies in the emphasis on the singularity of individual experience over the collective experience of a diasporic community. The second problem is that these intellectuals write from a position of privilege that is detached from the physical places in which diasporic life is lived.

In both the exilic imaginary and across contemporary diaspora scholarship, it is memory (rather than territory) that serves as the principal ground of identity formation in the diaspora (Fortier, 2000). Vieten (2006, p.268) notes that:

“the experience of a life in exile […] cannot be separated from memory of the homeland. In leaving the place called home, the migrant lives in memory, a nomadic and impermanent home”

For Lily Cho (in Tölölyan 2012, p.8), diasporic subjectivity is associated with racial memory, loss, and longing, whereby the “spectrality of sorrow” meets “miracles of [transnational] connection”, providing the social and cultural capital necessary to make sense of displacement and allow for the creation of identities around the single, cataclysmic event of departure (Eng 2008, pp.111-112). In this sense, memory is the prosthesis of territory; making up in symbolic and imaginative terms what has been lost in matter. The act of de-territorialisation thus scars, haunts and absorbs both the individual and collective diasporic subject, and the ‘wound’ attached to memory is mobilised as a key frame of orientation for diasporic commemoration, discourse and practice (Tölölyan 2012, p.9). In these forms, memory compensates for de-territorialisation, which serves to "erase histories and geographies, which are, in fact, present, legitimate and experiential" (McKittrick 2006, p.33).

This focus on memory, mobility and exilic imaginative practices has been reinforced by a widespread acceptance of postmodernist thought within the critical social sciences. ‘De-territorialisation’ no longer merely describes the act of forced displacement and its enduring impact on diasporic communities; for Deleuze and Guattari, de-territorialisation is a political ontology in and of itself. Formulated at length in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), de-territorialisation denotes a kind of becoming, in which subjects are no longer so constrained by ‘territorial’ limitations; “a Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew” (ibid., p.292). In other words, de-territorialisation denotes a process through which a subject position can become more fully realised. Deleuze and Guattari present the nomad as the de-territorialised subject ‘par excellence’, due to the absence of a subsequent re-territorialisation (ibid., p.381). However, this ontology is routinely, and often uncritically, applied to the literal, territorial dispersion experienced by diasporic communities (Vieten 2006; Chivallon, 2018).As a result of this conceptual convergence between nomad and diaspora, diasporic subjectivity is often associated with notions of "uprooting, mobility, nomadism, and the multiplicity of membership" (Chivallon 2018, p.281), leaving little room in the diasporic imaginary for settled positions and emplaced concerns.

Stuart Hall once claimed that “the classic postmodern experience is the diasporic experience”, explaining how the diaspora-migrant-nomad is “continually moving between centre and periphery” (2006, p.492; 1994, p.234). The contemporary and postmodern preoccupation with subjectivity has meant that diasporic scholarship tends to emphasise fluid and transcendental features of diasporic identity, uncritically defining the diasporic condition as a transnational phenomenon. For Hall, cultural identity transcends both time and place, is simultaneously historical and transformative and "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power" rather than "externally fixed in some essentialised past" (1994, p.225). Following this line of thought, Paul Gilroy (1987, p.154) locates black cultural expression at the intersections of race and class, the performative value of which allows the diasporic subject to transcend structures

of dominance and exist in a "temporarily settled" diasporic condition. Exilic and diasporic subjectivities seem to diverge in these moments of becoming and ambivalence. Furthermore, diaspora proves capable of resisting essentialist categorisations of culture as indivisibly racial, ethnic or national, and the term diaspora emphasises hybridity and emergence across multiple transnational planes. As Hall and Gilroy suggest, there is a shift in focus from 'roots' to 'routes', whereby a "common-sense view of place" is rejected in favour of a spatially defined 'global sense of place' (Grossberg 1997, p.290). Occupying a world of becomings, the de-territorialised diasporic subject locates meaning in and identification with movement, transcendence, and transnational collective space.

There are several problems with the prominence of de-territoriality as a defining feature of diasporic experience. Firstly, it tends to equate the diaspora concept with a celebratory, progressive form of transnational politics (Giri, 2005). Secondly, it is often based on diasporas in the anglophone world rather than reflecting other contexts of diasporic existence (Zeleza, 2005). Thirdly, it is seen as compelling only because it fits neatly with “the global social fact” of ever- increasing levels of individual mobility and displacement (Malkki, 1992). That said, the majority of critiques seem either unable or unwilling to relinquish the association between diaspora and the transnational, and in emphasising the importance of historicisation and multiplicity, they retain a de-territoriality that only serves to dilute and complicate the diaspora concept. While an argument will later be made of the importance of place in overcoming these problems, it is important to turn to the prevailing way in which diaspora studies tends to move beyond de-territorialisation in favour of a more grounded analysis: by defining diaspora in terms of a marginalised subjectivity.

The Marginalised Subject

In critical scholarship, diasporic subjectivity is often located in the interstices between structures of political, economic, social and cultural dominance. In these instances, the diasporic subject tends to be defined not in relation to its territorial displacement, but in relation to the subsequent and ongoing acts of marginalisation that take place across disparate, ‘newly’-inhabited territories of the diaspora. Cohen (1995) explains that this shift in the term’s usage results from the experiences of the Jewish diaspora entering the Christian world. The dispersal of Jews away from a territorial homeland was portrayed by Christian theologians as evidence of "God's punishment [for] the Jews' heinous crime of deicide” (ibid., pp.6-7). It was therefore Christian theological intervention, rather than the traumatic events of mass exodus or the destruction of the Second Temple, that shifted the meaning of ‘diaspora’ from its association with displacement and transnational movement, to its association with the Jewish experience of alien rule, hostility and marginality.

In describing disorientation as the “defining feature of the African diasporic experience in North America”, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois recognised this as a product not of territorial loss but of the "withering, steady blast of American racism" (Gomez 2004, pp.176-7). Resulting from racism, Du Bois argued, is a marginalised subjectivity he calls ‘double consciousness’ ([1903] 2007, pp.8-9):

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, –– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, –– this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

Double consciousness results in the fracturing of the diasporic self; forever having to reconcile how one is viewed in a racialised society with how one feels. Importantly, Du Bois writes of a ‘colour-line’ which, while metaphorical, also stands for the material conditions that produce double consciousness. As McKittrick states, the colour-line is “manifested by and produced in relation to the physical environment”; it is “material, philosophical, and an analysis of what it means to know and re-imagine ‘place’” (2006, p.22).

In contrast, ‘the margin’ has also featured as an alluring spatial metaphor in postmodernist accounts of diaspora, once again theorising the diasporic subject without directly engaging in questions of place. Exemplified by Bhabha's (1994) notion of 'in-between space', this line of enquiry stipulates that the identities of marginalised populations are produced in the spaces where the ideology and practice of dominant social groups intersect with tensions of remaining and becoming for non-domiciled groups (Rose 1993; Aneby-Yemini and Berthomière, 2005). The diasporic subject is particularly attuned to these spaces, it seems, when authors and researchers assume that their subjectivity is defined by a pre-existing connection to a particular elsewhere, and the moment of displacement itself is portrayed as stifling any possibility of a more straightforward, even positive affiliation with the places inhabited and navigated by diasporic communities. 'Babylon' - originally referring to a specific territory in which acts of oppression and subjugation of Jews took place - has morphed in both Jewish and Black diasporic thought into a transcendental space, signifying "the afflictions, isolation and insecurity of living in a foreign place, set adrift, cut off from their roots" (Cohen 1995, p.6).

Within this framing, imagination and transcendence become particularly prominent in what constitutes the so-called diasporic condition. It is as Giri (2005, p.221) suggests: “the diasporic mind constitutes its own unique place, and under the conditions of a traumatic history”. Reflecting on the works of bell hooks, McKittrick explains how the margin can become a place of strength and site of resistance for non-majority groups, as subjects negotiate these contradictions and

tensions and imagine alternative futures and ways of being (2011, p.224). However, an over-reliance on spatial metaphors to capture experience runs the risk of creating “unstable, […] diverse and sometimes contradictory subject positions”, that provide little analytical insight (Pratt 1998, p.14). Pratt’s critique of this perspective rests on its political positioning; “the metaphors […] help us to see difference, but they encourage us to lose sight of commonalities” (ibid., p.16). Similarly, Mitchell argues that spatial metaphors are abstractions “away from the