Diaspora

A diaspora is a population dispersed across multiple regions outside its geographic place of origin, typically comprising people who continue to identify—culturally, politically, religiously, or emotionally—with a particular homeland while residing elsewhere. The term is widely used for communities formed through voluntary migration as well as through forced displacement caused by conquest, persecution, enslavement, famine, or war. In modern scholarship, "diaspora" generally implies not only dispersion but also some continuing orientation to an actual or imagined homeland and the maintenance of a distinct collective identity over time.
The concept of diaspora encompasses a wide range of communities, from longstanding groups such as Armenians, Africans dispersed through the Atlantic slave trade, and overseas Chinese, to more recent diasporas shaped by twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflict and upheaval, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Venezuelans. Contemporary definitions vary, but many emphasize geographic dispersion; enduring ties to a homeland; and social or cultural boundary-making that distinguishes the group within host societies, even as diasporas may also integrate deeply and develop complex transnational networks across multiple countries.
The oldest continuing diaspora population is generally considered the Jewish diaspora, originating in the first millennium BCE; the oldest continuously inhabited diaspora community in one place is often identified as the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, established in the 4th century CE and expanded as a result of the Armenian Genocide; and the largest diaspora today is the Indian diaspora, numbering 17.5 million worldwide as of 2019.

Etymology

The term "diaspora" is derived from the Ancient Greek verb διασπείρω, "I scatter", "I spread about" which in turn is composed of διά, "between, through, across" and the verb σπείρω, "I sow, I scatter". The term διασπορά hence meant "scattering".File: Emigrants Leave Ireland by Henry Doyle 1868.jpg|thumb|Emigrants Leave Ireland depicting the emigration from Ireland following the Great Famine
There is confusion over the exact process of derivation from these Ancient Greek verbs to the concept of diaspora. Many cite Thucydides ], but the original does not include the verb diaspeírô either. The verb used is the verb speírô conjugated in the passive aorist." The passage in Thucydides reads:

καὶ οἱ μὲν αὐτῶν ἐνταῦθα ᾤκησαν, οἱ δ᾽ ἐσπάρησαν κατὰ τὴν ἄλλην Ἑλλάδα, translated to mean 'Those of the Aeginetans who did not settle here were scattered over the rest of Hellas.'

Dufoix further notes, "Of all the occurrences of diaspora in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which draws upon almost the entire written corpus in the Greek language . . . none refer to colonisation." Dufoix surmises that the confusion may stem from a comment by Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who wrote an entry on diaspora for the influential Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. His entry, published in 1931, includes the following remark: "In a sense Magna Graecia constituted a Greek diaspora in the ancient Roman Empire." "Magna Graecia" refers to ancient Greek colonies established along the Italian coast, which lost their independence following the Second Punic War and their integration into the Roman Empire.
The first recorded use of the word "diaspora" is found in the Septuagint, first in:

Deuteronomy 28:25, in the phrase ἔσῃ ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς, esē en diaspora en pasais tais basileiais tēs gēs, translated to mean 'thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth'

and secondly in:

Psalms 146.2, in the phrase οἰκοδομῶν Ἰερουσαλὴμ ὁ Kύριος καὶ τὰς διασπορὰς τοῦ Ἰσραὴλ ἐπισυνάξει, oikodomōn Ierousalēm ho Kyrios kai tas diasporas tou Israēl episynaxē, translated to mean 'The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the outcasts of Israel'.

When the Bible was translated into Greek, the word diaspora was applied in reference to the Kingdom of Samaria which was exiled from Israel by the Assyrians between 740 and 722 BC, as well as Jews, Benjaminites, and Levites who were exiled from the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 BC, and Jews who were exiled from Roman Judea by the Roman Empire in 70 AD. It subsequently came to be used in reference to the historical movements and settlement patterns of the Jews. In English, capitalized, and without modifiers, the term can refer specifically to the Jewish diaspora. The wider application of diaspora evolved from the Assyrian two-way mass deportation policy of conquered populations to deny future territorial claims on their part.

Definition

The oldest known use of the word "diaspora" in English is in 1594 in John Stockwood's translation of Lambert Daneau's commentary on the Twelve Prophets. Daneau writes:

This scattering abrode of the Iewes, as it were an heauenly sowing, fell out after their returne from the captiuitie of Babylon. Wherevpon both Acts. 2. and also 1. Pet. 1. and 1. Iam. ver. 1. they are called Diaspora, that is, a scattering or sowing abrode.

However, the current entry on "diaspora" in the Oxford English Dictionary Online dates the first recorded use a century later to 1694, in a work on ordination by the Welsh theologian James Owen. Owen wanted to prove that there is no difference in the Bible between Presbyters and Bishops; he cited the example of the Jews in exile:

The Presbyters of the Jewish Diaspora, to whom St. Peter wrote, are requir'd ποιμαίνειν ϗ̀ ἐπισκοπείν, to feed or rule the Flock, and to perform the office and work of Bishops among them.

The OED records a usage of "diaspora" in 1876, which refers to "extensive diaspora work of evangelizing among the National Protestant Churches on the continent".
The term became more widely assimilated into English by the mid 1950s, with long-term expatriates in significant numbers from other particular countries or regions also being referred to as a diaspora. An academic field, diaspora studies, has become established relating to this sense of the word.

Scholarly work and expanding definition

in an article published in 1991, set out six rules to distinguish diasporas from migrant communities. These included criteria that the group maintains a myth or collective memory of their homeland; they regard their ancestral homeland as their true home, to which they will eventually return; being committed to the restoration or maintenance of that homeland, and they relate "personally or vicariously" to the homeland to a point where it shapes their identity. Safran's definitions were influenced by the idea of the Jewish diaspora. Safran also included a criterion of having been forced into exile by political or economic factors, followed by a long period of settlement in the new host culture. In 1997, Robin Cohen argued that a diasporic group could leave its homeland voluntarily, and assimilate deeply into host cultures.
Rogers Brubaker more inclusively applied three basic definitional criteria: First, geographic dispersion of a people; second, "the orientation to a real or imagined 'homeland' as an authoritative source of value, identity and loyalty"; and third, maintenance of a social boundary corresponding to the conservation of a distinctive diasporic identity which differs from the host culture. Brubaker also noted that the use of the term diaspora has been widening. He suggests that one element of this expansion in use "involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space". Brubaker used the WorldCat database to show that 17 out of the 18 books on diaspora published between 1900 and 1910 were on the Jewish diaspora. The majority of works in the 1960s were also about the Jewish diaspora, but in 2002 only two out of 20 books sampled were about the Jewish case, with a total of eight different diasporas covered.
Brubaker outlined the original use of the term diaspora as follows:
File:Armenian dancers in downtown Manhattan, 1976.jpg|thumb|Armenian American dancers in New York City
Some observers have labeled evacuation from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina the New Orleans diaspora, since a significant number of evacuees have not been able to return, yet maintain aspirations to do so. Agnieszka Weinar notes the widening use of the term, arguing that recently, "a growing body of literature succeeded in reformulating the definition, framing diaspora as almost any population on the move and no longer referring to the specific context of their existence". It has even been noted that as charismatic Christianity becomes increasingly globalized, many Christians conceive of themselves as a diaspora, and form a bond that mimics salient features of some ethnic diasporas.
Professional communities of individuals no longer in their homeland can also be considered diaspora. For example, science diasporas are communities of scientists who conduct their research away from their homeland and trading diasporas are communities of merchant aliens. In an article published in 1996, Khachig Tölölyan argues that the media have used the term corporate diaspora in a rather arbitrary and inaccurate fashion, for example as applied to "mid-level, mid-career executives who have been forced to find new places at a time of corporate upheaval" The use of corporate diaspora reflects the increasing popularity of the diaspora notion to describe a wide range of phenomena related to contemporary migration, displacement and transnational mobility. While corporate diaspora seems to avoid or contradict connotations of violence, coercion, and unnatural uprooting historically associated with the notion of diaspora, its scholarly use may heuristically describe the ways in which corporations function alongside diasporas. In this way, corporate diaspora might foreground the racial histories of diasporic formations without losing sight of the cultural logic of late capitalism in which corporations orchestrate the transnational circulation of people, images, ideologies and capital.
In contemporary times, scholars have classified the different kinds of diasporas based on their causes, such as colonialism, trade/labour migrations, or the social coherence which exists within the diaspora communities and their ties to the ancestral lands. With greater migration flows through the world in modern times, the concept of a secondary diaspora or sub-diaspora groupings has started being studied. Some diaspora communities maintain strong cultural and political ties to their homelands. Other qualities that may be typical of many diasporas are thoughts of return to the ancestral lands, maintaining any form of ties with the region of origin as well as relationships with other communities in the diaspora, and lack of full integration into the new host countries. Diasporas often maintain ties to the country of their historical affiliation and usually influence their current host country's policies towards their homeland. "Diaspora management" is a term that Harris Mylonas has "re-conceptualized to describe both the policies that states follow in order to build links with their diaspora abroad and the policies designed to help with the incorporation and integration of diasporic communities when they 'return' home".