Postcolonializing Bildungsroman Diaspora, border and transnational identities Jin Chien Huang

Jewish After 70A.D, “dispersal” becomes a word to describe the Jew who do not have the place of their own. The dictionary also highlights the word’s association with the dispersion of the Jews after the Babylonian exile. (Brah 178)

The image of wandering Jewish people deeply connected to “diaspora” and become a trauma and sorrow memories to the specific nation. (Jew)

The Concept of Diaspora At the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey. (Brah 179) Diaspora are clearly not the same as casual travel. Nor do they normatively refer to temporary sojourns. (Brah 179) Paradoxically, diaspora journeys are essentially about settling down, about putting roots ‘elsewhere’. (Brah 179)

It is axiomatic that each empirical diaspora must be analyzed in its historical specificity. (Brah 180) The concept of diaspora concerns the historically variable forms of relationality within and between diasporic formations.(Brah 180) The concept of diaspora centres on configurations of power which differentiate diasporas internally as well as situation them in relation to one another. (Brah 180)

Other components of diaspora Economic, political and cultural specificities.(Brah 180) Gender, race, class religion, language and generation.(Brah 180) ‘Diasporic community’ is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. (Brah 180)

Diaspora and Minority By ‘minority discourse’ we mean a theoretical articulation of the political and cultural structures that connect different minority cultures in their subjugation and opposition to the dominant culture.(Brah 184) JanMohammed is careful to print out that a minority location is ‘not a question o essence but a question position, subject position that in the final analysis can be defined only in “political” terms. (Brah 184)

What category of person is minoritised in a specific discourse? By bringing all subordinate classes, genders, ethnicities or sexualities within its orbit, then there would seem to be even less to gain by jettisoning the language of subordination which, at the very least, signals inequities of power. (Brah 185-6)

Where is “home”? On the one hand, ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin’. (Brah 188) On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality. (Brah 188-9) In other words, the varying experience of the pains and pleasures, the terrors and contentments, or the highs and humdrum of everyday lived culture that marks how.(Brah 189)

It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of ‘belonging’. (Brah 189) Not all diasporas inscribe homing desire through a wish to return to a place of ‘origin’. The word dispora often invokes the imagery of traumas of separation and dislocation, and this is certainly a very important aspect of the migratory experience. (Brah 190) Identity is always plural and in process. (Brah 191)

Whither diaspora? The homing desire, however, is not the same as the desire for a ‘homeland’. Contrary to general belief, not all diasporas sustain an ideology of return.(Brah 194) Moreover, the multi-placedness of home in the diasporic imaginary does not mean that diasporian subjectivity is ‘rootless’. (Brah 194) The concept of diaspora refers to multi- locationality within and across territorial, cultural and psychic boundaries. (Brah 194)

Thinking through Borders

Gloria Anzaldua invokes the concept of the border also as a metaphor for psychological, sexual, spiritual, cultual, class and racialised boundaries. (Brah 195) Problems

Looking forwards

The creation of arts Reformation of cultures Various sights of view to societies

Work Cited Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996.