Diasporic Provisions. Containers – Storytelling – Return

Quick fixes, temporary solutions, contingency plans, built-in redundancies, extras to fall back on, just in case – these are forms of diasporic meaning making in the mode of provisional organising. It is a mode in anticipation of crisis (here or there), of better times (when the bureaucratic hurdle is overcome), of return (to the home country – yours, or your parents’, or their parents’, or …).

What happens when the provisional becomes permanent? The diasporic ordinary produces its own lived concepts, practices, materialities and aesthetics: What does your home look like when you don’t know if you can or want to stay? Is it worth it to invest? What if you want to go back?

What if you get sick? What if you are someone else’s safety net? What does it look like when you prepare for both, delight and disaster? Do you hang up pictures, do you keep the walls white? Do you remove the foil from the TV screen? What is the resale value?

Taking the cue from these ordinary and existential questions we are interested in the following:

BYOT (Bring Your Own Tupperware)

Cheap, mass produced containers (most likely not brand names), store- bought or repurposed are mundane and omnipresent objects and signifiers of diasporic provisions. Tropes of buying in bulk and letting nothing go to waste rely on the container as a medium, to store, carry, distribute and share, mostly food but also memories, to create and take care of relationships, to bring things back from/to the home country. Containers serve as makeshift furniture, they are manifestations of intersecting, transgenerational class and economic precarity and racialised and diasporic living conditions. What things do people hold on to? Whether out of material and/or emotional needs, anticipatory accumulation invites us to think about how objects relate to a precarious past and an insecure future as an essential part of the temporal hinge of “for now”.

The container as diasporic medium and means of transportation and circulation of stories is reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). It equally raises questions regarding the violences of containers and containment (Sharpe 2022). Which narrative form does the empty ice cream tub translate to? The meme, the notes app? Do containers appropriately represent diasporic life? Are they substitutions for representation, or low-key refusals of evidentiary logics?

Storytelling

Does provisional organising lead to provisional storytelling? What does this look like? We imagine this form of storytelling to collect and store rather than systematise. It does not want to extract from its subjects and anecdotes to make a wider point. It resists the urge to fully narrativise; it allows for recognition but also opacity; it does not expose but also does not hide. It uses annotations to destabilise hierarchies of knowledge (Sharpe 2016). It values “excess knowledge”. It shares affinities with approaches that want to be “close but not deep” (Love 2010) as well as with autotheory: diasporic storytelling theorises diasporic experiences and senses of self in the mode of the provisional. It is reluctant towards the authorial “I”. It blurs the boundaries between literary and academic knowledge production. It avoids oversaturation.

Return

Diasporic provisions often revolve around ideas of return, not always physically, but always imaginatively. Return is characterised by a simultaneous pull towards (home, the past, an elsewhere) and the desire to escape (the “host” country, the violent present). Hopes for return meet with the exploitation/appropriation of the returnees’ cultural and economic capital by the “home” country. But temporary forms of belonging also produce provisional forms of return, at the Späti, the Thaipark, in the supposedly marginal, in the afterhours, in spaces of diasporic infrastructure, along routes of care. These returns create their own kinds of intimacies, either experienced fleetingly, only once, or repeatedly, over years, in the wider family (the cousins, the aunts) and the community, but also in the neighbourhood, at work etc. Are these not also traces of queerness that pervade migrant reality?

Containers, storytelling and return also resonate strongly with questions of scale.  Globally scattered diasporic communities navigate sometimes loose, sometimes tight-knit (online) networks, switching between languages and time zones, between grand narratives of migration and the minutiae of every day life. The seemingly marginal and the existential are always in close proximity (Williams 2022). This is also a characteristic of the diasporic provisional.