In January 2024 after a semester of reading about and discussing theories of diaspora, we (the Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary research group) sat down to discuss the topic. This discussion gave us the space to reflect on and return to some questions and issues that came up during our reading sessions. As you will see, the conversation took us to many places, and we were often drawn to the anecdotal. We were also drawn into discussing the inflections and aesthetics of diasporic life in different countries as well as the possibilities for cross-cultural affinities. Our contributions connect the personal and the structural, lived reality and theoretical observations. For us, diaspora is a difficult and liberally used term, it refers to many different and yet somehow related things.
An: One thing that often strikes me when the concept of diaspora comes up are the many different ways in which people understand and use it. My question then would be, where are we headed?
Aj: During our last discussion, we said, diaspora is often a stand-in for other terms, migration, minority etc. It might be more common in an Anglo-American cultural or academic context.
T: To me, it also seems to be a fairly new concept in the German cultural context. Maybe it is a result of Anglo-American concepts swapping over to Germany. Here, the term usually refers to communities as diverse as refugees, people with migrant histories in their families, first generation migrants, exiles, and temporary migrant workers, and the term sometimes seems to conflate various experiences into a general feeling of displacement. It might foster solidarity between these different groups of people, but oftentimes overlooks the nuances between these groups’ experiences in relation to the nation state.
E: In the 1990s, diaspora became a prominent label to describe different migrant communities. Many of these works started by interrogating the history of the term. It was first used regarding the Jewish diaspora, the word itself means dispersal. Back then, critics asked, what happens if we apply this concept more broadly?[1] For TODO, this wider understanding of diaspora was already a given. If we compare Germany, the US and the UK (as we do in the project) then the question of diaspora plays out differently with regard to how the nation state and diasporic communities within it are imagined. In the US, there is a sense that diasporic life has led to the development of specific diasporic cultures, think of Asian American literature, culture, foods. In Germany, this notion of diasporic communities that are specific to the place they live in or settled, seems far less prominent, and instead the term post-migrant society became popular for some time.[2]
In order to understand diasporic affinities and how they play out transnationally, but also among and between different communities and with the aim to specifically center on queer subjects in the often very heteronormative, romanticising logic of diaspora, I turned to queer diaspora critique which explores the potential of disidentification.[3]
F: In the German context our relationship to diaspora, or the way it is integrated into the cultural landscape, is really informed by German assimilationist logics and notions of integration. What also comes with the terminology of diaspora is the notion of community either left behind or the formulation of a new community in a new space. I think some of this is disrupted by Germany’s relationship to migration or rather its relationship to ‘outsiders’ and hegemonic national identity.
E: In Germany, there is really no understanding of diaspora as part of German culture. Diasporic communities continue to be demonized as “Parallelgesellschaften”. I feel that via the discussion of diaspora, the role of the nation state becomes more pronounced.
Aj: Migration in Germany is often reduced to a limited period of labour migration, which always implied going back. Which is not to say that there aren’t diasporic communities in Germany trying to make space for themselves, e. g. thinking of Thaipark.
T: Talking about Thaipark, I think it is quite interesting to look at Berlin’s spatial politics and the city’s understanding of public ownership. As far as I understand the political controversy around Thaipark, it was the local residents in the neighborhood that demanded a relocation of Thaipark, as Preußenpark is supposed to serve the neighborhood simply as ‘their’ park, and not a place of ‘tourist gathering.’ But Thaipark grew out of a community gathering of Thai migrants, and developed into a bigger social event that people of different generations and backgrounds could join and felt attracted to. Now it is supposed to be moved to a less central area in a side-street to Preußenpark. This makes me wonder about different cultural understandings of sociality. Another such example would be Dong Xuan Center in Berlin-Lichtenberg…
E: That’s a shopping mall. Migrant communities often build around such Import/Export-Läden (shops).
Aj: It’s kind of remarkable that Dong Xuan Center exists.
An: For me, diaspora is not so much a stand-in, but rather a term that does theoretical work that the concept of migration, for instance, doesn’t do. To me, diaspora is not about the degree of how visible migrant culture is in the city structure. Thinking about Black Germans, I’d say it’s really more about developing a consciousness of Blackness in Germany and seeing oneself in relation to other Black diasporic communities in the Western hemisphere, rather than thinking about visibility or institutional implementations. Certainly, the formation of diasporic communities works differently in Germany than in other European countries. The idea of Parallelgesellschaften, and the perpetual impossibility of belonging leaves a mark. And yet, I do still feel these little moments of ‘living together.’ I have to think of some of the food places in Neukölln, that clearly bear traces of a specific diasporic experience, but also bring together a very diverse group of people who all take part in shaping the place. So maybe when thinking about diasporic communities in Germany, it also means to adjust our reading practices to the subtler forms of how they are created here in Germany.
E: From our discussions about current scholarship on the Black diaspora[4], I gather that there now seems to be a much more pronounced urge to talk about a version of the Black diaspora that is linked to a very specific place on the African continent, as in the Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan diaspora. And then there is also the Middle Passage epistemology of a different understanding of the (or a) Black diaspora where, as Anne was saying, it becomes more about community and consciousness which is rooted in a violently displaced Black heritage that cannot be connected necessarily to such a specific place anymore. It seems to me that there is currently a lot of productive conversation happening around Blackness that is expanding a US-centric vocabulary. The access to a homeland, of course, also differs in diasporas that result from labour migration as opposed to refuge/flight because of war (although sometimes these dimensions can co-exist). Especially if wars/violent conflicts/revolutions have completely altered the context that people have left behind and which they often cannot return to. Regarding the Iranian diaspora that left in the late 1970s and Salman Rushdie’s famous credo about “imaginary homelands”[5], this does not just refer to the (often romanticised) retrospective perspectives of migrants on their homeland, some of these homelands are literally imaginary because they have ceased to exist.
F: The way we understand or imagine diaspora, changes in relation to the national context, so I feel diaspora is always changing.
E: In Germany, we do not have a very pluralistic understanding of national history, which becomes very pronounced in the disputes around memorial culture at the moment. But we can understand diaspora as relational not only with regard to migrants and host nations but also in encounters among different diasporic communities. For me, this opens up what I would understand as a queer potential.
T: This is an interesting point because I think of diaspora as a concept that implies transnational relations. It can be family connections and obligations, but also the conversations between diasporic communities from different countries. Observing cultural productions in Berlin by South East Asian diasporic artists and Vietnamese-German artists specifically, there seems to be a gap. Engaging with cultural productions by South East Asian artists and curators who didn’t grow up in Germany or another predominantly white country, the discourses seem to be diving deeper into the potentialities of national dis-identification, whereas Vietnamese-German cultural production tends to focus a lot on defining one’s identity in relation to German society, maybe in order to validate one’s presence. At the same time, there is also a difference in approaches between the offspring of boat-people and contract workers. In order to make sense of these differences, using the term diaspora as relational is helpful to recognize the circulation of knowledge and experiences between various Vietnamese diasporic communities.
F: There are many quite concrete moments in history that informed the ways in which one can build a relationship to Germany as a diasporic subject, I’m thinking about Germany’s obfuscated colonial history. Different from France or the U.K., Germany didn’t operate as a ‘Mother country’ in quite the way that England did. I think this means that migrant populations arrive with a different expectation of the place they are migrating to.
E: And with regard to the context of labour migration, for a long time, there was really no interest in the assimilation of labour migrants. They and their children were actively discouraged from learning German. It was only when it was about citizenship that there was a paradigm shift and suddenly, it became all about integration and the ability to speak German as a prerequisite for social participation.
Aj: Compared to our discussion of the “ordinary” last semester, how do we think about the “diasporic ordinary”? What is the diasporic lens?
F: I guess it’s also the relationship between the diasporic and the ordinary, because in what ways are you able to build an ordinariness for yourself as a part of a diaspora that exists outside of the imagined national body politic. To what extent is finding your diasporic community ordinary? If you’re constantly “extraordinary” or “not ordinary” then what’s the access to the ordinary?
Aj: What does it look like?
F: Staying home a lot.
An: Yes. Even Black community meetings do not necessarily feel ordinary. They are still highly curated, planned, and if you go, you know that this is this one night out of the week where you are going to be with other Black Germans or other people of color. It’s not as ordinary or quotidian. Shedding the extraordinariness of diasporic being seems very hard…
E: However, for queer diasporic subjects there is also often a desire to get away from your culture of origin, as it can feel very oppressive and heteronormative. And here diaspora can also mean not having to be confined to this version of community.
T: I refuse to think that diasporic or migrant lives are not ordinary in Berlin. I don’t want to succumb to a white supremacist narrative that the city only belongs to white Germans and that migrants are not part of the city’s everyday life. I wonder how we can highlight that various lived experiences can co-exist and that there is also positive change, despite the on-going racism and violence. I agree with Anne that thinking about diasporic communities, a subtler reading practice might be necessary because the analysis should not solely depend on dominant and selective story-telling of mainstream media, state politics or big institutions.
An: It also has to do with the idea countries have about citizenship and belonging. The claim to the land in Germany still comes second to the claim of the bloodline. And if you can’t formulate a claim to the land via some family relation, then, as a diasporic subject, and a diasporic subject of color at that, you have to first be able to say why you are even here and haven’t gone back to where you came from yet.
F: It’s also informed by numbers and time, how big is a migrant community and for how long do they have to establish themselves in a space.
An: I also think that in Germany discussions on race and racism have taken a different trajectory. The struggles for colonial independence that happened all over the world in the mid-1900s in many other places in the West have translated into postcolonial theory, while Germany and its institutionalized silence around race and racism after 1945 sort of skipped that moment and instead went from an era of war and racist genocide straight to a post-racial imagination of itself, as in ‘there is no race, and therefore no racism.’ This is not to say that there was no awareness or discussion at all, but it did not break through in the way it did in other anglophone or francophone contexts just thirty years prior to when Germany started talking about those things.
E: That’s why they call it “Ausländerfeindlichkeit” (xenophobia). It’s a different thing, it’s not racism. Racism happens elsewhere, mostly in the US and against Black people. That’s the narrative.
Coming back to the question of the diasporic ordinary, I agree with Thao and want to resist an understanding of diaspora only in relation to the nation state. We can note that certain “extraordinary” situations are not limited to one specific diasporic history and there were already some striking parallels in the ways diaspora came up in the projects.
F: What does it mean to think about diaspora without the thing that makes you diasporic? I think that diaspora always refers to some totality or another, be that the relationship to the place left or the place arrived to, both of those places enable different things, and I think diasporic subjectivity requires the negotiation of both.
An: I’m not sure I would know how diaspora worked if we take the pressures of the host culture or the culture of hostility [laughter] out of the equation. I think this idea of culture of hostility sprang to my mind because, for one, a diasporic consciousness is also somewhat a strategy of fugitivity, like a necessary escape that is created by communities that constantly come up against structures of unbelonging. This is part of what you do when you reside in a hostile environment, I guess. Therefore, I think that diaspora as a concept also encompasses violence and people’s resistance to it. To me, diaspora is a relational concept, it is very difficult to disentangle it from concepts such as power or hegemony.
E: Reacting to this climate of hostility that Anne describes, I wonder what this does to the possibility of conviviality?
F: Maybe that’s more of a focus on the individual in an understanding of diaspora?
An: Yes, maybe? If we understand diaspora in terms of a movement it’s difficult to think about it outside of certain parameters, and then there is no way of not thinking about the histories of that movement influencing your experience in the here and now.
Aj: I don’t think you can detach diaspora from a national framework if you want some form of circumscribed definition of diaspora. The notion of a transnational diasporic community might make things more complex but I’m not sure you can get rid of a national reference entirely, at least not regarding a modern understanding of diaspora.
E: What I understand from Thao’s interest in South East Asian artistic practice, is the hope for a more transnational understanding of diaspora that includes specific Vietnamese diasporic narratives but also goes beyond that. In such a framing, diaspora is not restricted to one dispersed community that remains attached to a specific country, neither to a country of origin nor necessarily one host nation either.
Aj: To think about a diasporic community not located in one space but as a global community might loosen the attachment to country of origin to some extent.
F: It does and it doesn’t, in the sense that it then refers to the nation you all have in common. It almost elevates people outside of the national context in which they exist, and it connects you via the national context you left.
Aj: Does looking at the homeland from multiple perspectives detach it from this one national reference?
F: It becomes this dispersed network.
E: Looking at Nigerian and Ghanaian culture from the perspective of the African continent, they do not necessarily have to relate to each other at all. But in the Black and African diaspora in Germany, there might be much more affinity. I think there is also an understanding of “Middle Easternness” that would include a range of people that have very different experiences. In the diaspora, there are instances where an understanding of being racialised, being perceived in a similar way, can open up possibilities to connect by detaching from a specific national understanding of home country (and host country).
An: I am actually not sure that we need to prioritize the idea of the homeland or the national context to this extent, because for a lot of people it doesn’t make sense. I think we don’t need this emphasis on places of origin or places of ending up. Rather, it is interesting to me how diasporic community formation functions via cultural signifiers, via experiences of rejection and everyday racism.
Aj: Is there a concrete embodied state of global Black or Vietnamese diaspora?
An: One of the things I moved to Neukölln for is to blend, which is interesting because the number of people that look like me is not that high. But still, you feel like you need to go to places where many migrant people live, just to not stand out.
F: I feel much more comfortable being in an environment like Neukölln than a really white neighborhood. For me, it’s just about enough to not exist in a white environment.
E: For me, the queer diaspora experience is always ambivalent in relation to this question of blending and familiarity, especially if we think about gender normativity. There is also a rupture and maybe a stronger affinity among queer people of colour that do not necessarily share a specific geographical heritage.
An: I can totally relate to what Eli said, my community of people is more rooted in ways of thinking, in ways of approaching life, than necessarily in Blackness or Africanness, the latter of which I have no physical access to whatsoever.
Aj: What, then, would it mean to really think diaspora transnationally?
F: I think there is something in the minutia and the migrant aesthetics. There’s this meme, “there’s rice at home”, I have seen it in Nigerian diasporic contexts, but it has crossed various migrant communities, the child asks their parent “Can I have McDonald’s for dinner and their parent says, there’s rice at home”, or the old ice cream container that does not contain ice cream, but rice or some kind of dish. Little Simz has a line about it in one of her songs: “Jollof in the ice cream tub that’s the Af in me” (meaning the African in me).[6] I think there’s all these kinds of small aesthetic gestures that tap into a diasporic consciousness.
E: In queer theory, we use “camp” to describe a shared aesthetic affinity, and I wonder if it might make sense to speak about “migrant camp” to describe the specific humorous tonalities that characterise the social media and memes that Fenja is interested in.
Aj: Are these aesthetics or habits cultural? One might think this is a specific culture’s way of doing stuff and then you realise, oh, everyone who is in an economically similar situation actually does it.
F: I think it’s a mixture of both, I think a lot of it is informed by class and economic conditions that require certain ways of scraping money together. There’s also this cross-racial or cross-diasporic consciousness that exists in part in opposition to dominant culture or whiteness but it doesn’t have to refer to a specific homeland.
E: And if we think about regions and specific locations, this also adds to experiences of diasporic communities that go beyond the nation state and over time have an impact on how we understand local effects on community-building. I am thinking about people of Turkish heritage in the Ruhr-Gebiet or South Asian communities in the North of England.
T: What connects all Vietnamese diasporas globally is that they’re all traitors. The Vietnamese term Việt kiều is a term used by Vietnamese to refer to Vietnamese living abroad. At least in the generation of my parents, this term can be understood as “disloyal traitors” because they abandoned the country after the Vietnam War or were only supposed to leave for a short period of time for work but never came back. On a more serious note, how certain diasporic communities are formed also depends on certain global political agreements. It was both the German and Vietnamese state who agreed on sending contract workers to the German Democratic Republic, as well as sending them back for a considerable amount of money, for example. So, I wonder if thinking about diaspora as a global union of and dialogue between local and diasporic traitors who challenge national and societal norms, would be helpful when thinking of the usefulness of the term (global) diaspora … also in connection to transnational queer kinship, or José Esteban Muñoz’ “Brown commons” (2020).
Aj: The figure of the traitor is appealing.
T: Yeah!
Works Referenced:
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
Brubaker, Rogers. “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.1 (2005): 1-19.
Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. An Introduction. 2. ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2008.
Cohen, Robin, and Carolin Fischer, eds. Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies. London: Routledge, 2019.
Ellis, Nadia. “The Queer Elsewhere of Diaspora.” Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora. Duke UP, 2015, pp. 1-17.
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black. Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Foroutan, Naika. Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
—. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires. Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2005.
—. Unruly Visions. The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Macharia, Keguro. Frottage. Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
Mecheril, Paul, et al. Postmigrantische Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018.
Muñoz, José Esteban. The Sense of Brown. Ethnicity, Affect and Performance. Eds. Tavia Nyong’o and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1992. 9-21.
Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black. Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Speakers:
An = Anne Potjans
Aj = Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
E = Elahe Haschemi Yekani
T = Thao Ho
F = Fenja Akinde-Hummel
[1] Cf. Brah (1996); Chow (1993); Gilroy (1993, 2005). There has been a significant proliferation of the semantic and conceptual meanings as well the disciplinary uses of diaspora (Brubaker 2005; Cohen 2008; Cohen and Fischer 2019).
[2] Cf. Foroutan (2019); Mecheril, Bojadžijev, Foroutan et al. (2018).
[3] Cf. Ferguson (2004); Gopinath (2005, 2018).
[4] Cf. Wright (2004), Ellis (2015) and Macharia (2019).
[5] Rushdie (1992).
[6] Simz, Little. “you should call mum”. Drop 6, Spotify, AGE 101, 2020.
