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Media and Diaspora

John Sinclair


Since the late 1980s, the concept of diaspora has become ever more widely used to describe the movement of people away from their land of origin, such as migrants, exiles, refugees, expatriates, and “guestworkers.” Literally, a diaspora is a dispersal of people from one country into many, such as the Jewish Diaspora of antiquity, or in modern times, the flow of people out of China and India and into the rest of the world. Strictly speaking, a diaspora is distinct from ordinary migration in that members of a diaspora are linked not only back to their compatriots in their land of origin, but also laterally, with each other, across the borders of however many countries they have moved into. In practice, the term is more often used in a loose way to refer to population movements across borders and “transnational communities” in general, but especially where cultural barriers also have to be crossed, and people are living in marginal situations within a dominant culture. It is not just the flows of people that are of interest here, but the flows of media services and content that go along with them, both of which are part of what we mean by “globalization.” Diasporic movement is both a cause and an effect of globalization, and this generates different classes of diasporic peoples. For example, while the expatriate capitalist groupings known as the “Overseas Chinese” and the “NRIs” (Non-Resident ... log in or subscribe to read full text

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