Diaspora Project Digital Humanities Center

A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. Historically, the word was used first in reference to the dispersion of Greeks in the Hellenic world, and later Jews after the Babylonian exile. The word "diaspora" is used today in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently reside elsewhere.

Examples of notably large diasporic populations are the Assyrian–Chaldean–Syriac diaspora, which originated during and after the early Arab-Muslim conquests and continued to grow in the aftermath of the Assyrian genocide; the southern Chinese and Indians who left their homelands during the 19th and 20th centuries; the Irish diaspora that came into existence both during and after the Great Famine; the Scottish diaspora that developed on a large scale after the Highland Clearances and Lowland Clearances; the nomadic Romani population from the Indian subcontinent; the Italian diaspora and the Mexican diaspora; the Circassians in the aftermath of the Circassian genocide; the Palestinian diaspora due to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict; the Armenian diaspora following the Armenian genocide; the Lebanese diaspora due to the Lebanese Civil War; the Greek population that fled or was displaced following the fall of Constantinople and the later Greek genocide as well as the Istanbul pogroms; and the emigration of Anglo-Saxons (primarily to the Byzantine Empire) after the Norman Conquest of England.

In contemporary times, scholars have differentiated the different kinds of diasporas which currently exist based on the causes of them, such as colonialism, trade/labour migrations, or the kinds of social coherence which exist within the diaspora communities and their ties to the ancestral lands; 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.

According to a 2019 United Nations report, the Indian diaspora is the world's largest diaspora, with a population of 17.5 million, followed by the Mexican diaspora, with a population of 11.8 million, and the Chinese diaspora, with a population of 10.7 million.With $78 billion, India still highest overseas remittance receiver
''The Economic Times'', 28 November 2019.

Etymology

The term "diaspora" is derived from the Greek verb διασπείρω (''diaspeirō''), "I scatter", "I spread about" which in turn is composed of διά (''dia''), "between, through, across" and the verb σπείρω (''speirō''), "I sow, I scatter". In Ancient Greece the term διασπορά (''diaspora'') hence meant "scattering" and was inter alia used to refer to citizens of a dominant city-state who emigrated to a conquered land with the purpose of colonization, to assimilate the territory into the empire. An example of a diaspora from classical antiquity is the century-long exile of the Messenians under Spartan rule and the Ageanites as described by Thucydides in his "history of the Peloponnesian wars."

It was first used in this original sense when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek; the first mention of a diaspora created as a result of exile is found in the Septuagint, first in
* Deuteronomy 28:25, in the phrase , ''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(147).2, in the phrase , ''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".

After the Bible was translated into Greek, the word ''diaspora'' was used in reference to the Northern Kingdom 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 Southern Kingdom 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 dispersed indigenous population of Israel. When it is used in relation to Judaism and when it is capitalized without modifiers (simply, ''the Diaspora''), the term specifically refers to the Jewish diaspora; when it is uncapitalized, the term ''diaspora'' may refer to refugee or immigrant populations with other ethnic origins which are living "away from an indigenous or established homeland". 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

According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary Online'', the first known recorded usage of the word ''diaspora'' in the English language was in 1876 referring "extensive ''diaspora'' work (as it is termed) 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. In English, capitalized, and without modifiers (that is simply, ''the Diaspora''), the term refers specifically to the Jewish diaspora in the context of Judaism.

In all cases, the term ''diaspora'' carries a sense of displacement. The population so described finds itself for whatever reason separated from its national territory, and usually, its people have a hope, or at least a desire, to return to their homeland at some point if the "homeland" still exists in any meaningful sense. Some writers have noted that diaspora may result in a loss of nostalgia for a single home as people "re-root" in a series of meaningful displacements. In this sense, individuals may have multiple homes throughout their diaspora, with different reasons for maintaining some form of attachment to each. Diasporic cultural development often assumes a different course from that of the population in the original place of settlement. Over time, remotely separated communities tend to vary in culture, traditions, language, and other factors. The last vestiges of cultural affiliation in a diaspora is often found in community resistance to language change and in the maintenance of traditional religious practice.

Scholarly work and expanding definition

William Safran 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. While Safran's definitions were influenced by the idea of the Jewish diaspora, he recognised the expanding use of the term.

Rogers Brubaker (2005) also notes 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 has 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 (out of a total of 253) were about the Jewish case, with a total of eight different diasporas covered.

Brubaker outlines the original use of the term diaspora as follows:

Most early discussions of the diaspora were firmly rooted in a conceptual 'homeland'; they were concerned with a paradigmatic case, or a small number of core cases. The paradigmatic case was, of course, the Jewish diaspora; some dictionary definitions of diaspora, until recently, did not simply illustrate but defined the word with reference to that case.

Brubaker argues that the initial expansion of the use of the phrase extended it to other, similar cases, such as the Armenian and Greek diasporas. More recently, it has been applied to emigrant groups that continue their involvement in their homeland from overseas, such as the category of long-distance nationalists identified by Benedict Anderson. Brubaker notes that (as examples): Albanians, Basques, Hindu Indians, Irish, Japanese, Kashmiri, Koreans, Kurds, Palestinians, and Tamils have been conceptualized as diasporas in this sense. Furthermore, "labor migrants who maintain (to some degree) emotional and social ties with a homeland" have also been described as diasporas.

In further cases of the use of the term, "the reference to the conceptual homeland – to the 'classical' diasporas – has become more attenuated still, to the point of being lost altogether". Here, Brubaker cites "transethnic and transborder linguistic categories...such as Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone 'communities'", along with Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Huguenot, Muslim and Catholic 'diasporas'. Brubaker notes that, , there were also academic books or articles on the Dixie, white, liberal, gay, queer and digital diasporas.

Some observers have labeled evacuation from New Orleans

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