The Political Potentials and Pitfalls of Diaspora

디아스포라의 정치적 가능성과 문제점

The concept of the "diaspora" has established itself as one of the major topics in literary and cultural studies in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Contemporary studies on this topic tend to regard is diaspora as either as a liberatory space unmoored from a repressive national identity-formation or as a condition pregnant with challenges to the authority of a nation-state or nationalism. Viewed from within the social realities of multi-ethnic nations, however, diaspora has an alternative, darker face. For, reproduced within the concept itself, is that of a hierarchy: this hierarchy is one in which a dominant group seeks to repress the same ethnic members for their failure to conform. What is more, the cultural difference, which diaspora is believed to preserve, lends the dominant group an excuse to re-ethnicize its immigrants, subsuming them under the same extra-national category as that of the people or homeland they have left behind. By analyzing a range of historical and theoretical models, this study offers itself as an attempt to clarify the current, and often confusing, understandings of the condition of diaspora. By delving into its political potentials and discussing their possible socio-political ramifications, the study suggests that researchers of diaspora need to anchor themselves in historicity lest they end up "speaking for" their chosen subjects.