Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment
Tölölyan, Khachig · 1996
The field-defining essay by the founding editor of the journal Diaspora, and one of the foundational theoretical statements of diaspora studies as a discipline. Tölölyan traces how the term 'diaspora' broke free of its classical restriction to the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersions and came, in the late twentieth century, to name a much wider range of communities once called exile groups, overseas communities, expatriates, refugees, or ethnic minorities. Against that semantic expansion he theorizes diaspora as a form of 'stateless power' that operates across borders in a transnational moment, standing in a charged relation to both the homeland and the host nation-state. The Armenian case runs throughout as a paradigm. This is a distinct piece from his 'Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transnation' (2000), already in the repository.
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Tölölyan, Khachig 1996. Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 3–36 (University of Toronto Press); DOI 10.3138/diaspora.5.1.3. https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.5.1.3
What this offers a reader
The single most-cited starting point for understanding what the word 'diaspora' actually means and why Armenians are one of its three classical cases.
Foundational theory by the discipline's founding editor; the reference point almost every later diaspora-studies article argues with or from.
Explains, in serious terms, why the Armenian dispersion became a model the whole world now borrows to describe itself.
Where the modern idea of 'diaspora' comes from, with Armenians at the center of the story.
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