Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment
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.