Diaspora, Migration, and Identity: Postcolonial Perspectives
Through colonialism, many people voyaged from Britain. However, the voyages of colonized people from around the world to the major European Empires are also significant.
Many important writings by colonized people who settled in Britain during the colonial period exist, such as The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African by Thomas Gainsborough, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa by Olaudah Equiano. These writings became important texts in the movement to abolish slavery.
Cultural texts have been created as a consequence of 20th-century migrations, often taking the themes of migration and diaspora as their subject matter.
Since the end of World War II, colonizing nations have experienced the arrival of many people from colonized countries. Today, many European nations have a wide variety of diaspora communities.
Diaspora signifies the movement and relocation of groups of different kinds of people throughout the world.
Robin Cohen describes diaspora as communities of people living together in one country who recognize that the old country has some claim on their loyalty and emotions. The emphasis on collectivity and community here is very important.
However, generational differences are important. Children born to migrant people in Britain may claim British citizenship, but their sense of identity can be influenced by their parents’ past migration history. That makes them forge emotional, cultural, and imaginative bonds with their family’s original nation.
Therefore, it is more accurate to talk about diaspora identities rather than migrant identities. Not all those who live in a diaspora or share an emotional connection with the old nation have experienced migration.
The experiences of migrancy and living in a diaspora have animated much recent postcolonial literature, criticism, and theory. In addition, postcolonial studies can often appear to prioritize diasporic concerns.
Paul Gilroy has argued that diasporic peoples have continued to suffer because of new forms of prejudice in metropolitan countries against different races. The diaspora communities are often excluded from feeling they belong to the new country.
V.S. Naipaul claims that migration alters how migrants think about their home and host countries.
In relation to migration, Avtar Brah states that home is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. The feeling of belonging awakens the desire to return home. Somehow, the place of origin is idealized, despite having no intention of returning.
This disjunction between past and present makes home seem far-removed in time and space, available for return only through an act of imagination.
Conventional ideas of home and belonging and static ideas of being “in place” do not match the experience of diasporic peoples. Instead, new models of identity emerge, reconsidering “in-between” as a site of new possibilities and privilege.
Gilroy’s ideas from Black Atlantic expose that migrancy can expose the migrant and their family to displacement and fragmentation. This allows new models of identity and belonging.
Diasporic peoples live border lives on the margins of different nations. Borders are full of contradiction and ambivalence. However, standing at the border, the migrant is empowered to transmit cultural inheritance and tradition of home and the host country.