Diaspora: An Urban Communication Paradigm

Abstract

Diaspora has come to mean many things to many people. But overall it involves mass migration and the separation of a group of people from what might be called their ‘homeland’. That sense of migration implies scattering, sometimes unwillingness, coercion, and wrenching resettlement surrounded by an inherent sense of melancholia. At best migration may be bittersweet. Until relatively recently this sense of separation and relocation was permanent with little hope provided for return or even contact. This chapter attempts to redefine diaspora on the basis of communication technology that initially mediates between immigrant and homeland and increasingly mediates between immigrant and urban enclave so important upon arrival in a new land. Further, urban communication patterns are offered as an appropriate approach for the study of diasporic progression. A case study of a Greek community in New York is provided as illustration.

Diaspora (dīăs’pərə) [Gr., =dispersion], term used today to denote the Jewish communities living outside the Holy Land.

It was originally used to designate the dispersal of the Jews at the time of the destruction of the first Temple (586 BC) and the forced exile [Heb.,=Galut] to Babylonia. The diaspora became a permanent feature of Jewish life; by AD 70 Jewish communities existed in Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. Jews followed the Romans into Europe and from Persia and Babylonia spread as far east as China. In modern times, Jews have migrated to the Americas, South Africa, and Australia. The Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, until World War II the largest in the world, was decimated in the Holocaust. Despite the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Jewish people remains in the diaspora, notably in North America, Russia, and Ukraine. The term diaspora has also been applied to other peoples with large numbers living outside their traditional homelands. (The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 2003)