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SECURE, GENDERED POLITICS OF BELONGING 33

descendants of groups that were expelled soil, landscape, and rootedness’ with the idea
from their own lands and displaced to those of diaspora as ‘a more refined and more
territories, are not entitled to a share in the worldly sense of culture’. Avtar Brah (1996)
Trust. DNA tests are even used to prove these incorporated into her normative notion of
exclusive essentialist belongings. The most ‘diaspora space’ not just racialized diasporic
important question – in relation to other minorities but also the hegemonic majority in
Aborigines but also in relation to other mem- a decentred and non-privileged positioning.
bers of the settler society – is whether land Post-modernist discourses on ‘travelling cul-
rights should be exclusive, or whether other tures’ (Clifford, 1992), ‘nomadism’ (Braidotti,
members of the society (as well as the state 1991), ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha, 1994), and ‘living
itself) could continue to have rights to the at the border zones’ (Anzaldua, 1987) have
land as well. What are the political, let alone both inspired and echoed these constructions
the economic, consequences of indigenous of diasporism.
land claims? Indigenous people often claim a Unfortunately, as some of the critiques
spiritual unity with the land: of such literature (e.g., Anthias, 1998;
Helmreich, 1992; Ifekwunigwe, 1999;
We are the land. More than remembered, the
Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind Yuval-Davis, 1997a, b) have pointed out the
of the earth. … It is not a means of survival. … binary, naturalized, and essentialist ideas
It is rather part of our being, dynamic, significant, about kinship, nature, and territory, so charac-
real (a Laguna author, quoted in Tsosie, 2001: 184).
teristic of more traditional nationalist rhetoric,
Feldman (2001) argues that such claims are often creep in ‘through the back door’ in these
part of critical transformative pedagogy, a theorizations. Moreover, diasporic politics often
‘strategic essentialism’, to use a well-known tends to have very different sets of values and
expression of Gayatri Spivak (1993), which political dynamics. Unlike the Simmelian
can prepare the ground for an exclusive claim (1950) and Schutzian (1976) constructions of
to the land, once enough political power is ‘the stranger’ members of diasporic commu-
accumulated for self government as an enclave nities often engage in narratives of belonging,
within the nation-state, unless there is enough or of yearning to belong, not only in relation
power to claim a full ‘take-over’of the state (as to the country/society where they live, or even
happened in Algeria, Zimbabwe, and in a a ‘cosmopolitan’ boundary-less humanity, but
somewhat different manner, in South Africa). also in relation to their country, nation, and/or
However, there are also arguments state of origin. As Sara Ahmed (2000) has
(e.g., Reynolds, 1996) that the aboriginal pointed out, the construction of ‘the stranger’
perception, for instance, that ‘they belong to is a form of fetishism that is produced in the
the land’, rather than that the land belongs naming, and is devoid of any real human char-
to them, paves the way for an alternative, acteristics. It is just a reflection of the gaze of
non-exclusive, mode of ownership and sover- the one who has named her/him as such.
eignty. Such a claim, for an alternative inclu- As Robin Cohen (1997) has shown, dias-
sive nationalist discourse, has also been poras are much more heterogeneous than the
argued by Gilroy (1993, 1997) and others above theories would allow us to believe.
(e.g., Boyarin, 1994; Raz-Krakotzkin, 1994), Moreover, as the NGO document of the 2001
as applying to diasporic discourses. World Conference Against Racism in Durban
pointed out, Western people who are living
in the Third World are often described as
DIASPORISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE ‘ex-patriates’ while Third World people living
DISCOURSE OF BELONGING in the West are described as migrants or immi-
grants. In this sense diasporism is a racialized
Gilroy (1997: 328) attempted to contrast concept. The hegemonic Western gaze pre-
nationalist sentiments based on ‘notions of vails in this, as in so many other instances.