Page 74 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DIASPORA

negotiation of meaning between speaker and addressee. Language takes shape and
becomes meaningful in the space between ourselves and our audience while a text
is to be analysed as a dialogic relationship between subject–addressee and
text–context. Thus one of Bakhtin’s other key concepts, heteroglossia, refers to the 51
diversity and stratification of languages or voices to be found within a work. As such
the notion of the dialogic provided the key foundational idea for the concept of
‘intertextuality’ as developed by Kristeva and also resonates with Derrida’s notion
of ‘différance’.
Inherent in the way Bakhtin understands language is a critique of Saussure’s
semiotics as involving a dead, neutral and static object of investigation that appears
to foreshadow a number of the claims of poststructuralism. Thus ‘the dialogic’
emphasizes the construction of meaning as an active, dynamic process involving
signs that are able to take on a range of different meanings and connotations for
different social actors in different social, cultural and historical situations. Indeed,
signs are the site of a continuous struggle over meaning so that powerful groups try
to fix the meanings of words (monoglossa) in ideological ways that serve their
interests. The influence of the notion of the struggle over the multiple meanings of
words as expressed by the notion of the dialogic (that is, polyglossia or the
contestation of languages) can be seen in the post-Marxist understanding of
ideology and hegemony in the work of Hall, Laclau and Mouffe.
Bakhtin also argued that individual linguistic performances, both written and
oral, are the outcome of an internal process whereby the various voices of our past
and present are intertwined through the cultural web of language. Indeed, he argues
that we acquire language by internalizing the voices of others, and then spend
much of our lives re-externalizing these incorporated forms in a continuous
dialogue with others. As such the subject is constituted as a dialogic self.
Links Carnivalesque, différance, ideology, intertextuality, meaning, polysemy, post-Marxism

Diaspora The concept of diaspora is deployed to indicate a dispersed network of
ethnically and culturally related peoples. As such, this term is concerned with ideas
of travel, migration, scattering, displacement, homes and borders. Diasporas are
formed as networks comprised of transnational identifications that encompass
‘imagined’ communities and as such are often engaged in the politics and social
dynamics of remembrance and commemoration. Commonly, but not always, the
idea of a diaspora also connotes notions of aliens, displaced persons, wanderers and
those engaged in forced and reluctant flight. Globalization provides the context for
an increased interest in the study of diaspora in recent years, notably during the
1990s. In particular, patterns of population movement and settlement instituted
during colonialism and its aftermath established diaspora populations at the heart
of Western cultures and nation-states.
The strength of the concept of diaspora lies in its encouragement to think about
identities in terms of contingency, indeterminacy and conflict, of identities in
motion rather than of absolutes of nature or culture. Gilroy describes this process
as involving routes rather than roots; a ‘changing same’ of the diaspora that