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Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction [#361]
Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction [#361]
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  • Explores a concept that helps migrants, scholars, and social commentators alike to make sense of the experience of migration
  • Examines the origins of diaspora as a concept, its changing meanings over time, its current popularity, and its strengths and limitations as an explanatory device
  • Proposes a flexible approach to diaspora that can provide insights into many dimensions of the term

  
Diaspora is an important concept in history, sociology, religious studies, ethnic studies, political science, and literary criticism, among other disciplines. Meanwhile, journalists, politicians, and cultural authorities use the term with increasing frequency when describing contemporary global migration. But what does diaspora mean? Until recently, the term referred principally to the dispersal and exile of the Jews. However, over the course of the twentieth century, involuntary migrants from Armenia, Africa, and Ireland came to be seen as diasporic. Since the 1980s, diaspora has proliferated to a remarkable extent-to the point where it risks losing its coherence. If diaspora is merely a synonym for "migration" or "ethnic group," why use the word at all? Kevin Kenny's Very Short Introduction to diaspora examines the origins of diaspora as a concept, its changing meanings over time, its current popularity, and its strengths and limitations as an explanatory device. Mediating between the multiple definitions currently in use, the book proposes a flexible approach to diaspora that can provide insights into the motives for migration; the networks through which migrants travel; the political, economic, and cultural connections they form among themselves, with their homelands, and with fellow diasporans in other locations around the world; the idea of return to a homeland, sometimes literally but more often metaphorically; and recent developments concerning refugees and globalization. The argument ranges broadly across time and space, using examples drawn mainly from Jewish, African, Irish, and Asian history. Diaspora emerges not as a thing that can be measured but as a concept that helps people-migrants, scholars, and social commentators alike-to make sense of the experience of migration.
 
 
Reading Guide
  
  

Index: 

Acknowledgments
List of illustrations

1. What is diaspora?
2. Migration
3. Connections
4. Return
5. Diaspora today
References
Further reading
Index

About the author: 

Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College. His books include Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, and The American Irish: A History.

"This book is significant to the field because it grounds future writers, readers, and researchers beginning their study in diaspora. Through broad strokes of its history and development, Kenny does a good job putting it within migration and prioritizing a definition for usage of diaspora as a way to 'explain' or 'describe' certain migrations." -- Eric Tuls, Migration Researcher

Product details

ISBN : 9780199858583

Author: 
Kevin Kenny
Pages
144 Pages
Format
Paperback
Size
111 x 174 mm
Pub date
Jul 2013
Series
Very Short Introductions
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Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction [#361]

Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction [#361]

Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction [#361]