‘It ain't where you're from, it's where you're born’: re-theorizing diaspora and homeland in postcolonial Malaysia

Abstract

The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the 'original' homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the 'routed' dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is 'where you're born', rather than 'where you're from'. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland.

Fitting into a more appealing diaspora than my own: Positioning Ecuadorian and Honduran migrants within the Newark-area, Portuguese-centric diaspora community of Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A.

“…While a migrant group's continued orientation to the homeland represents a defining feature of diaspora in the majority of studies that seek to conceptualize this topic (Grossman 2019), casestudy research challenges this orientation by pointing to instances in which members of diaspora communities show deeper attachments to the state in which they reside (Gabriel 2011). Individual diasporic experiences are similarly emphasized through the notion of segmented assimilation (Portes and Rumbaut 2001), which draws attention to diverse orientations to the dominant/autochthonous group as a product of both individuals'…”

“…While the juxtaposition between the pull of the dominant language in the receiving community vs. the mother tongue/heritage language from the region of origin -echoing the contrast between Grossman (2019) and Gabriel (2011) discussed above -is well represented in the…”

“…At the same time, use of the shared migrant community language has indexical links to diasporic group belonging (Mills 2005). Marginalization represents an intrinsic part of the diaspora experience (Gabriel 2011); nevertheless, migrants' capacity to participate in the market on their own terms has increased in recent years (Sabaté i Dalmau 2013), and this development has blurred the boundaries between the social categories of migrant vs. local in terms of socio-economic integration (Vigouroux 2013: 243). The results have altered the "social and economic affordances" that frame individuals' ethnolinguistic orientations (Miller 2016: 351) and help to account for diaspora members' increased agentive potential in recent sociolinguistic analyses (Canagarajah and Silberstein 2012;Gabriel 2011;Li Wei and Zhu 2013).…”

Understanding migration in a globalized era: How postcolonialism views diaspora

“…Melani Budianta explains the tender position of Filipino Indonesian family residing in Singapore using the phrase 'precarious cosmopolitanism' (Budianta, 2016), while Carol Chan looks into how Indonesian domestic worker's migration to East Asia leads to the reconfiguration of ideas of freedom as well as gendered and moral practices (Chan, 2017). Taking on cultural studies view of political agency, scholars also look into diaspora literature as "narratives as longings" that reifies ideas of homeland (Gabriel, 2011) and tackle new patterns of repression as a reaction to global migration, such as backlash in the form of nativism and heighten tension between nationalism and globalization (Kim, 2017). These works explain the various tensions and structures of power that exist in the Asian region, be it from homeland, host country, and recognize the regional political-economical systems of control that oversee their movement across borders.…”

Home and away – Implications of short-term sojourning of young Australian bilinguals

“…As argued by Gabriel (2011) and Albury and Schluter (this issue), there is a need to widen the understanding of the notion of diaspora beyond "the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the 'original' homeland" (Gabriel, 2011:341). Albury and Schluter (this issue) argue that diasporas should also been seen as positioning themselves in the socio-cultural dynamics of both their new and their old homeland.…”