Talar Chahinian
Over the last few decades, the term “diaspora” has rapidly spread and
expanded to take on multiple meanings both inside and outside of
academic disciplines. So much so, that this proliferation of meaning,
configured as the dispersion of the term in a semantic and conceptual
space, has been referred to as “‘diaspora’ diaspora.” (1) In response to
the concept’s growing discursive popularity, the founder and editor of
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Khachig Tölölyan, while
providing the site for much of the proliferation in academia, has warned
that “diaspora” is “in danger of becoming a promiscuously capacious
category that is taken to include all the adjacent phenomena to which it
is linked but from which it actually differs in ways that are
constitutive, that in fact make a viable definition of diaspora
possible.” (2)
