-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Khachig Tölölyan, Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson, editors. Between Dispersion and Belonging: Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1640–1641, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy328
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote: “Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser”— “[Natural] species are chosen [as totems] not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think [with].’” When, how, and why did “diaspora” become good to think [with]? In Amitava Chowdhury and Donald Harman Akenson’s edited volume Between Dispersion and Belonging: Global Approaches to Diaspora in Practice, Akenson reminds us that by 1995 the term had become so “fashionable” that the 18th International Congress of Historical Sciences “denominated” it as one of the three most important terms historians would need “to address for the start of the twenty-first century.” “Springtime for diaspora,” he concludes, ambivalently echoing the Mel Brooks film The Producers (28). Was diaspora, then, a term and concept fashionable for a mere season? In his characteristically enigmatic fashion and in the most compelling of the three learned chapters he contributes to this collection, Akenson actually shows “diaspora” to be a concept for all seasons.
