Interview 9

2013

This special issue opens up a conversation between three multidisciplinary fields: memory studies, diaspora studies and refugee studies. The introductory paper articulates an analytical framework addressing various forms of memories of displacement. It defines the concepts of exilic and diasporic memories with regard to the classical and post-modern conceptions of diasporas and shows, beyond their formal opposition, the extent to which these two notions interrelate. The article continues by highlighting four themes that cut across the collection of papers in this special issue: the relationship between individual and collective memories; the diversity of actors (re) producing memory narratives; the transmission, negotiation and contestation of memory across space and between generations; and the confrontational and syncretic dynamics which between different types of memories. To conclude, the paper addresses the political implications of the production and dissemination of memories of displacement.

Understanding Diaspora Development: Lessons from Australia and the Pacific, edited by Melissa Phillips and Louise Olliff, 2022

Over the last three decades, the ‘former’ Bosnian refugees have become a distinct transnational migrant community, representing one of the proportionally largest and globally most widespread migrant groups from the former Yugoslavia. Many of the refugee groups from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who resettled in Australia during the 1990s and in the early 2000s, have reclaimed and reconstructed their local identities and memories by creating a vibrant network of translocal communities as both real and imagined alternatives to the places lost in the original homeland. Based on an extensive ethnographic research of the Bosnian diaspora in Australia, this chapter discusses how the translocal zavičaj communities, made up of the refugees and survivors from the Bosnian towns of Srebrenica and Prijedor, engage in long-distance activism and remember and commemorate their ‘places of pain’, the communities devastated by genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war.

Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and …, 2006

This is the text of a keynote lecture delivered 12 years ago to a diaspora studies interdisciplinary conference at Dickinson College, PA.

"This article proposes that the research area of refugee studies can benefit from contemporary discussions about the concepts of transnationalism and diaspora. It is argued that the concept of diaspora, understood as a transnational social organisation relating both to the society of origin and the society of settlement, can give a more profound understanding of the social reality in which refugees live. The article provides a brief presentation of current debates about transnationalism and diasporas. Empirical evidence from Kurdish refugee communities in Europe is used to highlight the fact that the concept of diaspora can provide an analytical tool for a sociological study of refugees in the country of exile. The article then goes on to argue that, in order to be a constructive analytical tool, the concept of diaspora has to be regarded as an ideal type in the true Weberian sense of the term. Finally, some of the limitations and dangers associated with the concept of diaspora will be discussed. Keywords: Refugee Studies; Transnationalism; Diaspora; Kurdish Communities"

Global Networks

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of diasporic identities, I consider how and why diasporic identities might be demobilized over time. I use the case of an Indian Pakistani community in the UK and the USA (sometimes referred to as 'Bihari') to examine how historical memories of conflict are narrated in diaspora and the impact this has on the presence or absence of 'diasporic consciousness'. The significance of memory in diasporic and transnational communities has been neglected, especially where the narration of historical events is concerned. The impact of forgetting has received particularly scant attention. I argue that, in the absence of this story, important lessons about the role of history in the formation of community are obscured. In this example, the 'latent' identities created on diaspora's demobilization help us to unpick the dyadic relations of 'home' and 'away' at the heart of essentialist conceptualizations of the concept.

CROSS CULTURES, 2006

The text of a talk given as the inaugural lecture for the launch of the Diaspora Studies program at Oxford University in 2011. The paper looks at several tensions between pairs of terms and concepts that structure ongoing debates within the field, e.g. dispersion vs diaspora; diaspora as objective social fact and as subjective, lived experience; distinctions between home and homeland; and other binaries.