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The second major concept considered here is diaspora. Diaspora, like exile, is a concept suggesting displacement from a center. Historically the paradigm case of a diaspora is of course the successive scattering and reconstitution-in-dispersion of the Jews after the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Roman conquests. In Jewish thinking, exile and diaspora are sometimes synonymous. Much in the Jewish historical experience of diaspora suggests the yearnings of exile: “next year in Jerusalem” (Clifford, 1997). Yet despite their close affinities, in recent usage diaspora often lacks the pathos of exile, a term that is never without a deep sense of woe. Like exile, diaspora can be elective or imposed; perhaps the historical lack of zeal for returning to Jerusalem on the part of some Jews, grown comfortable in the diaspora, lifts the burden of homesickness from the notion of diaspora. The existence of the state of Israel likewise severs notions of diaspora from exile, since there is no political obstacle to return. The key contrast with exile lies in diaspora’s emphasis on lateral and decentered relationships among the dispersed. Exile suggests pining for home; diaspora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be solitary, but diaspora is always collective. Diaspora suggests real or imagined relationships among scattered fellows, whose sense of community is sustained by forms of communication and contact such as kinship, pilgrimage, trade, travel, and shared culture (language, ritual, scripture, or print and electronic media). Some communities in diaspora may agitate for return, but the normative force that return is desirable or even possible is not a necessary part of diaspora today, especially with the loosening of its definition since the 1960s charted by Tololyan (1996). At the same time the phenomenon of diasporas has developed units of analysis that enable us to understand the dynamics of transnational cultural and economic processes as well as re-imagined new areas of study, challenging once more the conceptual limits imposed by national and ethnic and racial boundaries. (cf. Lavie, 1996) Latest diaspora theories are derived principally from the historically specific experience of “the Black Atlantic,” a transnational unit of analysis that addresses the complex socioeconomic and cultural interconnections between the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Afro-America This is addressed by Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, but initially it was DuBois who first formulated the problematic nature of such experience when he spoke of “twoness,” the twin experience of being both American and black, loyal to a nation while yet victim of its prejudice against the minority ethnic group. I shall refer here in more detail to Paul Gilroy and his path-breaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and the way he views diaspora “beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of an imported racial essence” (Gilroy 1990/91, 15). In his provocative analysis of a black Atlantic culture, Paul Gilroy proposes diaspora as a way out of the essentialist/anti-essentialist binary. The term ‘diaspora’ is taken up by historians of Africa and slavery in the 1950s; Gilroy argues that diaspora provides a way of understanding modernity and cultural identities (he also uses it to make the complex connection between the histories of blacks and Jews). He argues that the work of black Americans and others should not: be exclusively assimilated to the project of building an ethnically particular or nationalist cultural canon, because the logic of the great political movement in which these texts stand and to which they contribute operates at other levels than those marked by national boundaries. (1993, 218) Paul Gilroy argues that the nation-state is not an appropriate unit of analysis for the study of black diaspora populations and that it leads to a counterproductive, even destructive “ethnic absolutism” rather than a truly liberatory politics (1993, 5). Alternatively, he proposes “the black Atlantic” (which links the black peoples of the Caribbean, Britain, and the US to Africa) as “an alternative area or study of the compound culture” of blacks. He does not rely on “national culture” as securing identity, and he places more emphasis on identity formation through “routes” (the circulation of peoples and cultural forms and forces) than “roots” (a distinct and “authentic” culture embedded in a particular place). He says: .. dealing equally with the significance of roots and routes … should undermine the purified appeal of either Afrocentrism or the Eurocentrisms it struggles to answer. This book has been more concerned with the flows, exchanges and in-between elements that call the very desire to center into question (1993, 190). The black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argues, is a transgeographical culture without national boundaries that thrives on lateral connections and syncretisms, a culture where in-betweeness replaces identity as the defining trope of cultural production. Gilroy sees identity opposed and preferable to those of national, ‘racial’ and ethnic absolutism — its roots lying not in states and continents but on practices disseminated by colonialism and the international slave network. He claims: … the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the 'Indians' they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other” (1993, 2). His argument’s implications are that all “cultures” would show the same intermixing and transculturation, although this is ordinarily disavowed and suppressed in the interest of various nationalisms. One effect of this disavowal, he claims, is an inability to see the contributions made by nondominant peoples. Gilroy counters the (“white”) culture of modernity with the assertion that black people, though often omitted from accounts of the making of the modern world, have been crucial to its emergence as such: “the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out blacks as the first truly modern people” (1993, 221). He is not here simply reversing the usual paradigm (whites produce modernity and are, therefore, always a bit ahead), but rather insisting that the usual paradigm simply obliterates the irreducible and crucial place of blacks in the production of modernity. In this way he makes the marginal turn out to be central, and this reversal displaces the debate, opening up a space to see the world differently. Gilroy bases his claim on the ravages of the experience of slavery, which he sees as wrenching black peoples into the modern crises of identity (what Du Bois called “double consciousness”) which would confront non-enslaved subjects only later. Thus, Gilroy's strategy for attacking the unquestionable inequalities of global relations relies on dismantling from within the pretensions of “pure culture” through which, historically, such inequalities have been explained and/or justified, and asserting the transnational against the exclusionary force of the national.