Jen Dickinson

Diaspora diplomacy blurs the traditional conceptual dichotomies that map domestic and foreign policymaking efforts. Addressing how such distinctions are varyingly produced requires greater engagement with the way that diplomatic practice modulates the associations between belonging, nation and territory. This paper applies a semiotic analysis to a case study of the images circulated through the social media campaigns of the India Development Foundation of Overseas Indian (IDF-OI) between 2016 and 2017, a quasi-governmental organisation tasked with channelling diaspora philanthropy into state and national social and development projects. It shows that the connotative potential of images simultaneously positioned Indian diasporas as territorial stakeholders within these domestic agendas, whilst also generating performative representations of the diaspora as an extra-territorial global public. It argues that the images circulated through the IDF-OI’s digital platforms legitimised those particular voices that served both ideas, thereby empowering those with existing structural advantages. This paper suggests that with the increased use of social media in diaspora diplomacy, scholarship should engage with the richness of online platforms and the ambiguity of images as a specific component of those spaces, to better understand how diasporas are mobilised as non-state actors in contemporary international political affairs.

Diaspora strategies have been at the forefront of new studies of the political geographies of state-led transnationalism, contributing important insights into the widespread socioeconomic impacts of initiatives used to engage émigrés in extraterritorial nation-building. The conceptualization of the 'sending state' as a central territorialized bureaucratic form has however contributed to binary framings of diasporic space by failing to capture the range of interplays in and between multiple scales and spaces that characterises the formulation of a states' diaspora strategies, their evolution over time, and their variegated material outcomes. Alternative conceptualizations of the 'sending state' as a multi-sited network of governing entities disrupts binary readings of diaspora space, but it is argued here that such an approach reproduces top-down views of political agency. The review concludes by suggesting that scholars of diaspora strategies would benefit from exploring assemblage thinking, where a sustained engagement with spatial emergence and distributed socio-material agencies has the potential to reveal the dynamic topological connections through which diasporic spatio-political formations emerge, endure and may be disrupted. This has implications for understanding the impacts of diaspora strategies on individual diasporic subjectivities and ideas of common citizenship.

Engagements between sending states and their diasporas have come under increasing critical scrutiny. Whilst political geographers have driven critical analysis of national level policies, debates have largely overlooked the broader range of actors, transactions and practices involved in implementing national policies in a geohistorically diverse array of diasporic contexts and settings. Over the last decade, the Indian government has invested significant resources in overseas diplomatic missions, consulates and high commissions to administer its diaspora outreach strategies. This paper examines the role of the Consulate General of India (CGI) in Durban, South Africa, focusing in particular on the networks of agents, associations, groups and political actors involved in collaborating with the CGI Durban in diaspora outreach practices. This paper draws on two periods of fieldwork in Durban between 2004 and 2005 and was supplemented by ongoing visual and textual analysis of news articles, promotional material, reports and websites. Using the concept of articulation, the paper highlights the discursive and performative practices involved in bringing together the agendas of the GOI with those of South African Indian diaspora associations through the outreach practices of the CGI in Durban. It argues that articulatory practices are essential to resolving some of the subjective and embodied dilemmas and contestations of belonging inherent in South African Indians’ participation in diaspora outreach initiatives. Investigating how articulation contributes to drawing diverse and even competing agendas together makes room for further understanding the ways in which diaspora outreach practices can travel across a wide network, and the diverse agencies that can become catalysed in the process.

Recent studies of international migration have observed its increasing complexity. Circular, return and temporary migration between India and Kenya, arising from the economic and political multi-polarities of increasing South-South partnerships, is one example of such complexity. These flows are distinct from the migration patterns of the longer-established Kenyan Asian diaspora, who settled under the auspices of the British Empire from the 1890s until the beginning of the 1960s. This paper explores how these transformations are negotiated through the dynamics of Kenyan Asians’ ongoing post-colonial liminalities and ambiguities of citizenship, focusing in particular on the temporal production of distinctions between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, even when in practice these distinctions are much more fluid. This article highlights the regulatory practices of ‘time work’ that that enfold the migratory chronologies of ‘established’ migrants into the time of the nation, whilst excluding those of ‘newcomers’.  It explores the selective remembering, forgetting and reworking of the colonial past, a process informed by the dynamics of modernity, diaspora, nation and postcoloniality in contemporary Kenya. It argues that whilst distinctions between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants might reflect different positionings in transnational social fields, differences are also negotiated in contradictions between the experiences, meanings and understandings of time. This demonstrates how space on its own is itself a inadequate conceptual lens with which to examine relationships between ‘newcomers’ and ‘established’ migrants, and that further research is needed that attends to the temporal dynamics mediating the temporal dissonances of contemporary transnational social fields.

In this paper we propose a rethinking of the concepts of center and margin in geography. We review extant literatures from structuralist political geography and science-studies and explore alternative theoretical approaches in order to develop the concept of axes of centrality. Using theories of performativity to understand centers and margins as produced across an array of axes allows for an expansion of the concept as well as a focus on the body. We argue that contemporary experiences of transnational migration constitute a useful way of thinking about how bodies produce places differently as global centers and margins. Drawing on material from two studies of transnational communities, one of white, English-speaking South African return migrants, and one of British East African Asians, we take a biographical approach, demonstrating how two individuals with extensive migration histories have performed England, South Africa, Uganda and India as variously central and marginal across the life course. We posit the concept of “axes of centrality” to demonstrate how centers and margins are most usefully conceptualized not as places in themselves, but can be located in and between bodies in a variety of ways as they move through and perform space at a variety of scales and over time.

Keywords: center and margin, transnationalism, life course, performativity"

Diasporic associations and hometown groups fuel transnational exchanges and circulations. Their role has mostly been understood in terms of broader calculative agendas related to ethnic and national cultural politics. In South Africa, classical Indian singers, dancers and instrumentalists are an important part of these transnational landscapes. This paper focuses on the individual actors giving shape to these flows, and explores how a range of subjectivities is entangled with the materialities and forces present in classical performance spaces.
Drawing on fieldwork in Durban, South Africa, it explores how, and why organising actors assemble the matter of classical performance spaces. The paper also explores interconnections to Bollywood as another emergent diasporic site both in tension and accord with classical Indian performances.
Drawing from a feminist social practice approach, this paper argues that diaspora associational life is assembled through agents negotiating different gaps and discrepancies arising from the material and affective inhabitation of diasporic worlds

A total of 2,552 organs from deceased donors were transplanted in the UK in 2009, yet more than 1,000 people die each year waiting for an organ transplant. The metaphor of the ‘gift of life’ remains the rubric under which increasing the availability of organs for transplant is commonly organised. Like all gifts, the ‘gift of life’ must be reciprocated. Reviewing the advice given by, and for, transplant recipients in self-help and autobiographical literature aimed at those waiting for or who have just received a new organ we argue that reciprocity is circumscribed through projects of ‘care’ articulated at a range of scales including the organ, the self, the donor and the transplant community itself. We argue that the scarcity of organs available for transplant is used to compel recipients into adopting practices of self-care, to embodying the promise of the gift of life and to articulate a set of ethical responses to the new geography of embodiment that emerge from the movement of organs from one body and their transplantation into another.En 2009 on a fait dans le Royaume-Uni 2.552 transplantations d'organes provenant de donneurs décédés et pourtant plus que 1.000 personnes chaque année meurent en attendant une transplantation. La métaphore du « cadeau de la vie » reste la rubrique sous laquelle s'organisent normalement les efforts pour faire augmenter la limite des organes disponibles pour les transplantes. Comme tout cadeau, on doit rendre la pareille de ce soi-disant « cadeau de la vie ». C'est en reconsidérant les conseils donnés dans la littérature autobiographique et les manuels d'aide par ceux qui ont subi les transplantations aux ceux qui attendent ou qui viennent de recevoir un nouvel organe que nous soutenons que la réciprocité se retrouve circonscrite à travers les projets d'un « soin » lui-même articulé à toute une gamme d'échelles qui comprend l'organe, le soi, le donneur de l'organe, et même la communauté de transplantation. Nous soutenons en plus que la pénurie d'organes disponibles pour la transplantation sert à obliger les récipients de pratiquer un soin de soi qui donne corps à une promise pour le cadeau de la vie en même temps qu'il articule une gamme de réponses éthiques à la nouvelle géographie d'incarnation qui se dégage du mouvement des organes d'un corps à un autre. (ndt: cette dernière phrase en VO étant grammaticalement vague, veuillez consulter l'auteur pour une explication plus claire)2,552 órganos de donantes fallecidos estaban transplantados en el Reino Unido en 2009, aún más que 1,000 personas mueren cada año esperando un transplante de órgano. La metáfora del “regalo de la vida” sigue siendo la rúbrica según la aumentación de la disponibilidad de órganos está comúnmente organizado. Como todos los regalos, el “regalo de la vida” debe ser correspondido. Revisando los consejos dados por, y para, los receptores de transplantes en la literatura autobiográfica y de auto-cuidado dirigidos a los esperando o los quienes recién recibieron órganos nuevos, discutimos que la reciprocidad está restringido por proyectos de “cuidado” articulados en un campo de escalas, incluyendo: el órgano, el sí-mismo, el donante y la comunidad de transplantes. Discutimos que la escasez de órganos disponibles para transplantar está utilizado obligar a receptores adoptar prácticas de auto-cuidado, encarnar la promesa del regalo de la vida, y articular un serie de repuestas éticas a la geografía nueva de encarnación que aparecen del movimiento de órganos de un cuerpo y su transplante a otro.

Although the concept of diaspora is sometimes regarded as oppositional to the interests of existing political regimes, we argue that it can become a site where the negotiation of new terms of membership embraces the transnational and de-territorialized networks of overseas populations. Drawing on work on transnational governance, we explore the uneven geographies that accompany India's recent discussions of its dual citizenship provisions. Constructions of diaspora membership are revealed by mapping the discourses contained within the Dual Citizenship legislation of 2003, the 2003 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Overseas India Day) campaign, and the 2001 report of the Diaspora Committee onto the case of South Africa. The results suggest that the construction of diaspora membership focuses on professional success, ecumenical Hinduism, and multicultural incorporation. We also trace how diaspora membership betrays a continuing anxiety over the terms of Indianness. The results remind us that diasporic times and spaces mediate transnational governance.