Although they are often difficult to sustain, distinctions do exist between voluntary mass migrations and diasporic displacements. In the West, at least, the term 'diaspora' is increasingly employed to describe significantly large groups...
moreAlthough they are often difficult to sustain, distinctions do exist between voluntary mass migrations and diasporic displacements. In the West, at least, the term 'diaspora' is increasingly employed to describe significantly large groups of people now established in countries or regions away from their ancestral homelands. The traditional meaning of 'diaspora' however, recognises its Biblical application to the dispersal of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity and evokes an exiling and scattering of people under duress, thereby conjuring not simply migration from an original homeland, but some form of captivity. Within the histories of the territories of the former British Empire, the experience of tropical Africans captured and transported across the Atlantic in chains to labour on 'New World' plantations best fits this traditional pattern; and it has been West Indian artists, writers and musicians (not least the late Bob Marley) who have drawn extensively on the Jewish comparison, singing, as a famous lyric expresses it, 'King Alpha's song is a strange land'.
