In the author’s discussion of “diaspora” is a complementary and parallel exercise, in that he too seeks to find a theoretical and conceptual framework within which to locate issues of multilocality, displacement, complex social loyalties, and the overlapping identities so characteristic of what is sometimes characterised as the period of “late modernity”, “postmodernity”, or, more simply, “globalisation”. Notions of diaspora have two advantages. They are particularly pertinent to history in that the expression is used of migrant groups in classical and modern times and in the current period of globalization. The second advantage is somewhat double-edged. On the one hand, concepts of diaspora have great variety and mutability (a plus if we regard the term as adequately meeting a shifting reality). More negatively, the proliferation of meanings of the word diaspora has the danger of multiplying confusion by suggesting meanings that are not pertinent to the particular group concerned.
