Dialogical Voices and Construction of the Diasporic Identity

Dialogical Voices and Construction of the Diasporic Identity

Okuroglu Ozun, Sule

In the last decades, diasporic communities across the world and global shifts in the movement of people have provided critical spaces for both essentialist and traditional binary frameworks of ethnicity, nation and identity encapsulated in colonial and nationalist metanarratives. Worn out researches carried out in the field of post-colonial and diaspora studies have emphasised identity formation of immigrants as a linear process in which non-Western European immigrants reconstitute their identities as citizens of the First World especially by focusing mostly on Edward Said and his Orientalism. However - in the wake of increasing global interactions and border crossings - various discursive practices, cultural and personal positions of the diasporic communities have led to the construction of hybrid identities. This productive hybridity opens up dialogic spaces for diasporic subjectivity where discussions about “identity” challenge unchanging narratives of the stable self and welcomes multiplicity of continuous and discontinuous selves in relation to “other”. This point of view, by challenging set boundaries and silenced others, uncovers importance of different voices in the diasporic evaluation of the ‘self’. In this sense, identity formation of diasporic communities is a dialogical process which involves multiple cultures and histories; never ending moving back and forth movement between incompatible cultural and discursive positions. The construction of diasporic self, just like the characters of different contexts, involves the dynamic relation of the various self-positions in other spaces through dialogue with others. Today the term diaspora has been moving away from its static definition as forced displacement, home and away places, or home and alien place toward transnational, fluid and multiple movements resulting in contemporary transnational diasporic conditions and identities. This paper will specifically discuss the never ending and unstable dialogic identity formation within the context of diaspora experience.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

1012