| Chapter 1: | Introducing Africans in China |
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term is Greek; it obtains from the Greek word diaspeirein, meaning “to disperse, to scatter about.” Vertovec (1999) defined and outlined three major senses in which the term features in modern Diasporan studies as follows:
The three meanings that Vertovec mentioned include seeing Diaspora as a social form, as consciousness, and as a cultural production:
The first sense is closely related to and exemplified by the experiences of Jews, who often invoke their traumatic experience of exile from a historical homeland and who are now dispersed around the world. The second may refer to many minority populations—for example, in America, there are African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians, to name a few, who identify with a certain historical heritage. The third meaning of Diaspora,a means of cultural production, is closely related to the discussion of current notions of globalization, which is often seen by anthropologists and field linguists, among others, as a worldwide flow of cultural objects such as language, images, and meanings resulting in creolizations and hybridizations as well as cultural and linguistic transformations.
My use of the term in this book conforms closely with the third meaning. For me, Diaspora, as in the phrase African Diaspora in China, involves the constant back-and-forth movement of Africans into China,