Diaspora entails a permanent void of an unrealized life

Evidence

So there always was another life, and there’s also the long period in which I wasn’t sure whether I was going home or not. … It wasn’t true. I wasn’t going back. I knew to go back at that point for me was psychic death—it would have enclosed itself around me; I could feel it waiting for me. So I was right not to go back. But it was a loss. One has to say that. Diaspora is a loss. It’s not forever; it doesn’t mean that you can’t do something about it, or that other places can’t fill the gap, the void, but the void is always the regretful moment that wasn’t realized. History is full of what is not realized, and I feel that about it. Whenever I go back, I think I’m at home, but still I’m not at home. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1078

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines ‘diaspora’ not as displacement but as an enduring loss/void—the unrealized alternative life—a conceptual framing useful for theorizing colonial migrancy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding project on colonial psychology and racialized selfhood—the psychic dimension of the colonial intellectual’s relation to home. — connects to: The For-itself is diasporatic, dispersed into several dimensions of being which the In-itself lacks. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 473