Diasporas form through trauma, choice, or creative invention without a founding origin.

Evidence

Throughout Europe, we see various types of transfrontier networks developing, which are in many ways comparable to a diaspora. The archetype - which is that of the Jewish diaspora - has itself undergone considerable changes since World War II. In some cases, the diaspora corresponds to a founding event, a major trauma (genocide, civil war, expulsion), a particularly severe form of continuous repression, forcing a population into partial or total exile. In other cases, the point of departure is the outcome of a choice, and the diaspora is a set of attitudes in which, even after several generations, the migrants maintain close economic, cultural, personal, and family links with the home country and with other communities of the same origin settled in countries other than their own. The Chinese experience is the best example here. Finally, as Paul Gilroy has shown with reference to the Black Atlantic (1993), the diaspora can be a production, an invention, without any particular reference to a founding point in time, nor to any specific historical and territorial origin, which is in a way the case for blacks, who, from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom, including possibly the United States, have developed innovative cultural practices in the artistic sphere and that of corporal expression but also construct economic networks. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3176

Categorization

• DEFINE: A three-part typology of diaspora: trauma-driven exile, choice/attitude-based connection, and creative invention without a fixed origin.
• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic concept and other diaspora theory (Safran, Cohen) the reader may have encountered. — connects to: The exiled encounter with absolute unknown was the founding trauma of creolized identity. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 85
• SEED: Angle: a typology piece on diaspora forms could unpack how ‘invented’ diasporas (like the Black Atlantic) differ from trauma-based ones in their political function.