Diasporic identity must be deliberately reconfigured rather than naturally inherited.

Evidence

The second one is to remember that in the particular circumstances of the Caribbean, the people are themselves “a diaspora.” We are ourselves the effect of the dislocation and displacement, of the dissemination from somewhere else, and of what then happens, culturally, as, out of the cauldron of colonization, enslavement and plantation society, something new, something genuinely novel, emerges. Does that mean that we do not have any connection with what went before? How could it possibly mean that? But it does mean that that connection is not something which can now be naturally summoned up as if it exists in all of us, somewhere down there, in our bodies, in our genes, as a force of nature. It has to be re-created, has to be sustained in the culture, reconfigured, in the new historical circumstances which confront us. It has to be sustained in the mind, or the connection cannot be made. We would be wrong to adopt a notion of tradition as something which does not change, which protects us against change. As I have had to say to people before, “Africa is alive and well in the diaspora,” but the Africa we left four hundred years ago under the conditions of slavery, transportation, and the Middle Passage has not been waiting unchanged—to go back to, either in our heads or in our bodies. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1203

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines diaspora not as inherited ancestral inheritance stored in genes but as something that must be re-created and sustained in the culture.
• XREF: Directly feeds the conceptual vocabulary for Islamophobia readings: how displaced communities construct identity in new historical conjunctures rather than via fixed origins. — connects to: Identity is now a matter of choice rather than inherited absolute truth — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 112; Declared specificity must be enacted to resist assimilation. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 745; Root-based identity condemns emigrants to being split and flattened. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 714
• SEED: Essay angle: the distinction between cultural nationalism’s claim of recoverable origins and diaspora’s insistence on reconfiguration applies to how contemporary Muslim communities narrate their relationship to their ‘originary’ cultures.