Diasporic return to an authentic original culture is a foundational myth

Evidence

Having earlier spoken of his own psychic difficulties with the idea of “going home” (chapter 6), here Stuart deconstructs in more theoretical terms the foundational myth of the possibility of the exiled diaspora’s return to the authentic original culture of its mythological homeland. He notes the continuing affiliations of diasporic populations with their cultures of origin, as articulated through multisite households (these days, of course, often taking significantly virtual forms) and across generations, but he is concerned to escape any easy teleologies in which cultures are represented as having essential cores that can be maintained (or rescued). He starts with the fact that the Caribbean has long been populated by people who themselves had come—or, in many cases, forcibly been brought—from Africa, the East Indies, and China, having been conscripted into slavery or indenture, bringing with them a rich variety of cultures: hence their descendants must themselves be understood as the “diaspora of the diaspora,” as he puts it. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘diaspora of the diaspora’ — the key anti-essentialist concept: diaspora populations whose own homelands were already diasporic, destroying the home/return teleology.
• ADDENDUM: The rejection of essential cultural cores and return teleologies parallels the grafting metaphor in ‘Grafting & Growth’ — hybridity as productive rather than loss of authenticity.
• QUESTION: How far does the ‘diaspora of the diaspora’ logic extend — does it dissolve the notion of any authentic starting point, and how would that bear on claims of an authentic Islamic homeland used in Islamophobia discourse?
• XREF: connects to: Actual photographs of transformed homeland undermined the optimistic return fantasy — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 952