Migration makes diaspora the paradigmatic postmodern and postcolonial experience.

Evidence

So you have what Simmel talked about: the experience of being inside and outside, the “familiar stranger.” We used to call that “alienation,” or deracination. But nowadays it’s come to be the archetypal late-modern condition. Increasingly, it’s what everybody’s life is like. So that’s how I think about the articulation of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Postcoloniality, in a curious way, prepared one to live in a “postmodern” or diasporic relationship to identity. Paradigmatically, it’s a diasporic experience. Since migration has turned out to be the world-historical event of late modernity, the classic postmodern experience turns out to be the diasporic experience. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 769

Categorization

• XREF: Links Simmel’s ‘familiar stranger’ to late-modern condition — connects to the field’s scaffolding on migration, identity, and the postcolonial vocabulary that Islamophobia readings assume. — connects to: Early twentieth-century migration turned life into self-created improvisation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 105; Rushdie’s implied reader is a global postcolonial migrant sharing filmic and literary echoes — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 200
• DEFINE: Defines diaspora as the bridging concept between postmodern and postcolonial experience.