The Dispersion

Description

Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In The Dispersion, Stéphane Dufoix skillfully traces how the word "diaspora", first coined in the third century BCE, has, over the past three decades, developed into a contemporary concept often considered to be ideally suited to grasping the complexities of our current world. Spanning two millennia, from the Septuagint to the emergence of Zionism, from early Christianity to the Moravians, from slavery to the defence of the Black cause, from its first scholarly uses to academic ubiquity, from the early negative connotations of the term to its contemporary apotheosis, Stéphane Dufoix explores the historical socio-semantics of a word that, perhaps paradoxically, has entered the vernacular while remaining poorly understood. Contents Acknowledgements List of Maps, Illustrations, Figures and Tables Introduction. Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue Part 1: From the Word to the Concept Introduction to Part 1 Chapter 1. The Word of the Septuagint Chapter 2. The Religious Space of Dispersion Chapter 3. Towards a Secular Concept Part 2: Cham Dispersed: From the Jewish Model to the Reversal Introduction to Part 2 Chapter 4. Next Year in Ethiopia: Blacks at the Jewish Mirror Chapter 5. A Name of One"2019s Own: The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora Chapter 6. The Reversal Part 3: The Name of the Global Introduction to Part 3 Chapter 7. Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies Chapter 8. The Critical Turn Chapter 9. States and Their DiasporasThe first two sections of this chapter draw substantially on the introduction that I wrote for the edited volume on state policies towards expatriates. St"00E9phane Dufoix, "201CUn pont par-dessus la porte: extraterritorialisation et trans"00E9tatisation des identifications nationales,"201D in Dufoix, Guerassimoff, and De Tinguy, Loin des yeux, pr"00E8s du c"0153ur, 15-57. Conclusion. Two Cats and Three Demons Bibliography Index of Names