ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#38 | October 28, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036

The Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, and Forum for English Studies, Assam University, Silchar, will jointly organize a two-day National Conference on “Navigating Diaspora” during 11-12 March, 2014. The conference will be organized around plenary sessions, panel discussions and presentations by participants. Proposals for presentation at the Conference are welcome from faculty members, research scholars and academicians engaged with research on various aspects of diaspora studies.

Concept Note

The multivalent term “diaspora”, which has its etymological origin in the Greek gardening tradition, referring to the dispersal of seeds, has come to be associated with exile and some sort of suffering because of the mass relocation of people from their originary homelands to new regions and a consequent sense of loss derived from an inability to return, with the Jewish experience of forced exile from Jerusalem in the sixth century BC seen as the prototype diasporic experience. The mass movement of Africans via slavery to the Americas can also be considered to be a diasporic experience of a similar kind. More recently, of course, we have started talking in terms of the diasporas of ‘casualization’, formed by groups of people who have moved from
marginalized regions to metropolitan centres in search of, say, a better life. (more…)