at the moment is a veritable illustration of the power “generation” that is involved in the
abstraction of both time and space.
Perhaps, it is in response to this that Bill Ashcroft (2007) contends that though diaspora is
a term that has been in active intellectual use since the 1970s, it fails alongside other
similarly reckoned terms to account for the challenge of the moment. To this end, he
proposes the concept of “transnation” and in the following explication, he launches the
term for reflection:
‘The’ transnation represents a state of inbetweeness not adequately accounted for by the terms
‘diaspora’ ‘migrancy’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but becomes a post-colonial intervention into the
debates circulating around the questions of cultural identity, diaspora, language and literature
in a global future (1).Although most of these terms levelled with inadequacies by Ashcroft have been reflected
upon in the previous chapters, it is expedient at this junction to extend the argument about
their inadequacies by looking at two of such terms: transnationalism and diaspora.
Transnationalism because there is the tendency to confuse it with the idea of
‘transnation’, and diaspora because it assumes a ubiquitous presence within the discourse
of exile and migration. Various scholars with necessary disciplinary inflections of their
backgrounds have attempted to tackle the term transnationalism and have come up with
various definitions. From the migration-based definition of Van Amersfoort, Basch,
Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, to the economistically sprained submission of Portes,
Guarnizo and Landolt, to the abstractionist models of Clifford (Valentia Mazzucato 2004:
131-2), one thing is constant, and that is the simultaneity of straddling of nations by
peoples, materials, ideas and feelings. Nevertheless, the status of simultaneity of presence
is fraught with its shortcomings as more often than not, there is a feeling of absence,
which is usually perceivable not in the country of destination but in the country of origin.
Put differently, in this simultaneity of existence or presence, the allegiance ends up
getting tilted to one side, and this is where the nation state suffers a kind of loss both in
material and abstract terms. Turning to diaspora and relying on the criticism of Ashcroft,
“the diasporic community”, for instance, “has been understood as fundamentally absent
from the nation. In this discourse, diasporic subjects are crippled by absence, loss and