Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse

What is the difference between migration and diaspora? Are acculturation and ethnonationalism intrinsic dynamics of diasporas? These and other paradigmatic, if implicit, questions have received relatively little attention from scholars in the emerging field of diaspora studies, despite the exponential increase of scholarship in recent years. Epistemological development has lagged behind the writing of monographs and, to a lesser extent, comparative studies. As the term has been appropriated by African, Asian, and even single-town diasporas and by scholars who study them, we have actually become less clear about what defines diasporas and makes them a distinct category. This article proposes some suggestions as to how the extensive existing research on specific diasporas may be analyzed in comparative context as a means of developing an epistemology of diasporan studies.