The diversiform character of diasporas today: mapping and monitoring the polymorphous and/or the protean

This article is the first of a pair of manuscripts based on the assumption that different diaspora constitute various sorts of imagined communities that each comprise a dispersed association of ethnically and/or culturally and/or historically connected populations. These imagined but spread peoples appear (on the surface) to exhibit-to various degrees-unified cross-national identifications, and tend to have experienced similar and often "difficult" heritages of displacement, travel, and migration, and are inclined to reflect like psychic and political dynamics of memory and self-celebration. This first article is further predicated on the view, however, that the very concept of the imagined diasporic network (in tourism studies and related fields) generally gives rise to troubled ideas about enforced flight, reluctant scattering, and dislocated wandering, and therefore demands rich and deep levels of interpretive perspicacity if the resultant conflictual identities and the involved indeterminacies of being are to be effectively mapped and deeply registered. It recognizes that these hard to decipher contingencies of identification are nigh impossible to read in clear-cut absolute terms of nature or agreed inheritance, for each diaspora tends to be typified by and through idiosyncratic and hybridized cultural forms.