Out of Place: Re-thinking Diaspora and Empire

Much of the recent scholarly work analyzing the changes in the contemporary international system celebrates diasporas as embodying not just a break from the past, but the emergence of a new world order. This article presents a critical engagement with these claims — in particular, as they appear in two influential texts, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire — to argue that the existence of diasporas should not be automatically understood as a challenge to structures of dominance at the international level. I make this argument by analyzing the constitutive relationship between imperialism and diasporas. Through an examination of the colonial diasporas created by the British Empire in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries, I contend that significant continuities exist between past and present, and that they should caution us against an uncritical celebration of the role played by diasporas in the contemporary international system.