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Kurdish Diaspora Online pp 37–64Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Nations, Diaspora, Identity, and Alternative Explorations

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Abstract

The chapter aims to deconstruct key concepts that have been emphasized in the debates on migrants by engaging post-colonial and post-structural feminist studies. It begins with a discussion on nations, the imagined community, which shows how nations are imagined as people who have never met and who think they belong together, as opposed to ethnic “others.” Such ideas have also penetrated the debates on multiculturalism, and the aim here is to unpack such notions, which also include the concepts of identity and diaspora that have remained static in much academic writing. A detailed exploration of diaspora and transnationalism is particularly important, as the former has the power to disturb the singular relationship between nation and citizen. Because of the difficulty to break away from rigid ideas about identity, I present alternative ways to understand it. The concepts of performativity and scripts help to grasp how identity, although otherwise very abstract, is being done and undone among diasporic individuals.

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  1. Uppsala, Sweden

    Jowan Mahmod

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Mahmod, J. (2016). Nations, Diaspora, Identity, and Alternative Explorations. In: Kurdish Diaspora Online. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51347-2_3

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