![]() ![]() Literary works, written particularly by second generation diasporic writers, concentrate more on synchronic dimension than on diachronic one. The past, thus, becomes a part of the present consciousness of the diasporic subject. Although the past is invoked now and then, the focus is persistently on the ‘moment.’ The past is invoked to indicate a certain contrast, which must be incorporated, and controlled in the present life in order to negotiate the network of social relations in the immediate world. The word ‘diaspora’ itself, coming, as it does, from Greek ‘dia’ (‘through’) and ‘speirein’ (‘to scatter’), etymologically means ‘dispersal,’ and involves, at least two countries, two cultures, which are embedded in the mind of the migrant, side-by-side. ![]() The perspective of the ‘moment’ privileged in the above extract may indeed be very useful in the study of diasporic literature. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. ![]()
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