The geopolitics of diaspora

In recent years there has been a growing body of work dealing with issues of diaspora and hybridity, both within geography and in other disciplines, such as cultural studies. This work tends to celebrate the potential of the hybrid and diasporic to transcend essentialist notions of identity and subjectivity. In this paper I argue that these approaches often fail to pay sufficient attention to two particular aspects of the diaspora experience: firstly, the geographical specificities of particular diasporas, and secondly, the ways in which essentialist modes of being are often reproduced within diasporic discourse. This is done by providing an overview of recent research into the Croatian diaspora in the United States (particularly their involvement in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s), which begins to develop the notion of the geopolitics of diaspora.