The World in One Place: Rethinking Diasporas and their Territories through the Eyes of Historians

Abstract

This discussion focuses on the tendency of Diaspora Studies to analyse diasporic groups as deterritorialised entities with only a superficial attachment to their local environment, and with no horizon beyond their transnational networks and the idea of return. However, diasporas establish roots in their host societies as much as they embrace mobility. Drawing on examples from the Jewish and Armenian diasporas—a library and a synagogue in Paris and an Armenian neighbourhood in Jerusalem—the authors of this dialogue emphasise the importance of such constructed spaces in helping the group integrate into their surrounding societies, without either minimising or exaggerating the symbolic or practical significance of the ancestral homeland.