Diaspora Calls
Wrote this tonight for a lot of reasons. To those who are feeling out of place.
xx. <3 -a.
To be a diasporic philosopher is to inherit nothing whole—not a homeland, not a canon, not even your own way of knowing. You begin in fragments. And so you learn to read differently—not to extract answers, but to survive in relation to the text.
To write philosophy in the diaspora is to write from exile—not from nation alone, but exile from system, from a discipline, to write from shaky ground. The diaspora hides in the bushes and advances thought from underground.
The diaspora is a method of survival. The diasporic philosopher does not lament fragmentation. They begin there, in the search for meaning. From there, they are decoupled from canon, drawn instead to unstable texts—where meaning still stirs.
The diaspora calls us to our ancestors, or rather, our ancestors call to us through ancient phrases and lost traditions; generations of diaspora in our muscle memory. In our fragility, they share their strength. In the cultural isolation they say brachas on our behalf, and when homeland becomes unsafe, they hide us in the upstairs.
Nothing is certain in the diaspora, but much is true for the community. The act of meaning-making is its own ritual.
“I don’t know if this is true of the world, but it is true of us.”
That is diaspora, and it sustains through story and the acts we perform around story.
The diaspora rejects a unified tradition that is contingent on place and embraces the space we hold in time as our shared destination. We notice the wormhole opened by the present action to toss metal canisters attached by a string to the ancient past.
To be diasporic is to be trained in fragmentary reading. To expect contradictions. To treat tension as a source of meaning rather than a flaw in the text. And above all, to know that interpretation is survival. What matters to community sustainability is not what you once did, but how you transform those activities to meet new settings, new circumstances, new modes of discourse, and new mediums for engagement.
The diasporic philosopher begins where systems of knowledge break down, and it is the diaspora calling on us to choose wisely what we carry with us.
Diaspora says we embrace new circumstances, wielding old tools.
And yet, we retooled the tradition after its destruction at the hands of empir. We innovate from a time beyond destruction.
Diasporic philosophy is a field condition for those who were never centered in the system, but whose survival demanded fluency in it. The enslaved and those whose lands were stolen. Misfits, freaks, queer and curious, the sanctioned, the policed, the gay and trans, the Jews and the non-traditional. The out of place, the unmarried, the poor, the ill, and disabled. The Muslim, the immigrant, the needy.
Everyone who found community too late that they worry it will slip through their fingers.
Those with enough decency to recognize the indecency in others, and those who confront a political system they were told did not reflect the highest ideals of the country that, in fact, always has reflected its values–they only were not what we were told they were.
Diasporic reading isn’t about accepting error. It’s about refusing to collapse contradiction.It’s about making meaning inside systems that weren’t built for you. Diasporic reading is to read outside of the state. Diasporic reading is a decentralization program that embraces whatever, wherever, and whenever we build, think, and create, it is our space to do so, to build new communities of learning outside the bounds of place.
Diasporic reading is a quietly revolutionary resistance to the norms of discourse and belief formation.
Diasporic reading names the systems of coercion and discerns when it is time to rise up and when it is time to stay underground.
Diasporic reading is philosophical, not personal–or not only. It’s an epistemic stance—one that treats incoherence not as failure, but as signal. It traces the rough edges of human knowledge to be mindful that no insignificant amount of it is tortured and exploitative. Diaspora says we create, anyway; we revise, edit, rewrite, reform, recycle, reify–and reject when that is what discernment calls for.
For my siblings in diaspora.
Doikayt.