Rethinking diasporicity: embodiment, emotion, and the displaced origin

Abstract

This paper explores how Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology can be used to articulate an account of the lived experience of diasporicity that contrasts sharply with the abstract formulations of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. Becoming displaced from an originary time and space is the characteristic of being human. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy provides the outline of a universal diasporic experience. The question that arises is how this ontological diasporicity relates to the field of discourse, the optics of racialized power relations and the lived experience of the black diaspora. The work of Franz Fanon is introduced in order to explore how the fundamental black diasporic moods of melancholia and nostalgia can be thematized in such a way that both pre-discursive and discursive elements can be incorporated.

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