Chandra Prakash Bhongir, Civil Engr, May04 - Repositories

vicariously to the homeland. 6 This definition is very useful in the study of the Albanian
Diaspora in Southern Italy because the Arberesh of Italy are an Albanian community who
left Albania after the death of Scanderbeg, they continue to maintain their culture and
Albanian language, and are committed to the restoration of their homeland. Borders have
always defined the relationship between Diaspora and the nation-state. However if
nations are real yet imagined entities, the border itself also becomes an imagined entity.
Benedict Anderson’s work on nationhood fits well with the trends exhibited in Albania
and the struggle for Albanian independence on the part of the Albanian Diaspora.
In the modern world, ideas of national economy, become useless, since modern
nations are moving toward globalism and global economies. The classic Wilsonian-
Leninist form based on the slogan for self-determination is outdated and offers no
platform for the twenty-first century. In this construct Diaspora no longer occupies a
peripheral space, instead it becomes the hybrid which embodies the Other. This third
space to use Khachig Tololyan, definition is a “land, a territory , a place that functions as
the site of homogeneity, equilibrium,[and] integration.” 7 As such Diaspora becomes the
center, the place where discourse flourishes; and the exchange of ideas sets the frame for
political and social change in the homeland. The role then of the diasporic intellectual
becomes defined, first in relation to the place of origin and second to the place of
domicile. In the first case it is a question of a consciousness that resists the “submission
to consaguinity,” that is demanded by nationalists, and instead inhabits the borders
6 My definition of diaspora is closely aligned with William Safran’s work in diasporic
communities as developed in William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and
Return,” in Diaspora 1 (1991): 87.
7 Khachig Tololyan, “The Nation-State and Its Others, In Lieu of a Preface,” in Geoff Eley and
Ronald Grigor Suny eds., Becoming National, A Reader, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996):429.
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