Much ink has been spilled and much airtime sucked in mainstream media about Barack Obama’s distinct and colorful (pun intended) biography in this election cycle. Much too much, in fact, that I won’t provide links. It’s simply out there and has become part of our quotidian narrative, lexicon, and vocabulary about Obama. But I’ll provide the outlines of this biography.

Briefly, Obama was born in Hawaii, of a Kenyan father and Kansan white mother. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He then went to college at Columbia in New York, then to Chicago to work as a community organizer before going to law school at Harvard in Cambridge. He has been called the exotic Kenyan-Kansan. Briefly then, Obama is a product of global diaspora.

Let’s begin with the historical context of diaspora. The Greek word diaspora, which means dispersion, was first used by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War to describe the exile of the population of Aegina. (pace the Greek words, oikos, which means home, and barbarus, which means foreign, the etymon of barbarian) And the Hebrew word galut was employed in the Old Testament to refer to the forced exile of Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC/BCE. Diaspora was later used to describe Christian communities scattered across the Roman Empire before it adopted Christianity as the state religion.

Western traditional notions of diaspora can be loosely defined in two ways: first, as a collective forced dispersion of a religious and/or ethnic group precipitated by a political and/or military disaster (what Naomi Klein recently called shock therapy); and second, the group’s will to transmit its heritage in order to preserve its identity no matter the degree of integration or attempt at assimilation. There are many diasporas in many first-world countries, each represented usually in enclaves and classified as domestic cultural minorities: Armenian; Gypsy; North African; Chinese; Vietnamese; Cambodian; Somali; Ethiopian. And so on.

In the mid- to late-20th century, the disintegration of European imperialist networks and the emergence of various decolonization movements; the ever-changing social formations and modes of production under the aegis of capitalism; and the politics of the defunct cold war have had several ramifications, among which, because of many military, social, economic, and political practices corollary to these developments, first-world countries now have a sizable and expanding population of first- and second-generation citizens with third-world heritage.

Global diaspora and first-world ethnic diversity have already had effects on US politics locally and nationally. As an example, my own congressman (the first black congressman from Minnesota and most certainly the first Muslim US House Rep), Keith Ellison of Minnesota’s 5th District, easily the bluest in the state, was elected with considerable help from Somali refugees who are US citizens. And the case of Obama may yet be one proof that history is biography writ large.

(Biodun Iginla)


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