Decentering Diaspora

Contemporary accounts in diaspora studies continue to contrast diaspora to the “center,” insist on a moment of (forced or voluntary) dispersion and continued longing for “home,” and the oppressiveness of the diasporic situation. In this lecture, Boyarin lays out a different notion of diaspora as a synchronic condition from which the conditions of its emergence have no significance. It is, moreover, a productive condition, not necessarily at all unwelcome to its participants. The Babylonian Talmud will provide the case study.

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, and currently a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where the above topic is his subject for the year’s research.