Editing African diaspora (section)

=== Richard Iton's view of diaspora ===

Cultural and political theorist [[Richard Iton]] suggested that diaspora be understood as a "culture of dislocation". For Iton, the traditional approach to the African diaspora focuses on the ruptures associated with the Atlantic slave trade and [[Middle Passage]], notions of dispersal, and "the cycle of retaining, redeeming, refusing, and retrieving 'Africa.'"<ref name=Iton>Iton, Richard. ''In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era''. [[Oxford University Press]], 2010.</ref>{{rp|199}} This conventional framework for analyzing the diaspora is dangerous, according to Iton, because it presumes that diaspora exists outside of Africa, thus simultaneously disowning and desiring Africa. Further, Iton suggests a new starting principle for the use of diaspora: "the impossibility of settlement that correlates throughout the modern period with the cluster of disturbances that trouble not only the physically dispersed but those moved without traveling."<ref name=Iton />{{rp|199–200}} Iton adds that this impossibility of settlement—this "modern matrix of strange spaces—outside the state but within the empire"—renders notions of black citizenship fanciful, and in fact, "undesirable". Iton argues that we  citizenship, a state of statelessness thereby deconstructing colonial sites and narratives in an effort to "de-link geography and power", putting "''all'' space into play" (emphasis added)<ref name=Iton />{{rp|199–200}} For Iton, diaspora's potential is represented by a "rediscursive albeit agonistic field of play that might denaturalize the hegemonic representations of modernity as unencumbered and self-generating and bring into clear view its repressed, colonial subscript".<ref name=Iton />{{rp|201}}