13 - ‘Pity the Poor Immigrant’: Pity, Diaspora, the Colony

Summary

The links between pity and what we might loosely call the diasporic are perhaps all too obvious. There is, for example, the major locus of pity which we have come across before in Owen's ‘war, and the pity of war’, for behind – and not far behind – much diaspora lie the stark, often hideous realities of war, although it remains true that diaspora can be driven by many things: not only by war but by persecution, by the realities of economics and relative economic deprivation, by psychological terror. Or it can be driven by the realisation of previously unrealised oppression, by the possibility of new openings, or by escape from past or present collapse – of nation states, of societies, of local communities. What we can say with certainty about diaspora under present conditions is that what has in the past been – or been regarded as – an exception is rapidly becoming the rule. The absolute dominance of US-led commerce has pointed up more sharply than ever the global disparity between wealth and poverty, while the exigencies of climate change will render it increasingly imperative for those from physically low-lying countries, which include many of the poorest, to make their way as best they can towards what we may call, both geographically and economically, ‘higher ground’. In many ways we can see that what is happening today under conditions of so-called ‘advanced’ global capitalism is precisely as the old scandal-monger Marx had predicted, namely, the increasing development and subjugation of an alienated labour force in the name of the extraction of surplus profit.