…a displaced and dispersed population cannot automatically be identified as a diaspora as it is not sufficient for it, as for any social formation for that matter, objectively to fulfill the material conditions prescribed by a category, such as diaspora in our case. The crucial element that makes the concept meaningful and legitimate to use is their self-mobilization around their awareness of themselves as a diaspora. In other words, it is their ability to imagine themselves as such, to imagine and construct the relevant transnational linkages and to construct the appropriate discourses. It follows that this self-awareness and the processes of self-imagination as a diaspora, if they are to be sustained over time, require diasporic institutions, which construct and sustain a diasporic space of communication and exchange where definitions of the diaspora are elaborated and reproduced.
It is this, little studied, capacity of diasporic media that, together with a host of other diasporic cultural, political and economic processes, can transform diasporas from little more than aggregates of migrants into active and vibrant diasporic networks.
