Diasporas Disentangled: The Cultivation of an Open/Spiral Imagination in Tourism Studies

This companion article by Ivanova and Hollinshead seeks to show how “the changing same of the diasporic imaginal” (after Leroi Jones, via Gilroy) often conceivably constitutes “a wicked problem” (after Brown, Harris, and Russell) that is often so complex in its characteristics that hard and fast definitions about it (and solutions for its problematics) are not easy to conjure up. Thus, in order to monitor how ethnic, cultural, and historic codes are switched and hybridized in and through the inconstant identifications of diasporic senses of inheritance and aspiration, this article endeavors to show how transdisciplinary lines of inspection may prove useful. Taken in tandem with the previous article by Hollinshead, the two dovetailed articles thereby comprise no tributary celebration of the purity of ethnic or national culture, but one that indeed demands a high degree of open interpretive imagination if such matters of ambivalence and ambiguity are to be gradually and meaningfully deciphered.