Arden Yang Xian on Diaspora, Language, and the Limits of Narrative

Writer and New York State investigator Arden Yang Xian reflects on the concept of diaspora through personal encounters with texts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and V.S. Naipaul. The essay opens with a talk by geographer-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore at Yale, where Gilmore's unusual stress on the word 'diaspora' (daɪ–AS–pə–rə) reveals its phonetic foreignness. Xian traces colonial residues in English literature, from Thomas More's Utopia to Montaigne's 'Of Cannibals,' arguing that empire provided the background for early modern knowledge. The core of the essay examines Cha's Dictee, a multimedia work that resists genre and exposes the fractures of language under colonial rule. Cha, born in 1951 in war-torn Korea, migrated to the U.S. at twelve, and her work enacts a mechanical recitation that drains authority from imperial languages. Xian contrasts Cha's fragmented, ritualistic writing with Naipaul's insistence on continuity and identity formed through specific environments. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas and Miguel Street reveal diaspora as contradiction—distance enough to register loss, closeness enough to defer arrival. Xian concludes that both writers examine not diaspora as identity but the condition where identity cannot fully take hold.