Orginally published in French under title: La dispersion.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction. Towards a Historical Socio-semantics of a Word in Vogue -- Introduction to Part 1 -- The Word of the Septuagint -- The Religious Space of Dispersion -- Towards a Secular Concept -- Introduction to Part 2 -- Next Year in Ethiopia: Blacks at the Jewish Mirror -- A Name of One’s Own: The Emergence of the Black/African Diaspora -- The Reversal -- Introduction to Part 3 -- Constructing the Field of Diaspora Studies -- The Critical Turn -- States and Their Diasporas -- Conclusion. Two Cats and Three Demons -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In The Dispersion , Stéphane Dufoix skillfully traces how the word “diaspora”, first coined in the third century BCE, has, over the past three decades, developed into a contemporary concept often considered to be ideally suited to grasping the complexities of our current world. Spanning two millennia, from the Septuagint to the emergence of Zionism, from early Christianity to the Moravians, from slavery to the defence of the Black cause, from its first scholarly uses to academic ubiquity, from the early negative connotations of the term to its contemporary apotheosis, Stéphane Dufoix explores the historical socio-semantics of a word that, perhaps paradoxically, has entered the vernacular while remaining poorly understood.