Rethinking Diasporic Returns

This article calls for a rethinking of the concept of diasporic return in light of contemporary religious and political developments in Indonesia. It does so by exploring two modalities of diasporic returns, namely, re-embedding and re-encountering, neither of which necessarily involve transnational travel or any notion of an ancestral homeland, but both of which are nevertheless important to the process of diasporization. Based on ethnographic observation among the Ḥaḍramī diaspora in Indonesia, the article follows the biographical becoming of two nationally prominent figures who had been estranged from their diasporic community. The article traces how these two figures have returned, whether inadvertently or by choice, to the Ḥaḍramī diasporic identity and community. The two cases point to the porosity and contingency of diaspora as both a subjective position and a social formation that enables its members to exit and enter in various ways. They also exemplify forms of diasporic return that unfold in and through, but are not reducible to, national politics. Comparing the two cases and tracing their connections reveal the possible entanglements between diasporic and national politics in Indonesia’s religio-political field that have hardly been recognized by observers of Indonesian politics and religion. By developing the notion of diasporic re-embedding and re-encountering to complicate diasporic return, the article unravels the more complex, politically grounded and ambivalent relations that dynamically form and transform an Indian Ocean diaspora and its relationship to the Indonesian nation.