Extalgia: Transcending the Legible Frames of Diaspora

Abstract

Since Johannes Hofer's coinage of the term nostalgia in the seventeenth century, which he used to describe the pathological suffering of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, various disciplines engaging with migration and the broad-based discourse of diaspora have focused on this experience to the extent of “theoretical closure.” I argue that this discursive strand has prevented a systematic consideration of the simultaneous suffering and creativity that are provoked in stay-at-homes when their loved ones are dispersed to other lands. This article draws upon insights from the Ogu cultural practice of effigy carving in the representation of departed twin children to underscore how dispersal from the homeland provokes suffering and creativity in the left-behind, and is generative of what I have termed extalgia. Further, I illustrate the networks of suffering and creativity that are implicated in extalgia through an exploration of theoretical and empirical possibilities within the broader discourse of diaspora that mobilizes African and African diaspora textuality and culture to animate the complex spatiotemporal trajectory of the term. While premised on the fundamental discourse of diaspora, the article draws substantially from the iterations of exile as a strand of diaspora in its illustration. The article concludes that extalgia facilitates new understandings of how the absence of the dispersed is commemorated and curated in homeland memory through the expression of suffering and creativity by stay-at-homes, and challenges us to transcend the legible frames of diaspora to a holistic rendition of the experience as a spectrum. Ultimately, the article invites scholars to consider the various ways in which the concept of extalgia is dramatized in other disciplinary contexts across the globe, particularly concerning the ideational and practical borders and networks between extalgia and the time-honored notion of nostalgia.