Ma Mung, Emmanuel

Temporal Continuity, Spatial Contiguity and Creation of a Social Entity’s Own World - 2012.


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This article seeks to determine how a spatially dispersed social entity can reproduce itself. The proposed answer is that reproduction is achieved through the creation of a world specific to the diaspora (thus an appropriated world). Several processes are involved in this creation: representation and awareness of the dispersion, which underpin the formation of a collective subjectivity; the integration of the question of origin which enables the invention of a temporal (genealogical) continuity among individuals; the approximation of individuals, which enables the conversion of invented genealogical time into an imagined spatial contiguity, thus articulating a space and a time specific to the diaspora, an appropriated time-space.