Introduction
In the last few years, sociolinguistics has seen growing attention to the role of affect in discourse and communication, alongside critiques of the traditional overemphasis on linguistic representation that tends to ignore the materiality and corporeality of language and discourse (e.g. MacLure Reference MacLure2013; Starr, Wang, & Go 2020; Milani & Richardson Reference Çavuşoğlu2021; Pratt Reference Pratt2023). As Milani & Richardson (Reference Milani and John2022:9) point out, linguistic analyses such as critical discourse analysis (CDA) have traditionally failed to fully capture the affective dimensions of discourse, often treating affect as its ‘by-product’ rather than a ‘central element’ (see also Wetherell Reference Wetherell2013). Existing sociolinguistic work has shown how affect is produced, enacted, and indexed through a variety of semiotic resources (e.g. emotion lexicon, creaky voice, soft voice, speech rate, posture, etc.) as part of sociolinguistic style and stance-taking (e.g. D’Onofrio Reference D’Onofrio2018; Starr et al. Reference Starr and Wang2020; Pratt Reference Pratt2023). But more attention is needed in examining how the circulation of emotions work during affective practices, in and through discourse (Milani & Richardson Reference Çavuşoğlu2021), together with approaches that do not treat affect and emotions as ‘invisible underpinnings’ but as ‘analytical categories in their own right’ (Milani, Levon, & Glocer Reference Milani, Levon and Glocer2019:39). Responding to these calls, this article uses the notion of diasporic affect to explore how affect and emotions circulate and co-constitute diasporic spaces, practices, and discourses, producing solidarities but also antagonisms and ruptures. Focusing on diasporic affect and its communicative dynamics helps us move beyond dualities of body and discourse, which becomes necessary when discussing belonging in relation to conflict, dislocation, and collective trauma (see also Brown Reference Brown2011; Busch Reference Busch2017; Zembylas & Charalambous Reference Pratt2023).
Scholars traditionally saw diaspora as people gathered because of ‘nostalgia’ or a ‘wound’, mostly because of displacement but also because of forced migration due to war, exile, and so on (e.g. Cohen Reference Cohen1997). Although more recent literature has contested the notion of diasporic nostalgia/wound, as younger generations develop multiple and hybrid identifications to ‘homeland’ (Tölölyan Reference Tölölyan, Cohen and Fischer2019; also Sankaran Reference Sankaran2022), still, the role of affect is important—though overlooked (Aguirre Reference Aguirre2020)—in the constitution of ‘diasporic communities’ as ‘affective communities’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004b), especially when these communities carry a legacy of conflict and trauma. Indeed, research on diasporas with memories of violent conflict (e.g. Sri Lankan Tamils in London and Montreal), shows that ‘collective suffering’ and narratives of trauma emerge at the heart of their sense of belongingness (Jones Reference Jones2014), as ‘remembered places’ are often places associated with war and dislocation (Sankaran Reference Sankaran2022). This has been the case for Greek-Cypriot diasporas, as the 1963–67 intercommunal troubles and the 1974 war in Cyprus have left the island de facto divided. Although Greek-Cypriots comprise a small community, understanding the ways in which they negotiate discourses, emotions, and affects related to conflict as part of their diasporic experience can provide important insights on diasporic communicative practices as ‘affective practices’ (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2013).
Drawing on a research project (PoliDiCo) that employed linguistic ethnography to study the Greek-Cypriot diaspora in urban cosmopolitan environments (London and New York), in this article we show how the intergenerational experience of diaspora gets entangled with the lived and learned Footnote 1 experience of conflict. Looking at emotions and affect as part of diasporic communicative practice, we focus on the role of affective practices in the constitution and regulation of transnational communities. In particular, using the notion of diasporic affect we are interested in how the collective memory of trauma is handled, communicated, and negotiated across generations and across borders and the extent to which it impacts affective bonds, community relations, and community socialization processes.
Needless to say, the term diaspora encompasses very diverse sets of people—highly educated professionals, university students, labor workers, forced migrants, different generations, mixed families, and so on—and therefore, conceptualizations of transnational belongingness need to be empirically sensitive to the plurality of diasporic experience (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2005) also across different generations. Still, despite these differences, Werbner points out that diasporic communities are generally characterized by a common ‘sense of co-responsibility extending across and beyond national boundaries’ (Reference Werbner2002:131); therefore, notions such as ‘affective bonds’ and ‘diasporic affect’ become crucial in how we define and understand common diasporic experiences.
Adopting a bottom-up perspective and a social constructivist, practice-based approach that recognizes the multiplicity of actors, claims, networks, and connections within and across different types of borders (see Mc Cluskey & Charalambous Reference Cluskey, Emma and Charalambous2021), we approach the notion of diaspora as a ‘claim’, a ‘stance’ and as both a discursive and affective project:
We should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim. We should think of diaspora in the first instance as a category of practice, and only then ask whether, and how, it can fruitfully be used as a category of analysis. As a category of practice, ‘diaspora’ is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyalties (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2005:12).
With these insights in mind, in what follows, we first discuss theorizations of affect and emotion in relation to transnational communities and specifically diasporic communities, highlighting the political implications of diasporic affect and the rules governing its expression and enactment in communicative and affective practices and discourses. Then, after briefly discussing the methodology of the study and the sociopolitical context, we present data from the PoliDiCo project and focusing in particular on intergenerational dynamics, we show: (a) the discursive and communicative mechanisms that (mainly younger) participants used to navigate emotional norms about memory, conflict, and diasporic identifications; and (b) how these mechanisms are productive of subjectivities that could either reinforce, disrupt, or redefine these emotional norms. The article ends with a discussion of the entanglements of affect, community narratives, conflict discourses, and diasporic identifications in co-constituting diasporic belonging across generations.
Diasporic affect
Since the 1980s, the turn to affect and emotion in academia has generated a huge body of work in many disciplines (Schaefer Reference Donovan2019). When it comes to the crucial task of conceptualizing affect and emotion, this body of work, according to Schaefer, is generally divided into two strands, which also have implications on how we theorize the relationship between affect and language. In the first strand, there are theorists like Pile (Reference Pile2010) and Massumi (Reference Massumi2002) who suggest that emotion is qualitatively different from affect, as emotion refers to the culturally meaningful and discursive expressions of feelings, whereas affect is understood as relating more to the body. Massumi defines affect as autonomous, pre-conscious, and pre-personal, a relational force that is responsible for variations in the intensity of bodily states. As such, affect is understood as something that precedes emotions which are understood as ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativisable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning’ (Massumi Reference Massumi2002:28).
In the second strand, there are theorists like Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004b) and Cvetkovich (Reference Cvetkovich2012), who suggest that it is not only difficult but also theoretically problematic to draw a strict distinction between affect and emotion. Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004b) argues that, in practice, the distinction between affect and emotion can only be analytic, and she further explains that:
While you can separate an affective response from an emotion that is attributed as such (the bodily sensation from the feeling of being afraid), this does not mean that in practice, or in everyday life, they are separate. In fact, they are contiguous; they slide into each other; they stick, and cohere, even when they are separated (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2010:231).
This implies that although affect may mark the ways in which the body registers its sensory relations to the world, while emotion represents the linguistic manifestation and interpretation of these affective registers (Åhäll Reference Åhäll2018), it does not mean that affect ‘belongs’ to the body or emotion ‘belongs’ to language. Rather, it means that affective relations are already entangled with emotions (Shouse Reference Shouse2005).
In this article, we follow the second strand that views affects and emotions as mutually interrelated and, therefore, largely inseparable in practice and in language. Language has the ability to ‘affect’ and produce sensations and bodily experiences (cf. Starr et al. Reference Starr and Wang2020), whilst affect can shape how people speak, interact, and express their voice. Therefore, although we may sometimes need to heuristically talk about ‘emotion discourses’ or ‘affective reactions’, we understand their relation as an entanglement. Following this, we use the terms largely interchangeably, but we use ‘diasporic affect’ in order to highlight its impact on community belonging (i.e. the power to affect and be affected; see Seigworth & Gregg Reference Seigworth, Gregg, Gregg and Siegworth2010).
We also draw on a number of concepts which help us understand how affect and emotions circulate, how they are communicated and negotiated in diasporic social fields, and the role they have in the formation of transnational communities. In particular, we see emotions as located in movement, part of communicative dynamics, and having the ability to ‘align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004b:119). Hence, emotions play a crucial role in the ways that individuals come together, move towards or away in relation to others and constitute collective bodies. Along these lines, we suggest that diasporas may be understood as ‘affective communities’ in transnational flows and identifications. To denote how affects and emotions produce diasporic attachments in transnational social fields, we draw inspiration from Wise & Velayutham’s (Reference Wise and Velayutham2017:121) concept of transnational affect, defined as, ‘the circulation of bodily affects between transnational subjects and between subjects and symbolic fields. These evoke certain emotions, in turn creating qualitative intensities which produce vectors and routes thus intensifying belonging to and boundaries of transnational fields’.
We similarly propose the concept of diasporic affect as a theoretical lens through which to understand the ways in which diasporic affective communities coalesce around notions and narratives of belonging, relations of care and common suffering, and the political implications of these processes and practices. For empirically exploring diasporic affect, we find particularly useful Wetherell’s (Reference Wetherell2013) notion of ‘affective practice’, as it redirects the attention from the types of emotions/affects and their circulation, to the social actors and the context, event, and practices in which emotions are performed, negotiated, and contested, thus highlighting ‘affects as complex, live, often highly troubled, ongoing categorizations of human action’ (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2015:159). This also aligns with our conceptualization of diaspora as an affective and discursive project. Besides, as Wetherell argues ‘identity, affect, legitimacy and social practice are closely woven together’ (Reference Wetherell2015:164).
Affects/emotions are central to the politics of community as well as the politics of belonging (Russell, Eroukhmanoff, & Head Reference Beattie and Amanda2019; Aguirre Reference Aguirre2020), especially in the aftermath of traumatic events (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2016). Traumatic events (e.g. war, conflict, terrorism), according to Hutchinson, can trigger a collective emotional understanding and form affective communities or communities of suffering. An affective community is one that is ‘welded together’, for example, ‘by shared emotional understandings of tragedy’ (2016:4) and can shape the social, cultural and political environment in the aftermath of a traumatic event (Eroukhmanoff Reference Eroukhmanoff2019). Affective communities form through emotional performances, shared narratives, and solidarity rituals, reinforcing or challenging relations of care and emotional labor, in relation to shared trauma and suffering (Koschut Reference Koschut2014; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2016).
The concepts of emotional labor and emotional norms are grounded in Hochschild’s (Reference Hochschild1983) landmark theory, which posits that individuals are governed by ‘feeling rules’—socially prescribed guidelines that dictate the expression of expected emotions while suppressing others, based on social, cultural, political, and other norms. Individuals are thus required to perform emotional labor and use various discursive and interactional mechanisms to navigate emotional norms. These mechanisms are productive of subjectivities and belongings that could either reinforce or disrupt emotional norms. As Russell and colleagues (Reference Beattie and Amanda2019) suggest, recent attention to the everyday practices through which emotions are communicated and negotiated allow a deeper exploration of the relationship between individual and collective emotions, as well as their relationship with the dynamics and structures of power. This is especially the case when trauma emerges at the heart of the community.
Emotional governance, writes Eroukhmanoff (Reference Eroukhmanoff2019:176), entails the general management of emotions to cope with a traumatic event ‘that in the end, police[s] emotional responses and chastise[s] individuals if and when they express emotions that are incompatible with the dominant frame’. For example, how members of a diasporic community communicate their emotions in relation to a traumatic event (e.g. a war that occurred back in one’s ‘home country’) can trigger a collective emotional understanding that will position them in or outside that affective community. However, as Koschut (Reference Koschut2019:149) argues, emotions also become contested in ‘affective sites of contestations’, namely, ‘situations and events where rules and norms about the proper expression of emotions and their meanings are challenged, resisted, and potentially redefined’. In other words, individuals may affectively and interactionally contest the mechanisms of emotional governance taking place within an affective community such as diaspora. It is these affective complexities and the interactional and communicative mechanisms used by individuals that we aim to capture in this article with our exploration of the notion of diasporic affect.
We understand diasporic affect, then, as the circulation and communication of affects/emotions between individuals within a diasporic space which is—to an extent—regulated by community norms. This study looks into affective sites of diaspora and diasporic affective practices to explore how affects and emotions, especially those relating to a traumatic event, are communicated ‘in a contested space of diverging emotional meanings and interpretations in response to loss’ (Koschut Reference Koschut2014:50), and particularly, how community members of various generations interactionally negotiate expected emotional norms or challenge those. The emphasis on intergenerational difference is important as it shows the multiplicity and complexity of diasporic affective experience.
The context: The Cypriot diaspora in the US and the UK
The twentieth century was a period of intense conflicts in Cypriot history marked by both the anti-colonial struggle in the mid 1950s against British rule (run mainly by Greek-Cypriots) and the internal conflict between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities, as the former strived for unification with Greece, and the latter sought for ‘taksim’/‘division’. The Cyprus Republic was founded as a bicommunal state in 1960, but the escalation of conflict between the two communities led to constitutional troubles as early as 1963. Following a period of intense nationalism and intercommunal violence, in 1974 a pro-Greek coup overthrew the legal president of the Republic and a week later Turkish forces launched a military operation in Cyprus resulting in a war and the occupation of the northern third of the island. The ongoing violence and instability in the island, as well as the violent dislocation after the war, had as a result high numbers of emigration abroad, particularly in the UK—it is estimated that around one third to one fifth of the Cyprus population migrated (Karatsareas Reference Karatsareas2018). Since 1974, the island is de-facto divided and the so-called ‘Cyprus Issue’ remains unresolved.
The first wave of migration to the UK took place during the 1920s and 1930s, mainly for financial purposes, after Cyprus was annexed to the British Empire. The largest wave of migration, though, took place in the 1950s and 1960s, in the midst of political turmoil and violence. The 1974 war marked the third wave of migration, since many Cypriots lost their homes (Karatsareas Reference Karatsareas2018). London’s Greek-CypriotFootnote 2 population grew substantially in the 1970s, and the formation of various community organizations contributed to further strengthening a sense of community and solidarity, and consolidated diasporic bonds (Anthias Reference Anthias1992). Since then, narratives of dislocation and collective suffering have been maintained in London-based community organizations, newspapers, and student groups, usually in line with the main political parties in Cyprus (cf. Chatzipanagiotidou Reference Chatzipanagiotidou, Bryant and Papadakis2015). The High Commission of Cyprus in the UK currently estimates that there are around 270,000 Cypriots living in the UK, and around 12,000 Cypriots studying in British universities.Footnote 3
Migration in the US followed a similar pattern, with the main waves of migration occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, as Greek-Cypriots fled from intercommunal violence and the war.Footnote 4 The US-based Greek-Cypriot community is considerably smaller than the UK-based one and has therefore been more integrated with the Greek community (which has a longer history in the US). Both the Greek and Greek-Cypriot communities in the US appear to be politically active and collaborate closely for pursuing the political interests of their home countries—influencing, for example, the US Congress to take sanctions against Turkey following the 1974 invasion (Rubenzer Reference Rubenzer2008). In fact, ethnographic research on the Greek community in Astoria in the 1990s shows that the 1974 events in Cyprus had significant implications on the Greek diaspora, giving rise to active political mobilization (campaigns, lobbying, demonstrations) and affecting everyday practices (Karpathakis & Roudometof Reference Karpathakis, Roudometof, Krase and Hutchison2004).
The study
The data reported here come from a large interdisciplinary project (2019–2022) that aimed to investigate the extent to which the diasporic and cosmopolitan experience of living in New York and London allows Greek-Cypriot diasporans to revisit narratives of identity and discourses of conflict, and provides opportunities for renegotiating the collective remembering of a troubled past.
The project was methodologically designed as a linguistic ethnographic project, combining ‘ethnographic sensibility’ (Rampton Reference Rampton2007) and an alignment with ethnographic ontology and epistemology (Mc Cluskey & Charalambous Reference Cluskey, Emma and Charalambous2021), together with close attention to language/discourse and communicative practices (Rampton Reference Rampton2007; Karrebæk & Charalambous Reference Karrebæk, Creese and Blackledge2018).
Data collection involved (a) ±38 in-depth interviews with people identifying as members of the (Greek)Cypriot diaspora in each location (New York and London);Footnote 5 (b) ethnographic observations in London and New York, including participant observation in community events and activities such as community meetings, community social events, and demonstrations; (c) five roundtable discussions with community stakeholders, that is, people involved in leading roles in diasporic associations (two hours each); (d) surveying social media posts from the main community organizations (websites and Facebook pages).
Research participants included people of different generations who self-identified as members of (Greek-)Cypriot diaspora, and many of them had active engagement in community life. Although the research focused on Greek-Cypriots, participation was not denied to members of other Cypriot communities if they had an active role in Cypriot diasporic organizations, and one of the participants had Armenian-Cypriot background.
All three authors (Greek-Cypriots) were involved in the research project. Charalambous conducted the ethnographic observations in New York, living in Astoria and socializing daily with members of the Greek-Cypriot community for four months, regularly attending all kinds of events organized by the community. Being a newcomer in New York for a few months allowed her to personally experience the community’s practices of solidarity, as she received numerous invitations to both community events and family meals, and participants were usually very keen to tell their stories and help with further participant recruitment. Charalambous also conducted some observations and interviews in London, but the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted ethnographic data collection and, as a result, most of the interviews and the participation in events after March 2020 took place online. Zembylas and Aristidou were actively involved in data analysis and interpretations.
Interviews were conducted in participants’ preferred language (Greek or English or both) and usually lasted 90–120 minutes. They were semi-structured and focused on family histories of migration, community involvement, issues of identity, views of the Cyprus Issue, representations of ‘home’, and visions for the future of both Cyprus and the diaspora.
Following the principles of linguistic ethnography, data analysis included the examination of the micro-discursive details of talk (including lexical choices and linguistic structure, pauses, hesitations, repairs, etc.), whilst
taking context as a layered set of longer/broader social processes that not only shape what is happening in the here-and-now, but also ultimately take some shape in it themselves. One starts with some empirical episodes that look potentially relevant to whatever issue it is that one is concerned with, and then analytically, one begins to unpack the layered and multi-scalar systems and processes that coalesce in them (Rampton & Charalambous Reference Rampton2016:5).
Following this, all data were first coded in NVivo 12, in order to identify the empirical episodes for further analysis, focusing amongst others on identity narratives, narratives of dislocation, stances to conflict, images of ‘home’, and discourses of solidarity. Beyond these focal points, we also performed open coding for emerging themes, and we noticed a very strong emotional discourse in relation to community and Cyprus, as community identity was often described in emotional terms. Participants kept referring to feelings and emotions when talking about diasporic experiences and conflict as part of this experience. These accounts were often accompanied by embodied reactions such as crying, trembling voice, emphatic talk, or markers of disfluency.
Due to their prominence, these extracts were then selected and further analyzed, paying more attention to the analysis of discursive-affective practices and the interactional maneuvering involved, focusing on the ways in which participants evaluated certain affective stances or oriented themselves around certain emotion discourses that constituted—in Ahmed’s (Reference Ahmed2004b) terms—an affective political economy in the community. Our analysis sought to understand the role and function of diasporic affect in community life and especially the ways in which younger diasporans negotiated and navigated emotional norms in interaction.
In the following section we first describe the multiple ways in which diasporic affect was constituted and manifested in our data, highlighting the role of the conflict in emotional governance. Then we turn our attention to the emotional norms that governed Cypriot diaspora as an affective community and the different ways in which younger participants handled these norms.
Data analysis: Diasporic affect and the creation of affective communities
In all of our datasets, most participants across generations expressed strong affective attachments towards the community, as well as towards the idea of ‘home’. In fact, affective bonds and solidarity between community members was often seen and talked about as the foundation of the community and was brought up when talking about the formation of Greek-Cypriot diaspora. The 1974 events appeared to strengthen community engagement and performances of solidarity, whilst the shared experience of collective trauma intensified affective bonds.
Emotion discourses and performances of community solidarity were often described in stark contrast to the individualism of large cities (mostly applicable to New York) and the feelings of loneliness and being away from home and family, and they further contributed to creating a very strong sense of community. Solidarity was enacted in different ways, for example, many diasporans reported being assisted by community members to find a job, acquire the residence card, sponsor events, seek medical help whilst being uninsured, build a network, and develop friendships.
(1) USA (translated)
Researcher: Do you think that [in the interview] I left behind something important for your experience of the last years, as a Cypriot here in New York? Something that I didn’t ask or that you feel that you should have told me?
Yiorgos: No, ((inaudible))… The thing that I wanted to point out again is that we received so much love and help from Cypriots, both in America [meaning NY] and in Texas ((pause)) which I think this is something very valuable and deserves, we deserve as a people congratulations for this aspect.
As shown in extract (1), the “love and help” from community were mentioned by the participant himself as an important part of his diasporic experience, without being elicited by the interviewer. At the same time, affective practices of solidarity created a transnational sense of the Greek-Cypriot community (“we… as a people”) while also fueling pride discourses. ‘The ancestral land’ was often evoked as part of an emotional discourse. An example of such an emotional discourse can be seen in extract (2), where Demos, although he never lived for long periods in Cyprus, reports that he still “feels” a “homely connection”, and that “that little patch of land is home”.
(2) UK (original)
((Talking about the sense of ‘home’))
Researcher: What’s home then? If you have all these places that you feel connected to, what’s…
Demos: A very difficult question. I think I feel home in three… Well, I feel a connection that feels like a homely connection.
Researcher: OK.
Demos: When I’m in my grandma’s house in Paphos, which is like her family’s, …
Researcher: Yeah.
Demos: … kind of her parents’, grandparents’ house. So, we still have that, and we go there every summer. And I certainly feel like that little patch of land is home.
Other participants also referred to Cyprus as the place “where you came from”, which evoked strong feelings of belonging. The following example is illustrative.
(3) USA (translated; italics for English original)
Andreas: For me when I go to Cyprus, it’s the place I was born, it’s something that.. it’s innate love that you feel inside for this place, and especially when ((pause)) you go to your village where your parents are buried and all these. You feel that you reconnected, you went back to where you started. Here despite the many years, despite knowing life here better, I don’t feel a connection with this place because you are ephemeral. You’re part of the recycling system, because now you are good, you contribute to the system, but tomorrow you are not contributing you are useless.
In extract (3), Andreas (who lived most of his life in New York) embarks on a strong emotional discourse, highlighted by a rhetorical antithesis between the “innate love” for the ancestral home that connects him with his ‘roots’ (“where you started”) and past generations (“where your parents are buried”), and a lack of emotions towards New York, associated with an ephemeral dehumanising experience (“part of recycling system/useless”).
Like Andreas above, many participants in both contexts (and especially in the US) described Cyprus in idealistic terms, within a nostalgic and sentimental discourse, associated with feelings of happiness.
(4) UK (original)
Researcher: How do you feel when you’re there [in Cyprus]? Like, what’s the experience like?
Helen: Just very… It’s very calm. Like, yeah, one of my favourite memories, like, if I’m… Sometimes I meditate and if I try to think of a happy place, yeah, one of them is, like, being on that beach. Being on… Which beach was it? Can’t remember. But with my friend, and just, like, the sun and the sea.
Apart from transnational affective connections to Cyprus as the ancestral land, participants also expressed an affective connection to community spaces in diaspora, found in North London and Astoria. Moving away from essentialist relations between people and territories, the notion of space has been reconceptualized in diasporic research to include social activities and practices (Sankaran Reference Sankaran2022). Indeed, for most participants, Astoria and North London were not just geographical locations, but they represented a safety net, a solution to missing home, and getting a ‘flavor’ of home experienced in all senses (seeing, hearing, speaking, tasting, smelling). They were also described as spaces for socializing with Greeks and Cypriots, which further enhanced the sense of community and nurtured a sense of belonging.
(5) US (translated)
Evanthia: Besides, adjusting in New York was very easy. We immediately found a house, local supermarket with hallumi ((smiles)), a tavern in the corner, milkpudding [‘galatopoureko’] in the other corner, all these, ok. Maybe I felt it more intensively because as I said I used to travel to Texas, where there were very few Greeks dispersed. But here you walk in the street and you hear Greek all the time. You are surprised when you hear a different language ((laughs)).
In extract (5), Evanthia describes the sense of familiarity that she felt in Astoria, created by the semiotics of buildings such as ‘taverns’ and ‘local supermarkets’, types of food, and the audioscape of the streets (hearing Greek), whilst a different experience in Texas contributed to the ‘intensity of feeling’. Similarly, for Chris below, it appears to function as a refuge when missing Cyprus.
(6) US (translated)
((talking about missing home))
Chris: now we are sitting at a Greek café in Astoria and I’d say that when I’m here, I feel that I am not away… when I miss Cyprus, I go to a neighborhood with a lot of Hellenism.
North London also fueled affective attachments for UK participants, but whereas Astoria represented a “neighborhood of Hellenism” (extract (6)), North London created a sense of unity, belonging, and solidarity amongst Cypriots (Greek-, Turkish-, and Armenian-Cypriots), as they shared the same geographical and social spaces. For example, for Peter (Armenian-Cypriot) below, moving to North London and the daily interactions with Cypriots, even hearing Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot surnames at school, led him to ‘feel like Cyprus’ and ultimately, ‘like home’ despite being raised in West London.
(7) UK (original)
Peter: And then, at the age of 13, I moved to North London, Southgate and in one school there, I was like, this is like Cyprus this is like summer holidays! I have got Charalambous, I have got Tarkan, I have got all these different people. And I really loved it because I felt more at home and in a strange way, because you consider home to be somewhere you’re born; but if I was born and raised in that English environment in West London, how can I consider North London to be home?
Other community spaces, such as Orthodox churches and Greek community schools were also seen as important for reproducing collective bonds and feelings of togetherness. In these spaces, participants showed that they felt a heightened sense of community and belonging, and as they were spaces used together with the Greek community, they also reinforced a sense of Greekness.
Nonetheless, the ‘Cyprus Issue’ emerged as a very powerful cause of affective attachment that was associated with a distinct sense of Cypriot community identity (vs. Hellenism) triggering intensified emotional discourses and affective reactions (e.g. crying). On a personal level, many older participants saw the troubled history of the island being embodied in their own migration trajectories and life histories as it led to their dislocation, and it was connected with memories and experiences of loss and trauma. At the same time though, the war and conflict seemed to awaken a sense of community, as shown in the following extracts.
(8) UK (translated)
Nicos: ((talking about the war)) And suddenly, the consciousness of all these [Cypriot diasporans] was awakened, and they added this extra effort that they weren’t willing to do before. … And many of them, as I said before, aimed to help Cyprus, because many of them kept coming and asking “How can I send money to Cyprus? How can I help?”, and we advised them. And this is how our banks were developed then with the development of the community.
(9) UK (translated)
Researcher: Do you think that the’74 influenced the community here?
Chris: Yes, a lot, because, like my father who had a factory, let’s say that he earnt £100, he would send £60 to his relatives in Cyprus, you know. And many did the same as well. They saved, you know, they would send money from… it was difficult for us as well. We had a cut back, you know, to send… everybody was sending money to Cyprus. Even the poor ones maybe gave half their salary.
Researcher: Yes, yes.
Chris: … to go to Cyprus. We helped them a lot, we knew the damage that happened in Cyprus. We kept watching it on television and wanted to help. And we used to do parades with 30,000 people attending. Now we may be 3,000 attending. But during that time, we were all together.
In extracts (8) and (9), we see participants highlighting the importance of 1974 for creating solidarity bonds and as a sense of community. Both participants emphasize a strong sense of responsibility to ‘help each other’, that was materialized in different ways, and their use of ‘we’ creates a diasporic identity that differentiates them from those in need in Cyprus. Specifically, in extract (8), Nicos, a community stakeholder talks about the rest of the community who, shaken by the traumatic events in Cyprus, turned to community leaders for advice. In extract (9), although Chris initially differentiates between older and younger generations, in the second part of his extract, he switches from referring to his father’s generation, to “we helped” showing a strong identification with the wider engagement of the community in the face of the 1974 war.
At the same time, the 1974 war contributed to the institutionalization of the community, as it appeared to drive the creation of banks (extract (8)) and the formation and political mission of several community organizations (for example, it is mentioned in the websites of CYPRIOT FEDERATATION UK, PSEKA,Footnote 6 NEPOMAK,Footnote 7 etc.).
(10) Cypriot Federation website (original)
After 1974, Cypriot organisations came together under the umbrella of the National Federation of Cypriots in the UK. The Federation is a symbol of unity for the community, working with all political parties to coordinate the activities of the UK Cypriot community. We are proud to represent the UK Cypriot community and campaign for a free, united Cyprus. (https://cypriotfederation.org.uk/; our emphasis)
Active engagement in the community also seemed to be associated with feelings of pride. Indeed, in several of the extracts cited so far (e.g. (1), (9)–(11)), we can see a discourse of pride associated with the community and particularly with practices of solidarity. According to Wise & Velayutham (Reference Wise and Velayutham2017), pride is indicative of the socially constructed nature of emotion, in the sense that it can regulate human behavior. As they state, ‘social emotions regulate moral economies that are made up of social norms and systems of reciprocity and obligation, typically regulated through the collective evaluative gaze of the transnational community’ (2017:123). In the case of the Greek-Cypriot diasporic community, pride discourses created obligations and expectations regarding the affective practices that were seen as the norm. The next section turns to emotional norms and the ways younger community members navigated them.
Navigating emotional norms
In addition to intensifying emotional bonds and solidarity, the Cyprus conflict created also certain expectations for community members, influencing how they should feel, talk, and act towards each other, towards Cyprus, and towards the ‘national Other’ (Turks). In other words, as we show here, it created certain emotional norms that governed and regulated—to some extent—community behavior as well as relations within and across communities.
Certain routines such as commemorations of national days, demonstrations for condemning Turkey’s illegal occupation of the northern third of the island, parades, and reactions to social media posts on nationally important days were characteristic practices of the emotional labor invested—and expected to be invested—for sustaining the main emotional culture of ‘remembering’ the war and the shared trauma. These routine practices often created a sense of responsibility towards the conflict-affected ‘homeland’, which included expressions of solidarity towards the community and animosity towards Turks as ‘invaders’. The examples below show the emotional labor entailed in struggles to maintain a community united by shared trauma and collective memory. In particular, the emotional norms that drove community behavior became clearer when participants—and especially younger generations—deviated from them.
(11) US (translated)
Petros: … we are in pain for our land. The children of the second generation who were born here, perhaps are not the same. They don’t see it as the same, though, in the past, they used to help more. They help in their way.
(12) UK (translated)
Leonidas: ((talking about intergenerational differences)) there is a difference in the emotions or the power or strength of the emotions. If a Cypriot of the first generation hears a tragic event in Cyprus, like the Turkish invasion, he [sic] may cry. This [crying] will more rarely occur in the second generation but he [the second-generation Cypriot] will feel a similar pain because of the invasion. … The third generation’s life, and I’m talking about the emotional life, is more connected with the everyday happenings of this country. There is not an abrupt, but rather natural change in the way a person thinks.
In extracts (11) and (12) we can see a strong emotional discourse that connects the ‘land’ with affective reactions, but participants notice an emotional distance in younger generations. Although both participants tried to show an understanding towards younger generations (“they help their way”, “natural change”), still, there were some underlying expectations towards them or a negative evaluation of their changing stance (e.g. “they used to help more”). This emerged also as an important preoccupation discussed in community meetings in both contexts, and it was amongst the factors causing occasionally intergenerational tensions.
In what follows, we turn to the communicative mechanisms employed mainly by younger generations in their attempts to navigate these expectations and the norms governing emotional expression and action towards the conflict-affected homeland. These mechanisms were not mutually exclusive, and participants could alternate amongst them depending on the context.
Enacting the emotional norms
The emotional norm of solidarity promoted in the community was also found amongst the younger generation. In general, in community narratives, solidarity was described as the foundation of the community and a salient feature of its preservation, as shown earlier. Discourses of solidarity were also ‘transmitted’ to the youth, creating expectations of behaviour ‘we have to help too’.
(13) UK (original)
Demos: ((talking about how the 1974 war affected the community)) And then there was that kind of… They cared for each other; they looked out for each other. I’m sure there’s many examples where that wasn’t the case, but that is very ((inaudible))… because there were others doing it, we wanted to help. So, there was this sense we bond together, we help each other out, we progress as individuals and as a community.
In extract (13), we can see a very similar discourse to the one in extracts (8) and (9), highlighting solidarity (helping, caring) and community mobilization after the war. There is also again a sense of pride accompanying these acts of solidarity, as something admirable leading to progress, but at the same time this creates expectations for the younger generations. Although in the beginning of the extract Demos, a young stakeholder, refers to the older generations, the switch to ‘we’ encompasses a strong community identity and a sense of responsibility (“because there were others doing it, we wanted to help”) that transcends time and space. It is also worth noting how, although being born after 1974, through the use of ‘we’ he narrates the community’s reactions as if he actually experienced them, creating a generational continuity rooted in diasporic affect. Overall, younger generations, although they had not themselves experienced war and dislocation, consistently showed and declared respect towards the hardships that their ‘parents went through’, and this appeared to be part of the way they perceived and experienced community identity.
(14) US (original; our emphasis)
Gina: When we got older, though, we always knew that we liked being from Cyprus and we liked having a different dialect amongst the Cypriot friends. And now that we’re older, I feel like I still have some Greek friends, but it shows through that the Cypriots have actually stuck together.
Researcher: Yeah, yeah.
Gina: Like my roommate is Cypriot and I’m involved in the Cypriot organizations over the Greek ones, ‘cause I feel like we have a closer sense of comradery, just being a part of the actual diaspora.
Researcher: OK.
Gina: So, a lot of them [friends] are… Their parents were refugees, so we understand or try to understand together what our parents went through. Mostly subconsciously, like, it’s not like the point of conversation, but I feel like that’s why we choose to stick together and stay friends. Like, we know… Like, we know we grew up in the same exact way, we know our parents went through similar thing, and I feel, like, that’s what brought us together in the community.
As evident above, lived and learnt through family narratives and participation in community events and activities, the shared trauma and collective memory of the war instilled in younger generations a semiotic and affective ‘sense of comradery’ and a deep identification with the Cypriot community—‘the actual diaspora’ as Gina described it. Moreover, her repair from “we understand” to “we try to understand” reveals that sustaining the collective memory and shared trauma requires emotional labor on behalf of the younger members. Still, they did not always embrace the same emotional norms.
Oscillating between personal and dominant views
Even though younger participants often enacted the expected emotional norms (solidarity, empathizing with shared trauma, animosity towards the ‘enemy’), they sometimes oscillated between a personal emotional stance and what they understood as the dominant one. Subtly distinguishing their personal opinion from what they considered mainstream allowed them to distance themselves from dominant views, whilst acknowledging and respecting—or enacting—the collective emotional norms. Younger participants also seemed to be selective to whom they expressed their individual emotional stance, as this could lead to tensions, even amongst peers. This is evident in the example below.
(15) US (original; our emphasis)
Gina: I’m careful with who I share my opinion with, because there’s even some people my age who disagree with me. So, no ((smile)), I, I’m… I don’t care to get into it. I feel, like, that’s personal, because people would, are so quick to judge you and there’s, I know, some young Cypriots my age, born and raised here the same way as me, but they feel the complete opposite. But I feel like… I’ll share that. I’ll say, like, personally, I don’t think we need to throw out all the Turkish Cypriots. They existed before the invasion. It was a small percent and now the forced migration, now there’s more but, like… I don’t ((inaudible))… I don’t share it with everyone unless I’m asked.
This extract was part of a long informal talk over dinner between Gina and Constadina Charalambous, who had already established a friendly relationship due to the ethnographic component of the research. Still, Gina had troubles expressing her personal view on the Cyprus Issue, and this only happened after long hesitations and overt interactional difficulty (long pauses, repairs, hesitations). After she finally expressed how she imagines the future of Cyprus based on a ‘just solution for all’, including Turkish-Cypriots, in the extract above she moves on to specify that this is not something she normally shares with everyone. Gina, who at the time was leading a youth diaspora association, differentiates between her personal view, which does not concern people, and the more accepted stance in the community towards Turkish-Cypriots. Even though she is being critical of the mainstream views and feelings in relation to Turkish-Cypriots (“throw out all the Turkish Cypriots”) she still does not openly confront them, as she is aware of the potential troubles that deviating from the norms may entail (“quick to judge you”). Her reference to “even some people my age” shows the younger generations’ distance from emotional norms, but it also indicates the resilience of the dominant views as there are still young people embracing and enacting them. At the same time, her repetition of “I feel”—“they feel” shows the power of affect in forming dominant ideologies and community relations.
In the following example, Tonia, who previously worked at a diaspora organization focusing on the Cyprus problem, did not have the same familiarity with the researcher, and therefore exhibited more difficulty and refrained from expressing her personal view, as evident below. Although in her first reply in line 2 she replies in the first person (“I followed them”), she immediately switches to a collective ‘we’ that represents the collective actions of the organization.
(16) US (original; our emphasis)
1 Researcher: OK. And like in the summer when they had the negotiations, would you follow the news?
2 Tonia: Yeah, I followed them. We followed them.
3 Researcher: And do you have an opinion about it?
4 Tonia: ((sighs)) I don’t want to talk about it. ((laughter))
5 That I don’t even wanna reach ‘cause it’s just so loaded.
6 Researcher: Why?
7 Tonia: It’s just too loaded. It’s… Yeah, it’s just too loaded.
8 Researcher: You mean for you personally it’s…
9 Tonia: Yeah.
10 Researcher: Would the results like if they reach an agreement, would that for you change the idea you have about Cyprus or like affect your relation to it you think?
11 Tonia: I don’t think it will… I don’t know…
12 In what do you mean? Like the way I see Cypriots you mean? Is that what you…
13 Researcher: Or I mean Cyprus as, I don’t know, if suddenly became a federation, would that be a problem for you?
14 Or do you feel… Like some people said ‘I wouldn’t want to go back again’.
15 Tonia: No, I don’t think I would feel like that.
16 I wouldn’t like alienate myself or cut myself off from that. I might not agree with everything, but I wouldn’t.
17 I would never cut off ties if that’s what you’re asking.
18 Researcher: Yeah.
19 Tonia: No, that I wouldn’t do.
During her interview, Tonia had no trouble describing the actions of the community organization she was working for in organizing demonstrations and petitions condemning Turkey and calling for “Turkish troops out of Cyprus”. However, when she was asked to switch from the collective discourse to her personal views (line 3), she did not embrace this dominant discourse and affective stance, but neither did she explicitly criticize it. Instead, despite the interviewer’s repeated efforts, she consistently avoided expressing her personal stance claiming three times that the 1974 war is “too loaded” (lines 4–9), and she provided very vague answers to the interview questions. The only personal stance she was willing to share was her affective attachment to Cyprus, reinsuring that she “would never cut off ties” no matter what (lines 15–19).
The difficulties in expressing a personal view and the interactional maneuvering around it (choosing the audience, avoiding the topic, and oscillating between the personal and the collective) reveal again the power of the dominant norms, but also the emerging intergenerational differences in affective stances and expressions.
Resistance to collective emotions
Some young participants occasionally more openly resisted the community’s emotional norms and stances, competing for a new discursive space and new emotional norms, as part of a different political agenda in the diasporic project. This became obvious in some of the interviews or informal chats during observations, especially when the researchers had revealed that they shared a similar political stance. It also emerged during an online roundtable discussion we had with young community stakeholders, where we shared and discussed some of our initial findings.
In what precedes the extract below, which comes from this roundtable (that is, in lines 1–142), the participants were discussing the role of the Cyprus Issue for diaspora organizations, acknowledging its importance for the community.
(17) Roundtable discussion, young stakeholders (original; detailed transcript)Footnote 8
142 Markos: (.) particularly around the Cyprus Issue for me
143 erm (.) because of the heavy emotion
144 that is passed down through generations? (.)
145 if .hh (.) sometimes (.) it (.) actually becomes quite a::: (1.0)
146 toxic sort of discussion and environment (.)
147 er:: and almost- (.) in some ways a- (1.0)
148 I’ve always kind of- (0.5)
149 not really felt very comfortable always talking or (.)
150 organizing around that kind of way of thinking either
151 .hh erm (0.6) and I’ve always thou[ght-](.)
152 CC: [Why?]
153 (.)
154 Markos: Oh go on
155 CC: Wh-wh-wh- why didn’t you feel comfortable?
156 (1.0)
157 Markos: because (.) I think erm
158 (1.9) peop- ((audible exhalation))
159 (1.5) I think because people speak with so much passion
160 which is on the one hand fantastic but also: erm (.)
161 you- I mean- (.)
162 of- er- I-I think we all have ((light laugh)) the same experience with
163 especially the older generation you have the same conversations
164 over and over again (.)
165 and the Cyprus problem as we know haven’t hasn’t changed in 40 years
166 and the conversation is the same conversation(.)
167 well more than 40 years now but
168 .hh (.) the conversation is the same conversation
169 and I think for many people who maybe aren’t that interested in politics (.)
170 necessarily (.) will turn off
171 because if at family dinners (.) you have the same discussions (.)
172 the same arguments (.) the same kind of erm:: (.)
173 it doesn’t (.) I feel that there’s no progression in that area (.)
174 but it then (.) blocks a lot of discussion
175 a lot of space for other issues and other things
176 that are actually really important?
177 so for me as a ga:y guy (.) er:m (.) you know er-er- (.)
178 anything to do with sexuality or (.) LGBT or (.)
179 anything that was slightly alternative in that respect (.)
180 never had any space in (.) the com[munity]
Looking closely at talk-in-interaction in the extract above, we see that when Markos takes the floor, in line 142, he switches the discussion from diasporic organizations to a more personal account of what the Cyprus issue means for him. However, before expressing his personal stance, he first tries to produce an explanation/justification for it (lines 143–44) that indicates his uneasiness with this interactional task. Indeed, his talk is accompanied with hesitation markers (erm, hh, pauses), whilst in line 149, he also admits his discomfort with this issue. The researcher’s probe to further elaborate on why he feels uncomfortable leads to further interactional trouble, with an almost two seconds pause in line 159, and an audible sigh. When he finally resumes the talk, after another 1.5 second pause, Marcos acknowledges the community’s collective intense emotion—“passion”—when talking about the Cyprus Issue, and he respectfully evaluates it as “fantastic” (perhaps also in attempt to mitigate his previous description as “toxic” in line 146). After expressing his sympathy and understanding towards the collective norm, he then tries again to differentiate his own personal stance, but in his attempt to do so, he seeks an alternative collectivity, the younger generation, which helps him represent his view as not just personal, but part of an alternative shared emotional experience (“we all have the same experience”, line 162; also in line 169 “I think for many people”). Only after he establishes the grounds for expressing himself, Marcos finally expresses his personal view more eloquently, which consists of a critique of current community politics and a pursuit of a political agenda that includes more social issues (i.e. LGBTQ rights), instead of being restricted to the Cyprus conflict, hence producing an intersectional sense of belonging (cf. Milani, Levon, & Glocer Reference Milani, Levon and Glocer2019).
We see, therefore, that although there were alternative, emerging affective stances that relate to different ways of being a Greek-Cypriot diasporan in London, the discursive and emotional norms made it difficult for these alternative styles to be openly expressed. This is further discussed in the final section below.
Discussion and conclusions
In this article we discussed the role of affective practices in producing diasporic identifications, looking at the extent to which emotional norms regulated diasporic communicative practices. The role of affect and emotion in the formation of ‘affective communities’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a) and political communities has been previously discussed from sociological and anthropological perspectives but not so much in diasporic and sociolinguistic research. The analysis here showed how emotions/affects are communicated, enacted, or resisted in diasporic spaces across generations, and their role in creating and sustaining diasporic bonds, especially when a community has suffered war-related traumas.
As pointed out by Cohen & Fischer (Reference Cohen, Fischer, Cohen and Fischer2018:2), ‘as an emic category of self-identification, the notion of diaspora is imbedded with emotionally laden meanings that are intertwined with the specific history and experiences of the population in question’. This study, focusing on the Greek-Cypriot diaspora in London and New York, shed light on those emotionally laden meanings and their connection to the communities’ history, and tried to theorize them through the notion of diasporic affect. By examining the different sites and practices that create affective attachments and feelings of solidarity, love, and passion in relation to the homeland, we revealed the multiple ways in which diasporic affect manifested in our data, as well as its constitutive elements: geographical places and the materiality of buildings and streets; social spaces and multisensory experiences—tasting and smelling Cypriot food, hearing Greek, and so on; diasporic institutions; and social relations of love and care were some of the sites that cultivated a shared diasporic identity, feelings of solidarity and a sense of belonging. Even though we only analyzed interactional data (rather than multimodal), we could still trace how belonging emerged in participants’ accounts as ‘at once a feeling, a sense and a set of practices’ (Wright Reference Wright2015:391) and how it ‘actively co-constitutes people and things and processes and places’ (Reference Wright2015:393). Indeed, the time-reconfiguring nature of diasporic discourses, grounded in material realities, expressed in community narratives, and experienced through diasporic affect created a sense of belonging that surpassed intergenerational differences.
In addition, the collective memory of ‘common suffering’ appeared to have an important role in constituting diasporic affect and consequently diasporic belonging. More importantly, it regulated community relations and emotional expression by setting certain expectations and responsibilities for the affective community, especially for younger generations who bear the duty of continuing the diasporic project. In particular, the history of conflict and the sense of a shared emotional experience created certain emotional norms in relation to speaking, acting, and feeling about the conflict and the national others. Activities such as commemorations, lobbying, petitions, and community events, as well as interactional practices such as stance-taking (or not), and acknowledging respect for shared trauma can be seen as acts of emotional labor that help maintain affective bonds and ‘pass’ them to different generations. These practices created a sense of intergenerational continuity and belonging that was both semiotic and affective, shaped by collective memory and imagination and embodied via community participation. This indicates the chronotopic potentials of the diasporic discourses that are largely realised and performed through diasporic affect. Diasporic affect emerged then ‘at the very heart of the politics of remembering’ (Milani & Richardson 2022:462) and as part of political economy of the community, as specific affective stances and practices were more highly valued than others, being seen as essential for the continuation of the community both symbolically, as a metapragmatic sign, as well as affectively in creating relations of care.
At the same time, looking at the sites of contestation, together with the sites of nurturing diasporic affect, allowed us to reveal the heterogeneity of the affective community and the polyphony in the emotional experience and expression across generations—the intersectionality of remembering and belonging (cf. Wright Reference Wright2015; Milani, Levon, & Glocer Reference Milani, Levon and Glocer2019)—despite the efforts for emotional governance. However, the expression of different emotional orientations was evaluated differently in the community, and participants, sometimes, found it difficult to interactionally navigate emotional norms and expectations.
Paying closer attention to interaction in the analysis of diasporic affect revealed the intergenerational struggles and showed how younger participants often resorted to certain interactional mechanisms in their attempts to find ways to manage community norms. Understanding these mechanisms is important because it shows that diasporic affect does not just place someone ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the community, but it is rather negotiated and navigated as it is linked to different subjectivities, as well as to being a member of different affective communities. By occasionally enacting the emotional norms, acknowledging the collective norm and showing symbolic respect, subtly differentiating a personal stance from a collective stance, and by resisting and redefining the norms, the youth participating in this research sought alternative ways of expressing diasporic affect and understanding their role within the community and their vision for the community in relation to social and political issues.
Of course, these interactional mechanisms are not restricted to those analyzed here, but the analysis is important in revealing the role and functions of diasporic affect. Conversely, using affect as an analytic category helps us understand diaspora as an intergenerational, ongoing, and contested political project. By capturing the manifestations and circulation of emotions/affect through bodies and discourses, we can analyze their impact in community interactions, relations, and ultimately in community belonging, as part of intergenerational tensions, community gatekeeping, and community maintenance. Moreover, paying attention to affects and emotions that are produced by, expressed in, and enacted through communicative practices and diasporic spaces is necessary for researching diaspora as lived experience.
We argue, therefore, that a sociolinguistic analysis of the contested diasporic affective practices around a traumatic event offers an insightful way to empirically trace and understand how the feelings of a diasporic community may be mobilized and negotiated through specific interactional mechanisms that are formed to consolidate or challenge certain emotional norms. More research on diasporic affect in relation to conflict is needed though for producing a more nuanced understanding of how different emotional stances to conflict and peace are multimodally and intergenerationally circulated, managed, and contested in diasporic communities, online and offline, along with their political implications.
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