The Construction of Identity and Home(-Lessness) in Diaspora Discourse

With pluralization as a central characteristic of modern, complex societies, goes along the loss of embeddedness in one culture which provides individuals with their identity. This explains the contemporary discussion about the loss of identity, the steady increase of cultural differences / diversity and of problems concerning social integration deriving thereof. This article concentrates on discourses of people with migration experiences, members of diasporas, who out of biographical necessity have to deal with the search for identity, the under-standing between different cultures, the meaning of cultural belonging, and with experiences of strangeness / being a stranger. Migrant biographies bear, it is argued in the article, the symptomatic traits of experiencing modernity, which provokes a constructive approach to identities, and which furthermore requires social integration as an individual effort. This, however, leads to a specific cultural competence of interculturality, which particularly enables coping with cultural difference/diversity in the complex social environment of our time.