Cartographies of Diaspora provides an innovative theoretical framework for the study of 'difference', 'diversity' and 'commonality' which links them to the analyses of 'diaspora', 'border' and 'location'. In relating these questions to contemporary migrations of people, capital and cultures, it offers fresh insights into thinking about late twentieth-century social and cultural formations.
By addressing questions of culture, identity and politics, Cartographies of Diaspora throws new light on discussions about `difference' and `diversity', informed by feminism and post-structuralism. It examines these themes by exploring the intersections of `race', gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, generation and nationalism in different discourses, practices and political contexts. The first three chapters map the emergence of `Asian' as a racialized category in post-war British popular and political discourse and state practices. It documents Asian cultural and political responses paying particular attention to the role of gender and generation. The remaining six chapters analyse the debate on `difference', `diversity' and `diaspora' across different sites, but mainly within feminism, anti-racism, and post-structuralism.
In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.
Focusing on the return of the diasporic second generation to Greece, primarily in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Counter-Diaspora examines migration experiences of Greek-Americans and Greek-Germans growing up in the Greek diasporic setting, motivations for the counter-diasporic return, and evolving notions of the homeland.
On the impulse behind Cartographies, Marjorie Agosín writes, "I have always wanted to understand the meaning of displacement and the quest or longing for home." In these lyrical meditations in prose and poetry, Agosín evokes the many places on four continents she has visited or called home. Recording personal and spiritual voyages, the author opens herself to follow the ambiguous, secret map of her memory, which "does not betray." Agosín's journey begins in Chile, where she spent her childhood before her family left in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Of Santiago Agosín writes, "Day and night I think about my city. I dream the dream of all exiles." Agosín also travels to Prague and Vienna, ancestral homes of her grandparents, and to Valparaíso in Chile, which received them as immigrants. Kneeling among the yellow mounds at the Terezin concentration camp, where twenty-two of her relatives died, Agosín places "small stones, shrubs, the stuff of life on graves I did not recognize." And then on through the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Americas . . . Everywhere, she is drawn to women in whose devotion and creativity she sees a deep vein of hope--from Julia, keeper of the synagogue at Rhodes, to the women potters in the Chilean town of Pomaire. Agosín writes of diaspora, exile, and oppression, yet only to highlight the dignity and valor of those who find refuge in their humanity and their art, in community and tradition. Cartographies shows us what can be found when we journey with openness, as approachable to strangers as we are to ourselves.
In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.
This book proffers a new theory of the radical possibilities of contemporary postcolonial feminist writings from Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Caribbean, against what can be described as “actually-existing colonialisms.” These writers include prominent and other less-known postcolonial women writers such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Louise Erdrich, Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Esmeralda Santiago, Raymonda Tawil, Michelle Cliff, and Rigoberta Menchú. Negotiating the contradictions among gender, nation, and globalization, postcolonial women writers construct extimate subjectivities that mark their excessive locations in the social field through the dialectical relation between the intimate and the external, the intimately or internally external, articulating these contradictions within the larger history and narratives of anti-colonial internationalist struggle for liberation and emancipation. Grounded in a commitment to the future of the postcolonial nation and the project of decolonization and liberation within the ever-encroaching, neocolonial global capitalist system, postcolonial women’s narratives of displacing offer not only an alternative mode of ideological critique of scripted and commonly-inherited discourses of identity, home, culture that obfuscate the fundamental social antagonism, but also ways of changing them through practices of radical politics. The book thus charts four intersecting, dialogic strategies, by which postcolonial women writers produce extimate subjectivities: travel, unhomeliness, multiple and shifting subject positions, and transnational alliances. First, specific strategies of travel, voluntary and involuntary, within glocal networks of dispossession, displacement, and labor migration that foreground their extimate locations as internally external. Second, tactics of unhomeliness that uncover traces of the foreign, and elsewhere, in the edifice of the familiar that serve as the basis for interrogating dominant discourses of belonging. Third, techniques of multiple and shifting subject positions that recognize the excessive location of the extimate subject, in order to unravel not only the contingency of the subject’s ontic properties, but also her locations in the interplay of oppression and privilege. And fourth, strategies for building political solidarity with transnational and transethnic communities of struggle that are grounded in the concrete Universality of the excluded communities. This book bears witness to the radical possibility in contemporary postcolonial feminist writing, and promises a way out of the impasse of the current culturalization of politics in the humanities that has resulted from the uncritical celebration of hybridity and the concomitant emphasis on diaspora, postnationalism, and cosmopolitanism in dominant discourses of postcolonial, ethnic, and transnational studies.
The term 'Black Atlantic' was coined to describe the social, cultural and political space that emerged out of the experience of slavery, exile, oppression, exploitation and resistance. This volume seeks to recast a new map of the 'Black Atlantic' beyond the Anglophone Atlantic zone by focusing on Brazil as a social and cultural space born out of the Atlantic slave trade. The contributors draw from the recently reinvigorated scholarly debates which have shifted inquiry from the explicit study of cultural 'survival' and 'acculturation' towards an emphasis on placing Africans and their descendants at the center of their own histories. Going beyond the notion of cultural 'survival' or 'creolization', the contributors explore different sites of power and resistance, gendered cartographies, memory, and the various social and cultural networks and institutions that Africans and their descendants created and developed in Brazil. This book illuminates the linkages, networks, disjunctions, sense of collective consciousness, memory and cultural imagination among the African-descended populations in Brazil. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.
Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of 'hybridity' - the mixing of peoples and cultures - in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and 'race', in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging. The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial 'contamination', from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of 'mixed parentage', contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture? The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and 'race'. The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.
This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell'Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi's analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.
