This collection brings together new critical approaches to diaspora studies, branching out to areas such as literary studies, visual culture, and museum studies, and explores them in relation to a variety of fictional works, cultural traditions, theoretical paradigms, and geo-political contexts. The innovation of this volume lies in the interplay of both texts and theoretical insights from these different areas of cultural analysis, drawn together to probe diverse manifestations of diaspora while pointing out new directions of critique. Moving between representations of real and imaginary, violent and utopian, past, present and future diasporas, contributors demonstrate the ways in which authors, performers and artists are establishing new modes of representing and imagining diaspora in an increasingly globalised age. Contributions are organised into sections on performance, speculative fiction, city spaces, affective or violent diasporas, and silence and voice. Bringing together these wide-ranging histories, contexts and media allows for dialogue across vastly divergent experiences and representations of diaspora, and opens up a theoretical debate on the changing nature of this field of study.
Preface, John McLeod / Introduction, Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes & Lucinda Newns / Part I: Performing Diaspora / 1. Performing Street Art: CityLeaks, Affiliation, and Transcultural Diaspora, Cathy Covell Waegner / 2. The Pitfalls and Potentials of Transcultural Performance in Diasporic Contexts: Spectating Otherness at Home and Abroad, Miki Flockemann / Part II: Speculative Diasporas / 3. Speculative Migrations: Hari Kunzru's Historical Consciousness, the Rhetoric of Interplanetary Colonization, and the Locus-Colonial Novel, Rachel Rochester / 4. Mythology of the Space Frontier: Diaspora, Liminality, and the Practices of Remembrance in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, Agnieszka Podruczna / Part III: Diaspora City Spaces / 5. Diasporic Ways of Knowing: Teju Cole's Open City, Christiane Steckenbiller / 6. Affecting the City: Flanerie in Doris Lessing's Writings, Agnes Gyoerke / Part IV: Affective and Violent Diasporas / 7. Everyday Emotions and Migration: Using Affect to Understand Contemporary Diasporic Fiction, Sibyl Adam / 8. Forms of Diaspora and British New Slaveries in Chris Cleave's The Other Hand and Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow, Pietro Deandrea / Part V: Challenging Dominant Narratives of Diaspora: Silence and Voice / 9. Gendered Silence in Transnational Narratives, Karen D'Souza / 10. Reading Between Languages: Polyphony in M G Vassanji's Writing, Asma Sayed
