Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader

Exploring the dispersion of populations and cultures across many geographic regions and spheres, diaspora studies has emerged as a vibrant area of research amid rapidly increasing transnationalism and globalization. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader presents in a single volume the most influential and critically well–received essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies and contemporary theorizations of diaspora as a specific terrain within, and beyond, postcolonial studies. The book offers classic statements that have defined the field by such scholars as Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall. Essays tackle a number of subjects and diasporic configurations across the globe: Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean. Marking multinational and interdisciplinary theorizations of diaspora, and reflecting disciplinary modalities and methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, Theorizing Diaspora is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space.

Acknowledgments. Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points Of Contention In Diaspora Studies. (Jana Evans Braziel And Anita Mannur). Part I: Modernity, Globalism, And Diaspora. 1. Disjuncture And Difference In The Global Cultural Economy. (Arjun Appadurai). 2. The Black Atlantic As A Counterculture Of Modernity. (Paul Gilroy). Additional Readings On Modernity, Globalism, And Diaspora. Part II: Ethnicity, Identity, And Diaspora. 3. Diaspora: Generational Ground Of Jewish Diaspora. (Daniel Boyarin And Jonathan Boyarin). 4. Ethnicity In An Age Of Diaspora. (R. Radhakrishnan). 5. Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Making Asian American Differences. (Lisa Lowe). Additional Readings On Ethnicity, Identity, And Diaspora. Part III: Sexuality, Gender, And Diaspora. 6. Against The Lures Of Diaspora: Minority Discourse, Chinese Women And Intellectual Hegemony. (Rey Chow). 7. Returning(S): Relocating The Critical Feminist Auto–Ethnographer. (Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe). 8. In The Shadows Of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics And The Diasporic Dilemma. (Martin F. Manalansan IV). Additional Readings In Sexuality, Gender, And Diaspora. Part IV: Cultural Production And Diaspora. 9. Cultural Identity And Diaspora Stuart Hall. 10. Diaspora Culture And The Dialogic Imagination. (Kobena Mercer). 11. Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities In Motion. (Gayatri Gopinath). Additional Readings On Cultural Production And Diaspora. Post–Script: Cyber–Scapes And The Interfacing Of Diaspora. (Anita Mannur). Additional Readings On Diaspora And Cyberelectronics. Selected Bibliography of Works on Diaspora (Anita Mannur). Index.

Jana Evans Braziel is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. In 2002–3 she was Five College Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College. She has written widely on diaspora and cultural studies, and is the editor of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (with Kathleen LeBesco, 2001). Anita Mannur is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign.

"Diaspora is one of the most critically debated terms in contemporary discussions of migration and identity. Bringing together key essays in the field, this superb collection offers us a comprehensive overview of diaspora′s past politics and potential futures. Above all, it reminds us that diaspora is a distinctly human phenomenon, involving the displacement, movement, and separation of peoples." David L. Eng, Columbia University <!––end––> " Theorizing Diaspora speaks not only to those previously colonized and oppressed Others who have relocated from There to Here, but discusses why deracination is a process that affects all constituencies: those in the newly inhabited metropolis as well as those who remain behind." Grant Farred, Duke University