New Directions in Diaspora Studies : Cultural and Literary Approaches

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. Contents Acknowledgments List of Figures Preface Introduction Part I: Performance 1 Transcultural Performance in Diasporic Contexts 2 Performing Street Art Part II: Speculative Diasporas 3 Mythology of the Space Frontier 4 Speculative Diasporas Part III: City Spaces 5 Diasporic Ways of Knowing 6 Emotional Geographies of London 7 Everyday Emotions and Migration Part IV: Precarious and Silent Diasporas 8 British New Slaveries in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand and Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow 9 Gendered Silence in Transnational Narratives Bibliography Index About the Editors and Contributors