This book analyses the resolution of the psychic problem of diasporic existence from a postcolonial feminist perspective, by inscribing and defining the meaning of “virtual diaspora” through the lens of the East/India and the West. It explores the situation that arises when one leaves one’s country and becomes an emigrant/immigrant, which often causes pain both in the departure from one’s motherland and in the adaptation to a new environment. The book employs the theory of Deleuze and Guattari and explores the interstices of real and virtual diaspora and the aftermath of diaspora as a mental journey. Adding a new interpretation of transcendence, taken from the Indian perspective, the book examines the Deleuze’s theory of immanence and transcendence and the two major concepts of “becoming” and “real/virtual.” The book also examines the works of Helene Cixous, J.M. Coetzee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kunal Basu, and Tagore in light of the concept of virtual diaspora and from a postcolonial feminist angle. It does so by raising the following questions: When one has emigrated to a different country, can one conceive of that existence as real or virtual or both? Do emigrants or diasporic individuals live a life of both real and virtual diaspora? This comes from the idea that both real and virtual diaspora, under different paradigms, may be related to the power struggle and master-slave dialectic that affects all of humanity. A valuable addition to the study of postcolonial literature, the book will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of diaspora studies, postcolonial feminist theory, postcolonial literature, feminist philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian Studies.

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 Mench . 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.

This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

Based on a four‐year-long empirical study, this book employs contemporary theories from the Global South to investigate the role of education in the experience of migration and settlement of the Chakma people of Bangladesh in the city of Melbourne, Australia. Exploring the migration opportunities taken up by the Chakma and their efforts to retain, promote, and enrich their ethnic identity in Australia, the book critically examines the importance of education for ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities and the extent to which education helped the diasporic community in achieving a ‘better’ and ‘more secure’ life. It also positions education as a tool to help revive, maintain, and enrich the importance of culture and tradition, both in the home country and in the place of settlement and offers a theorisation of how the self-directed pursuit of education can create opportunities for minority peoples, to advocate human rights, Indigenous recognition and criticise a state’s failure to provide safety and security. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students researching in the fields of education, diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, and migration studies.

Nurse Migration in Asia explores the ever-increasing need for a larger nursing and healthcare workforce in Asia, where countries are undergoing rapid transformation, given economic globalisation and commercial expansion. The book examines some of the major forces that play key roles in the changing dynamics of 21st century nurse and care worker migration in the Asian context; changes which inevitably have global implications. The country case studies range from India, China, Singapore to Japan and the Philippines. Common themes emerge: the rapid and unpredictable nature of nurse migration patterns, including the direction, purpose and frequency of migration; and the changes in professional training, regulation, and workforce policy. Forces causing these shifts include the changing population demography, global and regional economic fluctuations, and finally changing professional roles and gender dynamics. The book analyses the response to these transformations, and how countries adjust their immigration regulations, to attract foreign healthcare professionals. It concludes by highlighting the importance for all countries to remain vigilant as regards the exacerbating workforce crisis, and engage in developing coherent policy governance frameworks to manage healthcare workforce at the national or international levels. A valuable addition to the literature, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of nursing, health and social care workforce studies, population demography, labour markets, gender and international migration studies, globalisation in health and Asian studies.

Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson developed out of the desire for dialogue with the late feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s extraordinary, previously unpublished, last work on love and vulnerability. The collection publishes this work for the first time, with a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors responding to it, to Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole and to her life and death. Anderson’s path-breaking work includes A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). Her last work critiques, then attempts to rebuild, concepts of love and vulnerability. Reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, myth and narrative all have a role to play. Social justice, friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work are central to her thinking. Contributors trace the emergence of Anderson’s late thinking, extend her conversations with the history of philosophy and contemporary voices such as hooks and Butler, and bring her work into contact with debates in theology; Continental and analytic philosophy; feminist, queer and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies. Discussions engage with the Me Too movement and sexual violence, climate change, sweatshops, neoliberalism, death and dying, and the nature of the human. Originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki, this large, wide-ranging collection, featuring a number of distinguished contributors, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on interpersonal relations, sympathy and empathy, affect and emotion.

Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.