Joel Kuortti’s Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity is a study of diasporic South Asian women writers. It argues that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. As diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is, the writings of imagined diasporas challenge “national” discourses. Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate in other places, forming new communities. In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a hybrid space in-between various identifications. This book looks into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. In the context of diaspora there is an imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies, resulting in multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance. The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on South Asian diasporic experiences. The writers are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.

Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.

When Africans dialogue with citizens of the United States of America, the continent in its parts through the perspectives of nationals engage each other in conversations. The conversations flow like streams in many directions yielding fruits of different sorts. It is possible for a systematic observer-researcher to fish out important themes and ideas. This book, Diaspora and Imagined Nationality: USA-Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood, traces the hegemony of Western ideas in postings and conversations online. In the process it frames Nigeria''s presence online as a postcolonial nation (or nation space) through various communicative activities of citizens at home and in the diaspora. These communicative activities and political activism have led to a wide range of scholarly interrogations and interventions in media, communication, and migration studies against the backdrop of globalization, democratization, and modernization theories. It has been amply documented that communication and social interaction produce ideas that can be evaluated along the lines of deliberative democracy. These approaches have produced outcomes without the benefit of the complex debates, dialogues, and disagreements that come with popular participation and creation of variegated knowledge by a collective. As part of the conclusion, the study posits that the concept of nationhood is not fixed but is a symbolic construct that evolves through unstructured conversations, sharing, and intense debates. This book navigates the unstructured virtual terrain of dialogues, debates, and seas of information available online. One of the objectives of this book is to bring together the multiple voices and transitions of individuals who left their home-countries to new host-communities by attending to one of the fruits of this technology-driven mode of communication and knowledge production. Diaspora and Imagined Nationality does not pretend to be a universal representation of all Nigerians in the diaspora; it instead focuses on what a small group of intellectuals of African descent and their friends talk and gripe about, and how these themes affect the larger collective. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "The world wide web''s impact on global communication has been phenomenal and it is becoming increasingly more so as technology advances. As a result of this, institutions and individuals are able to share ideas on the internet. The Nigerian Community is not immune to this activity and this brilliant book examines various issues that are developing from online discussions amongst Nigerians in the diaspora. Thus, Odutola explores how and why the notion of National Identity plays a significant role in online conversations. For him, Cyberframing Nigerian nationhood has created a radical new way of discussing the idea of the Nation as it has also allowed marginalised communities and people to (re) tell their own stories and create their own concepts of National identity without fear of being subjugated or challenged by dominant groups. Since the issue of National identity is now in cyberspace, it allows for endless definitions and discussions of this already complex concept and raises such question like ''Whose National Identity is it anyway?'' Overall, it is remarkable to see how communities in the diaspora have found their voices in their new ''imagined spaces'' on line to make ideas, discussions and projects become real." -- Ekua Andrea Agha "Among other things, information and telecommunications technology has made it possible to expand the meaning of community without propinquity. This book shows that despite the ongoing Diasporization of Africans as a result of the world''s most recent encounters with globalization, epistemic communities are in formation. These communities are composed of people who remain concerned about their countries of origin, and those who study those countries, engaged in conversation with people located there on matters of common concern and interest. The book in particular, considers the nature, forms, content and meanings of conceptualizations of nation, as well as discourses of nationalism by Nigerians at home and abroad, and consequences of these discussions and debates on clarifying what it means to be a nation. It is well-researched, thought-provoking, and constitutes a significant contribution to Nigerian, African, and Communication Studies." -- Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome, Professor, Brooklyn College CUNY "A wonderful read! One of the most original contributions to the cutting-edge body of work on netizenship and the public sphere in Africa. Theoretical acuity meets narrative savvy in Kole Odutola''s brilliant study of the impact of the USA-AfricaDialogue listserv on African studies. This book should be read and reread by all lovers of Africa and knowledge!" -- Professor Pius Adesanmi, Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing "Koleade Odutola''s recent book provides an essential scholarly contribution to two areas of digital humanities that one can argue are still under-theorized--Africa''s digitalscape and its relationship with the post-colonial emigres living in the West." -- Africa: Journal of the International African Institute "[A]n essential scholarly contribution to two areas of digital humanities that one can argue are still under-theorized--Africa''s digitalscape and its relationship with the postcolonial emigres living in the West." -- Journal of Africa Featured in The Nation Online, December 2014

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.

Recognising the great legacy of women's life writings, this book draws on a wealth of sources to critically examine the impact of these writings on our communities.

Over the century that has passed since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe. What happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries and begin to negotiate new experience gained in the process of migration? Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, countering its conventional reception as a subsidiary branch of national literature and reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland and origins to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, World Literature and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland. These diverse discussions are framed by a focused examination of diaspora as a methodological perspective and its relevance for the modern human condition.