New Routes for Diaspora Studies

Contents: I. Interrogating terms: 1. The middle passages of black migration/Jenny Sharpe. 2. Making the exodus from Algeria European family and race in 1962 France/Todd Shepard. 3. Enslaved lives, enslaving labels: a new approach to the colonial Indian labor Diaspora/Crispin Bates and Marina Carter. II. Maps of Intimacy: 4. Empire anglo-India and the alimentary canal/Parama Roy. 5. Domestic internationalisms imperial nationalisms: civil rights, immigration and conjugal Military policy/Rachel Ida Buff. III. Nation narrative Diaspora: 6. Serial migration: stories of home and belonging in Diaspora/Lok Siu. 7. Building associations nineteenth-century monumental architecture and the jew in the American imagination/Martin A. Berger. 8. Cultural forms and world systems: the ethnic epic in the new Diaspora/Betty Joseph. Index.

The study of diasporas provides a useful frame for reimagining locations, movements, identities, and social formations. This volume explores diaspora as historical experience and as a category of analysis. Using case studies drawn from African and Asian diasporas and immigration in the U.S., the contributors interrogate ideas of displacement, return, and place of origin as they relate to diasporic identity. They also consider how practices of commensality become grounds for examining identity and difference and how narrative and aesthetic forms emerge through the context of diaspora. (jacket)