Liminal Diasporas

Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment

Rahul K. Gairola, Sarah Courtis, Tim Flanagan, Rahul Gairola, Sarah Courtis, Tim Flanagan, Rahul K. Gairola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032726106
• eBook ISBN: 9781040184226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Liminal Diasporas: Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment offers readers a new lens through which to critically re-evaluate the necropolitics of migration. Using the term "liminal diasporas," the co-editors and range of authors define this notion as migratory bodies that are simultaneously subject to danger, violence, and precarious modalities of life. The chapters in this edited volume cover a range of topics including diasporic camp life for Palestinians, queer South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean, close readings of various texts, reformulations of "home" and "homeland," children's play/games, and even representations of zombie diaspora.

Overall, these chapters, along with the incisive Preface and Afterword that bookend them, offer compelling readings of what it means today to be a liminal diaspora before the era of COVID 19 into today's woeful violence in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. Liminal Diasporas, as such, is a timely and urgent collection that compels us to rethink the human condition in relation to possibly the most material existential crises that our planet has ever witnessed. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface – The right to stay and the right to move
• Introduction: Liminal diasporas in the era of COVID-19
• 1 Picturing precarity: Diasporic belonging and camp life in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi
• 2 “Leave to quit boundaries”: Danger, precarity, and queer diasporas in the South Asian Caribbean
• 3 Nostalgia, identity, and homeland: Reading the narratives of the diaspora in Susan Abulhawa’s fiction
• 4 Disabled movement beyond metaphor in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
• 5 Narrating global asymmetries of power: Children’s play/games and photography in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
• 6 Necropolitics in a post-apocalyptic zombie diaspora: The case of AMC’s The Walking Dead
• Afterword: The radical hope of diasporas
• Index