Memories establish a connection between a collective and individual past, between origins, heritage, and history. Those who have left their places of birth to make homes elsewhere are familiar with the question, "Where do you come from?" and respond in innumerable well-rehearsed ways. Diasporas construct racialized, sexualized, gendered, and oppositional subjectivities and shape the cosmopolitan intellectual commitment of scholars. The diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization. The essays in this volume reflect on the movements of people and cultures in the present day, when physical, social, and mental borders and boundaries are being challenged and sometimes successfully dismantled. The contributors - from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - discuss the diasporic experiences of ethnic and racial groups living in Canada from their perspective, including the experiences of South Asians, Iranians, West Indians, Chinese, and Eritreans. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity is an exciting and innovative collection of essays that examines the nuanced development of theories of Diaspora, subjectivity, double-consciousness, gender and class experiences, and the nature of home.

Memories establish a connection between a collective and individual past, between origins, heritage, and history. Those who have left their places of birth to make homes elsewhere are familiar with the question, "Where do you come from?" and respond in innumerable well-rehearsed ways. Diasporas construct racialized, sexualized, gendered, and oppositional subjectivities and shape the cosmopolitan intellectual commitment of scholars. The diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization. The essays in this volume reflect on the movements of people and cultures in the present day, when physical, social, and mental borders and boundaries are being challenged and sometimes successfully dismantled. The contributors - from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - discuss the diasporic experiences of ethnic and racial groups living in Canada from their perspective, including the experiences of South Asians, Iranians, West Indians, Chinese, and Eritreans. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity is an exciting and innovative collection of essays that examines the nuanced development of theories of Diaspora, subjectivity, double-consciousness, gender and class experiences, and the nature of home.

Experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement impinge upon the lives of an ever increasing number of people worldwide, with business class comfort but more often with unrelenting violence. Since the early 1990s, the political and cultural realities of global migration have led to a growing interest in the different forms of “diasporic” existence and identities. The articles in this book do not focus on the external boundaries of diaspora – what is diasporic and what is not? – but on one of its most important internal boundaries, which is indicated by the second term in the title of this book: memory. It is not by chance that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall, are central issues of the debates in diasporic communities and their relation to their cultural and political surroundings.The relation of diaspora and memory contains important critical and maybe even subversive potentials. Memory can transcend the territorial logic of dispersal and return, and emerge as a competing source of diasporic identity. The articles in this volume explore how, shaped by the responsibilities of testimony as well as by the normalizing forces of amnesia and forgetting and political interests, memory is a performative, figurative process rather than a secure space of identity.

The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers - Fred D'Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers' engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.

In exploring the intersections of memory, migration, and subjectivity, this book attempts to understand how Iraqi migrant women negotiate identity in diaspora.

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.