This edited collection examines culture and identity in Indian diaspora communities in Southeast Asia, and the UK. Using methodologies such as transnational and diaspora studies, history, autoethnography and family histories, the contributions here explore the movements of people from the Indian subcontinent across generations to a wide range of countries. Cultural practices including the use of performance, food, rituals, religion, education, employment, and names demonstrate how identities and practices are preserved, as well as adapted, in new contexts. This offers original insights into transnational movements of people, and how culture becomes a major part in the formation of a diaspora. The focus on Southeast Asia creates new knowledge by shifting the theoretical focus towards a region that shows great multiplicity in Indian migrant populations over a considerable period of time, but which has remained under-researched. The chapters on the UK act as a counterpoint to this, and contribute to the complex picture of shifting borders and practices across nations and generations.

An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor’s narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.