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.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 8,5, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, course: Ethnic Studies, language: English, abstract: In the present paper I embed Ifemelu’s migration to America in the broader diaspora of Africans to the United States which is undertaken in search of more favourable education and career prospects. I suggest that diasporans could potentially comprise the par excellence hybrid identity that Homi Bhabha has championed in the development of his postcolonial theory of identity formation. I argue that Americanah poses a substantial challenge to hybridity and mimicry-based cultural identities by accentuating the very limitations of these models; namely, that they seriously overlook the psychic trauma caused by the loss of cultural authenticity due to the disconnection from the motherland and by the identity reinvention undertaken in the host country. My thesis posits that Ifemelu is affected by diasporic melancholia. Adapting Sigmund Freud’s concept of melancholia in the context of diaspora theory I seek to demonstrate that the inarticulate loss of the motherland and the position inbetween cultures disorients and traumatises the subject. I argue that the feelings of ceaseless restlessness and vague yet constant dissatisfaction that the subject experiences point to the trauma of identity loss, a psychic wound that only the physical return to the motherland can heal.

Border Terrains examines 21st century diasporas through the lenses of identity negotiation, religious faith, language, media and representations in fiction.

This book explores an extensive range of questions and challenges within the training, theory, and practice of play therapy, with the aim of providing a stimulating and thought-provoking debate around many of the issues and dilemmas therapists experience. Drawing upon the author’s own experience as both a therapist and trainer/educator/supervisor, the volume grapples with questions of power, privilege, self-care, and mental health. It additionally addresses the wider challenges and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and international conflict upon practice and personhood. Questions around training are explored as well as specific practice challenges relating to managing limits and boundaries within play therapy and working with adopted children. Throughout the book, the author will reflect upon aspects of personal and clinical experience, sharing something of his own developmental narrative through training, teaching, and practice. Reflections on Play Therapy will serve as a core text for trainee play therapists and also a valuable resource for any experienced clinicians working therapeutically with children, young people, and families.

Diasporas result from the scattering of populations and cultures across geographical space and time. Transnational in nature and unbounded by space, they cut across the static, territorial boundaries more usually deployed to govern tourism. In a vibrant inter-disciplinary collection of essays from leading scholars in the field, this book introduces the main features and constructs of diasporas, and explores their implications for the consumption, production and practices of tourism. Three sets of mutually reinforcing relationships are explored: experiences of diaspora tourists the settings and spaces of diaspora tourism the production of diaspora tourism. Addressing the relationship between diasporic groups and tourism from both a consumer and producer perspective, examples are drawn from a wide spectrum of diasporic groups including the Chinese, Jewish, Southeast Asian, Croatian, Dutch and Welsh. Until now, there has been no systematic and detailed treatment of the relationships between diasporas, their consumptions and the tourist experience. However, here, Coles and Timothy provide a unique navigation of the nature of these inter-connections which is ideal for students of tourism, sociology, cultural studies.

This book engages with how the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa perform different forms of creolized socio-cultural practices in the contemporary era. Since the precolonial times, India and South Africa have developed commercial relations through sharing clothing materials, minerals, precious stones, and spices. Besides exchanging physical objects, varieties of cultures, traditions, and rituals were also exchanged between these countries. With the emergence of colonization in both these countries as Africans were brought to India as slaves and Indians were taken to South Africa as indentured laborers, a lot of objects like musical instruments, plant seeds, cooking utensils, and hand-woven clothes were carried across the Indian Ocean as cultural memories. With the passage of time, the cultural practices of the Indian Diaspora and African Diaspora got intermixed with the native local cultures of South Africa and India, respectively, and gave birth to porous, fluid, multi-rooted, and creolized cultural practices. This book brings forth some of the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical practices of these communities, and how these performances can expand the archives of creolized cultural practices of Diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean World.

This book describes how the first African American mass political organization was able to gain support from throughout the African diaspora to finance the Black Star Line, a black merchant marine that would form the basis of an enclave economy after World War I. Ramla M. Bandele explores the concept of diaspora itself and how it has been applied to the study of émigré and other ethnic networks. In characterizing the historical and political context of the Black Star Line, Bandele analyzes the international political economy during 1919-25 and considers the black politics of the era, focusing particularly on Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for its creation of the Black Star Line. She offers an in-depth case study of the Black Star Line as an instance of the African diaspora attempting to link communities and carry out a transnational political and economic project. Arguing that ethnic networks can be legitimate actors in international politics and economics, Bandele also suggests, however, that activists in any given diaspora do not always function as a unit.