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This volume examines the evolution of the concept of diaspora since the advent of Diaspora Studies in the 90s, specifically vis-à-vis other concepts: transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, creolization. The essays depict the discontinuities of diasporic experience, but also its ongoing negotiations. Building on transatlantic, gender studies and queer theory, they address the theoretical turn when sexual difference is taken into account and gender troubled. Allying theory and case studies, covering diasporas as diverse as the African, Caribbean, Palestinian, South and South-East Asian diasporas, the dispersion of Romas, the spaces of the Indian Ocean, South Africa and New Zealand, this volume promotes another diasporic model: multidirectional, plural and global. It finds in literature and film tools to think the ‘super-diversity’ and the contradictions of our global world. Ce volume est un état des lieux de l’évolution du concept de diaspora depuis l’avènement des études diasporiques dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, et plus particulièrement, de son questionnement face à d’autres concepts : transnationalisme, cosmopolitisme et créolisation. Il décrit les discontinuités de l’expérience diasporique, mais également les négociations en cours. Fort de l’apport des études transatlantiques, de genre et de la théorie queer, il rend compte de l’infléchissement théorique lorsque le sexe est pris en compte ou que le genre se trouble. Alliant théorie et analyse de cas, recouvrant des diasporas aussi diverses que la diaspora africaine, caribéenne, palestinienne, de l’Asie du sud et du sud-est, le déplacement des Roms, les espaces de l’Océan indien, l’Afrique du Sud et la Nouvelle-Zélande, il promeut un autre modèle diasporique : multidirectionnel, pluriel et global. Il trouve dans la littérature et dans le cinéma des outils pour penser « l’extrême diversité » et les contradictions de notre mondialisation.

Mindful of Avtar Brah’s idea of diasporic space as being configured by multiple locations of home and abroad, as well as by contested relations between people with diverse subject positions, I discuss bodily homecomings in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Here I align my readings with Kira Kosnick’s observation that ’geographically dispersed” queer subjects “themselves constituting diasporic communities, not on the basis of ethno-national origin, but on that of queer solidarities and shared identifications, can help to unsettle some of the assumptions of community as based on biological and biologized kinship’ (Kosnick 2010: 126). The objective of this paper is to trace how diaspora and queerness are imbricated in the construction of masculinity and male desire of the homosexual and transgendered characters in Selvadurai’s and Mootoo’s narratives, set in Sri Lankan and Trinidadian (thinly disguised as Lantanacamara) cultural landscapes respectively. In considering definitions of diaspora, one notes the implication of movement and place, whereby the consequences of movement between non-normatively produced identities and differently textured places result in repercussions for the queer mobile body in and from the former home. Thus the queer masculinities in these texts are writ on diasporic bodies that move ’between officially designated spaces’, where ’intricate realignments of identity, politics and desire take place’ (Patton and Sanchez-Eppler 2000: 3).

Reflet des débats actuels dans les champs croisés des Études afro-américaines et des Études diasporiques, ces essais critiques et études de cas explorent l’articulation entre les concepts fluctuants de « race » et de diaspora et les négociations des identités au-delà des différences. Ils étudient tour à tour l’évolution de l’(inter)nationalisme noir au sein de la Diaspora, les nouveaux discours sur la post-racialité et la notion de « postblackness », la conscience raciale chez les soldats afro-américains, l’expatriation et la re-diasporisation. Le constat d’un rejet de l’africanité au sein de sociétés telles que les Émirats, le Maroc ou la République dominicaine entre en relation avec les analyses d’œuvres d’art au prisme d’une conscience diasporique et de textes littéraires qui disent l’internationalisme ou subvertissent la notion de « race ». James Baldwin dialogue alors avec Percival Everett. Reflecting current debates in the intersecting fields of African American Studies and African Diaspora, these critical essays and case studies explore the articulation between the fluctuating concepts of ‘race’ and Diaspora and the negotiations of identities across differences. They examine in turn the developments of diasporic black (inter)nationalism, new discourses on ‘postraciality’ and ‘postblackness’, race consciousness among African American soldiers, expatriation and re-diasporization. The acknowledgement of a rejection of Africanness in societies such as the Emirates, Morocco or the Dominican Republic dialogues with examinations of artwork through the lenses of a diasporic consciousness and analyses of literary texts that celebrate internationalism or subvert the notion of ‘race’. James Baldwin thus converses with Percival Everett.

Dans le cadre de la série « Diasporas, Cultures de la mobilité, ‘Race’ », ce deuxième volume se propose de compléter les études sur le sujet au travers de regards croisés et interdisciplinaires sur la condition diasporique. Les thèmes du corps, de la mémoire et de l’intime se tissent tout au long du recueil afin d’en révéler et d’en transmettre toute la complexité. Dans le même ordre d’idées, l’impact de la déterritorialisation, inhérent aux phénomènes de migration et relocalisation, est une autre optique majeure dans ce recueil d’essais. Les auteurs s’intéressent aux procédés mémoriels individuels et collectifs internes à l’évolution des communautés de diasporas, par d’étonnantes comparaisons entre diverses régions du monde, états et zones linguistiques. La teneur intellectuelle, la portée critique et la singularité de ce nouveau volume d’essais se reflètent aussi dans les origines géographiques variées de ses contributeurs. Continuing the series on Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’, this second volume extends existing scholarship by exploring a range of multidisciplinary perspectives on the diasporic condition. Embodiment, memory and intimacy form three core themes through which the complexities of diasporic experiences are revealed and transmitted. Closely aligned to these concerns, the impact of de- territorialisation, inherent in the processes of migration and re-settlement, forms a strong thread throughout the collected essays. Authors engage with individual and collective memorial processes embedded in the evolution of diasporic communities, exploring striking comparisons between diverse regions, states, cultures and linguistic zones. The intellectual and critical scope covered by this original collection of new essays is further reflected in the varied geographical origins of the contributors themselves.

Despite contemporary tendencies to celebrate diaspora as a descriptive trope for global modernity and transnational mobility, it would be necessary to distinguish between diverse diasporic experiences (see Huggan 2010, Clifford 1997). Diasporic experience has significant ramifications for the formation of identity, the negotiation of difference and the articulation of ethnicity in a diasporic community as well as that community’s relationship to other local or diasporic groups of the host country. Racial climates in the USA and in Germany post-World War II will bear some scrutiny when considering how diaspora figures in discussing African American experience in Germany. Could Germany, despite its problematic history, perhaps still furnish a ‘black space’ that could perhaps function metaphorically and emotionally as a substitute for a longed-for homeland? This paper proposes to examine literary representations of the diasporic experiences of African-American GIs in Germany. The novels to be analysed here include Michael Dorris’s multi-perspectival fictional piece Cloud Chamber (1997) and Donald Vaughn’s autobiography Color My World (2011). The protagonists Elgin and Donald use their conscription into the US army to actually move from racially fraught American spaces to Germany (an equally difficult space) to negotiate their own raced identities while pursuing their dreams. Intersectional and diasporic approaches among others will address how race, masculinity and homosociality are negotiated by these African-American protagonists in their attempts to understand the spaces they come to occupy in German landscapes, where they engage with questions of home and belonging, which have been sources of discomfort for them back in the US.

Diaspora has often been used in conjunction with racial and cultural differences when discussing the tensions generated by attempts at situating selves and communities in new matrices far from natal spaces. Diasporic conditions thus often bear the stamp of ‘unbelonging’—at best an uneasy belonging— called forth by the marginalised positioning of diasporic communities in ‘host’ societies, whereby the term ‘diaspora’ is applied to those defined through racial and ethnic minority status, difference and exclusion. The term is however problematic since the attendant questions of origins, shared history and contemporary solidarity render it ambivalent: ‘it can be seen to reinscribe and champion essentialised notions of racial and ethnic difference, as well as contest and fracture them’ (Alexander, 2010: 113). In conjunction with this, my essay will explore mixed race identities and the concomitant condition of being astride cultural borders in Diana Evans’ 26a (2006) and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone (2009). A common feature in both novels is that the main protagonists are identical twins: female twins in 26a and male twins in Cutting for Stone. Hence, besides questions of race and gender, the twin sensibilities of ‘twoness in oneness’, ‘wholeness’ or ‘halfness’ are just as relevant to ideas of boundaries and borders, being and belonging intrinsic to the concept of diaspora. The African spaces of Nigeria and Ethiopia are of considerable import to both sets of twins in the novels since they relate to these spaces through their maternal genealogies. At the same time, both sets of twins also navigate the diasporic spaces of England and America while shaping their individual life trajectories.

Afterword, Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, Vol 20, No 2 (2019): White Supremacy in the United States and Beyond