1st Edition
Liminal Diasporas Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment
Liminal Diasporas: Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment offers readers a new lens through which to critically meditate on 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 wide 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 Foreword and Afterword that bookend them, offer compelling readings of what it means today to be a liminal diaspora before the era of COVID-19 and in a time of 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 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.
Preface - The right to stay and the right to move
Ashley Dawson
Introduction: Liminal diasporas in the era of COVID-19
Rahul K. Gairola, Sarah Courtis and Tim Flanagan
1. Picturing precarity: Diasporic belonging and camp life in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi
Bidisha Banerjee
2. “Leave to quit boundaries”: Danger, precarity, and queer diasporas in the South Asian Caribbean
Christopher Ian Foster
3. Nostalgia, identity, and homeland: Reading the narratives of the diaspora in Susan Abulhawa’s fiction
Payel Pal
4. Disabled movement beyond metaphor in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
Luke Brown
5. Narrating global asymmetries of power: Children’s play/games and photography in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
Felix Ndaka
6. Necropolitics in a post-apocalyptic zombie diaspora: The case of AMC’s The Walking Dead
Lauren O’Mahony, Melissa Merchant and Simon Order
Afterword: The Radical Hope of Diasporas
Jacqueline Lo
Biography
Rahul K. Gairola is The Krishna Somers Senior Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature and a Principal Fellow of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre (IPRC) at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published six books and over 50 peer-reviewed research articles. He is a series editor for both Routledge and Oxford University Press and is a 2024 Research Fellow at the University of Münster, Germany, under the Marie-Skïodowska-Curie-Programme of the European Union.
Sarah Courtis is Lecturer of University Preparation Pathways at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and a Fellow of Advance HE. She is currently publishing with Routledge and Oxford University Press, among others, with research foci on disability, feminism, and queer studies. She also teaches at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). She is also a performing artist, lyricist, and researcher in the popular Bogan Shakespeare troupe based in Perth, Western Australia.
Tim Flanagan is Lecturer in Humanities in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is author of Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze: The Art of Least Distances (Palgrave, 2021) and series co-editor of the series Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy. He is currently working on a book project oriented by the rethinking of ontology by logology undertaken by Barbara Cassin.
