Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1: Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations

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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.

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About the author (2016)

Françoise Lionnet is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, also from Cornell University Press.

Janet Wilson is an award-winning artist and a published author. She graduated with honors from the Ontario College of Art and Design as a mature student, the mother of two little boys. Her awards include Best Illustrated Book in the United States in 2004 for Jasper's Day, Canadian Information Book of the Year for her artwork in In Flanders Fields, and she is the first non-native artist to be awarded the Native Reading Week Award for her illustrations in Solomon's Tree. Janet is a career artist known for her fine art commissioned portraits and still life paintings.

Judith Misrahi-Barak, Associate Professor at Paul-Valéry University Montpellier, France, currently teaches English and Postcolonial Literatures. Her Doctorate was on the Writing of Childhood in Caribbean Literature. She has published articles on Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean writers and the Caribbean and Indian diaspora (Atlantic Studies, Commonwealth, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Moving Worlds, The Journal of the Short Story in English, The Journal of Haitian Studies, The Journal of Transnational American Studies... ), as well as book chapters in edited collections, including most recently Littérature et esclavage (S. Moussa, ed. Éditions Desjonquères, 2010); Narrating Nomadism: Tales of Recovery and Resistance (G. N. Devy, G. V. Davis & K. K. Chakravarty, eds. Routledge, 2012); Identité et diversité : créations, discours, représentations (A.-M. Motard, ed. Pulm, 2013); Tracing the New Asian Diaspora (Om Dwivedi, ed. Rodopi, 2014). She has organised several international conferences with invited writers. She is General Editor of the series PoCoPages (Coll. ‘Horizons anglophones’, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée). She is also Co-Investigator on the AHRC Research Network Series ’Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ (Principal Investigator Dr Nicole Thiara, Nottingham Trent University, UK), 2014–16. http://pays-anglophones.upv.univ-montp3.fr/?page_id=996..

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