Theorizing Diaspora A Reader

Exploring the dispersion of populations and cultures across many geographic regions and spheres, diaspora studies has emerged as a vibrant area of research amid rapidly increasing transnationalism and globalization. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader presents in a single volume the most influential and critically well-received essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies and contemporary theorizations of diaspora as a specific terrain within, and beyond, postcolonial studies. The book offers classic statements that have defined the field by such scholars as Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall. Essays tackle a number of subjects and diasporic configurations across the globe: Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean. Marking multinational and interdisciplinary theorizations of diaspora, and reflecting disciplinary modalities and methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, Theorizing Diaspora is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space.

Jana Evans Braziel is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. In 2002–3 she was Five College Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College. She has written widely on diaspora and cultural studies, and is the editor of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (with Kathleen LeBesco, 2001).

Anita Mannur is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.