Prospectus of Chapters.Part I: Methods and Definitions.Chapter 1: Introduction: What is Diaspora Studies?.This will be a general introduction to some of the main issues in the field. It will cover competing definitions of diaspora and also outline the differences between this and other terms that are sometimes taken to be synonymous or overlapping with it such as migration, exile, multiculturalism, transnationalism, etc. An effort will be made to introduce the terms in a simple (but not simplistic) way so as to prepare for returning to them for further elaboration in the course of the book.2: The Diasporic Imaginary.The takeoff point in this chapter will be a contrapuntal reading of Robin Cohen's Global Diasporas (1997), Marianne Hirsch's "Past Lives: Post-memories in Exile" (1997), Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin's Powers of Diaspora (2002), Avtar Brah's Cartographies of Diaspora (1997) and the work of Paul Gilroy, all of which set out useful models by which to think through questions of the diasporic imaginary.
Chapter 3: Cross-mappings: National, Postcolonial, Diaspora.This chapter will revisit some of the concerns raised in the previous one, but this time to exemplify in a much more situated fashion some of the differences and overlaps between studies of literature done under national, postcolonial, and diasporic frameworks and the methodological implications that may be drawn from these. Several texts will be alluded to in this chapter ranging from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy (national and transnational), Chinua Achebe (postcolonial), and Salman Rushdie (diaspora).Part II: Writing Diaspora.Chapter 4: Anton Shammas, Arabesques.I shall place Arabesques in dialogue with Edward Said's Out of Place (2000) and Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (2003) to help delineate the different kinds of configurations of the diasporic imaginary pertaining to the fraught geopolitical realities of Israel and Palestine.Chapter 5: Art Spiegelman, Maus.Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus will be used to illustrate some of the ideas in Marianne Hirsch's seminal article on post-memories of exile and Robin Cohen's outline of victim diasporas, which I will have discussed in the previous Section.
Chapter 6: Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.Tan's novel offers an excellent literary example of strong diasporic imaginary. The Joy Luck Club, unfolding as it does around the stories that emigrant Chinese mothers share with their American daughters, provides a useful way of seeing the purposes and slippages involved in generational narratives within the diaspora, especially as they are turned towards shaping a sense of elusive identity in a land that suggests the freedom of self-fashioning as the prime benefit for the immigrant family.Chapter 7: Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies.Lahiri's short stories will be used to elaborate on the repeated theme of unbridgeable solitudes.Chapter 8: Zadie Smith, White Teeth.Smith's White Teeth provides the opportunity for looking at what I want to describe as the absurdism of diaspora. I shall contrast Smith's novel to Hanif Kureishi's film My Beautiful Launderette (1985; dir Stephen Frears) and Stephen Frears' own Dirty Pretty Things (2002).
Chapter 9: Conclusion: Diaspora Studies and Literary Theory.The conclusion will bring together the various issues raised in the book and focus these on issues of literary theory. The aim of this chapter will be largely pedagogical; I shall try to elaborate a diaspora studies framework to discuss questions pertaining to literary history, the place of the author in the text, literary representation and sociological analysis, and the terms by which.