This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

The chapter analyzes how the diasporic motif of the non-Jewish Other has been utilized in Hebrew literature in Israel over the last three decades. Notwithstanding a change in Jewish identity from a minoritarian to a majoritarian perspective, this motif continues to shape the contemporary Hebrew literary imagination. By pointing, among others, to the figure of the most important non-Jewish Other in Israeli reality – the Palestinian – this chapter will argue that this category, though obviously mediated by current Israeli circumstances, is indeed built on the foundation of the diasporic category of the “goy.” What does the ongoing vitality of this motif, despite the transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tell us about the relationship between continuity and breakage in contemporary Hebrew literature and Israeli Jewish identity? By pointing to specific images present both in the pre-State Hebrew literary canon (e.g., texts by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Josef Hayim Brenner, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon) and in the Israeli literary mainstream of the last three decades (e.g., texts by Yehoshua Knaz, Dorit Rabinyan, and Sami Berdugo), this chapter will analyze the role of the non-Jewish Other for the projection of a Jewish Israeli national identity and its consequences.

Queer and trans of color critique engages the ways sexuality and gender themselves gain meaning in the context of systems of racial differentiation and, reciprocally, how struggles for justice, abolition, freedom, and decolonization must attend to sexuality and gender as both vectors of domination and sites of liberatory imagination and expression. This chapter considers how attributions of savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness to racialized populations in the United States are shaped by narratives of these groups’ inability to enact proper gender and sexuality. The chapter further considers how queer and trans of color critique addresses the specificities in how particular racialized groups are defined through systems of sexual and gender normativity and how they have engaged those systems in multidimensional ways, attending to queer and trans work in Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies. It traces differences and disagreements within those fields and tracks dialogues among/across them.

The book’s introduction draws the reader to the unique case study of the Iraqi diaspora and its involvement in state-building following military intervention in 2003. The chapter introduces the book’s puzzle, which questions why diasporas have thus far been ignored in analyses of state formation and state-building. Contextualising the book within the diaspora and state-building literature will also delineate the book’s unique contribution to both fields and its wider appeal to policymakers, the media, and thinktanks. The chapter then underlines the book’s original conceptual and empirical contribution to the study and understanding of the role of diasporas in state formation and state-building processes, which also includes the role of civil society in weak, postcolonial, post-conflict states. This is then followed by an outline and breakdown of the book to guide the reader.

Chapter 1 discusses the main concepts of the book, including diaspora and transnationalism, providing an understanding of the cross-border connections that link people and nations across time and space under modern processes of globalisation, facilitating diasporic political engagement. This is then followed by introducing the conceptual framework of diasporic state-building, which is drawn from three theoretical discussions related to the state, state-building, and civil society literature. The framework captures how diasporas are engaged in this process through an original conceptual and typological framework that operationally captures the two categories associated with building a state: firstly, diasporic mobilisation towards building the apparatus of the state and, secondly, supporting and challenging the state through civil society. This original conceptual approach to state-building captures the plethora of activity that is shaping the evolution of conflict, post-conflict, and post-colonial states. The framework guides the reader as well as demonstrating the multiple domains in which diasporas are influencing state formation under modern processes of globalisation.

When thinking about the world outside of “the West,” scholarship can fall into generalizing frameworks in which comparison with the West predominates or in which the world is divided up into somewhat homogenized “areas.” How can we reckon with the effects and ongoing histories of imperialism and occupation, uneven transnational dynamics of exploitation and extraction, and racial capitalism while not understanding those subjected to oppression and domination as merely passive in the face of those processes? How do we engage with forms of difference while understanding them as multidimensional, permeable, as opposed to essentialized expressions of local/national/regional culture? How do we attend to forms of place-based specificity while engaging the heterogeneity and diversity of the area, country, and/or population under discussion and while also addressing dynamic relations with other peoples and places – both chosen and coerced? This chapter considers how queer and trans studies have taken up these challenges.

This chapter discusses early Chinese writing in Australian Chinese periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century, which was then followed largely by an absence of Asian voices in Australian anthologies until the late 1950s. It critiques the early anthologies that turned attention to Asia as either focusing only on ‘Australian’ perceptions of Asia or separated ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ writers along lines of ethnicity. It discusses the publication of poetry collections by Asian Australian poets as occurring in the late 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of Asian Australian studies in the 1990s in light of American Asian studies. It critiques the limitations of an ‘Asian Australian’ framework along with the tendency to homogenise migrant writers under the rubric of multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Australia. It discusses the emergence of literary magazines as forums for Asian Australian writing and as developing cross-cultural solidarities, and anthologies, criticism and writing that has foregrounded diasporic frameworks and intersectionality. The chapter then undertakes analysis of four major recent writers.

The history of poetry in Australia is a history of languages and nations. This volume provides multiple perspectives on that history. Literary histories are always full of contention and this is especially so in Australia where the political and social reality of nation is itself in contention. Poetry was an influential medium through which the structure, experiences and values of settler colonialism and then nationhood were articulated and debated. But it was also complicit in the unconscious assumption of terra nullius in the language of settlement. This is not, then, a history of the untroubled development of a nation and its poetic traditions, but of deep and ongoing debates over language, aesthetic paradigms, land ownership, and cultural and spiritual life. History emerges through documents and narration of ‘the past’; it is part of what Lisa Lowe calls ‘the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalises the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding’. Poetry is also part of this economy yet can, perhaps more than any other genre, approach that which eludes the archive or exceeds it. This includes those subjects, practices and geographies that have been excluded from ‘the human’ as well as aspects of the ordinary, of embodiment and feeling. It may provide a mode of care for cultures and communities. With its epistemological and ontological charge, poetry has been both constitutive of and the limit-point of representation.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

While many Black Caribbean British writers persisted in operating within the literary framework of the empire, they blended an African Caribbean style and a Black diaspora perspective to enhance their literary activism. Developing a distinct style, later-generation writers asserted their presence in British society. Their thematic concerns went beyond the struggle for belonging or the need to establish a new Caribbean identity in a foreign environment. Further, as exemplified by poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, their works reflected a thread of resistance against British cultural imperialism and institutionalized racism. Although identity and self-determination continued to resonate deeply within the literature of Black Caribbean British writers, a shift occurred in the newer generation. Departing from biographical narratives, they explored diverse political and social themes while using a range of genre fiction to convey emerging complexities. The first part of the chapter critically analyses the legacies and continuities of the African Caribbean writing style. The second section examines the Black diaspora sensibility, showing how post-1990s Black Caribbean British writers engaged in critical analysis of the intricate intersections of race, gender issues, and sexuality through contemporary literary styles.

Utilizing Safia Elhillo’s poetry as a case study, this chapter explores the role of literary institutions in redefining African poetry. Elhillo, a Sudanese-American poet, challenges traditional geographic and cultural boundaries within the African literary canon through her collection The January Children. Her recognition by prestigious literary prizes, notably the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, exemplifies the expanding scope of what constitutes African poetry. This analysis highlights how institutions, by honoring diasporic poets, have historically configured the African literary tradition to be inclusive of diasporic and transnational experiences. The chapter argues that the essence of this inclusion of diasporic poetry lies in an African imagination that intertwines experiences from varied locales with the specifics of African realities as they migrate across national and continental borders. By examining these dynamics, the chapter underscores a significant shift in the literary canon, showcasing the evolving, multifaceted nature of African literature in a global context.