Book contents
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Major Concepts
- Chapter 7 The Shock of Relation
- Chapter 8 Strangers and Brothers
- Chapter 9 Incommensurability, Inextricability, Entanglement
- Chapter 10 Radical Black Poetics and South–South Movement
- Chapter 11 Remembering the Uses of Diaspora, or Palestine Is Still the Issue
- Chapter 12 Refugee Ecologies
- Chapter 13 Diaspora and Detention
- Part III Readings in Genre, Gender, and Genealogies
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 7 - The Shock of Relation
Queer Diasporas in Law and Literature
from Part II - Major Concepts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Major Concepts
- Chapter 7 The Shock of Relation
- Chapter 8 Strangers and Brothers
- Chapter 9 Incommensurability, Inextricability, Entanglement
- Chapter 10 Radical Black Poetics and South–South Movement
- Chapter 11 Remembering the Uses of Diaspora, or Palestine Is Still the Issue
- Chapter 12 Refugee Ecologies
- Chapter 13 Diaspora and Detention
- Part III Readings in Genre, Gender, and Genealogies
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers the entanglements between queerness and diaspora. It asks how the vital matter of desire – who we love and how – is roused by the traversing of borders. In particular, it considers the gestures of compliance and knowing, an aesthetic knowledge no less, that queer asylees must evince to be found credible enough to receive political shelter and hospitality in the West. The border regime’s regulations of refugee passage on the basis of ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ ultimately reveals a host of tendencies, definitions and differentiations that cleave our efforts to truly understand queerness as a thwarting of sexual rigidities and an embrace of play. The chapter ultimately makes the case that the genre of queer diasporic literature – a genre specifically concerned with sexual and national border crossings – attends to the caprice of non-normative desire.
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- Diaspora and Literary Studies , pp. 129 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023