Loyalists, those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States, remain poorly understood in large part because of the teleological implications of framing the American Revolution as the inaugurating event of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. This essay shows loyalists as reasonable people who carefully assessed the specific colonial circumstances where each lived. The trajectory of three individuals, in particular, highlights the diversity of loyalism and that it drew support from all corners of colonial society. These three are the Mohawk diplomat Mary Brant, the slave-owning Georgia soldier William Martin Johnson, and the formerly enslaved Thomas Peters, who served with the British Army for the duration of the war. All three left the United States due to their ardent loyalism, dying, respectively, in Upper Canada, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. Prioritizing loyalists highlights the violence of the rebel movement and showcases the War of American Independence as a civil war. In place of a familiar patriot and US-nationalist interpretation, recovering loyalism as a good idea emphasizes loyalists in their colonial context, assesses the transformative impact of war, and follows their diaspora throughout the British Atlantic and, especially, to British North America.

Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians.

The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.

Critical framing of UK poetry often ignores the pressures of racism or xenophobia (even when the work at hand responds to it), the shaping of a reader’s perceptions of the poet and her text as one and of the same and from where this cultural construction emerges, as well as the poet’s own determination of themselves as a subject. It is my intention here to interrogate the readerly gesture, its lyric premise of expression and authenticity, in order to reproach national canons and traditions that privilege the well-crafted lyric poem and its supposed universality. Mobilizing a decolonized reading of the lyric – one that dismantles formal features and a reader’s expectations of an expressive and authentic voice – I will offer finally two examples from my own experience teaching the works of Sarah Howe and Bhanu Kapil.

This chapter ruminates on the multiple meanings of home/lakay in the Haitian context, paying close attention to the concept of home in relation to material and physical spaces. Building on the work of scholars who have theorized diaspora as process, condition, and project, it argues that the Haitian Kreyòl term lakay presents fertile ground for extending theories of diaspora. It explores how these dynamics unfold in three works by contemporary Haitian artists: the novel La dot de Sara (2002) by Marie-Célie Agnant, two short stories by Edwidge Danticat from Krik? Krak! (1995), and the song “Fo m Ale” (2000) by Emeline Michel. Taking an approach that is both multilingual (French, English, Kreyòl) and multi-genre (essay, short story, novel, song), the methodology advances a broader argument about approaches to analyzing Haitian literature while calling attention to the importance of how diaspora manifests itself with local specificity.

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is the first major literary work to emerge from Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime in the Pacific. This essay examines Boochani’s landmark poetic-philosophical memoir for the way it exposes the systematic torture inside Manus Prison, Papua New Guinea. If, in the 1990s, the field of diaspora studies was reinvigorated by the apparently accelerated movement of people, money, and products, what purchase is a diasporic framework in the face of proliferating regimes of immobility? The chapter proceeds by thinking through three tropes common to diasporic narratives: first is the account of oppression that forces flight from the homeland; second are practical and ethical questions of hospitality/hostility, inclusion/exclusion, in the land of arrival; and third is the politics of collective identity in relation to the homeland. In short, how might we think of diaspora with its seeming opposite, detention?

This chapter outlines “refugee ecology” as a concept through which to engage how refugees are depicted in relation to the environment. Focusing on portrayals of water, it compares recent media portrayals of refugees with refugee narratives to understand how maritime entities shape understandings of refugees. While more mainstream accounts often depict waterways as sites of danger from which refugees must be rescued, refugee narratives offer a wider array of aqueous representations. Examining Nam Le’s short story “The Boat” suggests that, for Vietnam War refugees, rivers, seas, and oceans are not simply merciless forces that threaten refugee life. Rather, they are also repositories of the dead, archives of memory, and spiritual forces that reflect intimate human–nonhuman ties and reveal Vietnam’s deep seafaring past. Interpreted through the lens of refugee ecology, “The Boat” reveals how mariner history and knowledge are critical to the survival and emergence of diasporas.

The introduction examines the frameworks and major concepts for the study of diaspora and literature.

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.

In 2007, Syrine Hout argued that the Arab Australian author Jad El Hage’s The Last Migration: A Novel of Diaspora and Love (2002) was the first Lebanese and, by extension, Arab, diaspora novel. Hout’s claim suggests that any writing by Arab Australians that preceded El Hage’s novel was beyond the bounds of diasporic literature. Her argument implies historical progression where migrant writers start as unsettled exiles and evolve into settled diasporic writers. The irony in the Australian context is that very few Arab Australian novels exist prior to 2002, meaning that if Hout’s claim is correct, the trajectory that The Last Migration benefited from must have come from its interaction with anglophone Arab writing being shaped elsewhere, where longer histories exist, and alongside other migrant writing in Australia. This chapter focuses on a range of Arab Australian novels to reveal how and in what ways this writing is deeply Australian while simultaneously embedded in a diasporic writerly milieu. It does so by contextualising these novels within diasporic and nationalist frameworks to illustrate how such texts do not easily fit the kind of literary categorisations posited by Hout.

From its earliest Viking origins, Dublin was part of a networked Atlantic geography of exchange. Throughout its history, Dublin’s place in world literature has been influenced by the shifting shapes of those networks over time.Eighteenth-century, literary Dublin, for instance, was determined by the gravitational field of London, while by the middle of the nineteenth century, Dublin would have become the point of origin for a transnational diaspora– an origin akin to a wound from which the blood is being drained: insular, entrophic, and suffering (in James Joyce’s phrase fromDubliners) from paralysis. Joyce is the pivotal figure here, insofar as he was to see how the city’s insular, embedded sense of place could co-exist with a generative sense of incompleteness, an awareness of the phantom limb of the global network of which the city was a part, capable of being sutured by imagination.That suturing effect would also, paradoxically, reposition what had become a peripheral city to the centre of modernist writing, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, with Dublin today one of the most globalised cities in the world, literary form is being once more reconfigured as networks shift and are again radically decentred.

The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.

Contrary to a view of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a collection of road and traffic signs, commercial signage, graffiti inscriptions, and other physical objects, this chapter treats the LL as discourse. In this approach, a visible unit of the LL is understood to mediate between a sign instigator and a sign viewer. The sign viewer is often a passing stranger whom the sign instigator will try to engage as an interlocutor. While the sign viewer’s reply is usually not articulated linguistically, it can be understood in light of the viewer’s subsequent behaviour, understanding, affect, or other modes of reply. The LL unit is seen as a performance which displays text in particular ways that are shaped by the pragmatic intentions of the sign instigator, discourse framing, and LL genre. This perspective argues against the restriction of the LL to written units. Urban diversity in the LL is thus understood in terms of a set of separate but interrelated discourses. In addition to examples of conversational maxims and speech acts at work, the chapter examines the overseas Irish pub as a complex LL genre, using data from New York, Chicago, Montreal, Liverpool, and Vienna.

Chapter 3, Figures of Risk: Memoirs of a Chinese South African and a Cameroonian in China, features two memoirs of diaspora – from a South African of Chinese descent and a Cameroonian student in the PRC. Both represent the vicissitudes of diasporic mobility in Africa–China relations. They conceptualize mobility through the complex interplay between racial identity, government bureaucracy, threat of imprisonment, personal risk, and economic gain. This chapter shifts the focus to figures of risk, embodied by the gambler and the trickster. As memoirs, these narratives foreground how an individual positions their cultural identity (Hall), complicating and even subverting the official narratives of Africa–China relations through an explicit claim to lived experience. By focusing on these autobiographical writings, I expand the concept of the alluvial to mean the accretions and erosions of everyday life, whether material or metaphysical, acquired through interactions with Others. The texts exemplify cultural creolizations that play (or gamble) with the alluvium of diasporic experience.

In the Conclusion, Forming Afro-Chinese Worlds, I deepen my discussion of aesthetics by focusing explicitly on the literary forms that writers use to imagine Afro-Chinese worlds. I make one last conceptual intervention by theorizing alluvial form (how a narrative texturizes the matrix of space and time through water and sediment, reconfiguring “worldliness”) with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019). This novel approaches the topic of Africa–China relations by fictionalizing the real-life story of a Kenyan woman found to have Chinese DNA. Through short, proleptic bursts that mimic waves rolling into shore, the novel reanimates the Indian Ocean as the primary site of exchange between the Swahili coast and southern China. The text counters the dehumanizing discourse surrounding Africa–China relations, using literary form anchored in the sociocultural histories of East Africa and so representing China in and on its own terms. I end by considering the fractal form of history, or the underlying process of creolization that I have teased out of how each chapter conceptualizes the alluvial.