Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”

The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

Music historiography has traditionally been based on ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that the nation state is the ‘natural’ context of analysis. As a result, migration tends to be treated as an exception to the rule of nationhood with its comforting myths of belonging and tradition. By contrast, this chapter argues that modernist music can be regarded as the music of exile. It focuses on the ‘normality of migration’, encompassing both forced and voluntary migration, and it covers areas such as the role of international composition teachers and the ‘dodecaphonic diaspora’, the way serialism came to be associated with resistance to fascism and migration. In addition to presenting individual case studies, it seeks to quantify the commonality of migration, using the composers performed at the Annual Festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), as a statistical basis. What this demonstrates is that, although mobility may not be the norm, neither is it an exception. Furthermore, it is one of the ways in which the transnational network that is integral to musical modernism has come into being.

The children of Afghan refugees provide important insight into the way that universities can be crucial sites of racial formation. This chapter explores how second-generation Afghan American college students navigate their racial and ethnic identities and build community on a college campus. The results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted at George Mason University, located in Northern Virginia, which is home to one of the largest Afghan diaspora populations in the country. Findings revealed the disparate impact that the withdrawal of the US military and subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States had on students, the role of family and collectivist culture in their decision-making, how ethnic student organizations were a method of ethnic preservation and co-ethnic support, and how attending a university with a large Afghan student population exposed internal conflicts within the community. This chapter provides important insight for universities aiming to create inclusive environments and support the diverse experiences of second-generation immigrants, Muslim, and Afghan American students.

Chinese can be found in most parts of the world. The signs in this chapter are mainly from the United States. A few are from Kyrgyzstan. Signs in the diaspora contexts are distinguished by the need to negotiate between Chinese and the local language(s), as Chinese is used to represent local contents. Both meaning-based translation and sound-based transliteration are used, as well as a combination of the two. Also notable are the dialectal elements. The language of the Chinese diaspora in North American is heavily Cantonese, as the earliest immigrants were from Cantonese speaking areas of China. Cantonese has also been adopted as sort of a lingua franca. Traditional characters are used as a rule, reflecting the dominance of traditional culture. The traditional vertical and right to left text orientation coexists with that of the modern horizontal and left to right format.

This chapter discusses a group of texts which can be categorized as ‘diaspora sagas’: sagas which take place largely in Greenland, Vínland, the Faroe Islands and Orkney, regions settled as a result of migration westward from Norway in the Viking Age. This group comprises four sagas, Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Grœnlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, and two þættir, Helga þáttr ok Úlfs and Grœnlendinga þáttr. The chapter discusses the rationale for considering these texts as a group, arguing that they are distinctive for their close focus on the diasporic experience and identifying the most prominent shared themes in these sagas, including settlement and voyaging, the political evolution of the diasporic communities and their relationship with the Norwegian kings, and the process of conversion to Christianity. It suggests that these sagas share an interest in the complex identities of their characters, which are explored in relation to Scandinavia, other regions of Europe and indigenous inhabitants encountered in the Vínland sagas. Finally, the chapter discusses the narrative mode of the diaspora sagas and outlines what is known of their origins, authorship and preservation.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

This chapter outlines the approach that Dasra took in the BacktheFrontline initiative to combine rapid response to the COVID crisis with building long-term resilience in helping India’s most vulnerable communities. As the pandemic’s second wave surged through India, Dasra’s BacktheFrontline initiative identified and reached local organisations that were serving the most vulnerable demographics in the remotest regions of the country. Drawing on insights from Dasra’s many years of experience, this chapter showcases several strategic aspects that the initiative embraces. From moving quickly to identify frontline needs, to ensuring that the right organisations were selected to develop a shortlist that had diversity in both geography and need, the Fund sought to meet urgent needs while simultaneously investing in longer-term resilience for marginalised populations. Dasra expanded its goal to raising a $50 million fund over five years, which includes an original $10 million that has been used for rapid deployment on rebuilding and strengthening communities deeply affected by COVID. By encouraging partners to assess progress and make course corrections in order to build resilience in adapting to community needs, Dasra, as this chapter shows, showcases institutional learning. The chapter also shows how dispersed philanthropic resources can be mobilised by nurturing a philanthropic community with shared values, and an aligned vision on what it takes to achieve large-scale change for India’s most vulnerable. It further shows how taking a long-term view allows for the nurturing of learning and multigenerational philanthropy in India that can ensure philanthropic funds flow to India and can be sustained for many years to come.

The title of this essay references two provocative discourses in contemporary critical conversation, both of which inform my reading of Ruth Gilligan’s extraordinary novel, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan (2016). “Afterlives” alludes to Paige Reynolds’ Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (2016), a volume that explores how the “themes, forms and practices of high modernism are manifest in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to that cultural movement.” Following Reynolds’ lead, this essay expands the idea of “afterlives” to include “diaspora” and “race” while constructing an archive of Irish–Jewish texts, both fictive and academic, for a novel that concerns the intersections of Irish and Jewish characters at three historical moments: the inaugural decade of the twentieth century, the years during and after World War II, and the fall of the Celtic Tiger economy in the present century.

This chapter explores enchantment and speculation as features of contemporary black literature, connecting earlier forms of Pan-Africanist gathering to twenty-first-century preoccupations with genre fiction and popular culture. As political critiques of racialized capitalism intensify to include queries about the fundamental assumptions of materialism, black authors in a variety of settings and genres have drawn on forms of the immaterial – religion, spirituality, magic, ghostly haunts – to ground and illuminate possibilities for black art and life. The chapter first contextualizes the historical background of contemporary black literature and then explores contemporary models of gathering or cohesion based on such radiant effects as the sound wave, the empathic transfer, and the spirit. Two novels by radically searching black writers, Erna Brodber and Octavia Butler, help ground the chapter, as both authors demonstrate the thematic and formal possibilities of nonmaterialist thinking in global black literature and culture. Brodber’s experimentation with ideas from a variety of Afro-descended religious traditions in tandem with Butler’s genre-inflected vision of apocalypse and survival present a vision of black collaboration across difference, timescape, and distance – and demonstrate a prevailing investment in the potential for black (re)gathering on the other side of, in the wake of, catastrophe.

In the early modern period, Japan emerged as a key node in global trading networks. While a vast range of goods were traded, Japan’s position was underpinned by the silk-for-silver exchange that acted as a powerful magnet for foreign merchants. This chapter aims to situate Japan within global trade by exploring the underlying commercial dynamic that drove engagement and the crowded commercial landscape that emerged as a result. The focus is, first, on successive challengers including the Portuguese, shuinsen merchants, the Dutch, the English, and the Chinese and, second, on Tokugawa attempts to channel trade through sanctioned pathways while cutting links with any group that might inject volatility into a precariously balanced system. The chapter concludes by examining the Zheng maritime organization, which emerged to challenge the Dutch East India Company for control over trade routes in East and Southeast Asia.

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.