Diaspora and Multiculturalism : : Common Traditions and New Developments.

• Superior document: Cross/Cultures
• VerfasserIn: Fludernik, Monika,
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : BRILL,, 2003.; ©2003.
• Year of Publication: 2003
• Language: English
• Series: Cross/Cultures
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (461 pages)

In postcolonial theory we have now reached a new stage in the succession of key concepts. After the celebrations of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, it is now the concept of diaspora that has sparked animated debates among postcolonial critics. This collection intervenes in the current discussion about the 'new' diaspora by placing the rise of diaspora within the politics of multiculturalism and its supercession by a politics of difference and cultural-rights theory. The essays present recent developments in Jewish negotiations of diasporic tradition and experience, discussing the reinterpretation of concepts of the 'old' diaspora in late twentieth- century British and American Jewish literature. The second part of the volume comprises theoretical and critical essays on the South Asian diaspora and on multicultural settings between Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The South Asian and Caribbean diasporas are compared to the Jewish prototype and contrasted with the Turkish diaspora in Germany. All essays deal with literary reflections on, and thematisations of, the diasporic predicament.

Table of Contents

The diasporic imaginary : postcolonial reconfigurations in the context of multiculturalism / Monika Fludernik -- Dispelling the spells of memory : another approach to reading our yesterdays / Uma Parameswaran -- Between goldene medine and promised land : legitimizing the American Jewish diaspora / Ursula Zeller -- Diasporas of the mind : British-Jewish writing beyond multiculturalism / Bryan Cheyette -- Kindertransport : memory, identity and the British-Jewish diaspora / Beate Neumeier -- Cultural-rights theory : a view from the US-Mexican border / Feroza Jussawalla -- "Simple survival" in "Happy multicultural land"? : diasporic identities and cultural hybridity in the contemporary British novel / Roy Sommer -- Nonlinear dynamics and the diasporic imagination / Minoli Salgado -- Postponed arrivals : the Afro-Asian dispora in M.G. Vassanji's No new land? / Vera Alexander -- Writing across boundaries : South Asian diasporas and homelands / Makarand Paranjape -- Imagined communities as imaginary homelands : the south Asian diaspora in fiction / Monika Fludernik -- Diaspora studies and the culture of the African diaspora : the poetry of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite nd Linton Kwesi Johnson / Ulfried Reihardt -- The German-Turkish diaspora and multicultural German identity : hyphenated and alternative discourses of identity in the works of Zafer Senocak and Feridun Zaimoğlu.