This chapter deals with the interrelationships between forms of American English and Caribbean English and creoles, both past and present. Close demographic connections between the North American mainland and what was to become the Anglophone Caribbean have existed since the earliest days of colonial settlement. Later, American linguistic influence spread in the region through institutional links, occasional visits or migration by Caribbean nationals for work or education, and tourism as well as television. During the present age of globalisation, American English has extended its range and impact considerably, both worldwide and in the Caribbean. At the same time, individual Caribbean creoles such as Jamaican have also influenced the development of English in North America, by way of diaspora communities, the global success of reggae, dancehall and Rastafarianism, and the use of ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ on the web.

The word griot has been linked with hip-hop since its early days in the 1980s, but it is a fragile connection. Initially used by French travelers to West Africa who thought they were using a local term, it refers to hereditary praise singers, instrumentalists, and oral historians. Although there is some overlap between what modern-day rappers and griots do, there are also some significant differences, especially in their social status and roles in society. If rap has distant origins in Africa, dispersed via the transatlantic slave trade, and come back transformed, then how can we think about the highly specialized skills and roles of griots in Africa, their inspirations in the diaspora, and their intersections with rappers? Tracing the institution of griots in western Africa and charting how the term took root and expanded in the US will help us appreciate their congruencies and incompatibilities with hip-hop.

The chapter examines how India’s emergence as the world’s largest source of international migrants has affected its economy. It first provides a brief framework to understand international migration’s economic effects, arguing that these depend on selection and sorting effects inherent in migration: who goes, how many go, where they go, why they go and how many return. It then examines the different mechanisms and magnitudes of these effects through different types of financial flow via both the current account (remittances) and the capital account (bank deposits, bonds, FDI), via the network effects of the diaspora on trade and via human capital effects due to a ‘brain drain’. It concludes by arguing that the economic effects of migration on India have depended primarily on factors within India. People leave for a reason and will invest only if it makes financial sense to do so.

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.

Co-written with Hala Jaber, John Nutekpor, and Ewa Żak-Dyndał, this chapter explores the concept of folk music within the framework of migration and discourses of belonging. It takes as its point of departure the experiences of the author, a child of Irish migrants to America, now working in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, and three of her doctoral students from Palestine, Ghana, and Poland. The paradoxes often inherent in the concept of folk music are further complicated by the experience of migration in the twenty-first century. An exploration of recent scholarship on music and diaspora, migration, and social inclusion demonstrates the power of ‘folk music’ as a fluid, imagined concept within which identity and belonging can be negotiated. The chapter includes three case studies related to performance research with new migrant communities in Ireland. It concludes that migration fosters the need to create new imaginaries of belonging and that music is a primary strategic resource in this endeavour.

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.