The need to revisit approaches to diasporic epistemology is necessitated by the continually changing contours of diasporic communities and exchanges. This panel aims to present three unique and noteworthy presentations that explore emerging lexicons of race, gender and sexuality across geographically distant diasporas through imaginative and innovative frameworks of analysis. This special session is timely: it asserts that examinations of diasporas cannot be nationally bound and need to consider the intimacies and circularities across racialized geographies of the world. Additionally, a focus on non-fiction writing and short stories also considers generic imperatives of epistemologies and archives that have been built on novelistic narratives.

Diasporas have been explored exhaustively through the lens of ‘creolization,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘assimilation,’ ‘globalization,’ and ‘transnationalism,’ and panelists of this session will explore how these conceptions are historically situated and ultimately explore ways to historicize the contours of scholarship on diasporas through historical specificities. Building on foundational scholarship by William Safran, Stuart Hall, Khachig Tölölyan, James Clifford, Brent Hays Edwards, Juan Flores, Vijay Mishra, Aihwa Ong, Rhacel Parreñas, Gayatri Gopinath, Omise’eke Tinsley and Yomaira C Figueroa-Vásquez (among others), this panel focuses on new frameworks of diasporic analyses. Each paper makes a broad, and valuable claim, to re-think the historiography and cultural theory related to diasporas, while focusing on specific imaginative and historical texts that explore imperial legacies of racism and racialization in the diaspora (such that it dovetails with Black/African diaspora studies and postcolonial feminist studies).

To promote audience engagement, we have three panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers, preceded by 3-4 minutes of introductions and welcome note, which will leave us with 20 minutes for broader discussion. The respondent will pose questions both to the panelists and the audience so that a lively discussion can ensue. We will begin with “The Content and the Form: Articulations of a Twenty-First Century African Diasporic Identity in the work of Goli Guerreiro” by Marisol Fila. Marisol examines the historical fiction piece titled “Alzira está Morta: Ficção histórica no mundo negro do Atlántico” (2015) by Goli Guerreiro as part of a trilogy to consider the multimodal mediation of Afro-Atlantic histories through Portuguese-Brazilian writings. She explores the contentious and imbricated relations between content and form (through its digital inhabitance) to explore contemporary circulations of Black Atlantic diasporic identities through Portuguese digital exchanges across Brazil and the Americas more broadly. Marisol’s focus on non-Anglophone writing and its histories unfolds conversations about linguistic heterogeneity that will be valuable for the 2021 presidential focus on multilingualism.

Suchismita Banerjee in “Anglo-Indian Migration and the Politics of Minoritization” takes up overlooked concerns of racial, religious and gendered exclusion of Anglo-Indian communities in post-independence India through a close-reading of Esther Mary Lyons’ Unwanted: Memoirs of an Anglo-Indian daughter of Rev. Michael De Lisle Lyons of Detroit, Michigan (2005). Addressing gaps in in postcolonial (and settler colonial) histories of the South Asian subcontinent, Banerjee unpacks the lexicon of descriptions used for descendants of Indian women and European men, often times abusive and ethnic slurs such as ‘half-caste,’ ‘Anglo’ and ‘Chi Chi,’ to explore the gendered racialization of the memoirist through continual circuits of migration across India, United States and Australia. As with Fila, Banerjee’s focus on non-fiction only broadens questions of representation and mediation in diasporic lived experiences.

Finally, the formal part of the session ends with Tuli Chatterji’s paper titled “What is Diasporic Consciousness?” Her presentation reorients South Asian diaspora studies in a global frame by focusing on systems of racial exclusion in the United States, South Africa, Tanzania and England. Focusing on contemporary short stories that represent moments of racial violence, Chatterji’s presentation examines the production and inheritance of intimate knowledge of survival that carve “new ways of understanding global citizenship.” This presentation is valuable for its investment in analytical frameworks of race and racialization in South Asian diaspora studies, that has otherwise long been focused on cultural diffusion and hybridity.

In closing, the respondent, Ammar Naji, will offer comments by mapping the common threads across the presentations based on his own research on Arab and North African diasporas. These three papers all challenge the notion that diasporas are always in flux, and instead focus on transnational circulations of knowledge and lexicons alongside people. Finally, we will stimulate the audience to ask new questions about how multilingualism of global diasporas proliferates and expands contemporary lexicons of diasporic epistemology on a global scale.