Diasporic texts frequently grapple with the limits of normative kinship, confronting the inadequacy of traditional familial structures in addressing intergenerational trauma and dislocation. Building on scholarship from trauma theory (e.g., Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory), diaspora studies (e.g., Khanna, Gilroy, Hall), indigenous and settler colonial studies (e.g., Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Patrick Wolfe), and feminist and queer kinship studies (e.g., Judith Butler, David Eng, Kath Weston), this panel brings together scholars analyzing how literature stages the loss, reinvention, and political uses of kinship across diverse geographic and cultural contexts.
In a moment when global migration, environmental crisis, and neocolonial power structures continue to displace communities and fracture familial bonds, this panel argues that literature becomes a key site for both archiving historical loss and envisioning radical forms of solidarity and survival. By analyzing texts that refuse the comfort of closure or redemptive narratives, panelists address the ways in which kinship must be rethought in conditions of systemic abandonment.
The first paper, by Annette Beauchamp, focuses on Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, a diasporic biographical drama centered on pesticide poisoning in a California farmworker community. Beauchamp situates Moraga’s work within both Latinx environmental justice discourse and the broader tradition of U.S. diasporic resistance literature. Drawing on frameworks of subaltern memory and testimonio, this paper highlights how Moraga constructs forms of chosen kinship in the face of state neglect. The Valles family, and the wider community of McLaughlin, are framed not simply as victims but as active agents of survival whose familial ties become sites of protest and mourning. The paper also underscores how Moraga exposes the structural limits of kinship in a society that commodifies labor while rendering working-class, racialized communities disposable.
Alexandra Meany’s paper examines There There and Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange through the lens of indigenous kinship, reproductive futurity, and settler urbanity. Drawing from Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonial governance (e.g., Wolfe’s logic of elimination), Meany argues that Orange reclaims the figure of the “urban Indian” as a mode of intergenerational survival. Far from being a product of cultural loss, the urban Indian emerges in Orange’s novels as an enduring living memory, carried through reproduction, land-based relations, and alternative kin structures. Meany theorizes urban indigeneity not as disconnection but as a site of persistent resistance, through which Indigenous communities reproduce identity, memory, and political agency.
Eleanor Ty’s paper turns to Sabba Khan’s graphic memoir What Is Home, Mum? (originally The Roles We Play), which explores the tensions between cultural expectation, gender roles, and diasporic identity within a British Muslim context. Ty engages with life writing theory (Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson) and visual narrative studies to demonstrate how Khan uses spatial and architectural metaphors—rooms, windows, maps, and thresholds—to materialize the fragmented self and the weight of intergenerational memory. This memoir reconfigures the concept of “home” as both an emotional and political construct, navigating the pressures of racial performance, religious estrangement, and diasporic alienation. The paper offers a feminist reading of diasporic Muslim identity and reveals how autoethnography, when visualized, becomes a powerful tool for both critique and self-reclamation.
Together, these three papers offer a comparative, interdisciplinary exploration of displaced families, examining how diverse literary genres—biographical theater, graphic memoir, and indigenous contemporary fiction—respond to the disintegration of familial norms and the enduring legacies of colonial and neocolonial violence. The session will be structured as follows: 5 minutes introduction followed by three 15-minute presentations and 15–20 minutes of unstructured discussion. This format will foster substantive engagement with audience members, encouraging discussion around shared themes such as affective dislocation, nonnormative kinship, spatial belonging, and cultural survival.
This panel intentionally highlights a diversity of scholarly voices and texts, bringing together perspectives from Latinx, Indigenous, Muslim diasporic, and South Asian British experiences. The selected presenters come from varied institutional and disciplinary backgrounds, and the panel prioritizes intersectional approaches to race, gender, class, and geography. By situating familial dislocation within broader structures of power and resistance, this session contributes to urgent scholarly conversations about what it means to belong, to remember, and to care in times of political rupture and transnational upheaval.