Liminal Diasporas

Book excerpt: Liminal Diasporas: Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment offers readers a new lens through which to critically re-evaluate the necropolitics of migration. Using the term "liminal diasporas," the co-editors and range of authors define this notion as migratory bodies that are simultaneously subject to danger, violence, and precarious modalities of life. The chapters in this edited volume cover a range of topics including diasporic camp life for Palestinians, queer South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean, close readings of various texts, reformulations of "home" and "homeland," children’s play/games, and even representations of zombie diaspora. Overall, these chapters, along with the incisive Preface and Afterword that bookend them, offer compelling readings of what it means today to be a liminal diaspora before the era of COVID 19 into today’s woeful violence in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. Liminal Diasporas, as such, is a timely and urgent collection that compels us to rethink the human condition in relation to possibly the most material existential crises that our planet has ever witnessed. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.