CALL FOR PAPERS: Displacing Diasporas: How Diasporas Make and Unmake Empires and Nations

2026-10-15

Why is the term “diaspora” so difficult to define? For starters, throughout history it has had many definitions. Second and more importantly, it is difficult to define because the way diasporic communities use this term as an insider (emic), lived and embodied, varies from the way scholars use this term as an outsider (etic), within an analytical framework. For example, the initial use of “diaspora” referred to the dispersal of the Jews; this entailed a redemption narrative of exile and a return to a homeland. However, in “diaspora studies” the term is now more broadly applied to the migration of all ethnic groups, whether it be voluntary movement or involuntary displacement.

This Jewish longing for a homeland has become central to understanding the national identity formation of different diasporic communities. The State of Israel has co-opted this redemption story of exile to wage wars against its neighboring nations, justify settler colonialism, and most importantly, displace and diasporize the Palestinian people. At the same time, different diasporic peoples have similarly mirrored this logic in weaponizing their lack of a homeland to build nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism. One can see this in US immigration history and its current rise in anti-immigrant sentiments, as different diasporic communities compete for their exceptional “birthright” status while excluding one another as the “Other.” One can also see this in the history and rise of Hindu nationalism and the People’s Republic of China’s nationalism as their diasporic communities have been instrumentalized to support the imperial desires of the state and the elites. The difficulty of defining “diaspora” lies in how diasporas have leveraged their historically marginalized status to both advocate for the rights and responsibilities of self-determining communities living in precarious conditions, and buttress states and empires that further marginalize and effectively displace other groups while “becoming natives” themselves. We are looking for essays that wrestle with these apparent contradictions at the heart of the term “diaspora.”

Scholarship in the last three decades of diaspora studies, such as work by Madeline Hsu, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Paul A. Kramer, Lisa Lowe, and Shih Shu-Mei have increasingly challenged celebratory, nation-affirming, or homogenizing narratives of migration and belonging. They have identified contradictory narratives embedded in discourses of diaspora,  as narratives about communal self-determination, the rights of individuals and bodily autonomy, the longing for an imagined homeland and a shared past, and a celebration of diasporic multiculturalism have often propped up empires and nation-states vying for power within the structures of global capitalism.

We are looking for essays on literature, art, and culture that interrogate diasporic narratives for precisely these difficult and contradictory aspects, such as:

  • Essays that explore how diasporas have been displaced, and have had their identities weaponized to displace others.

  • Essays that expose how certain discourses of diaspora have been hijacked and displaced by imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist ideologies.

  • Essays that draw on indigenous studies to analyze and critique how diasporic communities become “natives” or “nativists” to a place they cannot claim indigeneity.

  • Essays that interrogate how diasporic literature, art, and culture are shaped by the geopolitics of global capitalism.

  • Essays that examine representations of the “good” or “model” immigrant accepted by the nation, and the representations of the “bad” or “difficult” immigrant excluded from the nation, and what roles such representations play vis-a-vis both diasporic communities and the nation-states they live in and between.

  • Essays that interrogate how dominant diasporic narratives often imagine the global north as a place of freedom and liberation for queer, trans, and/or disabled communities from the global south, even as these narratives sometimes exclude, circumscribe, demonize and/or selectively incorporate such communities.

  • Essays that explore the ways that diasporic queer communities have internalized logics of homonationalism, and/or resisted these logics.

Please send a 500-word proposal and short bio no later than December 15th, 2026 to guest editors Chienyn Chi (chienynchi@gmail.com), Amrita Mishra (mishraa@berea.edu), and Nicholas Bloom  (nfbloom@gmail.com). Contributors will be notified by January 15th, 2027; article drafts of 6000-9000 words will be due by May 30th, 2027 for double-blind peer review.

 

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature

ARIEL focuses on the critical and scholarly study of global literatures in English. The journal publishes original articles in postcolonial studies exploring colonial power and resistance as well as innovative scholarship on globalization, new forms and sites of exploitation, colonization, and decolonization in an age of transnational capitalism, displacement and diaspora studies, global ecocriticism, cultural and cross-cultural translation, and related areas. Founded in 1970 as one of the first journals in Commonwealth studies, ARIEL has remained at the forefront of postcolonial and world literature criticism, with readers and subscribers in more than 50 countries around the globe. Read more here: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/ariel-review-international-english-literature

Editors

Michael T. Clarke, University of Calgary
Kit Dobson, University of Calgary