The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an interface between these overlapping interdisciplinary endeavours of literary studies, legal studies, and diaspora studies. In doing so, it explores new approaches and invites new perspectives on diasporas, migration and the disciplines that study them, hopefull also adding to the cultural resources of coping with a swiftly changing social landscape in a globalizing world.

This work attempts to counteract the essentialism of originary thinking in the contemporary era by providing a new reading of a relatively understudied corpus of literature from a ambivalently stereotyped diasporic group, in order to rethink and problematise the concept of diaspora as a spatial concept. As work situated in the Law-in-Literature movement, beyond the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, this book aims to construct a ‘literary jurisprudence’ of diaspora space, deconstructing space in order to question what it means to be ‘settled’ in literary refractions of the lawscape by drawing on refractions of case law in a corpus of texts by Romani authors. These texts are used as hermeutic framings to draw unique spatio-temporal landscapes through which the reader can explore the refractive, reflective, interpretative conditions of legality as a crucible in which to theorise law.The radical intent of this work, therefore, is to deconstruct jurisprudential spatial order in order to theorize diaspora space, in the context of the Roma Diaspora. This work will offer readers new possibilities to re-imagine diaspora through law and literature and provides an innovative critical interdisciplinary analysis of the shaping of space.

Examines the current deportation system in the United States, the aftermath effects, and the political, social and legal issues.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

Drawing on extensive archival and library sources, Karsten explores these collisions and arrives at a number of conclusions that will surprise.

Today, law is no longer homogenous or unquestioned. Different overlapping legal systems constantly interfere with one another, both on an international level, in complex transnational contexts such as the European Union or human rights law, but also in the context of cultural diversity or conflicts between religious norms and civil institutions, between minorities and the power of the state. On the other hand, the neutrality of law is also under growing pressure, be it from different global transnational players, or from within nation states where calls are made to adapt law to the will of "the people." The heated European debate on the "refugee crisis" has made it manifest that law is more necessary than ever and yet fundamentally contested, perhaps even caught in contradictions and self-limitations. At the same time, the current perspective on legal problems allows us to address issues of diversity and the role of Europe in the globalized world more clearly. The articles of this book take these recent developments and debates as a starting point to discuss from the perspective of different disciplines the pressing question of how to live together in the new millennium and how to figure the long history of law before, besides, and after the dominant paradigm of state law.

Diaspora is an ancient term that gained broad new significance in the twentieth century. At its simplest, diaspora refers to the geographic dispersion of a people from a common originary space to other sites. It pulls together ideas of people, movement, memory, and home, but also troubles them. In this volume, established and newer scholars provide fresh explorations of diaspora for twenty-first century literary studies. The volume re-examines major diaspora origin stories, theorizes diaspora through its conceptual intimacies and entanglements, and analyzes literary and visual-cultural texts to reimagine the genres, genders, and genealogies of diaspora. Literary mappings move across Africa, the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Pacific Islands, and through Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Gulf, and Indian waters. Chapters reflect on diaspora as a key concept for migration, postcolonial, global comparative race, environmental, gender, and queer studies. The volume is thus an accessible and provocative account of diaspora as a vital resource for literary studies in a bordered world.

Spatial Justice and Diaspora brings the concept of spatial justice into conversation with empirical studies of racism and displacement, challenging and extending critical discussions of place, socio-spatiality, identities, and the juridico-political order. The volume brings together work exploring the conceptual and practical meaning of diaspora through a broad range of grounded studies, ranging from Palestinian street protest in Chile, to poetry written in Guantanamo Bay, to everyday practices of Ethiopian homemaking in Sweden. In so doing, it adds to theoretical explorations of spatial justice a keen attentiveness to lived experiences of the local, while also questioning any romanticized or essentialist reading of diaspora. Bringing to the fore innovative interdisciplinary scholarship, Spatial Justice and Diaspora offers a new critical intervention at the intersection of these fields.

In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison's Beloved and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen's Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

This collection of essays examines the worldwide dispersal of Asian populations and links these seemingly disparate movements through the category of Asian diasporas.