diaspora fiction

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a body of literary works written by authors living outside their ancestral homelands or by writers whose communities have been dispersed by migration, exile, or forced displacement, and a critical framework for analysing how such works negotiate the experience of living between cultures, languages, and national identities; diaspora fiction characteristically explores themes of belonging and unbelonging, the gap between memory and reality in representations of the homeland, the experience of cultural hybridity and its costs and creativities, intergenerational tension between immigrants and their children, and the ways in which racial, ethnic, and cultural identity are transformed by the experience of migration; major figures in the global corpus include Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat, each of whom navigates the relationship between a specific diasporic experience and the wider questions of identity that diaspora makes urgent