Gallego, Mar and Isabel Soto, eds. The Dialectics of Diasporas: Memory, Location and Gender. Valencia: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans, PUV, 2009.
This volume reflects the evolution in the field of diasporic
studies. The essays have been grouped into two sections. The
first, Articulating the African Diaspora, takes as its object the
experience(s) of Afro-diasporic individuals; the second, entitled
Diasporic Encounters Elsewhere, casts a wider net and focuses
on literary representations of diaspora ranging from that of
Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans and white Anglo-Europeans.
Likewise, not the least interesting aspect of this volume is the
manifold ways in which Paul Gilroy has been re-theorized and
applied to a variety of writings—from canonical African
American texts such as Paule Marshall’s Praise Song for the
Widow, to texts of a broader diasporic family: Bharati
Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter, among others. Indeed, the essays bear testimony to
diaspora as an experience which potentially can—and does—affect all peoples, so much so
that diaspora becomes metonymically representative of lived experience itself.