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Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities Avtar Brah London: Routledge, 1996 (reprinted 1998) ISBN 0-415-12126-4
Cartographies of diaspora ... nice title, but what does it mean? Well, literally, it means maps of or mapping of diasporas. To assume, however, that this book describes and catalogues the various diasporic formations of the late 20th century would be to prejudge it and overlook its ambition. In fact, diaspora, which Brah argues should be seen as a conceptual category rather than a descriptive one, is the channel through which she endeavours to think through and also rethink some of analytical categories which contemporary cultural discourse seems to now take for granted-difference, universalism, identity, ethnicity-and in the process she offers a new theoretical perspective from which to examine the relationship between 'culture' and the massive social, political and economic transformations of the context of the late 20th century.
The one trope which threads itself irresistably into the fabric of...