Liminal diasporas in the era of COVID-19

Introduction: Defining liminal diasporas

As the end of the first quarter of the 21st century approaches, scholars of migration, diaspora, and empire studies are witness to global, interlinked crises that behove us to urgently rethink the ways in which “diaspora” has been conceived. Historically defined as populations that have been dispersed or displaced, diasporic communities today are adrift in the tumult of the global coronavirus pandemic that has exacerbated the contraction of economies and the closure of borders that might have once provided a safe port, or at least safe passage, to those forced to flee. Dehumanization of historically marginalized citizen-subjects (for instance, people of colour; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual [LGBTQIA+] people; migratory labourers) stages the broader sense in which, as a species, we are as much rethinking individual relations with one another as with our species’ relation to animals and the Earth. Indeed, the Anthropocene’s “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarty 2009, 201) is itself silhouetted by what Thomas Nail (2019) has called “the Kinocene”, an epoch of movement characterized by the ontological sense of an era in which movement as much convulses human beings as it does life itself. To be is to be agitated.

As such, together with political upheaval and the rising spectre of authoritarian regimes around the globe, as well as competing interests and militancy for natural, human, and even extra-terrestrial resources, we are compelled to propose an investigation into what we call “liminal diasporas”. In Norbert Bugeja’s (2012) formulation, “[t]he notion of the limen (Latin for ‘threshold’)” signifies the boundary between one structure or another and the movement between them; the limen becomes a metaphor for a “state of existing on the threshold of experiential or discursive conditions, or in the interstices or peripheries of social, political and cultural normative structures” (2). For Victor Turner (1969) in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure,

[t]he attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial. (95)

In this Special Focus of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, we read “liminal diasporas” as subjective bodies in motion that are dangerously marked by difference, otherness, alterity, and precarity. Such migratory figures precariously occupy the twilight zone between Foucault’s (2007, 2008) notion of “biopolitics” (which captures the administration of life and populations as biopolitical subjects yoked to a political rationality of governance) and Achille Mbembe’s (2003) notion of “necropolitics” – the sociopolitical power to expose a person, even of one’s own community, to political, social, and/or civil death. Liminal diasporas, according to this theoretical framing, are ambivalent communities because they may be exposed to death in Mbembe’s sense or else illustrate the regimentation, domination, and control of those powers that serve to at once condition and produce subjects as argued in Michel Foucault’s (2008, 27–29) formulation of biopolitics. In the age of COVID-19, xenophobia and racism have been amplified globally and produced liminal diasporas as highly precaritised entities.

In addition, as Ashley Dawson (2017) argues, “[a]s environmental disruptions proliferate across the globe, a condition well described as climate apartheid is becoming increasingly apparent. Climate apartheid encompasses the hardening of borders and restrictions on the movements of those affected by environmental and social disruptions” (194). Dawson’s pairing of climate change with South Africa’s apartheid system is a powerful heuristic through which we can read how climate change and race both characterize the liminality of diasporas today, opening them to scrutiny as disciplinary regimes of territoriality and movement. That is, the sign of the refugee is one that lacks the migratory privilege of cosmopolitan citizens who wield passports of privilege as they travel across the world. In the context of climate apartheid in the era of COVID-19, globe-trotting has thus become a far rarer phenomenon, short-stopped by closed borders as advised by world health officials. Meanwhile, outside national borders, desperate refugees are impacted by planetary catastrophes ranging from environmental disasters to the current COVID-19 pandemic that reify Dawson’s conceptualization of global apartheid.

Global changes marked by climate, disease, racism, and forfeitures of humanity have contributed to the proliferation of what we characterize as “liminal diasporas”. They highlight a crisis that has been occurring in plain view for generations and is painfully reminiscent of Vijay Mishra’s (2007) conceptualization of the Indian diaspora as one among many steeped in trauma and mourning (118). These diasporic groups, as Mishra argues, live on the threshold of society, enduring a life of segregation and oppression, marked by difference underscored by mourning for lost homelands, in the everyday practices of living. Liminal diasporas must not only negotiate languages (of homelands left behind and of adopted homelands in which they now find themselves), but often have to adapt or create their own language if they are to have a voice at all. In this way, to be, to belong, is not something measured by its proximity to what is already said, to what has always (traditionally) been said – it is rather something that is in fact yet to be said. As such, the very notion of a liminal diaspora articulates the sense in which the real challenge is not to establish increasingly better formulations of identity (more granular, more porous) but rather to think in terms that involve new and unforeseen tectonic alignments rather than sedimentation – a transformation rather than a transposition.

We would here note that liminal diasporas, namely those targeted by the state, are not exclusively helpless. Rahul K. Gairola (2016) describes a process of producing new spaces of belonging in which queer Black and Brown postcolonial diasporas strategically engage. Rather than being conscripted by the nation state into mythologies of “homeland”, transgressive diasporic subjects learn to wield their losses as privileges in everyday gestures of inclusive activism through the transformative praxis of “homelanding”. For Gairola,

[a]s a verb that describes a process of resistance and reappropriation rather than an adjective that crystallizes identity, “homelanding” is a key hermeneutical act that recognizes social articulations of belonging that are historically anterior to national metanarratives. [ ... ] “Homelanding” is an active process of culturally resisting and reappropriating exclusive domestic sites that consolidate essentialist social articulations of the homeland. (2016, 17)

Such a process of remaking the conditions of belonging that are territorialized across the globe historically warrants not simply a power of the people as exemplified by the anti-Marcos uprising in The Philippines in February 1986 (Gairola 2016, 121), but also the notion of people’s power with respect to “public power” in the realm of energy accessibility through a model of participatory governance (Dawson 2020, 172–173). Such control occurs even as these conflicts regulate, through deficits of sustenance and energy, the health and well-being of individual lives and their linked families and support (eco)systems.

The migratory precariat: Recent scholarly trends

The articles in this Special Focus offer new ways in which we may critically meditate on liminal diasporas of the 21st century in historical and cultural contexts that are intertwined with various global articulations of liminality with respect to diaspora. Many of them emerge from the June 2019 “Recalibrating Diasporas: Asia Pacific and the Spaces Beyond” conference held at Murdoch University in Greater Perth, Western Australia, and co-sponsored by the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Sweden. The articles traverse gender, sexuality, state power, and even life beyond death in our precarious times. To this extent, they critically track the complicated ways in which liminal diasporas are both targets and survivors, characterized by the contemporary global precariat. We have thus curated the articles that offer glimpses into the possible sights and sites, and routes and roots, of liminal diasporas in the exceptionally challenging times of COVID-19.

Bidisha Banerjee’s “Picturing Precarity” examines representations of liminal diasporas in Leila Abdelrazaq’s (2015) graphic novel, Baddawi. In contrast to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) meta-vision of victimized “bare life”, Banerjee reads the refugee camp as a home space that consolidates community. She sees the refugee crisis of the 21st century as one of the most challenging in recent times, since it is estimated that today more than 68 million people are displaced from their homes. Banerjee observes that the last decade has witnessed the publication of many graphic novels that are considered refugee graphic narratives, many of them set in the Arab world or written by writers from there. Baddawi is based on the story of Abdelrazaq’s father Ahmad who spent the first ten years of his life in Baddawi, a camp for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Banerjee details that camps such as Baddawi, established in 1955, are unique models of refugee diasporic space wherein a temporary, liminal space becomes a diasporic “home” for millions.

Critics including Agamben have theorized the refugee camp as a space where the state of exception becomes permanent and the undocumented migrant is stripped of all rights and reduced to “bare life” (Agamben 1998, 168–169). Banerjee contends, however, that in the absence of statehood, nationality, or citizenship, refugees have no option but to embrace their refugee status as liminal diasporas. Despite the precarity and violence of these camps, they become spaces of diasporic belonging and even, ultimately, spaces of comfort and return. That is, Banerjee’s contribution frames resistance to precarity as surfacing in the sullen deathscape of exclusion in graphic narrative camps like Baddawi. In doing so, the article calls for a renewed understanding of diasporic identity and belonging in conflict settings while signalling how security and surveillance apparatuses deploy “disease” as a strategy to justify exclusion and exposure to border violence.

Christopher Ian Foster’s timely article “‘Leave to quit boundaries’: Danger, Precarity, and Queer Diasporas in the South Asian Caribbean” follows and extends our examination of liminal diasporas to the novels of A.R.F. Webber and Shani Mootoo. In Foster’s formulation, these narratives compel readers to critically evaluate how racialized genders and sexualities shape liminal diasporas in the Caribbean. The rise of nationalist and neoliberal capitalism does not mark an antipathy to, but rather a successful recolonization of, the global south and continued marginalization of communities in overdeveloped countries. This neo-imperialism creates displacement, diasporas, and the mass production of refugees. What invariably results is the policing of that migration at the borders of the global north that vainly protects its ill-gotten property with walls, barriers, cages, and dehumanizing discourses of invasion, criminality, and weaponized ideologies. To this end Foster assesses contemporary and historical diasporas through the lens of queer Black phenomenology with postcolonial-materialist analyses of immigration.

Specifically, A.R.F. Webber’s ([1917] 1988) novel, Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters, which explores East Indian labourers on Guyanese plantations, conjoins migration and sexuality within larger colonial systems of economics, race, class, and gender norms. In contrast, Shani Mootoo’s (2008) novel Valmiki’s Daughter critically demonstrates how the complex lives of those harbouring transgressive desire alternatively are shaped, and how they are often on the move, intersecting with the objects and conditions of migration itself, from big oil in Trinidad and its local and global displacements to colonial heteronormativity and a dislocation of desires in the present. When comparatively read together, both South Asian Caribbean texts reveal incisive, new narrative sites framing the recalibration of diaspora in increasingly necessary tactics which challenge neo-fascism by facilitating queer belonging against the nation state’s heteronormative xenophobia.

Payel Pal’s “Nostalgia and Memories of Homeland: Reading the Narratives of Diaspora and Crises of Identity in Susan Abulhawa’s Fictions” considers themes of displacement and nostalgia for homeland in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (Abulhawa 2010) and The Blue Between Sky and Water (Abulhawa 2015). Pal addresses the importance of literary representation in capturing moments of humanity and bringing new perspectives into focus, particularly forgotten and/or marginalized narratives. The significance of Abulhawa’s works is that it bestows a voice on Palestinians in exile through an exploration of nationhood without a nation. Pal investigates the reconstruction of the homeland through nostalgic acts of remembrance aimed at the rediscovery of cultural identity through her close reading of the novels. Here, she considers the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through three conceptual models of the nation state (primordialist, constructivist, and instrumentalist), thus illuminating parts of a vast web of discord while contextualizing the complex generational trauma and grief that haunts the displaced Palestinian community.

Pal’s reading of both texts excavates their representations of the dismantling of Palestine’s national sovereignty and the re-forging of a nationalist consciousness with later generations of refugees. Mornings in Jenin traces the consequences of dispossession through the experiences of a four-generation Palestinian family spanning many years of conflict and trauma. Abulhawa deploys nostalgic storytelling to construct cultural memories in younger generations born into refugee camps, and later, the United States. The Blue Between Sky and Water is a narrative of solidarity and resilience, portraying the optimism of Arab women torn from their homes coming together to form an exilic community. While many of its characters die uprooted and disconnected, the protagonist Nur represents hope as she discovers dignity and strength in the refugee camps. While a cycle of violence churns on, fragmented notions of homeland provide social links between the dispossessed. Pal’s contribution thus illuminates the complex role of nostalgia in reconstructing an alternative Palestine and provides a timely discussion of the trauma faced by displaced Palestinians.

The fourth article in the issue, Luke Brown’s “Disabled Movement beyond Metaphor in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea”, delivers an unexpected but relevant angle to liminal diasporas. Brown’s article offers a brief analysis of disabled movement in relation to the Indian Ocean littoral, including a concerted examination of the disciplinary gap between disability studies and Indian Ocean studies. The use of “disability as metaphor” in a range of literary and cultural texts “effaces attention to the individual, embodied experience of disability [ ... and] the symbol eclipses the materiality of the actual body, erasing [its] complex, lived realities” (Watts Belser 2015, 63). In order to resuscitate these “complex, lived realities” for disabled subjects, particularly corporeal forms must be re-emphasized in literary analysis. Close readings of material rather than metaphorical representations of disability in two key works of recent Indian Ocean literature, The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (2011) and By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah (2001), evince the generative potential of investigating these individual embodied experiences in both texts.

Brown attends to the nuances of embodied disability and debility through critical readings of these novels that complicate understandings of disabled subjects. They reframe disability as a site of colonial power struggles, offering a divergent understanding of such conditions beyond contexts that disability studies often assume: the borders of the Atlantic and largely white subjects. Disability operates divergently from other standard power differentials; paradoxically, it both disempowers disabled people and offers modes of resistance to dominant hierarchies including gender, race, and nationality. Close readings of The Cat’s Table and By the Sea reveal that within Indian Ocean literature, disability is not merely a marginalized identity, an experience of debility, or an allegory for the colonized subject. Rather, it is also a site of colonial control and resistance. These texts portray the disabled pretender (the character who role-plays a disability for a brief time) as the one most ready to benefit from the myriad possibilities that disability – in the context of migration – affords. Disability is, in both texts, the key cipher for migration out of the Indian Ocean although disabled migrants remain a lacuna in much critical scholarship.

Felix Ndaka’s contribution focuses on NoViolet Bulawayo’s (2013) deployment of children’s play/games and photography by reading her We Need New Names as a text that represents African encounters and contacts with global modernity. Here, the notion of liminality in diaspora extends to children as nascent communities with particular expressions of longing and forms of adaptation. It poses children’s games and mobility as interpretive schemas that can be used to analyse intimate experiences of foreign spaces/powers in ways that centre childhood as an important site for grappling with larger social-political issues at a time when national borders are porous and permeable to globalizing forces. Ndaka’s article, moreover, examines photography as an archive that mobilizes and disseminates power-laden narratives in hierarchical regimes of representation. Thus, photography’s epistemic violence can be historically traced to Africa–west encounters. While analysing symbolic performances of these non-hegemonic characters and their experiencing of north–south and south–south encounters, this article also homes in on Bulawayo’s representation of how they engender forms of agency and resistance that trouble hegemonic representational and epistemic regimes.

Ndaka demonstrates that the narratives’ cultivated exhibitionism of “poverty porn” is ultimately an authorial ploy designed to redirect, implicitly and explicitly, these images back to the voyeuristic northern subject and to present a trenchant critique of epistemological certainty and coherence of the western gaze. Bulawayo’s engagement with unequal north/south relations and contacts necessitates a reconsideration of Africa’s social, economic, and political realities in a world wherein configurations of power permeate and shape the everyday. The novel’s title, We Need New Names, drives this imperative not only to rethink the certainties of the names and narratives we fashion about ourselves and our contemporary realities, but also to rethink our position in an acutely entangled, interconnected world. Bulawayo does this by representing children’s games and photography – seemingly innocuous, everyday activities – as avenues through which we grapple with conditions of global power relations as they either mobilize or disintegrate into the local (Ndaka 2018, 90). Bulawayo’s portrayal of such encounters forges a link between this modernity and the historical in tactics that compel a return to the political processes involved in constructing the everyday. This further reveals the multifaceted and fragmented facet of global diasporic modernity.

Finally, “Necropolitics in a Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Diaspora”, co-authored by Lauren O’Mahony, Melissa Merchant, and Simon Order, deploys Achille Mbembe’s (2003) notion of “necropolitics” to critically examine the vicissitudes of life and death in the ghastly dystopia of American Multinational Cable’s (AMC)’s popular television series The Walking Dead (2010–present). The co-authors first situate the series within the wider zombie genre while reading zombies as liminal diasporic figures swinging between life and death. The series transports viewers into an apocalyptic zombie plague in a parallel present. Set in Georgia, USA, it follows a group of individuals torn from their usual lives and thrust into a brutal daily struggle to survive. Existence, meagre as it sometimes is, occurs in the gaps between life and death: the main characters face ongoing outside threats from the walking dead zombies (known as “walkers”) as well as sinister, vigilante survivors. Threat moreover emanates from within: everyone is infected with the unknown biological agent that reanimates the dead. Even if they die a “natural” death, they will become an organism that is “dead” but partially living, a liminal chimera of sorts that is always moving between death and life.

For the main characters, this is an upside-down world, a “state of exception” (Agamben 1998); despite the show’s protagonist being a police officer, governance and law have dissolved in favour of fluid situational decisions that determine life or death. O’Mahony, Merchant and Order deploy Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” to explore life-and-death dilemmas and the protagonists’ fraught relations to survivalism and governance in many episodes. Frequently the costs of protecting too much or not empowering enough are elucidated for the audience: strategically placed child-zombies including “dead kindred” remind the characters and viewers exactly what is at stake for liminal diasporas among the walking dead. The Walking Dead’s representation of these two discourses is accompanied by a range of justifications, particularly around the use of firearms. The article invokes the Special Focus’s concerns through spectres of contagion, disease, and borders – those between the human and the non-human and between secure and dangerous zones that symbolize the liminalities of human beings transmogrified into diseased zombies in the age of COVID-19.

Conclusion: Endemic pandemics

Each of the contributions in this Special Focus provides a close reading of fictional texts that illuminate the realities faced by the displaced, the “other”, the dehumanized multitudes. They examine the precarity of life and raise questions about those forces that both separate us yet bring us together (again). In the age of COVID-19, these questions have become most pertinent. With the world in a shared crisis and borders between countries and regions closed, movement between spaces is strictly controlled. Like the haunting images of refugees ensnared in a labyrinth of razor wire atop mesh metal walls in British Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A.’s (2015) gripping music video Borders, the casualties of human folly excavated by these articles reveal situated lives oscillating between life and death in ways that culture must acknowledge and address. Whether examining “temporary” refugee camps depicted in Baddawi, or the challenges faced by queer, Black communities, or the longing for belonging experienced by displaced Palestinians, or the “slow violence” enforced on postcolonial states, or a literal zombie apocalypse, these Special Focus contributions share a common predicament of lives weighed against one another with some being valued more than others against the backdrop of migration.

War, famine, disease, disability, ethnic pogroms, refugee and ecological crises – all of these have resulted in displacement, alienation, erasure of identity, and precarity through danger and difference that have exponentially magnified in the era of COVID-19. Containment of the pandemic assumes a hope of life “returning to normal” while the segregation of a “type” of person does not. In the words of Pallavi Rastogi (2020) in her compelling book Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, “[d]isasters always have catastrophic consequences not only for individuals but also for the larger collectivities to which they belong” (14). Whatever the outcome, these articles insist that it is the stories we tell that help us make sense of the world. As they demonstrate, times of extraordinary crisis and disaster are not so extraordinary, or at the very least have become more and more unexceptional. Our goal here has been to name these themes and fuse them to a social, historical, and ethical reality – a history of the present that can serve as an ethical map for ourselves and future generations through the concept of “liminal diasporas”.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes on contributors

Rahul K. Gairola

Rahul K. Gairola is The Krishna Somers lecturer in English and postcolonial literature and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the co-editor and author/co-author of five books including Memory, Trauma, Asia (forthcoming, 2021), South Asian Digital Humanities (2020), Migration, Gender and Home Economics in Rural North India (2019), and Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (2016). He previously taught at The City University of New York, USA, and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. He is (with associate professor Bina Fernandez, University of Melbourne) co-editor of the Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Book Series.

Sarah Courtis

Sarah Courtis is an Associate Lecturer of career learning at Murdoch University in Western Australia. In 2019, she earned a PhD on the lyric in musical theatre, for which she wrote the book and lyrics of 2084: A Musical (2016). Her academic interests are varied, as she has presented on Shakespeare, musical theatre, Tolkien studies, and diasporas. She is a fellow of Advance HE and works as a theatre practitioner.

Tim Flanagan

Tim Flanagan lectures in philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His research examines ongoing themes in the history of philosophy, especially with regard to the development of topics in aesthetics and metaphysics. He is co-editor (together with Wahida Khandker) of the series Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy and author of the forthcoming monograph Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze: The Art of Least Distances. He previously taught at Dundee, Greenwich and Wolverhampton universities in the UK.