African-Caribbean Women's Mobility and Self-Fashioning in Post-Diaspora Contexts.

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This research tests the effectiveness of 'post-diaspora' as a new concept and analytic tool. It asks how this concept can be used to reimagine new means by which African-Caribbean women achieve agency through mobility in twenty-first century contexts of globalization, transnationalism and deterritorialization. Post-diaspora is neither a departure from, nor a continuation of contemporary usages of diaspora: rather the 'post' signals a new problem space that allows us to imagine new futures, by focusing on mobility both as a defining feature of Caribbean identities and as a route to self-fashioning for African-Caribbean women. Rather than linear journeys that result in the reconstitution of a remembered past in a present of new physical and cultural geographies, post-diasporic journeys are rhizomatic: they radically configure the assumed significance of 'home' and 'away'. In rhizomatic journeys, roots are provisional and unfixed. Routes are often circuitous, and return - physical, rhetorical and economic - is a key component of African-Caribbean women's mobility (Trotz 2006; Trotz and Malone 2013; Reynolds 208, 2010). While contemporary engagements with concepts of diaspora emphasise loss of 'origin', displacement, 'genealogies of dispossession' (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002; Cho2007), the formulation 'post-diaspora' moves away from ideas of homeland as singular and discrete, and from the accompanying idea that feelings of longing constitute the diasporic subject. As a concept, it intervenes in attempts in contemporary scholarship to progress discussions of the African diaspora beyond the privileging of nationalist sensibilities and an 'exaggerated attention to belonging' (Rushdy 2009), to more mobile and enabling articulations of blackness. It is a reimagining of affiliated identities beyond those that pertain to the nation state (Gilroy 2004, 2011; Hall 2007). Caribbean and African-Caribbean communities in North America, Britain and elsewhere are both twice diasporised (Hall 1976), and in the process of onward and recursive migrations, they are reconstituted by different and more variegated encounters (Cohen 2009). The concept of post-diaspora is attentive to the consequences of multiple encounters and the possibility of diverse affiliations. This transdisciplinary Network uses knowledge and resources of five disciplinary areas: gender studies, literature, sociology, cultural geography and history. The Network also facilitates a trans-historical and transnational dialogue on the theme of post-diaspora. It connects scholars from Britain, the Caribbean and North America, who bring their own theoretical, methodological and disciplinary processes to answer the following questions: 1. What does present research tell us about how Britain, the Caribbean and North America can be understood in post-diaspora contexts? 2. What are the gender dimensions of post-diaspora for African Caribbean women, with its emphasis on multi-directional mobility and instability? 3) How do these non-linear forms of mobility and the production of multiple affiliations produce the conditions for African-Caribbean women's agency and self-fashioning? 4) What forms of expression are available to reconfigure identities as post-diasporic? These questions will be addressed through a website archiving the Network's activities and hosted by London South Bank University; a series of short research meetings and seminars of invited international scholars; an edited collection for a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal Small Axe and selected contributions to Diaspora: a Journal of Transnational Studies; a one-day policy dialogue between members of the Network and the International Migration Taskforce, Planning Institute of Jamaica; two creative platforms of invited practitioners whose work addresses the theme; a meeting with the curators of the Black Cultural Archives, London.