Twenty-first century U.S.-led neocolonial capitalism is structured as a global racialized hierarchy of political domination and international labor exploitation with roots in European colonialism. In this system, countries, regions, and demographics classified as not-white, not-Western, and not-bourgeois, are inferiorized, othered, and pushed onto the lower ranks (Quijano). This structure is also sustained by a globalized academic apparatus that prioritizes Western epistemological traditions, inferiorizing and objectifying epistemologies and knowledges from African, Asian, Native American, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and other racialized and Indigenous peoples (Grosfoguel). Moreover, this worldwide structure is also sustained by Western-centric understandings of the body. In addition to the hegemonic social classification based on the concept of “race”, these ideologies include stratifying logics of gender and sexuality –such as the naturalization of hetero- and cis-normativity–, of age –the young as superior to the old–, and of ability (Lugones, Imada, Berdai Chaouni). Area studies in this academic culture have critiqued this Western-centrism, but traditionally remained in dialogue only within disciplinary confines.

Within this context, we ask how the various racialized diasporic communities under this system devise alternative cultural forms, philosophies, epistemologies, and aesthetics, while foregrounding the system’s historicity and global totality. We seek interdisciplinary and inter-dialogic papers that examine cultural productions on the following thematics, broadly understood: queer diaspora (Ponce), critiques of U.S. homonormative exceptionalism vs. non-western nationalisms (Puar, Gopinath), African diasporic cultural production across the Atlantic Ocean such as the Black Transatlantic (Gilroy), Asian American diasporic cultural production across the Pacific Ocean such as the TransPacific (Hoskins, Nguyen, Suzuki), Indigenous land dispossession (Lowe), “non-encounters” between diasporic contexts (Mendoza), the relation of diasporas to dominant and emerging political cultures, and the structural determinants that foster or prevent interdiasporic dialogue.