International Diaspora Research Articles

Enhancing Collaboration and Support for the French Scientific Diaspora in the United States

The French scientific diaspora in the United States (US) is a diverse community of professionals, essential for France and the host country. Their contribution to science and innovation, in both nations, stem from bilateral collaborations and knowledge exchange. Yet, while living abroad, this group of scientists faces multiple obstacles that can interfere with their productivity and influence. This report highlights the necessity of determining how numerous stakeholders can support and actively engage with this diaspora. To identify the needs of the French scientific community in the US, data was collected during seven interviews with diaspora network managers and analyzed various aspects defining the landscape of the community: the challenges and concerns it faces, the benefits of engaging in a diaspora network, and the opportunities to support these networks. These findings enumerate the difficulties encountered by the diaspora members and the networks themselves, ranging from lack of funding and administrative roadblocks to visibility and long-term sustainability issues. Moreover, the report underscores that involvement with other international diaspora networks considerably expands and diversifies professional connections, facilitating the exchange of experiences and best practices between networks. This analysis emphasizes the needs of the French scientific diaspora and the incentives and actions for supporting it, facilitating the establishment of a set of strategic recommendations for the European Union (EU), France, and the US. Furthermore, it proposes a series of measures to improve communication and collaboration, among French scientific diaspora networks and their international counterparts. Ultimately, by providing an in-depth comprehension of the French scientific diaspora in the US and establishing recommendations to foster these networks, this report paves the way for a more interconnected future, extending beyond the scientific sphere. Additionally, this study can serve as a guide for other scientific diasporas in the US or other regions of the world.

Forged in the fires of war: the rise of a new Ukrainian identity

ABSTRACT Ukraine has always been a plural state comprised of multiple ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional subcultures. Yet, since 2014 and, in particular, since February 2022, these often-competing identities have been codified under a more overarching identity. The forging of unified plural Ukrainian identity as concept has arisen out of a mutual struggle for survival, international diaspora mobilization, the elevation of diverse narratives of experience from across Ukraine, and a connected digital environment that links and reinforces concepts of social capital. Rooted in theories of constructivist identity formation, this analysis examines those attributes of Ukraine and Ukrainian society which have been fused together under great pressure to create a new and perhaps more unified national identity. Leveraging cases examining discourses on identity and the production of shared socio-cultural artifacts and quantitative data from both public opinion surveys and large-scale social media sentiment, this analysis finds that Ukraine, often thought of in the West as fractured along multiple lines, is, in fact unifying behind a common national idea. This unification and the creation of a new national identity have profound implications for post-war Ukraine.

Avoiding Hardship, Deflecting Conflict: From Fostering to Reluctant Relatives among World-Connected Bamiléké Families (Cameroon)

In 1982, Esther Goody demonstrated the importance of child fostering for social reproduction. Why, in the 2010s and 2020s, does the idea of child fostering remain a valorized expression of “African solidarity” when so many Bamiléké simultaneously retreat—even recoil—from engaging in this practice? Bamiléké parents replace fostering, once praised for promoting resilience, with concerted cultivation. This contribution explores how changes in kinship and class formation contribute to the decline of child fostering among transnationally-connected middle-class Bamiléké in Cameroon and in several of its international diasporas. It presents two contrasting emic ideals regarding the who and the how of good parenting, employing sharply distinct notions of kinscription—or which kin should be responsible for which aspects of childrearing—and of the role of hardship in child development. Three further case stories, from the perspectives of fostered children and foster parents, illustrate exemplars that influence new norms and debates regarding child fostering, kinship obligations, and good parenting that emerged during the early 21st century. The multiplicity of ideas regarding responsible parenthood generates conflict, which many Bamiléké parents seek to avoid by becoming reluctant relatives. New orientations toward parenting demonstrate that parenting and parenthood reflect and contribute to social inequality.

Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community, by Kirstie Blair

Reviewed by: Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community by Kirstie Blair Taryn Hakala (bio) Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community, by Kirstie Blair; pp. vii + 235. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, £63.00, $85.00. Kirstie Blair's Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community reassesses Scottish working-class verse culture, drawing it out of the literary margins and arguing for its importance to Scottish literary history and Victorian studies more broadly. Breaking with past studies that have been negative and dismissive of Victorian Scottish poetry, Blair shows that the working-class poets in her study are often self-consciously "imitative, parochial, provincial, romantic, sentimental, and escapist" and that these qualities are "not flaws" (8). These poets understood the potential cultural and political benefits of their mastery of high culture and wielded familiar forms in important, and sometimes innovative, ways and for political ends. Blair's impressively extensive research gives readers a fascinating look inside a sizeable, rich, and largely untapped archive of Scottish working-class writing. Partly because this archive is so vast and complex, Blair's study focuses on popular poetics and poets who operated in local Scottish contexts, especially in the newspaper poetry columns. While this focus may seem narrow, Blair points out that because Scottish provincial verse often circulated in newspapers and periodicals as well as in song lyrics to "an extensive international diaspora of readers who still consider themselves to be locals," it "had a surprising global reach" (13). Moreover, this focus reveals "the enormously influential discourse … on Scotland's unique identity as a home for working-class poets" (14) as well as "the crucial significance of the 'local' bard in Scotland's cultural imagination" (26). Each of Working Verse's five chapters considers a different context or genre while tying them back to their relationship to the provincial newspaper press. Chapter 1 considers occasional and performed verse and sets up the arguments of subsequent chapters. The Scottish working classes were encouraged to write poetry to bolster Scotland's status as the "Peasant Poetic Queen of Nations" (20). Local and provincial working-class verse cultures were, therefore, valued and, as Blair shows, mobilized for social, cultural, and political ends. Chapter 2 examines an exceedingly popular series of Scottish poetry anthologies called Whistle-Binkie (1832–90), challenging its perception as a symptom of a post-Robert Burns decline in Scottish poetry. Through her analysis of the anthologies alongside unpublished correspondence between editors and contributors, Blair reveals how a collective of working-class male writers—the Whistlebinkians—was constructed and nurtured. One of the most interesting aspects of this chapter is Blair's discussion of nursery verse and the ways in which male authors appropriated the sentimental poetics most often associated with femininity and women poets. Indeed, though there were working-class women who wrote nursery verse, in Victorian Scotland working-class men were the foremost authors; nursery verse was largely regarded as a male genre. Through its positive depictions of working-class family values and the Scots language, this poetry demonstrated the fitness of the working classes for full participation in politics and society. In chapter 3, Blair rereads poems that build on Burnsian pastoral as part of an activist tradition. She shows how, when we consider this poetry in its original context, the newspaper column, we can discern its political motivations. While it appears to be the least political of all poetic genres in the Victorian period, Blair argues that "its naïvety is a [End Page 155] front" (136). Poems about rights of way, improvement, and emigration put familiar forms and tropes to work in debates about working people's relationship to the land. Chapter 4 challenges the commonly held belief that industrial change was not fully explored in literature until the Scottish Renaissance of the early to mid-twentieth century. Blair shows that, on the contrary, "Scotland's industrial development is the context that shapes the verse culture on the [Victorian] period" (138). The chapter focuses on the poetry of miners and railway workers and explores how these poets deftly combined form and content to draw attention to issues and advocate for change. The final chapter shifts from...

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF DIASPORA

ABSTRACT This paper explores the contemporary relationship between international student migration and diaspora formation. It argues that international students have been largely absent from recent discussions of ‘knowledge diasporas’, where migrants’ ‘home’ states attempt to harness and co-opt the skills and knowledge of their émigrés. This is surprising, given students’ evident role in knowledge circulation and exchange. In this paper, we foreground the significance of international students but also explore their relationship to diaspora formation from a different angle. We argue that some states are increasingly engaging in (sometimes seemingly contradictory) policies designed to obstruct overseas diaspora formation, and these policies centre on their international student populations. Through a number of case studies and drawing on the secondary literature, we demonstrate the ways in which states are strategising to repatriate international students following their studies overseas. More broadly, we argue, this represents an alternative to popular notions of brain circulation and knowledge diasporas, chiming with a far more long-standing concern with ‘brain drain’.

Variation in size and shape of toxin glands among cane toads from native-range and invasive populations

If optimal investment in anti-predator defences depends on predation risk, invading new regions (and thus, encountering different predators) may favour shifts in that investment. Cane toads offer an ideal system to test this prediction: expensive anti-predator toxins are stored mainly in parotoid glands whose dimensions are easy to measure, and toad invasions have changed the suites of predators they encounter. Although plasticity may influence parotoid morphology, comparisons between parents and progeny revealed that gland dimensions were highly heritable. That heritability supports the plausibility of an evolved basis to variation in gland dimensions. Measurements of 3779 adult toads show that females have larger glands than males, invasive populations have larger glands than in the native-range, and that parotoid sexual size dimorphism varies strongly among invaded areas. Geographic variation in parotoid morphology may be driven by predation risk to both adult toads and offspring (provisioned with toxins by their mother), with toxins allocated to eggs exacerbating the risk of cannibalism but reducing the risk of interspecific predation. Investment into chemical defences has evolved rapidly during the cane toad’s international diaspora, consistent with the hypothesis that organisms flexibly adjust resource allocation to anti-predator tactics in response to novel challenges.

Antisemitism in the “Jewish NKVD” in Soviet Ukraine on the Eve of World War II

Abstract Following the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, murderous violence against local Jews broke out in many localities of the territories it had occupied in the wake of the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. In particular, organizers demanded revenge for the recent Stalinist repressions and deportations. Participants claimed that the “Jewish Soviet state,” the “Jewish NKVD,” or local Jews had been responsible for those crimes. Even now, the legend of prewar Jewish responsibility figures in the dubious “double genocide” thesis animating nationalistic historiographies in Eastern Europe and its international diasporas. The following study counters that mythology, addressing the story of actual Jews in the NKVD at the end of the 1930s. It draws on the archives of the Ukrainian security services, especially records that document Stalin’s effort to divert blame for the recent Great Terror onto senior and mid-level officials. Stalin’s green light to criticize the bosses gave other NKVD officers the opportunity to address many issues, including that of antisemitism among NKVD cadres. These sources suggest that antisemitism was in fact a potent force within the NKVD in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Words and violence: militant Islamist attacks on bloggers in Bangladesh and the UK

ABSTRACT From 2013, groups associated with Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent systematically targeted secular bloggers and writers in Bangladesh and its international diaspora for brutal killings and relentless harassment. At least twelve writers were killed after 2013. This article explores the historical context of the violence, including in the UK, a site of enduring conflicts between secular and political Islamist Bangladeshis. The context includes memories of the 1971 Bangladeshi genocide and the charged political environment after 2009 arising from the International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh) that had sought to bring perpetrators of the genocide to trial. The rise of political blogging in the Bangladeshi diaspora and the impact of the killings is explored. A range of conceptual issues are discussed, including the power of social media in the killings and the mobilization of political fear. The article is based on depth interviews with Bangladeshi bloggers and activists living under threat.

Stories of the New Geography

The Refugee Tales project holds a distinctive place amongst 20th and 21st century responses to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The project comprises collections of tales published in textual editions alongside a politically embodied campaign to call an end to the practice of indefinite detention of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The tales that are told take the form of an established writer giving voice to those that are caught up in this inhuman process. Some of the oral narratives come from refugees, some from care-workers and supporters, and some from from those caught up in the institutional processes of bureaucracy. These tales are heard and rehearsed on an annual walk that appropriates the pilgrimage route to a new geography that contests political space and its confinements. The project as a whole captures the spirit and purpose of Chaucer’s work. While engagement with textual detail is intermittent, but probing where it appears, this body of work, as Chaucer’s did, gives voice to those whose voices are unheard. The Refugee Tales pick up on how Chaucer integrated a narrative about England into an international geography—though with a difference. While Chaucer sets his stories chiefly outside the shores of England for literary purposes, The Refugee Tales appropriate the space of England to create a borderless nation that is hospitable to persons from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and in fact a whole international diaspora of nations whose people have become displaced. The Refugee Tales takes its inspiration from Chaucer not to produce a quaint exercise in medievalism or to update his work as a solely intellectual exercise. This project engages minds, body, creativity and political will. International in its remit, it frees the Father of English poetry to kick over the traces of borders that would separate nation from nation, children from parents, and human beings from each other. The Refugee Tales digs deep into the spirit of the medieval past to face up to a pressing and urgent global challenge.

Influences of Extended Family on Intimate Partner Violence: Perceptions of Pakistanis in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

Limited research has been undertaken on the role of extended family members in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). This study uniquely explores the perspective of Pakistani men and women about the role of a husband and wife's families in relation to marital conflict and IPV. For this qualitative study, data were collected through 41 individual interviews, including 20 from Pakistan and 21 from the United Kingdom. The findings are presented in four themes, including "privacy and personal space," "interference and instigation of problems," "conflicting and uncommunicated expectations," and "adjustment facilitation." A lack of privacy and personal space within a family home shared with extended family on the husband's side, interference in terms of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law making complaints about the wife, and the couple's differing expectations of the husband's responsibility for his extended family could cause tension and conflict that could lead to IPV. The husband's family could also have a positive effect by minimizing conflict through offering the couple personal time and helping the wife to adjust to her new family. The wife's family was perceived as having a much more passive role in terms of not interfering, but instead allowing her to adjust to her new extended family. In conclusion, the husband's extended family can have a considerable impact on conflict within couples. Public health prevention initiatives for IPV in Pakistani people should address the role of the husband's extended family. The findings of the study are not only important for the population studied, which is part of an international diaspora, but also for other communities worldwide that value close family structure due to cultural and religious preferences.

Migration, Imagination and Identity in Modern Sarawak

This analysis of changing perceptions of ethnic identity in Sarawak revolves around migration and imagination. The research is based on a case study of one longhouse, Levu Lahanan, and its imagined community from the mid-1980s on the Balui River to their resettlement in the Bakun Resettlement Scheme in 1999. One of fifteen longhouse communities belonging to five different ethnic groups, they were resettled to make way for Bakun Dam, which was completed in 2012. My use of the term imagination is linked to Sarawak state planning in organising the staged migration of the fifteen longhouse communities, the appeal to emerging Christian communities by calling the operation Exodus, and the exercise in salvage ethnography by recording oral histories, songs and other evidence of migration and difference. My argument is linked to recent developments in communication technology in the form of Facebook, WhatsApp and mobile phones which link the Lahanan longhouse and its urban and international diasporas. In their imagination, if not in reality, members of the diaspora return to their apartments of origin to revive their sense of belonging to a longhouse community, a place and an ethnic identity in a time of state, national and global change.

Sovereign Power, Biopower, and the Reach of the West in an Age of Diaspora‐Centred Development

AbstractWhy at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood apart from historical developments in the West's approach to governing international spaces. Once predicated upon sovereign power, rule over distant others is increasingly coming to depend upon biopolitical projects which conspire to discipline and normalize the conduct of others at a distance so as to create self‐reliant and resilient market actors. We argue that an age of diaspora‐centred development has emerged as a consequence of this shift and is partly constitutive of it. We develop our argument with reference to Giorgio Agamben's “Homo Sacer” project and in particular the theological genealogy of Western political constructs he presents in his book The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). We provide for illustration profiles of three projects which have played a significant role in birthing and conditioning the current diaspora option: the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D); the US‐based International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA); and the EU/UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative Migration4Development project (JMDI‐M4D). Drawing upon economic theology, we make a case for construing these projects as elements of the West's emerging Oikonomia after the age of empire.

Comment on “Philippine Infrastructure and Connectivity: Challenges and Reforms”

Comment on “Philippine Infrastructure and Connectivity: Challenges and Reforms”

Keeping Soviet Russia in the Czech Diaspora?

The Hospodář was a twice-monthly magazine for Czech farmers in America, launched in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1891. In the 1920s it became more international as the United States shut out immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union became a leading subject in its editorials, columns and especially the hundreds of reader letters published every year. Transnational families were a window into the Czech communities in Volhynia and Crimea. Social Democrats, Communists and others argued about the Soviet Union’s merits as a workers’ and peasants’ state. Agronomist Stanislav Kovář became a regular columnist in Vologda and then Novorossiisk on the NEP and then collectivization in Soviet agriculture. Tolerant, largely written by readers, without political or religious affiliation, and international, the Hospodář was a productive forum for experience, imagination and discourse in the international Czech diaspora on the early Soviet Union.

Literary Cultures of Eastern European ‘Displaced Persons’ in Australia: Elena Jonaitis, Helen Boris, Pavla Gruden and Elga Rodze-Kisele

This paper draws upon findings from a project undertaken to interview writers who came to Australia as ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs) after the Second World War, and examines the literary cultures within their communities. The focus is on four women writers, who exemplify the talent, resourcefulness, and contribution these immigrants made to literary and cultural life in Australia, and who significantly contribute to establishing alternative histories of Australian literature. The writers are Elena Jonaitis, originally from Lithuania; Helen Boris from Ukraine; Elga Rodze-Kisele from Latvia; and Pavla Gruden from Slovenia. The four women reveal how ethno-cultural identity and national attachments are an important aspect of these literary cultures. Their work also shows how their personal experience of immigration and the specificities of the DP experience impacts on literary production. These writers have had work published in their ethno-cultural community in Australia, their wider international diaspora and their original homeland. They have also established literary and cultural networks within their local community, and managed to engage a wider Australian audience.

Film tourism as heritage tourism: Scotland, diaspora and The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Using the case study of The Da Vinci Code (2006), especially the extensive promotional activities surrounding the film (organised by VisitScotland, Maison de la France, and VisitBritain), this paper argues that film tourism be understood as a facet of heritage tourism. Scotland is a nation with a long history as a destination for heritage tourism, including literary and art tourism, whose brand identity in this regard functions slightly differently to that of England. Scotland has a large international diaspora, the result of its specific national history, which conceives of itself as Scottish, and returns – from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA – to events like Homecoming Scotland (2009) to reconnect with its roots in the manner of heritage tourism. The Da Vinci Code, like Braveheart before it and Brave since, appeals to this international audience through its depiction of Scotland. By analysing the film's construction of history, and the scenes shot in Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh (Rosslyn has previously featured in paintings and photographs, and was the star of a famous diorama in the early nineteenth century), it becomes evident that a sense of return and belonging is evoked in this Scottish setting that can resonate with heritage tourists.

The Musical Routes of the Spanish Black Atlantic: The Performance of Identities in the Rap of Frank T and El Chojín

On account of the immigration boom at the turn of the 21st century, the various ways in which cultural production in Spain has engaged with and been shaped by residents born overseas and the issue of ethnic difference now comprise a significant field of academic study. In this paper, I examine the self-representation of artists of African origin on the Spanish rap scene. To this end, I draw on and adapt Paul Gilroy's conceptual space of the “black Atlantic” and Simon Frith's understanding of the musical performance of identities in an analysis of the work of the two most prominent black Spanish MCs, Frank T and El Chojín. In view of their exclusion from dominant notions of what it is to be Spanish (as they detail in several of their lyrics), these two rappers construct alternative identities in dialogue with the international black diaspora by borrowing and sampling from African-American and African musical styles and voices.

Friction and the pursuit of justice in post-war Sri Lanka

This article engages with friction between international and local actors in an era of globalised transitional justice processes with cases from post-war Sri Lanka. We find that in the context of a victor's peace, the prevailing actor can mobilise ordinary people against international transitional justice initiatives, and can stage localised processes which do not involve the grass-roots level to any real extent. An actor-oriented perspective sharpens friction as an analytical concept by moving beyond the broad categories of conflicts between the local and the global. Our analysis highlights four significant actors in post-war justice: the internationalised state, domestic constituencies, the international community and diasporas, whose encounters, roles and internal complexity determine the outcomes of transitional justice processes.

Collective Transnational Power and its Limits: London-Based Nigerian Organisations, Development at ‘Home’ and the Importance of Local Agency and the ‘Internal Diaspora’

In the recent wave of enthusiasm about the development role of migration, international diaspora organisations have been posited as powerful actors in the progress of their communities of origin. Drawing on research on Nigerian diaspora organisations in London and their places of intervention in Nigeria, this article seeks to subject such claims to greater empirical scrutiny. To understand the relative importance of these organisations in the development of their ‘home’ communities, their collective transnational interventions are set in the context of contributions made by local actors and internal migrants within Nigeria. It is found that the international diaspora organisations engaged in this study make a limited, almost marginal contribution to local development at ‘home’, and that local actors and internal migrants are much more important drivers of community progress. It is therefore argued that ‘home’-based actors and internal migrants should be given greater recognition in the conceptualisation of how and to what extent migration contributes to local development. To this end, a translocal perspective is advanced that incorporates local, internal and international actors in more effectively comprehending the development role of migration in all its forms.

Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (review)

Reviewed by: Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures David Damrosch (bio) Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. By Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. London: Continuum, 2008. 172 pp. Paper $39.95. "The mappamund has been changing pattern," a speaker declares in Finnegans Wake, "since time and races were." Nowhere have the changing times required more extensive redrawing of maps than in world literature [End Page 396] studies, as scholars seek ways to chart the exponentially larger literary field now under consideration. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen's Mapping World Literature is an important contribution to our process of remapping. In four elegant, economical chapters, Thomsen synthesizes leading theories of the struggle for international recognition and the processes of global canonization, and he proposes a suggestive model of his own for grouping works into coherent "constellations" for reading, teaching, and analysis. In a first chapter, "World Literature: History, Concept, Paradigm," Thomsen surveys conceptions of world literature from Goethe to the present, giving judicious appraisals of the strengths and limitations of a range of theories. In triangulating among the conceptions he discusses, Thomsen seeks to draw out a dynamic understanding of the process of canonization by which works come to be considered part of world literature. In Thomsen's view, we need models that allow both for individual genius and for systemic effects such as center-periphery relations, imbalances of national prestige, and the gradual, delocalized process by which works may gain canonical status over time. He emphasizes as well that the literary field is temporally divided into the established, slowly changing canon of older literatures and the shifting, uncertain field of contemporary world literature. Thomsen develops his distinctive approach in his second chapter, "Shifting Focal Points in the International Canons," in which he argues for a more nuanced understanding of canonicity in its spatial and temporal variety. Temporary "subcenters" of canonical force can develop in a given nation or region for a limited period of time, as with the sudden prominence of the Russian novel in the age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or, to look across genres, the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller. Thomsen proposes that such subcenters greatly enrich the limited picture offered by an exclusive focus on major literary centers such as Paris or New York. He contrasts the mutual reinforcement of writers within subcenters to the situation of "lonely canonicals"—individual writers such as Kierkegaard and Borges who achieve prominence in the absence of any broader national prominence in the world market, showing the need to find new categories to supplement those of the nation and the international system as a whole. This is suggestive, though at times Thomsen draws his canonical lines rather restrictively; Julio Cortázar's many foreign admirers may be surprised to learn that Borges is "the only Argentine writer to have gained a lasting prominent position in world literature" (45). Thomsen makes good use of Borges's important essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition," yet doesn't pause to consider the extent to which, in ironically disengaging himself from direct representation of his peripheral homeland, Borges may be creating [End Page 397] a literary space for himself against other Argentine rivals to national and international fame alike. In his third and fourth chapters, Thomsen examines two categories of writing in a newly transnational mode: the literature of migrant writers and the literature of Holocaust survivors. Thomsen discusses migrant writers in terms of Homi Bhabha's hybridity and the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Ulrich Beck; he compares "cosmopolitan regionalism" and formal innovation in migrant writers from Joyce and Eliot to Milan Kundera, Gao Xingjian, and Michel Houellebecq. Thomsen's analyses fruitfully combine consideration of national cultures, systemic features, and individual aesthetic strategies in accounting for the success of the migrant writers he examines. If migrancy involves an entry into a new national space, Holocaust literature takes migrant internationalism a step further. Members of a highly self-aware international diaspora, Holocaust writers often are not writing from a national perspective or even that of a bicultural hybridity. Their readers, in turn, may read Holocaust literature together with works on other times and places, such as Armenia in 1915. Such writing constitutes a distinctive...