Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered by ed. by Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik (review)

This enlightening collection of essays, on recent permutations of exile and identity, reflects deep-seated anxieties about the emerging course of globalization. In remarks that examine whether the global age has wrought chaos or a new form of cosmopolitanism, Peter Paik, a coeditor of the volume, describes the “movement and mingling, at an unprecedented velocity, of ideas, people, commodities,” as an economic phenomenon with momentous cultural consequences. The contributors to this volume represent a diverse array of academic disciplines and also ethnic backgrounds, but each focuses on how changing patterns of diaspora and exile are shaping our notions about migrants and the borders they cross. The contributors are agreed that borders still matter, although their significance as symbolic margins is changing. No longer thresholds between discrete spheres of agonistic identity, borders are increasingly spaces where contemporary culture is produced. The essays thus include accounts of children adopted from foreign lands, migration within the developing world, and genre-bending samples of world literature and cinema. Whether a single group of essays can coherently frame this shifting kaleidoscope is a question the editors would have done well to address, but the collection aptly conveys the sensation of limitless possibility and vertigo that scholars, migrants, and global elites all feel in trying to find their place in a world of shrunken—and enormously expanded—scale.