Abstract
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.