Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

The introduction sets out the framework of the book by situating Hong Kong as a site of Britishness. It introduces the major aim of the book: to challenge widely made assumptions about the primacy of ‘race’ in determining the entitlements and benefits of being ‘British’, and to call for a full consideration of how racial and cultural diversity shaped Britishness. It explains how Hong Kong, a nexus of mobilities within and across the British Empire, Chinese treaty port world, and the Asia-Pacific, offers us a uniquely important site to understand identities and belonging in the British Empire. The case of Hong Kong, this book argues, illuminates the blurred distinctions between Britons and other Europeans in colonial Asia, and the possibility for colonial subjects to claim a British subjectivity. Building on recent literature on modern Asia and global history, this book will also challenge common assumptions about race and identities in colonial Hong Kong. It will also trace how rising nationalism and the global dispersal of cosmopolitan sensibilities created tensions in the colony, offering a global history of exclusivity and cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century.

This chapter will lay out a potted account of the literature of New York and its relationship to world literature braiding two main themes: first will be that of New York as a center of self-invention, a place that was primarily commercial at its inception but progressively expanded to embrace diverse forms of ethnic, cultural, sexual, and urban interactions. And second will be to focus on the significance of neighborhoods and sweatshops as the spatial vectors through which immigrants and diasporics gain a sense of New York. The bulk of the chapter and will be devoted to a close analysis of the chronotopes of the neighborhood and the sweatshop in Toni Morrison’sJazzand Melissa Rivero’sThe Affairs of the Falcónsrespectively as a means of grasping the relationship between localized foci of individual mobility, identity, and alienation in the literature of New York and the ways in which we might also discern these as key organizing principles of world literature.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical justification for the book and proposes a new framework for explaining what scholar Albert Hirschman calls "voice" after "exit" against authoritarian regimes.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's contribution and details the implications of The Arab Spring Abroad for future studies of transnational activism, diaspora mobilization, and immigrant politics.

The Introduction presents an overview of why diaspora mobilization matters, why the existing literature has not satisfactorily explained its causes and dynamics, and previews the author's key arguments. This chapter justifies the book's comparative framework and details the data collection strategies used to investigate the Arab Spring abroad.

The Introduction presents an overview of why diaspora mobilization matters, why the existing literature has not satisfactorily explained its causes and dynamics, and previews the author's key arguments. This chapter justifies the book's comparative framework and details the data collection strategies used to investigate the Arab Spring abroad.

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical justification for the book and proposes a new framework for explaining what scholar Albert Hirschman calls "voice" after "exit" against authoritarian regimes.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's contribution and details the implications of The Arab Spring Abroad for future studies of transnational activism, diaspora mobilization, and immigrant politics.

This chapter introduces the book’s central focus and argument and discusses the themes in relationship to which it is structured. Recent work on connectivity in Eurasia has focused upon the role played by international projects of development, notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Building on ethnographic work with informal traders active across Afghanistan, the book emphasises the importance of informal networks of trade and commerce to Eurasian connectivity. The longdistance trading networks it describes and analysed are historically layered, structured in diverse ways, and comprised of politically astute actors able to navigate the complex geopolitical worlds across which they work. Trust is important to the activities of such networks, but so too is the ability to withstand moments of mistrust.

Divided into three parts, Chapter 1 outlines the rationale for selecting respondents—homeland Liberians, permanent and circular returnees, diasporas—with an overview of their demographic profiles; the conceptual framework, actor-oriented analysis, which considers myriad responses to development interventions based on actors’ disparate life-worlds (lived experiences), social locations (socio-economic positions), and levels of agency (capacity to act); as well as deep thinking about the author’s positionality. The methodological, theoretical, and biographical reflections in this chapter are intended to contextualise how the author came to understand Liberia’s political economy of belonging and its relationship to contestations over dual citizenship.Chapter 1 demonstrates why it was essential to converse with Liberian actors inhabiting different locales in three continents. It shows, for example, that diasporas disclose through their identities, practices, and relationships that citizenship can be simultaneously passive, active, and interactive. They also both challenge and substantiate certain theoretical approaches including conceptualisations of diasporic influences on homeland foreign policy and, by the author’s extension, homeland domestic policy. Reflecting on her positionality as a Liberian researcher who has occupied multiple spaces and places, the author evaluates her own biases as someone who made a conscious choice not to naturalise abroad and how this decision influences her analysis of Liberian citizenship construction and practice.

Since the 1990s, black British writers have increasingly re-focused on Africa, either taking recourse to specific African contexts, or raising questions about the relevance of Africa to their work. In Some Kind of Black, Diran Adebayo’s protagonist Dele intermittently dons a patterned Agbada, self-consciously stylizing himself as an African Briton. Brian Chikwava’s novel dubs London Harare North, large-scale emigration from Zimbabwe having turned the capital into an extension of the former Rhodesia. Whilst the term ‘Afropolitan’ does not befit all black British authors, some openly embrace the tag. As these examples indicate, this chapter focuses on texts that resist easy categorisation but which nevertheless explore Africa’s historical, contextual, genealogical, and cultural connections to Britain.