Urban Elsewhere Diasporic Imagination and Narratives of Transnationalism

“Urban Elsewhere: Diasporic Imagination and Narratives of Transnationalism” is a comparative and interdisciplinary study that examines representations of urban space through a diasporic lens. My research employs a corpus-driven thematic analysis combined with close textual readings, centered around the recurring trope of “elsewhere” in diasporic literature and criticism. Drawing from a collected corpus of examples, I argue that “elsewhere” operates as a potent conceptual signifier through which diasporic subjects articulate and negotiate identity, longing, spatial belonging, and experiences of displacement. The term troubles traditional geographic binaries such as here/there, inhabitable/uninhabitable, homeland/hostland, real/imagined, and inside/outside, revealing how diasporic texts reconceptualize geography and lived experience in ways that are deterritorializing, interconnected, creative, sustainable, and radical. Building upon this analytic foundation, the second part of my dissertation examines Dionne Brand’s Love Enough (2014), Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere (2022), and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017), focusing on their portrayals of urban spaces. These authors render urban environments navigable and habitable for diasporic subjects by actively contesting exclusionary politics of belonging, ownership, representation, and governance. Through close readings, I highlight their alternative spatial visions: Brand radically reimagines governance through an evocative incident of mishearing “100 police force” as “100 musicians” to curtail urban violence; Abdelmahmoud repurposes Highway 401, nominally a non-place, into meaningful sites 2 of diasporic belonging and resists reductive racialization through his hybridized understanding of Blackness shaped by Sudanese, Canadian, and American contexts; and Lee emphasizes intergroup solidarity and cultural citizenship as foundational to diasporic urban experiences.