The Bloodless Diaspora: Queering Genealogy to Resist Assimilation into Whiteness in Twenty-First Century Media

Abstract

My project proposes a new way of interpreting the natures of diaspora and belonging in early twenty-first century literature, film, and other media in North America. The literature of migrants and their North American-born descendants often traffics in tropes of cultural identity, biological inheritance of communal membership, and establishing binaries between “old world” and “new world” that their characters seek to recreate. Ultimately these authors and their disaffected descendants become estranged from their homeland and acculturate and assimilate more rapidly into white North American normativities. My paper introduces the concept of the bloodless diaspora to combat systematic assimilation into social and political whiteness. I use queer genealogical practices to suggest that one’s sense of belonging to a diasporic community can be forged not just through a birthed inheritance, but by creating intimate links with diasporic figures past, present, and future and forming a chosen family or chosen ancestry. I look at literature and film from three different diasporas, Arab-North American, Ashkenazi Jewish-North American, and Chinese-North American, to illustrate diaspora as a shared, active literary and communal practice, rather than a condition into which you are born. Ultimately, the bloodless diaspora resists the ever-present gaze or normative, North American whiteness and uses speculative storytelling to craft a potent imagined community.