Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal�/“illegal,� and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.    

Study of diasporas provides a useful frame for reimagining locations, movements, identities, and social formations. This volume explores diaspora as historical experience and as a category of analysis. Using case studies drawn from African and Asian diasporas and immigration in the U.S., the contributors interrogate ideas of displacement, return, and place of origin as they relate to diasporic identity. They also consider how practices of commensality become grounds for examining identity and difference and how narrative and aesthetic forms emerge through the context of diaspora.