ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding the importance of diaspora for the contemporary period demands a practice of reading across the diverse methodological approaches made across different descriptive genres. It offers an approach which seeks to define diaspora in the contemporary with an eye to the more nuanced affective realms. The chapter suggests that the differential theoretical form makes for an inappropriately linear historical approach, which lacks sensitivity to the untidy business of living with the cultural effects of diaspora. It shows that contemporary fiction, due to its capacity to easily reference different times together, reaches more easily than diaspora theory sometimes can toward the affective character of the lived experience of diaspora. Historicism in the contemporary time approaches the narration of the present and the past with an unprecedented level of uncertainty and confusion. Fiction can offer helpful ways of understanding the complex legacy of diaspora in the present time.
