ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to bring some key concepts in the discussions on art, culture and global migration together to build a nuanced theoretical framework for exploring contemporary art emerging from postmigrant conditions. It submits that transcultural and diasporic perspectives can be used to broaden and refine the postmigrant approach and that coupling the postmigrant, the diasporic and the transcultural may overcome some of the limitations of each perspective. Like the subsequent chapters, it seeks to expand the analytical value of the postmigrant lens by introducing a new term that enhances its applicability. More specifically, it explores how the concept of the diasporic imaginary can be brought into a productive interplay with the idea of postmigration in order to develop a concept of the postmigrant imaginary. Seeking to provide an alternative to national frameworks for understanding community and multiple belonging, this chapter seeks to answer the questions: how would our understanding change if the diasporic and the postmigratory were imagined as the very conditions of possibility for narrating collective identities today? And how can art contribute to generating such postmigrant imaginaries?
