Memories establish a connection between a collective and individual past, between origins, heritage, and history. Those who have left their places of birth to make homes elsewhere are familiar with the question, "Where do you come from?" and respond in innumerable well-rehearsed ways. Diasporas construct racialized, sexualized, gendered, and oppositional subjectivities and shape the cosmopolitan intellectual commitment of scholars. The diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization.

The essays in this volume reflect on the movements of people and cultures in the present day, when physical, social, and mental borders and boundaries are being challenged and sometimes successfully dismantled. The contributors - from a variety of disciplinary perspectives - discuss the diasporic experiences of ethnic and racial groups living in Canada from their perspective, including the experiences of South Asians, Iranians, West Indians, Chinese, and Eritreans. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity is an exciting and innovative collection of essays that examines the nuanced development of theories of Diaspora, subjectivity, double-consciousness, gender and class experiences, and the nature of home.

Vijay Agnew immigrated from India in 1970 and studied at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto. A professor of social science, she has taught at York University in Toronto since 1976, and is director of the Centre for Feminist Research. She is author of Resisting Discrimination: Women from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and the Women’s Movement in Canada, which won the Gustavus Myers Award in 1997 as “an outstanding book on the subject of human rights in North America.” Her other books are In Search of a Safe Place: Abused Women and Culturally Sensitive Services and Elite Women in Indian Politics.

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