Notes on Identities, Unbelonging, & Solidarities
Words By: Gayatri Sethi | Cover & Book Design By: Annika Sarin
A collective learning resource that offers inquiries about diasporic identity and belonging aimed at practicing global solidarity.
What does it mean to be in diaspora? How do our identities and aspirations for belonging unfold during times of collective upheaval?
In her lifelong search for solidarity, educator Gayatri Sethi draws upon her own complex diasporic journey to explore widely accepted ideas about identity and belonging. Spanning three continents and multiple phases of the author’s life, Diaspora-ishoffers inquiries into many facets of identity—names, relationships, ethnicities, citizenships—and poignantly demonstrates how these are weaponized to exclude and other. Addressing prevalent misconceptions about immigration, Sethi pushes for a deeper understanding of migration and diaspora that centers decoloniality and anti-imperialism. Diaspora-ish is an urgent call to unlearn oppressions in order to work bravely toward collective liberation.
In an extension of her genre-bending nonfiction debut Unbelonging, Sethi juxtaposes personal observations with academic notes and inquiries to guide readers through paradigm shifts in learning. Diaspora-ish presents an anti-imperial, anti-racist, collective learning resource that centers historically marginalized and excluded global realities.
Praise for the Book
“Sethi’s sharp gaze pierces America’s model minority myth and white-adjacent behaviors. She sees and names the immigrant’s invisibility and othering and describes universities as places of “compliance, not liberation.” . . . tackles thorny issues of anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and white allyship that are often swept under the carpet.”
“. . . the unconventional combination of free verse, journal entries, and workbook activities supports active engagement . . . This learning resource is best read and reflected on in small doses.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Sethi analyzes, through discussions of geography, history, and cultural practice, diasporic “ways” as epistemologies – modes of knowing and surviving shaped by displacement and resistance… The text’s greatest strength lies in its insistence that ambiguity and partial belonging are not deficits but critical resources… a valuable contribution to diaspora studies, ethnic studies, and feminist cultural theory…” – School Library Journal
