Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture

In Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture, this book theorizes the differential visibility of diasporic communities and the way their in/visibility has evolved at the turn of the 21st century, partly as a consequence of the development of new media. Its transdisciplinary focus combines social sciences and, in particular, sociology with media studies and examines a large spectrum of issues related to in/visibility through the prism of a corpus of contemporary cultural productions, which include films by major film directors (Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha), visual artists (Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum, Keith Piper) and novelists (Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie and Sam Selvon) as well as emerging voices (Hari Kunzru, Kiran Desai). The book maps the trajectory of diasporas in and out of social visibility and focuses more specifically on the less visible migrants, whose voices are often unheard or silenced. This paradoxical invisibility in our days of hypervisibility is interpreted by the author as an epiphenomenon of the increasingly differential visibility which is brought about in a world where the media have become ubiquitous and where visibility has become fractal.