Diaspora-ish: Notes on Identities, Unbelonging, & Solidarities

Gr 10 Up–Cultural worker, educator, and caregiver Sethi is connected to multiple diaspora communities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and her new book is an extension of her award-winning 2021 title Unbelonging. Sethi’s goal for the work, which is explained in the reading guide at the beginning of the volume, is to encourage readers to become interactive, reflective participants in the text and to heal by creating and engaging with the material. Organized into four thematic arcs (“Identities,” “Emigration,” “Solidarities,” and “Revolutions”), the book resists neat categorization, mirroring the very condition it explores: life lived in the in‑between, with Sethi exploring the definition of identity and what “-ish” means in relation to categories, such as race, gender, caste, and class. Through personal narrative and broader observation, Sethi (who is of South Asian Punjabi descent, was born in Tanzania, grew up in Botswana, and now lives in the United States) examines immigration as an ongoing process rather than a single event—one that reshapes identity across generations. Sethi analyzes, through discussions of geography, history, and cultural practice, diasporic “ways” as epistemologies—modes of knowing and surviving shaped by displacement and resistance. Readers are invited to participate in self-reflection by utilizing the book’s scaffolding, such as sentence stems and other guided prompts at the conclusion of each thematic arc. While this title may frustrate those seeking a sustained argumentative throughline, its fragmentation is integral to its theoretical intervention. The text’s greatest strength lies in its insistence that ambiguity and partial belonging are not deficits but critical resources.