Metaphor and diaspora in contemporary writing

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Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers, ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity. Essays on Nadeem Aslam, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Chris Stewart not only open up their private thought-worlds but also uncover structural metaphors of diasporic experience and show how metaphor, far from being a merely literary figure, may be used (and abused) for political purposes, for defining and preserving a sense of identity, and for surviving in an often hostile world. In the process, the diasporic subject itself emerges as metaphorical by nature, constantly seeking its own meaning as it shuttles back and forth in its imagination between recollected homeland and adopted home.