The study of the relationship between race and place takes center stage in this neat collection of essays, which first took form as papers presented at a symposium organized and hosted by the University of Alabama in October 2009. The Race and Displacement symposium featured the work of both established and emerging scholars from a wide range of fields and disciplines, all of whom had gathered to engage and discuss the concept of racial diaspora. The essays in this volume represent the dialogue and debates that took place during that conference weekend with the bold purpose of beginning “a new conversation about race and place in the way it reconceptualizes the relationship between racial formations and territorial notions of identity, thereby placing the concept of the diasporic subject at the heart of questions concerning postmodern individual and political identity” (4).

Coeditors Maha Marouan and Merinda Simmons have grouped the essays thematically into four sections: “Race and Bodies,” “Race and Place,” “Race and Nation,” and “Race and Imagination.” The contributors rely on a myriad of methodological perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches to investigate and understand race and displacement in both imagined and lived contexts; the literary, cultural, and historical inquiries assembled in this volume examine a range of texts, from literary and oral narratives to cultural performances and federal regulations. The scope of this volume is intentionally broad, including discussions of historical and contemporary race and displacement and moving beyond, though still including, examination of the transatlantic slave trade.

In its focus on the racialized body in broader and transnational contexts, the first section presents Regina N. Bradley's study of Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café, Ashon T. Crawley's essay on black male gospel singing and the role of gossip and rumor in constructing black male sexuality, Deborah Katz's examination of black female sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand, and Matthew Dischinger's reading of Naylor's Mama Day as a postcolonial text.

The three essays in the second group examine race and culture as constructed and contested by larger spatial relationships. Lauren Vedal uses Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, a novel with protagonists who have migrated to Canada from the Caribbean, to discuss notions of and the desire for whiteness and safety in Canada. Melanie Fritsch examines an African American captivity narrative, arguing that, positioned within a broader understanding of the black Atlantic, African American texts expose the contradiction between Enlightenment thinking and the development of slavery and racism. Walter Bosse explores race and spatial mobility in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, noting the constructedness of “white” and “black” racial categories in America.

The third section shifts its focus to look at the ways in which articulations of race and racial categorizations in national policies and immigration laws have been used to control movement and regulate space. Cassander L. Smith looks at interactions between Cimarrons and the Spanish and English in sixteenth-century Panama, Delia Hagen shows how federal laws and market capitalism radically altered the mobility that was so central to the Métis way of life, and Abigail G. H. Manzella examines Japanese displacement and racial ideas about the Japanese in the United States during World War II using Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine.

The three essays in the final section rest at the intersection of race, place, and imagination. Jonathan Glover examines the relationship between sexual desire, scientific study, and racial knowledge; Yumi Pak argues that lynching serves as the central trope in Jean Toomer's Cane; and Kathrin Kottemann offers an analysis of postcolonial identities in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain and Bernadine Evaristo's Lara.

This volume will prove useful to advanced students and scholars interested in literary studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and transnational and diaspora studies. Some may find the volume too brief or complain that one or two essays might benefit from a bit more analysis or perhaps a bit less jargon, but these would be critics who miss the point that here, as the editors intended, the whole “is greater than any sum of its parts.”