"Writing Diaspora" questions aspects of cultural politics, including the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, the media, pedagogy, literature, literacy, sexuality, intellectual labour, the uses and abuses of theory, and popularized notions about 'others'. Essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the 'otherness' ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and victimization; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made in the name of moralist rectitude - all these forces create new 'solidarities' whose ideological premises remain unquestioned. "Writing Diaspora" sets up an oppositional discursive space in the midst of these new solidarities. Chow juxtaposes a range of cultural contradictions in order to rethink the currently dominant conceptualizations of the solidarities themselves.