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In this fascinating and erudite book, Bryan Cheyette throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers - some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal - to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonisation, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, the book culminates in fresh engagements with contemporary Jewish, post-ethnic and postcolonial writers. Cheyette regards many of the 20th- and 21st-century luminaries he examines - among them Hannah Arendt, Anita Desai, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, Caryl Phillips, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Zadie Smith and Muriel Spark - as critical exemplars of the diasporic imagination. Against the discrete disciplinary thinking of the academy, he elaborates and argues for a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures

Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) are the foundational trilogy on which Zygmunt Bauman developed much of his later work (from postmodernity to liquid modernity and from "the Jew" to "the Stranger"). This article is a unique engagement with the trilogy and with the metaphorical thinking which relates the trilogy to Bauman's later work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The article is divided into three parts focusing broadly on Warsaw, Leeds, and Jerusalem as contextual "windows" for Bauman's Jewishness under the sign of totalitarianism, exile, and globalism. This is the first account of Bauman's Jewishness in relation to his extraordinary life and work and includes, for the first time, his little known "Jewish" essays which are placed next to his more general theories of modernity.