Diasporas, and diasporic writing, have existed ever since mass migration created immigrant communities with common languages and culture, but Diasporic Literature, as a category within Literary Studies, has only emerged in recent decades, as the prevailing classification of literature according to national provenance is yielding ground to new categories reflective of the cultural/national complexities of much contemporary writing: postcolonial, multicultural, transnational, diasporic and world literature. As illustrations of the changing and evolving nature of diasporic writing I will discuss four texts from the Chinese diaspora in the United States and Australia.
