In the 21st century, the experience of leaving home and crossing national boundaries belongs to ever-growing numbers of persons. Whether escaping persecution or seeking work, fleeing hopelessness or striving for creative opportunities, each migrant - like all others throughout history who sought a distant new life - steps into a foreign world where much is strange and alien.

This timely book explores the increasing emergence of the theme of migration as a dominant subject in the world of art, as well as the ways in which the mobilities of our globalized world have radically reshaped art's conditions of production, reception, and display. The title of the volume is taken from an essay by Ranajit Guha in which he considers the conditions of alienation and exclusion that are so inextricably linked to the experience of the migrant. In a collection of thought-provoking essays, fourteen distinguished scholars in the fields of visual studies, art history, literary studies, global studies, and art criticism address the universality of conditions of global migration and invite a rethinking of existing perspectives in postcolonial, transnational, and diaspora studies. They also suggest exciting new empirical and theoretical directions for each of these traditional frameworks.

Saloni Mathur is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.