The recent explosion of revolts in the Arab world exposes the oppressive practices of autocratic regimes and nation-states as well as the politics of racial ethnification inside Arab homelands. Today ethnic writing from Yemen posits a revolutionized form of “diaspora” that is no longer defined by geographic mobility and border-crossing to the West. Enduring conditions of diaspora inside the homeland, the community of Black Yemenis (or Akhdam in Arabic) use “diasporic imagination” as an interventionist discourse against racial discrimination, forced labor migration and exclusive tribal affiliations. In his novel, Black Taste … Black Smell, Ali Al-Muqri depicts the culture of racialization and migratory dwelling experienced by Yemen’s black others forcibly displaced between political prisons and miserable slums in their country. The racial attitudes of government officials, the persecution of Arabs of African descent and the enclosed ownership of natural resources in the Arab Gulf turns the homeland to an alienating site of belonging. This paper will argue that one doesn’t need to leave home or emigrate from the homeland to feel diasporic. Al-Muqri’s novel demonstrates how the case of Al Akhdam community in Yemen projects an understudied aspect of diaspora that is rarely examined in diaspora studies. The Yemeni novel makes a case for diaspora that is mainly informed by racial and ethnic subjugation rather than material movement to the West. Contemporary Yemeni literature transcends the emphasis on postcolonial migration from East to West and projects a conception of diaspora undefined by transnational border-crossing and migration to the West. By employing the trope of “diasporic imagination” as a political aesthetic in their writings, Black Yemeni writers traverse the strictures of Arab nation-states and forge a stateless form of citizenship informed by the rerouting of Black roots and the formation of diasporic intermediaries across national borders. The emergence of black Yemeni writing challenges literary critics to rethink the intersectionality between race and the formation of diaspora communities inside the homeland, and the way black activism has become a significant aspect of the Middle East’s political unrest.