Narratives Of Exile And Identity

In an innovative effort to situate Baltic testimonies to the Gulag in the broader international context of research on displacement and memory, scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States seek answers to the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ in their representation? Do various ethnic groups remember the past differently: how do they use historical and cultural paradigms to structure their experience in unique ways? The scholars researched the archives, read testimonies, interviewed former deportees, and examined artifacts of memory produced since the late 1980s, applying crossdisciplinary approaches used at the study of the Holocaust testimonies; the testimonies of women have received a particular emphasis. The essays in the book also examine the issues of transmittance, commemoration and public uses of the memory of deportations in contemporary social, cultural and political contexts of Baltic societies, including the reflection of Gulag legacy in literature, the cinema and museums.

In an innovative effort to situate Baltic testimonies to the Gulag in the broader international context of research on displacement and memory, scholars from the Baltic States, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States seek answers to the following questions: Do different groups of deportees experience deportation differently? How do the accounts of women, children and men differ in their representation? Do various ethnic groups remember the past differently: how do they use historical and cultural paradigms to structure their experience in unique ways? The scholars researched the archives, read testimonies, interviewed former deportees, and examined artifacts of memory produced since the late 1980s, applying crossdisciplinary approaches used at the study of the Holocaust testimonies; the testimonies of women have received a particular emphasis. The essays in the book also examine the issues of transmittance, commemoration and public uses of the memory of deportations in contemporary social, cultural and political contexts of Baltic societies, including the reflection of Gulag legacy in literature, the cinema and museums.

Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people “speak” and “story” home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is home—as a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absence—central to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a “unit of analysis” in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Home—how we experience it and what it that says about the “selves” we come to occupy—is an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions.

In this study of exile, Sean Akerman chronicles the ways in which narrative approaches provide opportunities to understand and represent the lives of those who have been displaced after violence. Drawing on fieldwork he conducted with Tibetan exiles in New York City, and supplemented with archival research from other exiles around the world, Akerman investigates how narrative approaches can reveal what it's like to embody historical tensions, how identity becomes contested within displaced groups, and how personal stories can impact political realities. The book also engages with the ethics of research practices more generally. How does a researcher write in a way that does justice to displaced lives while working within a scientific framework? What sort of ethics are at stake as one spends long hours interviewing an informant, and then interprets that person's stories? The exploration of narrative approaches then becomes a way to imagine new possibilities of representation and call attention to the limitations and power dynamics within the discipline of psychology. In light of massive upheavals and displacements all over the world, Words and Wounds provides a timely consideration of how to understand and chronicle one of the most pressing issues of this age.

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities. The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the “exile” as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.

In this original and compelling book, Mary Chamberlain explores the nature and meaning of migration for Barbadians who migrated to Britain and elsewhere. It is a unique oral and social history, based on life-story interviews across three or more generations of Barbadian families. Locating migration within the contemporary debate on modernity, Narratives of Exile and Return highlights the continuing role of migration in shaping the culture and history of Barbados. But it does more by providing post-modern theorizing with concrete national and ethnic settings.

Edward Said was an exiled individual – the 'out of place' Palestinian in the USA. He saw the consequences of the 1948 dismantling of Palestine and the establishment of Israel through his parents' experiences and through the collective statelessness imposed on the Palestinians. His own personal experience of exile intensified when he moved to the USA. Yet despite the significance of exile to Said's lifeand work, no scholarship has yet focused on this theme in his writings or traced its ongoing applicability and importance. Rehnuma Sazzad fulfils this pressing need in literary and cultural research by providing the first comprehensive definition of Said's theory of exile and reveals its legacy in relation to five Middle Eastern intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Leila Ahmed, Nawal El Saadawi and Youssef Chahine. By selecting a novelist, poet, feminist, filmmaker and essayist, Sazzad shows how, for Said, the ideal intellectual is a metaphorical exile, demonstrating a willing homelessness. This book creates a portrait of redoubtable intellectual practice and in the twenty-first-century context, when the frontiers of belonging are being constantly redrawn, Edward Said's Concept of Exile adds new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity.

A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers—Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald—and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis. In a genre-defying book hailed as “exquisite” (The New York Times) and “spectacular” (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years—resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggle to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities takes a transnational and transcultural approach to exile and its capacities to alter the ways we think about place and identity in the contemporary world. The edited collection brings together researchers on exile in international perspective from three continents who explore questions of exilic identity along multiple geopolitical and cultural axes—Cuba, the USA and Australia; Colombia and the USA; Algeria and France; Italy, France and Mexico; non-Han minorities and Han majorities in China; China, Tibet and India; Japan and China; New Caledonia, Vietnam and France; Hungary, the USSR, and Australia; and Germany, before and after unification. The international and crosscultural span of this collection represents an important addition to the fields of exile criticism and cultural identity studies. Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities will be of interest to readers, scholars and students of exile, diasporic and transmigration studies, international studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, language studies, and comparative literary studies.