Exile, Language and Identity

Exile, Language and Identity
Author: Magda Stroinska
Publisher: Frankfurt am Main : P. Lang
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

'Exile' means a prolonged, usually enforced absence from one's home or country. There is no paradigm for an exilic existence and no prescription of how to heal the loss of one's home and one's identity. Exiles move in space, migrating from one place to another, but they are trapped in time. They long for what they have lost and fear what is yet to come. Like the Roman god Janus, they constantly look both ways, often lacking language that would help them to reconnect with the world. This volume examines the process of the exile's self-translation by rediscovering a way of expression for the ensnared experience. It requires a new language so that the self may take a new shape. By discussing the unavoidable losses wrought upon immigrants, exiles and refugees by the mere fact of being displaced, the authors hope to foster a better understanding of these problems and help to rebuild shattered identities and ruined lives. Contents: Magda Stroinska/Vittorina Cecchetto: Introduction - Mary Besemeres: Cultural translation and the translingual self in the memoirs of Edward Said and Andre Aciman - Claire Burke: Exile from the inner self or from society? A dilemma in the works of Max Frisch - Ruth Burke: Persephone as paradigm: Fictional exiles in postcolonial francophone literature - Chantal Abouchar: Albert Memmi's Agar: The paradox of the couple - Andrea Rinke: German films in a German exile - Magda Stroinska: The role of language in the re-construction of identity in exile - Natalia E. Rulyova: Joseph Brodsky: Exile, language and metamorphosis - Annabel Cox: Achy Obeja's « Sugarcane and Cuban-American bilingual literature: Language choices and cultural identities - Branka Popovic: Theproblem of identity and language in refugees from the (former) Yugoslavia - Vittorina Cecchetto: From immigrant to exile: Does language contribute to this process? - Anthony Purdy: Collage and chronotope in Regine Robin's La Quebecoite - Iris Bruce: Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles: Sprechen, schreiben, schweigen - Catherine Reuben: Exile, identity and memory: the boundaries of perception - Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed: At the borders of language, language without borders: Non-verbal forms of communication of women survivors of torture.

Letters of Transit

Letters of Transit
Author: André Aciman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1999
Genre: Emigration and immigration
ISBN: 9781565845046

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9401205922

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.

Letters of Transit

Letters of Transit
Author: André Aciman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 135
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781565846074

"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

Edward Said's Concept of Exile

Edward Said's Concept of Exile
Author: Rehnuma Sazzad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786722607

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.

Explorations of Exile, Bilingualism and Identity in the Autobiographical Works of Nancy Huston and Eva Hoffman

Explorations of Exile, Bilingualism and Identity in the Autobiographical Works of Nancy Huston and Eva Hoffman
Author: Kathrin Marisa Leimig
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 41
Release: 2011-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3640839447

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 2.0, University of Southampton (School of Humanities), course: Cultural Flows, language: English, abstract: The postmodern notions of exile and displacement are contested among scholars as their applications constantly undergo further transformation and modification. Especially the effects of globalization, including economic mass migration and other transnational population movements, have contributed to add a multiplicity of variations to their original denotation. Whilst in Greco-Roman Antiquity exile was coined as label for an individual banishment from a centre of civilization, in a postmodern context it refers to both a voluntary or involuntary human condition. Yet, beyond doubt, one must clearly distinguish between the different exilic experiences of various groups such as refugees, expatriates, émigrés, emigrants and so on because they differ in modalities and circumstances: it is obvious that enforced political displacement under harsh conditions and to an undesired place has a much more traumatic impact on self-identity than, for example, a planned migration for economic reasons. Yet exile was never a unitary category as it can refer to specific social and political conditions. Even though it is often used as an umbrella term, the motivations or direct causes to leave one's country of origin can be as manifold as the various exilic realities in the host countries. Still, what all exiles have in common is the fact that they leave behind their home country in exchange for a life abroad. Nevertheless, in this context there are two questions that are crucial: has the exile chosen to leave or was s/he forced to do so? And is s/he part of a safety net or does s/he come to the host country unprotected?

Stories of Home

Stories of Home
Author: Devika Chawla
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-09-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0739194933

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.

The Dialectics of Exile

The Dialectics of Exile
Author: Sophia A. McClennen
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781557533159

The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied literary tradition, criticism of exile writing has tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures offers a theory of exile writing that accounts for the persistence of these dual impulses and for the ways that they often co-exist within the same literary works. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, Sophia A. McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile) and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), this book explores how these writers represent exile identity. Each chapter addresses dilemmas central to debates over cultural identity such as nationalism versus globalization, time as historical or cyclical, language as representationally accurate or disconnected from reality, and social space as utopic or dystopic. McClennen demonstrates how the complex writing of these three authors functions as an alternative discourse of cultural identity that not only challenges official versions imposed by authoritarian regimes, but also tests the limits of much cultural criticism.