Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity (original) (raw)
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Exiles have been victims of a form of institutional exclusion that characterized many polities in Latin America. This article puts forward two claims. First, that until recently their displacement was largely dismissed as basis for recognition of victimhood. In the Cold War era, this was due primarily to the exiles’ own perception of being militants willing to forego a personal sacrifice for their cause, an image they personified against the accusations of treason and betrayal of the nation that those in power projected onto them. Later, this lack of recognition of exiles as victims was retained due to the concentration of attention on prototypical victims of repression such as the detained-disappeared or the long-term political prisoners. The second claim put forward is that, while ignored as victims, exiles remained agents of their own destiny and reclaimed their abrogated national identity and citizenship. Being displaced and having lost the political entitlements of citizenship, they were forced to come to grips with past defeats, face present challenges, and reconstruct their future. It was under those conditions that exile had not just constraining effects, but also expanding effects. Exile also provided windows of opportunity to change statuses, upgrade skills, discover strengths, and develop new relationships. It thus often became a transformative experience, a kind of aggiornamento, which is analyzed here focusing on some of its impacts on the reconstruction of Southern Cone societies in post-dictatorial times.
How Do We Read the Literature of Exile Today? For a Post-colonialist and Post-totalitarian Poetics
Marius Mihet (ed.), NEW ENCOUNTERS. Literary, Cultural and Historical Studies, 2023
In the present, exile features unexpected mutations. When it comes to the lightest ones, exile is a mere challenge, an adventure. Wealthy countries ensure that exile becomes positive. At least from an economic standpoint. From an ideological standpoint, exile can change the various forms of extremism and radicalism into their opposite, expanding integration in the counter-direction by way of culture. The transnational exile of the present day means the diversification of the notion by way of nuances without changing the root of the concept. Most times, transnational exile subsequently formed a diasporic mentality; in ideal conditions, it was reduced to the simple, trivialized, apolitical notion of crossing the border.
Diaspora, Exile, and Displacement: Literary and Theoretical Perspectives
Violent upheavals of the twentieth century -imperialism, the two world wars, struggles for national independence, decolonization, and the Cold War --have made exile and dislocation the great preoccupations of literary works, autobiography, and theoretical writings. Globalization, driven by unprecedented trade and new technologies of communication, information, and travel, has accelerated the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. Diaspora is thus treated here not as a singular but rather historically varied and heterogeneous phenomenon. The transnational mobility of people may be the result of forced or voluntary migration, self-exile or expulsion. Refugees, people in transit, are the product of war, ideological heterodoxy and persecution, ethnic conflict, and natural calamity.
The imprint of exile through the plot of the narratives
Antíteses, 2010
Exile is a circumstance different from other migrations, although it resembles them in the possible insertion or alienation from the receiving society. It is with no a doubt a forced migration process which is always accompanied by an idea and an imaginary: the disappearrance of the conditions that forced to exile and thus, the return. Although it is not possible to generalize, because there is no one single experience of exile and the subjectivities that compose it are diverse, it undoubtedly produces a sensation of alienation, which can lead to the rejection of the cultural norms of society; it is part of a process of “being in one place, but thinking about another.” However, as exile is prolonged, the experience of adaptation for the different generations involved becomes diversified, communication vessels develop, feelings of inclusion, of adaptation, of attachment with the social and cultural environment that the place of refuge offered. The present text builds on testimonies of Uruguayans exiled in Mexico who have returned to their country. In their narrative, the meanings that relate to the subjective perspective that provoked the “return” to their country of origin as being viable and a palpable event are perceived. In summary, an incursion through the testimonial plot explains to what extent the return is a recovery of the space of identity longed for and the subsequent abandonment of the foreign space, in other words, it adds to the perspective of identity as a dynamic and relational.
Dissertation, 2018
Wanderers in the spaces of their memories and the streets of their would-be homes, generations of suffering immigrants are traced back to the past, propelled by the crescendo of melancholic stillness that moves displaced bodies through states of in betweenness that both dispels and teeters on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Many transnational narratives situate the immigrant at a crossroads in terms of a loss of the ‘original’ culture in exchange for the new ‘American’ culture, where national diversities are confined to a singular framework and rhetoric of displacement, overruled by the myth of successful assimilation, whereby the hardships of adjusting to foreign spaces are ‘normalized’ and reduced to a series of trials. This portrayal, in turn, does not leave any room for the rhetoric of pain, or what I label as the ‘migrant’s mourning’, where the immigrant’s suffering is suppressed and eclipsed by a collective history of racial abjection. Insights into the psyche of the immigrant serve to map the hedge between the past and the present and absolute versus relative spaces. Applying psychoanalytical and postcolonial frameworks to literary analysis, this dissertation explores some of the prominent transnational narratives to establish that the melancholic dynamics of space, memory, and language can subvert misrepresentations and grant the immigrant mobility within the confines of homogenized spaces. It seeks to explore the ways in which the transnational American narrative employs melancholic tenor as aesthetics to empower displaced figures. Situating its protagonists at the locus of nations, these narratives underscore melancholia, mourning, and memory as tools and protocols of agency that challenge the myth of assimilation and re-think the rhetoric of displacement.