Exile Identity Research Articles

‘Tibetans in Dharamshala’ or ‘Dharamshala in Tibetans’: Tibetan place-making and belonging in exile

ABSTRACT This article explores place–identity relationship by employing the concept of place-making in a prolonged exile context. It undertakes a study of the association of exiled Tibetan community with Dharamshala, the de-facto Tibetan capital-in-exile. I conceptualize this association through Tibetan place-making in two mutually inclusive processes. The first is the creation and recreation of an ‘essentially Tibetan space’ through visual and demographic landscape of the town. The second process constitutes the daily acts/practices that facilitate place-making. Consequently, I demonstrate the manner in which Tibetan place-making practices inculcate a sense of belonging with the place of residence thus depicting the association of place and identity among refugees. The article postulates the agency of Tibetan community in enabling visibility of Dharamshala as a marker of Tibetan exilic identity despite their marginal status as de facto refugees in India.

Memories of Home: The Belfast Films of Mark Cousins and Kenneth Branagh

This article discusses Mark Cousin’s I Am Belfast (2015) and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2022) as autobiographical cinema. While acknowledging the multiple differences between each film, I argue that they also share many common themes and motifs. These include a determination to depict Belfast as a city shaped as much by a down-to-earth working class identified by their sense of community as by its official history of the Troubles. Both celebrate friendships across the religious divide, and both share a utopian sensibility, expressed as much through aesthetics as narrative devices. My argument centres on the imaginative construction of Belfast in both films, while also drawing attention to how devices, such as the inclusion of songs by Van Morrison, open the works up to a wider process of exilic identity construction. I also consider the issue of ‘cultural Protestantism’ as evidenced in Branagh’s film and how cinema’s own history intersects with the personal histories of both film-makers.

Becoming a Teacher: The Liminal Identities and Political Agency of Refugee Teachers

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the experiences of refugee teachers through an identity-based conceptualisation of the capability approach to explore these teachers’ social environment, working conditions, values, and lived experiences. The research builds on the teachers’ capabilities literature to argue that norms, dynamics, and identities shape their political agency, opportunities, and constraints, providing nuanced understandings of their experiences as refugee teachers. Our aim is to narrate how they negotiate across different identities and mobilise their agency to be able to function as teachers and fit within their host countries. In doing so, we not only challenge the deficit model and oversimplified challenges experienced by teachers, but also explore the complexity and nuances of their journey of becoming and developing a teacher identity as a refugee under constrained working conditions. At the same time, teachers relentlessly build on their precarious teacher identities to work for their communities. The findings show that teachers build liminal identities in exile where the boundary between being a refugee and a teacher is simultaneously contested and embodied, but also key to their political agency and subjectivity of creating change.

How to Resolve the Trauma of Exile?

The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who were forced to leave their respective homelands after World War II in the wake of Soviet occupation came to form exile communities across the world. These communities continued their cultural traditions and practices with the arts becoming a medium to reaffirm their identities in exile and narrate their experiences. But with a quarter of a century having passed since their migration, the 1970s became a period of re-evaluating this focus, often represented by topics of generational conflict or inability to change with the times. In North America, first generation Baltic exile playwrights Ilmar Külvet, Alfreds Straumanis, and Algirdas Landsbergis often scrutinized the condition of exile within their works. In this study, I will examine the Baltic narrative of exile as a cultural trauma and take into focus three works by these authors with representations reflecting on the changing times and crises of belonging and identity. The three plays also present a way out of these tensions and can be considered deliberate efforts by the authors to shift cultural discourse and explore other creative potentials of exile, best facilitated by negotiating between the old and the new, the traumatic past, and the ever-changing present.

The Testimony of Tablets in Dunya Mikhail's Poetry

The formation of diasporic identity is inextricably linked to the collective memory of home culture: its history and traumatic experiences. This study argues that there is a vast connection between diaspora and traumatic memories of the past and that both affect the formation of the exilic identity. It tackles significant concepts such as diaspora, displacement trauma, home, and nostalgia. This study focuses on the poetry of the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail (1965–). Besides, it discusses how Mikhail adopted a new type of poetry called Tablet poetry. In addition, it significantly shows how diasporic experiences and traumatic memories can affect the formation of the identity of first-generation immigrants. It contends that what happened in the past will affect immigrants in the present and that they will be permanently haunted by it.

Atgriešanās garša: Agates Nesaules romāns “Zudušie saulgrieži gastropoētikas aspektā

The aim of the article is to research the construction of the neomythic world of the post-exile phenomenon in Agate Nesaule’s (1938–2022) novel “Lost Midsummers” (2018). The narrative of returning to a symbolic homeland through food and drink is described. Particular attention is paid to the post-exile narative, where exile and post-exile become a peculiar binary opposition in the structure of both works. Protagonists have been removed from their homeland (centre) one day to return from a foreign country (wanderings) to a symbolic home. In general, the work of prose actualizes trauma, nostalgia, and memories. The protagonist Kaija does not find the homeland she was looking for after returning to independent Latvia. The protagonist loses her exile identity and goes into an internal post-exile state. Often, after experiencing emotional exile, the new condition in homeland becomes a “second exile”. The motive of the novel determines the use of the structuralist method in the study, where exile and post-exile become the opposite poles of the mythical world. During the period of exile, Kaija is promised to return to the centre, but when she returns to her homeland after several years, she is unable to feel a complete fusion with the newly independent Latvia. The study takes a closer look at how the exile identity was characterised in the early nineties.

Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes

Reviewed by: Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes Erick Dickey Fuentes, Víctor. Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro. Editorial Verbum, 2021. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-84-1337-727-8. Morir en Isla Vista is a non-traditional Spanish novel written by Víctor Fuentes that details the life of the Spanish exile living in the United States in the post-Spanish Civil War era. Unlike many Spanish exiles who fled Spain in the early months of 1939, Víctor Fuentes belongs to the generation of the “children of the civil war” who left Spain in 1954 and whose life as an exile would be embodied by numerous exiles that would take him from Spain to Venezuela, to New York and finally to Isla Vista, California as a Spanish professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Adapting to life in exile proved to be difficult for Fuentes as the novel relates the many struggles that he faced integrating into his new adopted homeland particularly in the early years where he was forced to find menial jobs in order to survive financially. While the novel relates in diary form the many vicissitudes and personal troubles suffered by Fuentes throughout his life, such as his failed relationships, battles with depression and psychosis, and difficulties writing novels, the memory of Spain and the Spanish Civil War pervades the text. This becomes a recurring theme in exile literature, as the exile, who is separated and alienated from his home-land and longs to return to Spain, is forced to live off of memory. Therefore, the continual remembrance of Spain and his fellow exiles represents Fuentes’s endeavor to reconstruct new memory traces as their identity has been erased by the Franco dictatorship. This multifaceted novel veers from the traditional narrative structure of the post-war novel with Fuentes’s use of the Cervantine model of the found and transcribed manuscript in addition to the incorporation of multiple narrative voices that combine fiction with reality. It is also a work that reflects on one of the most important and recurring issues within the body of Spanish exile literature, namely the continual remembering of the mother country. The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse in the water, which is that of the author Víctor Fuentes. This initiates what one could call the appearance of the “split narrator” or “Yo-dividido” as Fuentes interjects himself as a character in his own novel recounting his life in exile as the narrative shifts between first- and second-person narrators. This symbolizes the metaphorical “death” of the exile as he is forced to reconstruct a new identity in exile, cut off and separated from his mother country, but still remains as the “other” in the adopted homeland. Upon Fuentes’s mysterious death, his narrative takes shape as a second narrator appears—the Transcriber—who reconstructs the life story of Fuentes’s exilic journey by recovering Fuentes’s discarded writings left in a box. As the Transcriber, he also takes the liberty of inserting, when he deems it appropriate, some critical commentary on Fuentes’s works and bears the responsibility of completing Fuentes’s unfinished text much like Cide Hamete Benengeli in the Quijote. The plurality of narrative voices is Fuentes’s way of creating a collective identity or memory for the exile community. More than an autobiography, this text could be seen as a co-biography given the many voices that appear in it. Fuentes’s narrative represents the memories of the Republican children of a collective suffering, which is illustrated by Fuentes’s usage of a Hispanic “Yo-nosotros” living in exile in the United States. Here Fuentes problematizes the question of the identity of the exiled. The allusion to the “I-we” dichotomy has now merged into what Fuentes believed to be the great deed of the collective subject. Fuentes is determined to rescue the memory of these individuals from what he terms “oblivion and the destructive [End Page 166] clutches of time.” He accomplishes this by enumerating a list of exiles who died and briefly describing their contributions in exile in the United States while also remembering...

Collective Memories, and Diasporic Experiences in Hala Alyan's Poetry

The construction of the diasporic identity is inextricably linked to the collective memory of home culture: its geography, history, traumatic experiences, and achievements. This paper tackles the effect of trans-generational trauma, diaspora, and collective memories on the second generation of diasporic individuals as represented in selected poems by the Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan. It traces the development of her exilic identity through the analysis of selected poems by her, written over different periods of time. The poems have been chosen from Alyan's volumes: Atrium (2012), Hijra (2016), the Twenty Ninth Year (2019), and an individual poem published in (2020). The paper examines some significant concepts such as: diaspora, trans-generational trauma, displacement, and home-seeking. The paper argues that trans-generational experiences and collective memories can affect the formation of the identity of second-generational immigrants. It contends that what happened in the past will affect the subsequent generations, and they will permanently be haunted by it.

The Flourishing of the UK African and Caribbean Diaspora in the Twenty-First Century with Reference to Jeremiah’s Letter to Jewish Exiles in Babylon Sixth-Century BCE

ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt to explore how the UK African and Caribbean Diaspora might flourish by focusing more on self-agency. Drawing upon Black Pentecostal and Black theological concepts, the paper highlights, exilic identity, settlement and growth, welfare and prayer and prophetic truth as fecund with ideas towards Black self-determination in the diaspora. These are drawn from Old Testament prophet Jeremiah’s letter to Jewish exiles in Babylon in sixth-century BCE that suggests a framework for flourishing and resisting empire. This is a quasi-autobiographical approach that utilises the writer’s experience and research as a Black Pentecostal and ecumenist, Black theologian, and a member of the UK African and Caribbean Diaspora for over five decades.

Identities in Exile: Re-membering Identities, Re-membering the Nation in Laksmi Pamuntjak’s Amba

Identities in Exile: Re-membering Identities, Re-membering the Nation in Laksmi Pamuntjak’s Amba

The Land and Its Kings: 1–2 Kings

The Land and Its Kings: 1–2 Kings

Postmemories of Migration: Cuban Exile and Poetics of Latinidad in Jennine Capó-Cruet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers

Abstract Taking Juan Flores’s premise of historical memory and lived experience to foundational to U.S. latinidad as a starting point, this article asks how twenty-first century second-generation Latina writing intervenes in contemporary understandings of U.S. latinidad as a pan-ethnic cultural field. It analyzes the narrative techniques, structures, and conventions through which contemporary Latinx writing engages ethnic memory and lived experience, considering how, and whether, those narrative conventions coalesce into a “poetics of latinidad.” Specifically, this article analyzes Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015), a novel comprising two interlaced storylines that animate the categories “lived experience” and “historical memory.” The novel intertwines its protagonist, Lizet’s, lived experience as a second-generation Cuban-American and the fictionalized re-rendering of the Elián Gonzalez case, a historical event that has proved an inflection point for Cuban-American exile identity in the U.S., destabilizing Cubans’ status as an “exceptional” community in the U.S. Latinx migrant imaginary. Thus, this article argues that Capó-Crucet’s novel fashions a poetics of latinidad in key ways. Engaging Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” it analyzes how the interwoven stories of Lizet and Ariel Hernández (the fictionalized Elián González) repurpose the role of historical memory toward the narrative intelligibility of the second generation’s lived experience in the U.S. while recuperating and memorializing the first-generation’s experience of exile. It then situates this novel within a burgeoning corpus of twenty-first century Latina college narratives, including Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves (2002), Meliza Bañalez’s Life is Wonderful, People are Terrific (2015), and Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016). These texts rely on postmemory to address the experiences of second-generation Latina college students; Capó-Crucet’s novel articulates a poetics of latinidad in this intertextual framework.

“Como uno que yo me sé”. Nuevos aportes a la biografía y obra de Andrés Febrés, S.J. (Manresa, 1732-Cagliari, 1790)1

El jesuita Andres Febres (Manresa, 1732-Cagliari, 1790) compila y publica en Lima, dos anos antes de la expulsion, su Arte de la lengua general del reino de Chile, principal compendio de materia gramatical, lexicografica y de traduccion misional del mapudungun del periodo colonial, que servira de base para futuros estudios sobre la lengua de los mapuche. A la espera de que se elabore una biografia y biobibliografia completa de Andres Febres, en este trabajo intentamos recoger y sistematizar los datos dispersos que existen y presentar informacion y documentos, hasta ahora desconocidos, que esclarecen su identidad y su destino en el exilio. Proponemos algunas interpretaciones sobre su personalidad y el valor de sus aportes.

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible

Latvju dainu atbalsis Veltas Sniķeres lirikā

The research “Echoes of Latvian Dainas in the Lyrics of Velta Sniķere” examines motifs and fragments of Latvian folk songs in the poetry by Sniķere. Several poems that directly reveal the montage of folk songs are selected as research objects. Linguistic, semantic, hermeneutical and historical as well as literary methods were used in poetry analysis. The research emphasizes the importance of Latvian folklore in the process of Latvian exile literature, the genesis of modern lyrics, and the philosophical conception of the poet. Latvian folk songs in the lyrics of Sniķere are mainly perceived as a source of ancient knowledge and as a path to the Indo-European first language, prehistoric time, which is understood only in a poetic state. Often, the montage of Latvian folk songs or their fragments in the lyrics of Sniķere is revealed as a reflexive reverence that creates a semantic fracture and opposition between profane and sacred view. The insertion of a song in the poem alters the rhythmic and phonetic sound: a free and sometimes dissonant article is replaced by a harmonic trochee, while an internationalism saturated language is replaced by a simple, phonetically effective language composed of alliterations and assonances. The montage of folk songs in a poem is justified by the necessity to restore the Latvian identity in exile, to restore the memory of ancient, mythical knowledge, to represent the understanding of beauty and other moral-ethical values and to show the thought activity. Common mythical images in the lyrics of Sniķere are snake, wind, gold, silver, stone etc. The Latvian folk song symbolism and lifestyle of the poet are organically synthesized with the insights of Indian philosophy.

Jews, Western sociology’s intimate others

This article argues that Goldberg’s Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought fills an important gap: Jews are not only ‘good to think’ (Lévi-Strauss) but also essential for Western social theorists to critically interpret modernity and ambivalence towards it. In the article’s first part, devoted to the book’s epistemological and methodological underpinnings, I raise the following points: the book’s disciplinary focus prevents it from engaging more fully with broader intellectual and sociocultural currents, its national- cum-thematic structure precludes the exploration of transnational comparisons and nationally exogenous factors, the neglect of Jewish exile and cosmopolitan identity in the face of antisemitism and lack of clarity as to whether the book conforms to a realist epistemology or a symbolic one. In the article’s second part, I raise points about Goldberg’s rereading of the sociological canon, notably regarding Durkheim, Simmel and Weber.

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor

Identities in Exile: Re-membering Identities, Re-membering the Nation in Laksmi Pamuntjak’s Amba

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s first novel, Amba (2012) is one of several contemporary Indonesian novels by the post-1965 generation that breaks the silence on the violent suppression of the Indonesian left in the mid-1960s. Like other recent creative responses and initiatives by Indonesian artists and civil society, Amba represents the “postmemory” of the 1965-66 events. This paper examines the modes of internal exile triggered by 1965 as portrayed in three characters in Amba and how exile disrupts and delays identity formation across different generations of Indonesians—hence, exiled identities. The history of Moluccan exile post-1950 is also crucial to the novel’s representation of people whose identities were displaced, ruptured, or in limbo as a result of political violence. The depiction of internal exile in Amba is examined based on work done by scholars on Indonesian exile narratives (Hill, Hearman) and concepts of transgenerational trauma (Schwab) and postmemory (Hirsch). This paper then discusses the various acts of “re-membering” to recover a coherent sense of self and of the nation depicted in Amba, such as through literal and figurative journeys, re-establishing kinship ties, narrating personal memories of the traumatic past, and the role of art in revealing suppressed memories of the 1965 event.

Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience

Notwithstanding the steady growth of Vietnamese Catholics in the United States, the lack of historical research has left many gaps and led to a generic and imprecise understanding of their experience. The scholarship from the social sciences and religious studies has shed light on some areas but also leaves out the historical dimensions, particularly the exilic identity that formed among Catholic refugees during the initial period of resettlement. This identity came from three major historical developments: the impact of ultramontanism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the experience of nationalism and anticommunism, and the abrupt end of the Vietnam War. To deal with national loss, family separation, and the challenges of living in a foreign society, Catholic refugees resorted to their ultramontane legacy and anticommunist nationalism. Although Vietnamese American Catholics no longer identify themselves as exilic, their initial experience formed some of the most important aspects about their identity to this day.

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible ed. by Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor

Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible ed. by Katherine E. Southwood and Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor