Exilic Consciousness Research Articles

Exploring Identity Dynamics in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko through different Paradigms: Marginality, Liminality, Alterity, Cultural Syncretism, Exilic Consciousness, and the Myth of Going Home

This article researches the complex experiences of Koreans residing in Japan as depicted in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. The analysis is divided into three parts each of which consisting of different paradigms: marginalization, liminality and alterity, cultural syncretism and exilic consciousness, and the myth of returning home. It shows how they remain marginalized despite the passage of time which indicates that their existence is liminal as they negotiate a dense cultural identity oscillating between Korean heritage and Japanese societal norms. The idea of alterity captures this constant estrangement from Japan. Further, this study delves into how characters in this novel adopt a hybrid culture mixing both Korean and Japanese traditions. Lastly, it explores the myth of coming back to Korea that affirms emotional attachment to an idealized homeland that is barely attainable. Pachinko is also unique because it uses generations for its story line thereby revealing the transforming face of Zainichi experience marked out by resilience, cultural negotiations and long-term effects caused by displacement.

‘We have much identity’: contesting the claimed hybrid identity in Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun

ABSTRACT Since the second half of the 20th century, the notions of hybrid, hyphenated and transcultural identity have found urgent currency for scholars interested in the Arab Anglophone literary movement. Several books and anthologies have situated Arab Anglophone writers within diaspora and multicultural studies (e.g.). In particular, the fascination of Western academia has augmented comfortable diffusion and propagation of writers and critics endorsing these concepts. Whilst representing trans-cultural and hybrid identities is of immense importance when assiduously addressing issues of diaspora, migration, exilic consciousness, and dislocation, it has also become a ‘survival’ strategy for some ‘minority’ writers. The article challenges the claim that Arab Anglophone women writers’ depiction of hybrid identity is an expression of their lamentable state of affairs. It rather argues that those writers espouse strategic construction of hybridized identity to serve extrinsic aims related to recognition, canonization, and readership. This depiction is thus closer to an ‘essentialist practice’ than to a trans-cultural hybrid identity construction.

Living in the Third Space: A Postcolonial Study of Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

The Postcoloniality of Pakistani Literature in English is manifest in all the works produced both by the local and the diasporic writers representing the nation. Multifarious postcolonial dimensions of these literary yields, ranging from the personal exilic agonies to the collective traumas triggered by displacement, have been explored. Among these sociocultural dimensions represented in the creative works and theorized in the critical works, the notions of the Third Space and exilic consciousness remain the central ones. Invoking Homi Bhabha’s theoretical articulations on the issue, the researchers engage with Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers for an understanding of the condition of the characters oscillating between the native and adopted cultures. This is a qualitative study and the method of textual analysis has been used. Through a thorough analysis of the text of the novel, the perplexing positionality of the characters living in the third space, as represented by Aslam, has been exposed and critiqued. To contribute to the understanding of the Pakistani diasporic community’s problem, the findings have been located in the broader cultural context.

EXILIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVEL BY JOHN MAXWELL COETZEE

As a South African writer but currently living and working in Australia, so deep down, J.M. Coetzee has a profound sense of exile, which affected his writings. Not only having lost their identity cards and places of living, but the characters in Coetzee's novels also have the consciousness of an exiled soul. Each story he reflected also contains allegories of the politics, the apartheid state institution. The article explains some aspects of political discourse and exilic consciousness, helping us understand the apartheid tragedy that has had a strong impact on the lives of South Africans in particular and of humanity in general.

The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition

This article examines the role exile plays in the works of the first generation of Turkish German authors by focusing on Güney Dal. The first part of the article deals with Güney Dal’s interviews with other Turkish German authors in 1983. Even though the authors interviewed by Dal do not consider themselves exiles, I show that exilic consciousness is marked not only by the impossibility of returning home, a condition that the authors interviewed deny sharing with exiles, but also by the fact that the exilic subject is already displaced within and is as such unable to be at home. In the second part, I interpret Dal’s novel Eine Kurze Reise nach Gallipoli (1994), which he wrote after moving back to Turkey, as a work that showcases this insurmountable uprootedness and argue that Dal’s modernist novel shows that the disintegration of exilic consciousness can establish a link with political and ethical issues beyond the reach of the isolated and paranoid subject.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Unreconciled Strivings of ‘Exilic Consciousness’: Critical Praxis of Resistance in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin

This article discusses how Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author's ability to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.

“At This Age, This Is Who I Am”: CeCe Winans, Exilic Consciousness, and the American Popular Music Star System

Abstract My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs.

Decolonizing Judaism: Barbarism and the Return to Nativism

Santiago Slabodsky's Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking returns to a history of Jewish persecution, but unlike other attempts to trace the tradition of the Jewish “conscious pariah,” it does not aim to identify an “essence” of Judaism (say, “exilic consciousness”). The book's underlying goal is to think through the failures of previous Jewish projects to turn to the history of Jewish persecution, in order to form successful and meaningful political alliances with other, equally persecuted victims of Western hegemony. In this review, we position Decolonial Judaism in conversation with contemporary debates on exilic or diasporic Judaism and discuss the usefulness of a decolonial versus a postcolonial framework for evaluating the modern history of Judaism. Finally, we gauge the potential of reading decolonized or barbaric Judaism into the contemporary settler-colonial Jewish condition in Israel/Palestine.

Exile, exilic consciousness and the poetic imagination in Tanure Ojaide’s poetry

As a thematic trajectory, exile constitutes a visible presence in the Nigerian poetic afflatus and imagination. This is sometimes not adequately or sufficiently acknowledged. Increasingly, however, exile and exilic consciousness have continued to occupy a contested and contestable site in literature especially Nigerian poetry. This is essentially because of the multiple and shifting networks of significations that undergird the very constitution and definition of home, exile and the exiled. While exile could signify absence from one’s homeland and hence register an erasure of physical presence from a particular landscape, other interpretive grids that negotiate exile refract it as a spiritual and psychological state that does not necessarily translate to physical absence from home. The essay contends that both modes of epistemology and hermeneutic insights are tenable. Its framing and defining concern is the negotiation of the theme of exile in Nigerian poetry especially the poetry of Tanure Ojaide. The paper’s sustained argument is that Ojaide’s poetic imagination and sensibility have generously benefited from the trope of exile which has been conditioned by the reality of living and working away from home in the United States of America even as the poet himself problematises this reality with his frequent visits home and the construction of a hybrid identity as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. The paper uses Ojaide’s When It No Longer Matters Where You Live as a paradigm of textual representation to underscore the exilic consciousness in Nigerian poetry. It concludes that Ojaide’s volume contributes significantly to the work on the theme of exile in world literature and reflexively foregrounds the currency of the theme of exile in Nigerian poetry and, indeed, literature.

Wishing to Be White: Begging to Be Black

With race in mind, in this response the author draws on her own experiences of exilic consciousness, racial melancholia, whiteness, dissociation, and self-censorship to dialogue with Yvette Esprey. The author explores the issue of voice and how this is affected by context. The notions of the normative unconscious, K (nots), and the anti-analytic third are differentiated from one another. The relative weight given in the literature to unconscious processes such dissociation as opposed to more conscious self-censorship is explored in theory and with reference to Esprey’s case studies.

Edward Said’s Worldliness, Amateurism and Heterotopia: Negotiating the Interdisciplinarity of Literary Theory, Canonicity, and Paradigm

Literary criticism nowadays is essentially crossing the boundaries of disciplinarity and canonicity where literary theory has increasingly been shaped by overlapping concepts and branching out of theories as well as whipping out the limitations imposed by theory itself. The post-conditions of contemporaneity have imposed a view of reading and analysing the literary text that is dynamic, proliferated and in flux as well as resistant to monolithic critique and confined disciplines and professionalization. This outlook has increasingly made the notions of literary criticism, theoretical paradigms and canons not only artificial and irrelevant to our materialistic world, but, in many cases, ‘ violent ’ to those whose life concerns exist in the margins of these paradigmatic notions. In this essay, I argue that those of us who aspire to an interdisciplinary and a metacritical analyses would be well served by importing inspirations from Edward Said’s work, scholarship and life, particularly drawing on his ‘ Worldliness ’, ‘ Amateurism ’ and ‘ Heteroglossia ’ (or heterotopia) as well as drawing examples from his negotiation with intellectual paradoxes and tensions informed by his positionality as a border crosser intellectual (or his exilic consciousness ). Specifically, this article engages with Said as an author of a radically secular body of work marked by as comportment towards being, and as an example of an “ amateur ” critic who “ speak [s] truth to power ”. It argues that Said instates a critically-interrogative scholarship as antidote to essentialist, politicised, determinist and hegemonic literary canons (whether those of texts or theory) which are paradigmatically informed by relations of power in academia. The paper argues that through the investment of his scholarship and personal life, Said rejects academic institutions and affiliations with their tendency towards doctrinaire assumptions of critical work. Further to this, Said’s fascination of diversity, heterogeneity and his advocacy of the intellectual’s detachment from the institution of specialised criticism mount up as a radical critique of specialisation and professionalism and denouncing them as being allied with ideological and cultural dogma. Keywords: Edward Said, worldliness, amateurism, heterotopia, inter/post-disciplinary literary theory

Imagining Masculinities Through an Exilic Consciousness

A description of masculinities through the experience of fatherhood is presented as psychic exile in light of Edward Said’s notion of exilic consciousness. This is an attempt to write the exilic, understood by Said as that which stands as both located and displaced, familiar and estranged, and simultaneously within and without. This elaboration on masculinities is presented in a polyphonic psychoanalytic voice utilizing the concepts of exile, mimicry, mourning, nostalgia, and the contrapuntal to expand on the ambiguities of the necessarily discontinuous and precarious nature of male gender development. The notion of abjection is incorporated to give salience to the perverse dimensions of an exilic position. Associations to, and evocations from, case material and personal reflections are offered to give voice to a situated South African narrative, sensitive to the transience of that lived experience.

Hope and Sorrow of Displacement: Diasporic Art and Finding Home in Exile

Rushdi Anwar is a Kurdish artist in exile who references his personal experiences of genocide, situated within the modern history of his homeland, Kurdistan, to reflect on the region’s sociopolitical issues. His conceptual art demonstrates that exilic consciousness may be articulated and continuously developed through diasporic artistic expressions. Rushdi’s artwork installation ‘Irhal [Expel] – Hope and Sorrow of Displacement’ (2014–2015) aims to draw attention to the commonalities of human experience by narrating the journey from sorrow to hope. It invites audiences to understand displacement from a common perspective, the search for a safe home. Through a Deleuzian lens, this article explores Rushdi’s nomadic journey by looking at his diasporic artwork that connects the Australian context with the global crisis of conflict and displacement.

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

Ma Jian and Gao Xingjian: Intellectual Nomadism and Exilic Consciousness in Sinophone Literature

This paper examines the exilic experience and nomadic discourse in the lives and works of Gao Xingjian and Ma Jian, two prominent literary figures who have lived outside China since the late 1980s....Their exilic writing provides new source material for the study of literary exile and nomadism at the turn of the 21st century.

“On the Right Side of the Barricades”: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism

The main intention of this essay is to use Walter Benjamin's insights in his “On the Concept of History” as a critical tool for examining Zionist discourse. Specifically, the theses provide a vector for reading the perception of Zionism as reflected in the writings of Benjamin's close friend Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism and messianism. Scholem may be seen both as the object of the critical reading offered in this essay and its inspiration. On the one hand, Scholem was among those who participated in the construction of the Zionist metahistorical narrative, even if his contribution took a uniquely complex and sophisticated form. I read Benjamin's theses against Scholem's perspective, particularly his attempt to distinguish Zionism as a manifestation of “redemption,” the “utopian return,” and messianism. On the other hand, Scholem himself signals towards this critical stance. His writings from the 1920s, in which he advanced the idea of bi-nationalism in Palestine, suggest an alternative discourse that gives a concrete meaning to Benjamin's reflections written more than a decade later. An exilic perception of Benjamin can be actualized according to Scholem's early principles, for a process of remembrance oriented towards the Palestinian victims of redemption. In this context, the way to reveal the Jewish exilic consciousness is through the words of the victim of the “utopian return,” through the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet.

To be born into exile

The paper deals with the roles the literary and political legacy of Kelemen Mikes (1690–1761) and his Letters from Turkey have come to play in Hungarian literary emigration. Unlike Mikes’s 19th century cult, which interiorized exilic experience inasmuch as it provided an allegory for domestic political claims, in the 20th century the consecutive exilic waves (1944–45, 1947–48, 1956) increasingly identified Mikes with a peculiar exilic consciousness, which they felt to mirror their own in various ways. Accordingly, the figure of Mikes was designed, mainly in essay and in poetry, to represent and reinforce a wide range of diverse political and literary self-images, from nationalism to apolitical aesthetic modernism, from the experience of the Hungarian writer as a castaway to that of genuine human foreignness.

“Seeing the entire world as a foreign land”: the exilic intellectual in JM Coetzee's Disgrace

My reading of JM. Coetzee's Disgrace is informed by the deployment of the concept of exilic consciousness by postcolonial theorists, notably Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, and literary critic Julia Kristeva, to project an anti-utopian and antinomian vision of the universe that is very much at odds with conventional morality and ways of thinking about reality and identity. Through the author's expressive use of irony and other related tropes and discursive protocols that inform the novel – notably Lurie's stubborn display before the tribunal when he refuses to submit to a patently predetermined world view he perceives to be too “administered” (Said 2000: 184) – Coetzee's text becomes a lens through which particular unstable identities are played out in the postcolonial condition. Coetzee does this by suffusing Disgrace with a vision of the exilic imagination that is mediated mainly by the conflicting and contradictory strains of language.

Ellen Biþ selast – “Courage is the best thing”

ABSTRACT Themes such as war, exile, diaspora, dislocation, marginalization, alienation and identity are among the foremost topics of critical investigation in contemporary literature, as are the strategies of resistance and survival the displaced employ to invent a space of their own, an alternative or new identity. Could medieval studies benefit from such present-day enquiries? Can we bridge the divide between contemporary exilic experience and the Anglo-Saxon world of Old English poetry? This article explores ways in which Homi Bhabha's “third space,” Edward Said's “exilic consciousness,” and Victor Turner's “liminal space” could illuminate and scaffold some medieval works for contemporary readers. Recent findings by modern disciplines such as anthropology, trauma psychology and forensic archaeology regarding the trauma of violence, displacement and exile could also add new insights. In view of such perspectives, the ar ticle examines in par ticular how displaced individuals such as the Wanderer persona act positively, creatively and courageously to create a new, more complex identity.