Exilic Consciousness Research Articles

A “generation in‐itself”: authoritarian rule, exilic mentality, and the postwar generation of intellectuals in 1960s Taiwan

This essay analyzes why and how, compared with the sweeping student and youth movements in the United States, Europe, Latin American, Japan, and other places in the world in the 1960s, the postwar generation in Taiwan remained politically and socially passive. Focusing on the relations between their exilic mentality, historical consciousness, and national identity, the essay is concerned with the political‐cultural factors that shaped their inactivism. This generation grew up dominated by narrative constructed by the displaced state and the previous generation in exile. Their exilic mentality mingled with a strong sense of isolation and obligation to the Chinese nation, though the rigid political and social control filled them with gloom. The postwar generation of intellectuals in 1960s Taiwan, both local Taiwanese and mainlanders, was not an active “generation for‐itself” but constituted a passive “generation in‐itself.”

“An Unremembered Time”: Secular Criticism in Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics

In Pankaj Mishra's novel, The Romantics, Samar writes about his struggle to reconcile diverse cultural influences in his private life with a political context increasingly defined by a narrow definition of Hindu identity during the late 1980s and early 1990s in India. While he characterizes India's political rhetoric as dominated by notions of cultural purity and religious orthodoxy, my essay argues that the novel's setting and historical context is rife with symbols of India's inter-cultural and hybrid past that Samar refers to as emerging out of “an unremembered time”. I argue that Edward Said's notion of “secular criticism”, with its emphasis on exilic consciousness, is a particularly apt way of unpacking the novel's examination of majoritarianism through ironic representations of Hindu nationalism, Indo-Saracenic architecture and the history of the founding of Benares Hindu University. This paper tracks how Samar's fictional memoir is marked by a growing unease with uneven effects of modernity on Indian society in the midst of escalating sectarian violence in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Alienation and Revolutionary Vision in East African Post-Colonial Dramatic Literature

This paper is a trans-disciplinary inquiry into the principles of alienation and revolutionary ethos in two East African plays of postcolonial society. It engages literary-textual exegesis and sociological theories to unravel the multi-dimensional forms of alienation as an interrogation of contemporary postcolonial history. The writers, though somewhat in throes and dilemma of exilic consciousness, ‘commodify’ and appropriate the literary enterprise as weapon of active physical revolt and textual indignation against the post-independent maladies and conditions of alienation. We discover a paradigm shift from obvious ironic strain of political, economic dissonance and use of prison as metaphor for psychic/physical and spatial dislocation in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi to religio-genic instrument of oppression, exploitation and revolutionary fervor in I Will Mary When I Want. While the latter play x-rays the combative struggle of the mau-mau warriors for an end to colonialism, the former deploys the resources of ‘reversed-alienation’ and nostalgia to enact a melodrama of psychic and intellectual rebellion against the African capitalists of post-colonial Kenya. Thus, African drama is an active participant in the critical, ideological and sociological transactions of historical materialism in post-colonial Kenya.

‘You Can't Go Home Again’: From Karel Schoeman's Na die geliefde land to Jason Xenopoulos's Promised Land*

This article examines the changes rung on Karel Schoeman's 1972 novel, Na die geliefde land (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau) by the 2003 film adaptation, Promised Land, directed by Jason Xenopoulos. The crucial effects and demands of the medium of film as well as the historical moment of production are taken into account to conclude that the filmic updating of the novel is interesting, finally, for its use of its source material as a vehicle for commenting on post-apartheid South Africa and the world of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, rather than as an exploration of how Schoeman's play with exilic consciousness might be brought to screen. *My thanks to Meg Rickards for her invaluable comments on an earlier version of this article, and to my Honours Film class of 2004 for their insights.

Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in Performance

This essay uses my play Psycho Wracks as a point of departure from which to explore exilic dimensions of postcolonial experience and discourse. It also investigates the possibilities of feminist performance practices as countercanonical approaches that are both critical and recuperative. In creating the play Psycho Wracks, based on the figure of Sycorax, I was not so much interested in rethinking The Tempest or extending understanding of Shakespeare (though, as discussed later, certain postcolonial and feminist interrogations of his work were relevant to my aims) as I was concerned with abstracting and meditating upon her character as a trope and a springboard for allusive, parodic, and ironic creation.2 Rewriting Sycorax, I was primarily focused on resurrecting the exiled feminine or the exilic consciousness of the banished subaltern female, an endeavor built on a meditation upon absence, literal and symbolic. Mulling over the implications of her "difference" and her history (or lack thereof), I began imagining the possibility of speaking through and for her in performance. Numerous issues and questions concerning her genealogy, subjectivity, characterization, iconicity, and significance coalesced for me around one central question: what would she say, were she to stage a return?