Form Of Exile Research Articles

QUEERING EXILIC EXPERIENCE

To exist as queer is, one might argue, to exist in a form of exile: from sexual normativity; from cultural narratives; from the national corpus. Might we not reverse this formulation and ask, is existence as an exile also a form of queer existence? Ricardo Ortiz invokes exactly this question in Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, his study of recent cultural productions by artists living in the Cuban-U.S. diaspora. In his conclusion, he explains that the focus of his work is not intended to be identified strictly as “ ‘Cuban-American literature,’ no matter how comforting all those terms can still be in their particular forms of cultural concretion”; instead, he proclaims the book “a study of ‘political and cultural erotics,’ ” of “the retention of some relationship to a quality of cubanidad that has survived . . . from the heyday of the nation” (274). Ortiz produces a wide-ranging study of texts from within Cuban America that enable readings of the Cuban exilic experience as both exceptional and exemplary, as productive of feelings — and sometimes lived experiences — of queerness, strangely concomitant with the gender and sexual normativity of both U.S. and Cuban cultures. His study exposes how identification with a feminine-identified national fatherland and existence within two dyadically gendered sexual cultures (both of which privilege masculinity) place the subject of Cuban exile in a position of alterity not unlike those assumed by queer subjects. Moreover, those queer subjects who find themselves both inside and outside normative cubanidad are nevertheless unwilling to remit Cuban identity, even as the prospect of return becomes not only an increasingly less viable possibility but also, in many cases, less desirable.

Preface

In summarizing the general condition of poverty, one observer concisely described it as “a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society.”1 Efforts to define poverty more specifically perhaps risk incompleteness, since the causes underlying human destitution are so diverse and interrelated. This volume is an attempt to collate major dimensions of poverty and their impact on human development. In conjunction with the Council of Science Editors Global Theme Issue,2 we recruited established and emerging experts within nine topical areas, illness and disease, maternal health, health disparities, health care services, nutrition, education, housing, social and economic determinants, and engineering and technology. We asked them to provide their scientific perspectives on the causes and solutions relevant to human poverty. Twenty-five U.S. and foreign universities, as well as thirteen national or international organizations are represented. This collection focuses on the United States, as an example of a developed country in which poverty disrupts many lives,1 and provides an international context as well, through studies of developing countries in which the scale and impact of poverty are often more graphic and apparent. Thus, China, India, Nicaragua, Peru, Russia, and the countries of Africa are represented here, in addition to the United States. We hope the entire volume provides a better understanding of poverty, as it has for us, and that it may spur others to apply the rigor of science to understand, to reduce, and to ultimately eliminate poverty in our nation and around the world. The opening section is devoted to diseases of poverty, including chronic as well as acute infectious disorders. While not exhaustive in scope—measles, lower respiratory infections, and diarrheal illnesses are covered only by review of recent literature—the connections between neglected diseases and suboptimal development are abundantly evident. One worker remarked with regard to his disease of interest, “It's tied in with grinding poverty; where you find it maps almost perfectly with the poorest of the poor.”3 Many whose contributions are in Part I are active participants and leaders in efforts to directly reduce the human toll of these conditions. Their cautious hopefulness in the face of difficult odds indicates the progress their work is engendering. In Part II, maternal health is specifically addressed, and the critical need for support of mothers in avoiding the cycle of poverty is delineated. Indeed, this theme recurs throughout many other sections of this book. In Part III, health disparities in U.S. urban and Native American communities are formally addressed, whereas international health disparities are conveyed throughout most of the book. Access to health care and the problems of the uninsured are the subjects of Part IV. Basic human needs for food, education, and shelter are addressed in Parts V to VII, with papers from experts involved in the intimate connections between these topics and the experience of poverty. Part VIII considers social and economic determinants of human development, in both national and international contexts. Finally, Part IX discusses engineering and technological aspects of human development, which are especially critical for sustaining progress in poverty reduction in the developing world. While these nine sections provide a framework for the book, the boundaries between them are admittedly artificial. The answer to the question of why someone is poor will vary among individuals but invariably involves one or more of the issues addressed here. One author who supports preferential options for the poor has written, “Unless the poor are accorded some right to health care, water, food, and education, their lives will inevitably be short, desperate and unfree.”4 Poverty touches numerous aspects of human life simultaneously, and concerted efforts must be sustained in multiple arenas to secure meaningful gains. That is truly the message of this volume. We acknowledge the generous assistance of Dr. Evelyn Strauss, head of the initiative Scientists Without Borders at the New York Academy of Sciences (http://www.nyas.org/programs/borders.asp). Dr. Strauss referred us to numerous contributors for this book and proposed a section on engineering and technology. We also, and especially, thank Ms. Linda H. Mehta, acquisitions editor, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, for inviting us to participate in this project and for invaluable advice and guidance throughout each phase. Finally, we acknowledge the authors of these papers for their scholarship, compassion, and commitment. They are experts in science who also sense the humanity of the world's most vulnerable individuals and its casualties, while striving to reduce “the distance between the poor and the rest of us.”1 As editors, we thank them very much for contributing their knowledge, time, and energy to this project.

The Use of Exile: The Revaluation of Power Between the Ancients and Modernity

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War the city of Athens held its last ostrakaphoria, the ritualized ostracism that served to thwart the ambitions of potential tyrants. Now, in the arena of contemporary politics, a new form of exile has emerged, the so-called residency ban enacted against individuals categorized as sex offenders that effectively prohibits them from maintaining domicile within participating municipalities. It is at the site of exile, perhaps more than at the site of even death itself, that the state reveals its failure. The exile is the actor beyond compliance, insufficiently disciplined and improperly socialized. In this paper, I examine the revaluation of power as represented in the comparison of ancient and modern exile. I argue that the futile effort to control sexual predation through the use of exile succeeds in inadvertently creating a new kind of political resistance. Through the lens of exile a notion of modern power emerges that is inverted from its ancient antecedent.

An interview with Rebecca Goldstein

An interview with Rebecca Goldstein Jessica Lang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Rebecca Goldstein This interview with Rebecca Goldstein took place on November 9, 2006, in her new home, an apartment in a former factory near the Charles River, in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea of home plays a prominent role in Goldstein's writing, so it seemed fitting to meet her in that setting. Many of Goldstein's novels, starting with her earliest, The Mind-Body Problem (1983), and carrying through The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), Mazel (1995), and Properties of Light (2000), describe home as a place that is furnished with the creature comforts of middle-class living and located in a pastoral setting with regularly spaced houses and attractive front lawns. For Goldstein, however, this idealized notion of home is a form of exile, an environment that makes her feel oppressed and, as she reveals both in this interview and through her protagonists, least herself. Goldstein, in her search for home, rejects the physicality in both form and place typically associated with it. Instead, she leaves the externalized space to move into a far less tangible realm, one that invokes aspects of the self such as intellect, imagination, emotions, and creativity. In short, Goldstein is most comfortable developing ideas and explanations, imagining stories, and tracing histories. Part of this propensity she attributes to her training and work as a philosopher; part is inspired by a love of stories and texts passed on to her by her father. While in many ways the tension in her writing between longing for home and living in exile works as a dislocating force, as it uproots the protagonist, thereby forcing changes in habits, at the same time it locates, strengthens, and redefines the [End Page 1] most important ties to the past. Ultimately, many of Goldstein's characters find refuge in the search itself. Goldstein's quest for place and meaning extends to the narrative structure of her work: her stories typically begin in the present and then hearken back to a past that is—importantly—part of a larger and more complex history than the scope of a novel or biography can ever truly re-create. In some ways this trajectory reflects her sense of her own history and her complicated relationship to the Orthodox Judaism of her childhood. It also speaks to her awareness of a history that extends back thousands of years and the minuteness of her own life in comparison. In our conversation, Goldstein comfortably sifted through ancient Greek philosophy, the anthropological past, the more recent past of the Holocaust, and her personal history as an American Jew. In the historical framework she tends to favor, Goldstein deliberately fractures time in a way that reminds readers that it, too, like light and space, is not only a tool for story-telling but also an element of physics and philosophy. Through fracturing time, Goldstein brings history and the present together, just as the intangible nature of ideas and thought takes physical form in the words and pages of her books. The presence and absence of place and history, and with them beauty and truth, form the skeleton of Goldstein's texts; this polarization also serves to fill them out. Her construction (at times invention) of language reflects and animates her philosophical and historical ambitions. The Dark Sister (1993), a novel with a double history and a double plot, plays with language of reflection and mirrors; Properties of Light, in which one character is a ghost, invokes a vocabulary of negation and nonexistence. The Mind-Body Problem and The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind both work to define the limits of the mind and the self, of rationality and love. Goldstein's two most recent works, her nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel (Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel [2005]) and Benedict de Spinoza (Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity [2006]), are in many ways the culmination of her previous efforts: truth and imagination, the self and the mind work together in her understanding of the great intellectual contributions of these two figures...

Japaneseness, multiple exile and the Japanese citizens abandoned in China

This paper considers the case of the zanryū koji and zanryū fujin—Japanese women and children abandoned in China through war—and their lives in both China and Japan as conditions of exile. It examines how their separation from the Japanese mainland meant that they were unable to develop the markers of Japaneseness, and the consequences of this for their return to Japan, where they continue to live in a second form of exile.

Exile, Return and Restitution in the Czech Republic

The exile and return experiences in the Czech lands since 1918 have been various and have had significant implications for the people who live and once lived in that territory. The focus of this paper is on the Sudeten Germans a former minority of the Czech lands. The exile experience of this group has resulted in significant debate as to whether this form of exile as legislated banishment was expulsion or displacement, and whether they should have the right to return. In addition the question of guilt as a mechanism for invoking the forced transfer of a population has also raised the issue of recompense or restitution. Conceptual issues like nationalism, identity, belonging and the right to a homeland have played an important part in the attempts at the development of a stable state and also more recently reconciliation processes between the Czechs and Sudeten Germans.

Fighting for Survival

This article examines how the postdefeat fate of leaders of different regimes affects their incentives to end or continue a losing war and how the outcome of war interacts with regime type to affect the leaders' postwar fate. Three regime types—democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes—and three fates—staying in power, losing power, and losing power with additional punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment, or death—are distinguished. Only leaders of mixed regimes are likely to lose power and suffer additional punishment whether they lose a war moderately or disastrously. Therefore, leaders of such losing mixed regimes have a disincentive to settle on moderately losing terms; they prefer to continue war in a gamble for resurrection. As a result, wars with losing mixed regimes last longer and produce higher numbers of battle deaths for both sides than other wars.

Some Problems of a Playwright from South Africa

Thank you for this opportunity to be self-indulgent. I'm going to talk at a personal level about some of the problems I find myself dealing with as a playwright, and as a playwright from South Africa. At the beginning of this year I returned to South Africa, more specifically my home in Port Elizabeth-a little windswept industrial town on the eastern seaboard of the country-after a six-month stay in the United States, during which I had directed two of my plays: The Road to Mecca at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and a tryout in New York at the Perry Street Theatre of my latest play, My Children! My Africa! I was desperate to be back on South African soil again, as I always am after an extended absence from it. Returning home has always been a complex and emotional experience for me. I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death. I know it would mean the end of Athol Fugard the playwright, that any creative energies I have would wither away and die. Everything that I am, good and bad, as man and artist, I owe to that country. In fact, I sometimes think of my writing as an attempt on my side, hopelessly inadequate, to acknowledge, to pay back, something of the colossal debt that I owe to South Africa. I said once I think the most important thing a human being does with his life is how he loves in the course of it. The little or the lot that I know about