Idea Of Exile Research Articles

“The Meanings of Journey in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction”

Abstract Almost unanimously considered nowadays as one of the greatest Latin American writers of the contemporary era, the Chilean Roberto Bolaño put into question, in his well-known novel The Savage Detectives (1998), the structure and meanings of journey. Seen not only as the characters’ capacity to move from one place to another, each journey described within this book acquires symbolic meanings, being in turn an intricate process of initiation or a personal quest of the protagonists. Nevertheless, journey, as seen in Bolaño’s fiction, also implies sometimes the idea of exile, a very specific exile within literature, the Chilean writer’s characters representing contemporary expressions of the great Homeric heroes or absolutely original embodiments of Joyce’s Ulysses himself.

Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing PressWriting Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States

Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing PressWriting Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States

Displacing Political Islam in Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the narrative of Islamic nationalism in twentieth-century Indonesia, focussing on the experience of, and discourse surrounding, the self-identified Islamist Darul Islam movement and its leader, S. M. Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962). I offer a narrative of the independence struggle that counters the one advanced by Indonesia's Pancasila state, and allows us to capture subtleties that old discussions of separatism—with their assumption of fixed centres and peripheries—cannot illuminate.The article unfolds three historical threads connected to ideas of exile and displacement (physical and intellectual), and the reconstitution (successful or failed) that followed from those processes. Starting from the political circumstances under which Kartosuwiryo retreated to West Java after the Dutch reinvasion of 1947—in a form of physical exile and political displacement from the centre of politics to the periphery, from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition—I then transition to an elaboration of Kartosuwiryo's ideology. His political strategy emerges as a form of voluntary intellectual displacement that bounced between local visions of authority, nationalist projects, and transregional imaginations in order to establish the political platform he envisioned for postcolonial Indonesia. Lastly, I argue that the elision of Islam from the reconstructed narrative of Kartosuwiryo's intentions, characterised as separatist and anti-nationalist, was a key aspect of Indonesia's nation-building process. It is my final contention that official Indonesian history's displacement of Kartosuwiryo's goals away from Islam and into the realm of separatism allowed for two reconstitutive processes, one pertaining to political Islam as a negative political force, and the other to Kartosuwiryo as a martyr for Islam.

Hacia una retórica de la presencia en el exilio en la dramaturgia de Jorge Díaz y Jerónimo López Mozo

This paper analyzes alienation as a consequence of exile in the plays Cancion de cuna para un anarquista (2003), by Jorge Diaz, and El olvido esta lleno de memoria (2002), by Jeronimo Lopez Mozo. Under the idea of a real and symbolic return in the post-dictatorship societies of the Southern Cone and Spain, the confrontation with reality generates a new trauma, which reveals an alternative discourse that alters a pre-established social order. The idea of exile, based on Edward Said’s formulations in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), not only means the separation of something, but also results in the loss of that something forever. To speak of exile, (auto) exile or the exiled subject does not mean to restore the condition of loss, but rather, it faces a reality imposed to oblivion. The exile in these plays creates “borders” and “barriers” that become in a type of imprisonment.

Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester: Chronicles and Ideas of Exile and Imprisonment in Fifteenth-Century England

In 1442, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (c. 1400–1452) was permanently removed from London as punishment for her involvement in a conspiracy to foresee or bring about the death of Henry VI. Sometimes contemporary chroniclers depicted Eleanor's removal as imprisonment, sometimes as more akin to exile. An analysis of three chronicle recensions explores these portrayals for what they can reveal about the fluidity of these states and their relevance at a particular historical moment. As this approach argues that ideas of exile and imprisonment were malleable and interrelated, the significance of Eleanor's story is also highlighted.

The Ambivalent Émigrée: Mayy Ziyādah’s Rhetoric of Nationhood

This paper reflects on the idea of exile in relation to the fractured intellectual landscape of identity formation as pronounced in a series of conceptualizations of homeland, nation, and nationhood in early twentieth-century Egypt. Where there is strong anti-colonial feeling and a need to forge a clear understanding of belonging, the conceptualization of homeland assumes paramount importance, with prominent Arab intellectuals and littérateurs like Mayy Ziyādah sharing in the ongoing discussion. Ziyādah was ambivalent toward mainstream applications of national identity at the time, not only because of her multilayered, fluid personal identity, but also because, under the impact of Enlightenment thought, she believed in world citizenry.

«Король Лир» У. Шекспира: переосмысление сюжета и вечных образов в русском и индийском литературном пространстве XIX века

<p>«Вечные образы» художественной литературы понимаются как своеобразная форма осмысления живой и актуальной действительности. Они отвечают универсальной потребности человека вести духовный поиск, размышлять над человеческой судьбой и общественными проблемами. В литературе Х1Х–XX вв. мы наблюдаем широко распространенное в литературах разных народов цитирование и переосмысление вечных образов из творчества английского писателя У. Шекспира. Среди наиболее популярных произведений отмечаются «Гамлет», «Ромео и Джульетта» и «Король Лир». В статье представлено исследование русской и индийской литератур XIX в., в которых отразилось использование и переосмысление сюжета и образов «Короля Лира».</p><p>В русской литературе шекспировское влияние заметно на произведениях А. Н. Островского («Свои люди — сочтемся»), И. С. Тургенева («Степной король Лир»), в индийской — Диджендролала Рая («Шахджахан»). Все они по-разному оценивали и воспринимали идеи Шекспира. «Степной король Лир» определяется как аллюзия или реминисценция. Это подсказывает необходимость ассоциативного восприятия этого произведения читателем. «Свои люди — сочтемся» является очевидной адаптацией, поскольку Островский стремился отобразить в образах сугубо реалистических, художественно-конкретных типичных представителей своей эпохи. «Шахджахан» также является адаптацией, ибо автор изменил сюжет и действующих персонажей, ориентируясь на спрос и понимание читательской аудитории своей страны.</p><p>Обобщаются аспекты, которые привлекли авторов к образам и сюжетам «Короля Лира»: драмы разворачиваются на фоне патриархального социально-экономического уклада, характерного для русского и индийского общества середины XIX в.; конфликт между отцами и детьми универсален по своей природе; идея изгнания как форма страдания оказалась привычной и понятной для индийского и русского менталитета; понятным также был и сюжет о разделе имущества по решению главы семьи и последующих семейных раздорах.</p><p>Основополагающей идеей произведений стала мысль Шекспира: власть и золото так же не вечны, как и все в этой земной жизни.</p>

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell

Reviewed by: Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell Amy Nejezchleb Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell, pp. 317. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. $39.95. Home is a quietly contested place, full of liminal spaces and Richard Rankin Russell has given us a monograph on how the matter of home is handled in Friel’s major plays. Russell offers thorough analyses of the Donegal playwright’s most-loved, well-known, and most-often produced plays: Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Freedom of the City (1973), Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1999). Friel was to begin his career as a short story writer, but soon found his métier in the theater. He moved from short fiction to experiments in radio drama. It was the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! that truly set him on his path, and sixteen years later, Translations propelled him to international acclaim. Not all of his creative endeavors gathered laurels; his fame often fluctuated due to the unevenness of his work. Russell traces the extraordinary impact of place on Friel’s protagonists. His characters seem perpetually to be looking for ways to temper, tolerate, or escape Irish culture; whether their reponses are against the fixed ideologies of nationalism and British imperialism, American modernization and reductivism, or the forced politicization of communities, Friel’s major plays all question the very nature of home. Russell is especially interested in how communities are impacted by modernity in the plays. His contribution adds to recent studies that investigate place and space in Irish theater, such as Helen Hausner Lojek’s The Spaces of Irish Drama (2011) and Chris Morash and Shaun Richards’s Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013). Moreover, as Russell points out, Friel engages with more than local culture and community. He sets his plays in urban, public, and personal spaces, including the spaces of mind and body. The idea of place is fluid in Friel’s most poignant characters, including Frank Hardy, Maire and Yolland, and the Mundy sisters; indeed, Russell shows how characters create “place through their invention of community.” The first chapter focuses on the character of Gar in Philadelphia, the story of a young man intrigued by the promises of America, especially as he has seen it in film, which present a world seemingly wholly unlike his home. Hoping to escape a motionless Irish culture, Gar emigrates to follow the seductive promises of modernity. Yet the result is ironic: the Ireland of the 1960s that Gar leaves behind will transition to a newly dynamic and modernizing state, while Gar’s decision leads him to remain in his aunt and uncle’s apartment in Philadelphia, rehearsing the same stereotypical memories of the small island. The chimera of glamor that came to him by way of American films actually serves to divorce Gar from what truly makes him free, the sense of place he knows in his rural Irish community. In Chapter two, Russell uses Derrida’s theory of “hauntology” to illuminate [End Page 155] the stories of three very different protestors caught in Derry’s Guildhall in The Freedom of the City. These dispossessed tenants have been sacrificed—seized by the events of myth—while their ghosts form a community based on shared space. Like intersecting planes, the bodiless tenants interrogate past events and reveal their stories. The modern bullet of the brigadier comes to symbolize the conflict between the erosive idiolocalities of Irish nationalism, British imperialism, and western modernity. Chapter three explores Friel’s preoccupation with ideas of exile and homecoming. A secondary focus is the theater’s ability to create community, which Russell finds on full display in Faith Healer. Most critics read the central character of Frank Hardy as the artist or sage. In a daring twist on this, Russell interprets Frank’s death as a ritualized sacred communion—though some readers may have a hard time accepting his reading of the violent dismemberment of Frank’s body as positive. Modernity’s extreme opponents, personified by the Irish farmers who literally dismember Hardy with modern implements, enable Hardy to...

Socialist Realism and New Subjectivities: Modern Acting in Gao Xingjian’s Cold Theatre

While Gao Xingjian’s discussions of acting and theatre have been analyzed in terms of postmodernism, Western modernism, the idea of exile, and traditional Chinese acting techniques, little has been said about Gao’s place within the distinct theoretical, artistic, and material context of the rapidly modernizing pre-Maoist, post-Qing China in which he began his work. Chinese ideas of a distinctly Chinese modernity; the specific way in which China utilized Stanislavski; debates over the status of huaju (spoken drama) and various Chinese forms of theatre; and emergent ideas about the relationship of the state, religion, and the individual provide a seething cauldron of debate. In addition to engaging with Western notions of subjectivity, Gao’s early work specifically maneuvers through the terrain of Chinese debates of the period in order to generate a curiously contingent modern Chinese subjectivity, and, in so doing, provides insights into the nature of Chinese modernity.

Reconstructing the history of exile and return: A reading of Dom Moraes’s The Long Strider

Throughout his life the celebrated Indian English poet Dom Moraes had suffered the dilemma of being doubly exiled. His Eurasian origin had exiled him both from his motherland India as well as from an England which he vainly tried to make his home. This article focuses on his last book, The Long Strider (2003), co-authored by Saraya Srivatsa, where Moraes revisits this idea of exile and homecoming through a double narrative relating the fascinating history of an Englishman named Tom Coryate who actually “walked” from England to India in 1613 to visit the court of Jahangir. This is interwoven with Dom Moraes’s own journey tracing the footsteps of the pioneering Englishman. Apart from exploring the manifold routes of and movements between home and exile, this travelogue/history/fiction also offers interesting insights into key postcolonial concerns such as the colonial gaze, the process of narrativizing the Orient, and the process of constructing history. The article looks at the relationship between Moraes’s text and the long tradition of “postcolonial” narratives of exile and homecoming scripted in India since the 19th century, when a profound sense of cultural displacement had been brought about by colonization. It also analyses the changed dynamics of the process of homecoming that The Long Strider presents in the context of the last few decades, when repeated ethnic clashes and mass killings seemed to put the very idea of India under erasure.

The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile

Artists in exile or in transit have produced some of the most exciting works, which is why intercultural theatre thrives in the contact zones among different ethnic, cultural, and performance traditions. Snow in August , a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, is a case in point. Why would a secular artist bring the religious rhetoric to bear on his philosophical investment in the idea of exile? The act of fleeing and constant search for a personal space through art carries important symbolic meanings for a playwright struggling with the contemporary tendency to politicize theatre works. This essay evaluates the 2002 premiere of Snow in August in Taipei in the context of Gao's theories of "cold literature" and "total theatre." Gao uses the hagiographic story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics. Gao believes that art is strictly a personal affair rather than an institution of moral teaching or social engagement. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao's theatre, because the religious discourses are constructed as venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated.

Michael Gluzman. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xiv, 250 pp.

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

Outcaste or Internal Exile? Ambiguous Bodies in the Making of Modern Japan

Based on more orthodox interpretations of ‘exile’ such as those put forward by Edward Said, many similarities can be drawn between the ideas of exile- particularly the notion of internal exile - and the outcaste that we see in the form of the Dalit in India. In this paper, we will firstly analyse the conceptual linkages between ‘exile’, ‘outcast’, and ‘outcaste’, highlighting both points of interchangeableness and departure for these notions as they relate specifically to the late Tokugawa Japanese ‘outcaste’ groups known as eta and hinin who were officially liberated through the Emancipation Edict promulgated in 1871. Second, after a brief background discussion where we problematize the above notions through the lenses of time and space, we will examine the state/condition of being an outcaste in the late Tokugawa period, and consider how close this situation was to a state of exile. Third, we will examine a specific example of the act of re-inclusion of outcastes into their local community created by the 1871 Emancipation Edict that led to the creation of the ‘former outcaste’ or ‘new citizen’, and analyse to what extent this embodies the process of returning from exile. Lastly, the paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the extent to which a crossover between the terms ‘outcaste’ and ‘exile’ may be applicable in the Japanese context, as well as the positive aspects of attempting such a conceptual reconfiguration for historians and activists working on the Buraku problem.

“Home Is Where the Shaykh Is”: The Concept of Exile in the Hagiography of İbrahim-i Gülşeni

The hagiographical narrative of the Halveti shaykh İbrahim-i Gülşeni, spanning a critical period in Islamic history when the shaykhs of Sunni mystical orders were pushed out of Iran and Azerbaijan to take up residence elsewhere, initially seems to be an excellent source for understanding how medieval thinkers reacted to the concept of exile. However, upon closer examination of the hagiographer and his work, we realize that it was not just the existence of a physical exile from one's homeland that was critical to the work. This article takes a closer look at how Muhyi-yi Gülşeni, the author and compiler of the hagiography of İbrahim-i Gülşeni and his followers, constructs the concept of exile in both its physical and metaphorical senses. In the world of a vastly expanded Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the reign of Sultan Süleyman that required its literate elites to take up posts far from home, Muhyi reconfigures the idea of exile to reflect a separation or estrangement from one's mystical guide. This narrative strategy both reinforced the audience's devotion to the order and offered a source of comfort to groups who were forced to travel to distant parts of the realm.

The Theocratic Ideology of the Chronicler

The Theocratic Ideology of Chronicler, by Jonathan E. Dyck. Biblical Interpretation Series 33. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 1998. Pp. xii + 256. N.P. This volume is a substantial revision of author's 1994 Ph.D. thesis under John Rogerson at University of Sheffield. He wishes to explore the relationship between Chronicler's theocratic ideas and sociohistorical context within which he worked (p. 1). More specifically, Dyck seeks to show that theocratic constitution of Second Temple Judah was an ideological achievement to which Chronicles contributed significantly. Dyck's approach is ideological critical in social-scientific sense of trying to uncover social force of Chronicler's rhetoric. The book contains six chapters. The first discusses concept of an author's purpose, distinguishing different senses of word: what Chronicler said (locution), what he meant or intended thereby (illocution), and what he achieved by what he said (perlocutionary motive). The chapter then surveys major proposals that have been offered about Chronicler's purpose, beginning with M. Noth, under five categories: exclusivist, inclusivist, theocrat, royalist, and Levitic apologist. A brief excursus explains his dating of Chronicles in second half of fourth century BCE. The second chapter addresses theoretical issues raised by notion of ideology as it relates to interpretation, focusing on social critique of Marx and development of his ideas by L. Althusser and especially P. Ricoeur. The three chapters at heart of book represent three readings of Chronicles based on Ricoeur's three-stage analysis of ideology. Chapter 3, Exile and Identity, uses idea of exile as a point of reference for contrasting exclusivism of EzraNehemiah with more inclusive ideology of Chronicles. While exile separates (= returnees) from people of land in Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles establishes no such inside/outside distinction but casts exile as a brief interruption in portrait of all Israel as a united federal nation, cultically sovereign over its own land. The fourth chapter, Legitimacy and Hegemony, examines a series of texts in 1 Chronicles in an effort to demonstrate that ideology of identity in Chronicles also serves to legitimate Jerusalem as center of Chronicler's Israel. The third and final reading is postponed by chapter 5, which contends, drawing principally on sociological models of modes of production, that there was an economically based hierarchy within Persian Judah that had temple at its center and that extended to primary social unit in Judah, houses of fathers. …