Memories Of Exile Research Articles

Memories of Exile, Memory in Exile: The Sri Lankan Separatist Conflict in the Films of Pradeepan Raveendran

In this article, we wish to examine the place of the memory of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka and how it is transmitted. We analyze how stories, memories, and narratives collide, and how Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in France seek out traces of their past to negotiate their inclusion in the present. Using a body of film - Pradeepan Raveendran’s creations - and interviews with the filmmaker, we explore how each personal history of the conflict accounts for the reorganization of the subject’s identity and environment, and thus, is perpetuated from one generation to the next. This article explores building on Stef Craps’s work on postcolonial trauma, how the memory of this conflict is transmitted in France. We also analyze how each actor negotiates a new space, both real and imaginary, in the space of the diaspora. Finally, we look at how the past is reconstructed to build a collective memory akin to Maurice Halbwachs’s new “social frameworks” (Halbwachs 1925).

Memories of Exile

Memories of Exile

A Language of Hope: Non-traumatic Narrative of Transnational Memory in Khodadad Mohammadi’s ‘The Translator’s Tale’

Focusing on the memory of refugees, asylum seekers, and detainees, this article categorizes their diasporic memory under transnational memory and questions the seemingly natural linkage between trauma theory and memories of exile. By examining the significance of the action of translation in Khodadad Mohammadi’s short story ‘The Translator’s Tale’, this article uncovers agency and hope in non-traumatic narrative and draws attention to the potential of such a narrative to promote solidarity among different communities and collective memories, contributing to the nexus of memory, literature, and activism.

Scripture, Sovereignty and National Self-Determination in Martin Buber’s Bein Am Le’Artzo (1944)

Abstract This paper investigates Buber’s understanding of the relationship between the Jewish people and the Promised Land as it emerges from his biblical commentaries of the 1940s. It argues that Buber’s exegetical writings from the period should be read as an extension of his political pronouncements on Zionism, complementing his binational vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Palestine. Focusing on Buber’s 1944 lectures published under the title Bein Am Le’Artzo, I show how Buber questions the indigenous identification between the people and Land of Israel. Drawing on Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s theoretical concept of “exile within sovereignty,” I read Buber’s commentaries on the commandments of shmita and bikurim as an attempt to integrate the memory of exile within his vision of Zionism. The biblical resonance he attributes to the Jews’ resettlement in Palestine thus forms a pointed polemic against the ideal of Jewish nativism. In contrast to those who used the Bible in order to mythologize the Jews’ autochthonous relationship to the land of origins, Buber’s commentaries stress the diasporic consciousness preserved in the scriptures themselves.

1889: International Asylum Law and the Memory of Exile in South America

1889: International Asylum Law and the Memory of Exile in South America

National memory in exile: The case of the Georgian émigré community, 1921–2018

AbstractThis paper investigates the construction and role of national memory in exile through the intersection of nationalism and memory studies. Building on descriptions of the Georgian émigré memory, its comparison with the Soviet Georgian identity and its travelling trajectory, this study illustrates the potential of subaltern national exilic memory. My research data on prominent Georgian émigrés are juxtaposed with a recent historical study of the internal diaspora of prominent Georgians in the Soviet Union. This is a story of postcolonial intellectuals and nationalist elites who acted as a carrier group in 1921, advocating internationally against the suffering of Soviet Georgians. Exiles produced an alternative account, comprised of four counternarratives, to that of the Soviet Union. These identified narratives constitute a stored memory that became an available past for Georgia. The safeguarded émigré memory was negotiated, recovered, used for centennial celebrations in 2018 and finally reintegrated into the national body.

Siostry Klemensy od Wniebowzięcia (Janiny Wójcik) wspomnienia z zesłania (1940–1946)

Sisters Klemensa of the Assumption (Janina Wójcik) memories of exile (1940–1946) Sister Klemensa of the Assumption, Janina Wójcik (1893–1982), was born in Nowy Sącz, to the family of Ignacy – a railwayman and Jadwiga née Zwierzyńska. She graduated from the Private Teachers’ Seminary in Tarnów, gaining qualifi cations to teach manual labor in elementary schools. She entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in 1917. She made her perpetual profession in 1925. Before the outbreak of World War II, she worked in the monasteries in Wirów, Szymanów, Jarosław, Słonim, Niżniów and Maciejów as an economist, refectory and vestress. After the outbreak of World War II, she was forced to leave the monastery in Maciejów. She stayed briefl y in Lviv. In 1940, she was deported to the Mariinsky Autonomous Socialist Republic of the USSR. She worked in the canteen in Nowa Strojka, then in the hospital in Joszkar-Oła. In the 1970s, Sister Klemensa wrote down retrospective memoirs entitled “Memoirs from Russia of Sister Klemensa of the Assumption (Janina Wójcik). My memories of the last war (1939–1946)”. They count 25 single-sided pages. They include the time of deportation, with particular emphasis on information about the work performed. Sister Klemensa returned to Poland, to Nowy Sącz in 1946.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Literatura y exilio: desarraigo, refugiados y la ambigüedad de la memoria en el sur de Europa

ABSTRACT In February 2017, the most massive demonstration in favor of refugees took place in Barcelona with the motto Refugees welcome! Yet, since then migration policies have become more restrictive under the influence of neofascist movements. How are we to cope with this social polarization? How are we to overcome the moral paralysis of Southern Europe regarding refugee policies? Since language creates reality, this article will examine the vagueness of words used to describe the different fluxes of forced mobility. Etymological analysis reveals how the use of terminology has been politicized up to the point of inhibiting any possible collective reaction. Following these considerations, the phenomenology of exile developed by philosophers and writers such as Josep Solanes and María Zambrano is recovered. The article proposes the articulation of a memory of exile as an ethical imperative for Europe, a continent of former settlers, outcasts, exiled and refugees.

Gatunek dziennika we Wspomnieniach z podróży do Syberii, pobytu w Berezowie i w Saratowie Ewy Felińskiej

"Memories of the Journey to Siberia, Staying in Berezovе and Saratov" by Eva Felinska is a complex genre-style formation of memoir literature of the Right Bank of Ukraine in the Romantic era with characteristic features of positivist tendencies. It is united by a common thematic idea, recording and contemplating on the events which took place during the author's forced journey to Siberia and stay in places of exile. Assimilation at the level of subgenres and modifications as a result of further "shaking" of the genealogical paradigm of the Enlightenment under the influence of the formation of a new individual romantic authorial consciousness, inherent in the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, acquired a new stylistic color and functionality. Within the general subgenre dominance of women's Siberian memories of exile, a travel diary, forced travel, private letters, folk tales, article, review, business economic document were combined, which together made E. Felinska's "Memories of the Journey to Siberia…" interesting for a wider audience of readers, making it possible to present various spheres of socio-historical development of the era and directly construct and present a multifaceted image of the memoirist, which has not disappeared against the large-scale background of the era. E. Felinska's diary style is characterized by certain conciseness, attention is focused on the most significant events, and in the center of the image there is a nomination, the text provides above all cognitive-scientific informativeness. With the continuation of work on "Memories of the Journey to Siberia…" genre modification of the Siberian diary of forced travel, getting rid of the features of exotic space and ethnographic color, inherent in depicting the customs and traditions of indigenous peoples of the North, turns into a household diary that covers the everyday realities of the life of the writer-exile. Keywords: E. Felinska, genre, letter, genre modification, diary, memories.

THE MEMORY OF EXILE RECOVERED IN THE UTOPIAN BODY OF THE SCENE: THE BODY AND SOUND IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROMETHEUS CHAINED ACCORDING TO ALBERTO KURAPEL (1988

This article analyzes a particular corpus of theater-perfor- mance: Prometheus chained according to Alberto Kurapel, a work released on March 11, 1988 in the Exile Space, Montreal, Canada and published in 1989 by the Humanitas publishing house. From the photographic images and the video of its staging, this analysis focuses attention on the body - on its various constructions / presentations - and on sound understood as a space / body that reveals another reality. Bodies that denote a dis- location caused by the notion of exile, since the actor-performer is the entity in charge of recovering memory in the utopian body of the scene, unraveling its meanings and showing its symbolic depth. The study at- tempts to answer the question: how is the historical memory of exile in Alberto Kurapel's Prometheus constructed with body and sound?

Memories of Exile and Temporary Return: Chilean Exiles Remember Chile

Memories of Exile and Temporary Return: Chilean Exiles Remember Chile

Silesian-Texans’ Memories as Recorded in Autobiographical Accounts

The paper discusses the significance of immigrants’ memory in exile as well as its influence on the new lifestyle people have to adjust to in unknown surroundings. The author concentrates on a group of Silesian-Texans who left their homeland in Upper Silesia in the 19th century and found their first settlement in Panna Maria, Texas, USA. That emigration was a challenge for those migrants, and they had to go through difficult cultural, social and economic changes in the remote area. However, they never wanted to forget about their Silesian home. That is why they tried to preserve contact with their Polish families in the form of letters, short notes and stories. This paper analyses the unique autobiographical accounts which were used as the correspondence between the old homeland and new homeland for Silesian migrants. They were written mainly in the forms of letters, but there could also be found diaries and stories which depict their life in the USA. Those autobiographical accounts are based on migrant reality, without distorting it, thus presenting the devotion towards Polish and American culture, religion and society. The author of this paper explores the most crucial aspects of life for Silesian migrants which shaped their identity in the USA on the basis of the preserved materials and interviews.

Yugoslavia from the Other Side. Memorialization of the Yugoslavian Communist Revolution Among Slovenians in Argentina

The article addresses how Slovenians in Argentina ritualise memories of the socialist Yugoslavia. The Slovenian diaspora in Argentina was established by post-war refugees, who inextricably related the perception of Yugoslavia with memories of the Second World War, the communist revolution and, in particular, the post-war exile and extrajudicial mass executions. The article specifically analyses commemorations of the victims of communist violence as the central anti-Yugoslavian political ritual and argues that imageries of communism, Yugoslavia and the anticommunist struggle, all carefully ritualized in ceremonies and commemorations, not only reinforced the social memories of exile, but also catalysed the social organization of the diaspora, its political ideology, and the framework of its attitudes towards the homeland and the past.

Poéticas da migrância e ditadura: exílio e diáspora nas obras de Julián Fuks e Francisco Maciel

Resumo O artigo trata da questão dos exílios e das migrações, em relação à ditadura militar, em dois autores da literatura brasileira contemporânea: Julián Fuks e Francisco Maciel. O romance A resistência (Fuks, 2015) é analisado segundo os conceitos de pós-memória (Hirsch, 2008) e privatização do trauma (Seligmann-Silva, 2014). Este romance, em sua tentativa de construir a memória da família relacionada ao exílio de pais argentinos e à adoção de um filho, retrata, nas dificuldades formais de escrever o livro, os problemas políticos do processo de justiça de transição no Brasil, em comparação com a Argentina. Na obra de Francisco Maciel, a discriminação racial contra a população negra é um tema central. A repressão política considerava que o movimento negro representava ameaça contra a segurança nacional. O artigo analisa a questão das migrações dos negros na obra de Maciel em termos de diáspora (Hall, 2003), e explica como ela não se torna apenas tema, mas também forma literária, no romance Não adianta morrer (Maciel, 2018).

La memoria desterrada: Soldados de Salamina de Javier Cercas en el contexto polaco

A memory in exile: Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas in the Polish contextThis article analyzes some aspects of the reception of Javier Cercas’ novel Soldados de Salamina in Poland. This book is considered to be one of the emblematic works of the contemporary postmemorial trend in the Spanish narrative. Therefore, it seems to be appropriate to examine this novel and its Polish translation within the frame of memory studies using the concept of travelling memory. From this perspective, translation is perceived as a medium which transports the memory of past events belonging to a specific group into a different social and historical context. Polish and Spanish memories apparently do not have common points. It turns out, however, that the Polish reading public does not seem interested in the others’ memory, although is willing to accept some of their ways of dealing with the traumatic past.

Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt. The Narrated Diaspora, 1550–1750

Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt. The Narrated Diaspora, 1550–1750

Problems of Comparative Research into Lithuanian and Latvian Collective Memory: The Concepts of Memory of the Balts and of Baltic Regional Memory

The present article deals with the concepts of regional collective memory and intercultural identity actualized in Lithuanian and Latvian comparative cultural studies. The phenomena of memory of the Baltic region (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) and memory of the Balts (Lithuanians, Latvians), their differences and intersections are briefly discussed in the research part. The former is defined as a geopolitical regional construction, and the latter as a result of traditional common ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic development of two Baltic nations. Some examples of the usage of the term Baltic in literature and literary studies highlight the problems of the concept of regional memory and cases of newly interpreted or unsystematically used terminology. Lithuanian translations of the title of the poems Baltijas eleģijas (The Baltic Elegies) by Ivars Ivasks, Am Baltischen Meer (The Baltic Sea) by Durs Grünbein, or the essay Bałtowie (The Balts) by Czesław Miłosz could stand as examples. Developing the concept and the research field of Baltic (Latvians and Lithuanians) memory, several possible perspectives of comparative studies of Lithuanian and Latvian collective memory are suggested. Memories of exile and migration, the areas of the Lithuanian-Latvian border, the capital cities Riga and Vilnius, the periods of independence and between the wars, and the Holocaust could be taken as places of memory revealing historiographical parallels.

Johannes Müller, Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt: The Narrated Diaspora, 1550-1750

Johannes Müller, Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt: The Narrated Diaspora, 1550-1750 (Dissertation Leiden University 2014; Leiden/ Boston: Brill. 2016, 254 pp., ISBN 9789004315914).

Memory in Exile

In this article, a discussion about memory in exile is presented that takes up the thesis that exile is a condition of post-existence and afterness. The main claim is that exile is not only existence after a cut and separation but is an existing as afterness, in a “present tension” of being with the without and without a with. It reveals a sense of the present and of presence as multi-directed movements, as clusters of echoes and delayings. In exile, memories are not the continuous simultaneity of double images but are rather “photisms,” shimmering between images, the coming and going between languages, experiences, a longing back and forth. Exilic memory is the experience that bears witness to the present as the movement of presencing, of appearing while sliding away.