This volume of exiles’ accounts “[uses] the stories as springboards to discussing Iraqi history, politicization, and diasporic experiences in depth” (International Journal of Middle East Studies). With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq—from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba’th coup and support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation. Zainab Saleh shares the experiences of Iraqis she met over fourteen years of fieldwork in Iraqi London—offering stories from an aging communist nostalgic for the streets she marched since childhood, a devout Shi’i dreaming of holy cities and family graves, and newly uprooted immigrants with fresh memories of loss, as well as her own. Focusing on debates among Iraqi exiles about what it means to be an Iraqi after years of displacement, Saleh weaves a narrative that draws attention to a once-dominant, vibrant Iraqi cultural landscape and social and political shifts among the diaspora after decades of authoritarianism, war, and occupation in Iraq. Through it all, this book illuminates how Iraqis continue to fashion a sense of belonging and imagine a future, built on the shards of these shattered memories.

It is often claimed that we know ourselves and the world through narratives. In this book, Robert D. Newman portrays narrative engagement as a process grounded in psychoanalytic theory to explain how readers (or listeners or viewers) manage to engage with specific narratives and derive from them a personal experience. Newman describes this psychodrama of narrative engagement as that of exile and return, an experience in which narrative becomes a type of homeland, beckoning and elusive, endlessly defining and disrupting the borders of a reader's identity. Within this paradigm, he considers a fascinating variety of narrative texts: from the Jim Jones episode in Guyana to Freud's repression of personal history in his story of Moses; from a surrealistic collage novel by Max Ernst to the horror films of Alfred Hitchcock; from the works of James Joyce, Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera, and D. M. Thomas to the tales of abjection in pornography. Transgressions of Reading is itself an engaging work, as interesting for its provocative readings of particular works as for its theoretical insights. It will appeal to readers from all fields in which narrative plays a crucial role, in the study of film and art, modern and contemporary literature, popular culture, and feminist, psychoanalytic, and reader response theory.

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration – Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one’s own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody’s story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

"Originally published in Great Britain by Persephone Books"--Title page verso.

Comprehensive historical survey and critical analysis of the vast body of narrative literature about the Soviet gulag. Leona Toker organizes and characterizes both fictional narratives and survivors' memoirs as she explores the changing hallmarks of the genre from the 1920s through the Gorbachev era. Toker reflects on the writings and testimonies that shed light on the veiled aspects of totalitarianism, dehumanization, and atrocity. Identifying key themes that recur in the narratives -- arrest, the stages of trial, imprisonment, labor camps, exile, escapes, special punishment, the role of chance, and deprivation -- Toker discusses the historical, political, and social contexts of these accounts and the ethical and aesthetic imperative they fulfill. Her readings provide extraordinary insight into prisoners' experiences of the Soviet penal system. Special attention is devoted to the writings of Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but many works that are not well known in the West, especially those by women, are addressed. Consideration is also given to events that recently brought many memoirs to light years after they were written.

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities. The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the “exile” as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.

The Israeli, Palestinian, and American contributors to this volume consider the catastrophic failure of the Oslo peace process and the years of bloody violence that ensued.

Explore the shock of the new—and the familiar—experienced by well-known expatriate writers when they returned to the United States. The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad. Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein. Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the “returning absentee” by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.

This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, émigrés, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is devoted to exile cultures in Paris, London, and New York, as well as in Moscow, Madrid, Toronto, Buenos Aires and other cities. The studies focus on the factional divisions within each national exile culture and on the relationship between the various exiled national cultures among each other. They also investigate the relation of each exile national culture to the culture of its host country. Individual essays are devoted to Witold Gombrowicz, Paul Goma, Milan Kundera, Monica Lovincescu, Milos Crnjanski, Herta Müller, and to the "internal exile" of Imre Kertész. Special attention is devoted to the new forms of exile that emerged during the ex-Yugoslav wars, and to the problems of "homecoming" of exiled texts and writers.