Giving Voice to Exile in Literature

Giving Voice to Exile in Literature: The Burdens and Privileges of Inheritance aims to provide undergraduate, graduate and professional readers with a nuanced understanding of how the unique status of exile, issues of displacement, complexities of cultural identity formation, the state of in-betweenness (liminality), and alienation shape fundamental human experiences. Its contributors, prominent artists, literary critics, social scientists, medical professionals, students of exile, and an acclaimed bookseller, explore the origins and causes of uprootedness and examine its historical, social, cultural, psychological, intercultural, political, and linguistic consequences. Their essays are informed by a constructive awareness of the tensions between a “purist” approach to exile as forceful/violent banishment from one’s native land as a result of intolerance and that of exile as a metaphor for all kinds of alienation, societal estrangements and psychic dislocations. Most of the essays in this volume bear the imprint of an experiential/scholarly/lyrical mode of composition and are further informed by the contributors’ acute awareness of the imbricated nature of their parents’ exilic experiences and their own creative and scholarly endeavors. By acknowledging the burdensome traumatic travails of their ancestors, the contributors find pleasure and privilege in their filial and professional responsibility to bear witness to the resiliency of the human spirit, transcending exile, which Joseph Conrad called an “unnatural state of existence.” In so doing, they testify to their efforts to metamorphose their inherited sense of exile into acts of commemoration, education and creativity.