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.
Table of Contents:
Foreword: Why Exiles Sing
Richard Blanco
Introductory Essay: Running from Mount Sinai: The Inescapability of Exilic Inheritance
Asher Z. Milbauer and James M. Sutton
Chapter 1: The Metamorphoses of Exile: Maimonides the Wanderer
Alberto Manguel
Chapter 2: Exiled to Heaven: Dante and the Poetics of Pilgrimage
Alessandro Vettori
Chapter 3: Exile and Artistic Vision: On James Baldwin’s Inspirations and His Influence
Shawn Anthony Christian
Chapter 4: Sophocles, Derrida and the Exile of Illness: An Historical, Literary, and Philosophic Reflection
Gregory Schneider
Chapter 5: Exilic Legacies: Unpacking the Suitcase of Memories
Asher Z. Milbauer
Chapter 6: Exilic Pilgrimages
Ruth Behar
Chapter 7: On Being Different: The Difference that Différance Makes
Ana Luszczynska
Chapter 8: I’m not a Nostalgia Junkie, I Just Have a Thing for Pomegranates
Vanessa Garcia
Chapter 9: There is No Return
Rodney Castillo
Chapter 10: Stories that Must be Spoken
Diana Poussin
Chapter 11: Breaking from My Chrysalis: An Immigrant Becomes an Exile
Sofia Scotti
Chapter 12: The Psychodynamic Journey of Migration and Exile
Eugenio Rothe
Chapter 13: “And They Did Not Return”: Exile, Loss and Literature
Mamta Chaudhry
Chapter 14: Cultivating Fluid Identity: A Daughter’s Tale of Chinese / Japanese Ancestry. An Interview with Gail Tsukiyama
Asher Z. Milbauer and James M. Sutton
Chapter 15: A Bookseller in a City of Exiles and Immigrants: My DNA. An Interview with Mitchell Kaplan
Asher Z. Milbauer and James M. Sutton
