Volume 92, Number 1, Summer 2024 | Social Research / Johns Hopkins University Press
In the latest issue of Social Research (Vol. 92, No. 1), scholars explore the nature of exile. Some essays reflect on exile forced by war and political persecution, others on the difference between being an exile and being a refugee.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Avishai Margalit, “Internal Exile and Politics“
This essay has two parts. One scans notions of inner exile as withdrawal from society; the other examines politics. There are many ways of withdrawing from society: solitary life in a remote place, or retreat to the “inner citadel,” the inner self free from the yoke of society. But withdrawal can take place while being amidst society. The essay addresses moral implications of retreat from society, especially from its politics. The discussion concentrates on societies in which the act of withdrawal can be voluntary. The paradigmatic cases are the recent events in Israel: the liberal protest against authoritarian “reform” of the judicial system, and Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing cruel counterattack by Israel on Gaza.
T. Alexander Aleinikoff, “Climate-Induced Displacement and the International Protection of Forced Migrants“
In coming years, scores of millions of people will be forced from their homes because of the effects of the climate crisis and other environmental events. While there is general recognition that those displaced by climate events merit assistance and protection, the existing international refugee regime does not provide an adequate framework for action. This article proposes an approach that focuses on the fact of displacement due to the climate crisis and embraces a right not to be displaced. It thus centers questions of accountability and root causes and embeds claims to climate justice in discussions of regime reform. Climate displacement provides an opportunity—indeed, the necessity—for a fundamental rethinking of the prevailing protection paradigm.
Michael Ignatieff, “Exile as Metaphor“
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor argues that illnesses like cancer are harder to endure because of the metaphors of dread that accompany them. Exiles experience a similar phenomenon. The real dimensions of the experience can be made harder by metaphors of dispossession and loss. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is a profound reflection on—and rebellion against—the metaphors that defined the Russian exile experience after 1917. This essay discusses the experience of the author’s own family to examine how they struggled against the undertow of metaphor that shaped their experience of exile.
Karen Akoka, “Reversing the Gaze from Refugees to Labelers: For a Socio-history of Labeling“
This article is a plea for a theoretical and methodological approach in asylum and migration studies that enables distance from the institutional categories and taxonomy of refugees and migrants. It suggests reversing the gaze from “refugees” and “migrants” to the societies that label them as such and studying the historical evolutions of labeling operations with a strict definition of the refugee as the product of labeling. Applied to the study of the evolution of the refugee/migrant labeling in France from the 1950s to the 1990s, this approach shows the political dimension and constant redefinition of the migrant/refugee binary. As such it questions the division between refugee and asylum studies and invites going beyond the documentation of the experiences of exiles to include the political production of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchies among them.
Jacques Rupnik, “Milan Kundera’s Liberating Exile“
Milan Kundera’s leaving his native Czechoslovakia was directly related to the constraints under which he had to live in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of the country in August 1968. Yet the way he defined his exile in France, where he settled in 1975 and spent the second half of his life, departs from the political circumstances and the role commonly associated with political exile. This essay explores Kundera’s understanding of a “liberating exile.” It then looks at the significance of Kundera’s choice of France as a destination for his exile. Finally, it addresses questions about the famous exile’s non-return to his country of origin after the fall of communism in 1989.
Wendy Doniger, “Exile’s Return in the Ancient Indian Epics“
The essay explores the positive aspects of exile in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in both of which the exiled heroes experience magical adventures quite different from those that we know from the exploits of exiles in Greek and Latin classics and European children’s literature. These heroes also vividly encounter ancient Indian mythology and philosophy, and in the end undergo a transformation that prepares them for their ultimate entrance into heaven.
Alok Rai, “Urdu’s Ambiguous Exile: Love and Loathing in ‘New India’”
Hostility toward Urdu—primarily toward script but more markedly in some contexts toward lexicon as well—is a noticeable feature of a “Hinduizing” India. However, the implicit Islamization of Urdu is a historical puzzle that has been normalized into becoming obvious. I seek to uncover the historical context of the emergence of this tragically consequential historical misunderstanding. But the story of Urdu in “new India” is incomplete without also incorporating the paradoxically pervasive presence of Urdu, the deep longing for Urdu and its tonalities, its emotional nuances and resonances, in our popular culture.
Irena Grudzińska Gross, “Life with a Foreign Accent“
Using the words of some poets, the essay illuminates some difficulties of living in exile.
Joseph Horowitz, “Reconsidering Stravinsky in Exile: The Tangled Taxonomy of His World War II ‘Victory‘”‘ Symphony“
In his polemics, composer Igor Stravinsky in exile insisted on the liberating autonomy of the creative act. But the tangled history of his Symphony in Three Movements, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a “victory symphony” in 1945, suggests a composition process that was less than fluent. This “symphony” complexly monograms its composer’s layered identity, disclosing a condition of exile equally challenged and resourceful. Had Stravinsky less cause for resilience—had there been no Bolshevik Revolution, no world upheaval—he might have left a musical legacy less intriguingly textured with self-denial and reinvention, less mediated by rationalization, more sustained in the elemental energies powering his initial creative surge.
Robin Cohen, “Home and Exile: A Trialogue Between Three Africans“
This article is centered around three Africans who wrote on the themes of home and exile: Chinua Achebe, a celebrated Nigerian writer; Lewis Nkosi, an accomplished Black South African writer and journalist; and me, Robin Cohen, a White South African social scientist. Their views on home and exile are discussed in the form of a comparison and implicit conversation (a trialogue). The lives of these three protagonists barely touched, but there are some odd intersections that will serve to sharpen the differences between them. By shedding light on the ambiguities of what home and exile mean to different social actors, the virtuous and somewhat uniform assumptions that are frequently used to describe the exilic condition are questioned.
Elizabeth Allen, “Emaré / Egaré: Sanctuary and Exile, Law and Romance“
Edward Said writes that exile produces the towering myth of the modern nation. But the medieval legal history of sanctuary and exile offers an alternative model of provisional survival and transition. In the Middle English lay Emaré, sanctuary and exile are romanced; legal predicament is rendered as adventure and opened for examination. Incest and exile in a rudderless boat, marriage, childbirth, and a second exile eventually achieve a happy ending, but as with legal sanctuary, romance remedy is uncertain and provisional by design. Medieval law and romance furnish a concept of sanctuary that frames exile as contrapuntal awareness of both mitigation and suffering.
Peter Gatrell, “Refugeedom: Making Room in the Crowded Conceptual Terrain“
Although a crowded conceptual terrain characterizes the study of refugees in the modern world, this article makes a case for adopting the concept of refugeedom. Translated from the Russian-language term that entered the lexicon during World War I, “refugeedom” encapsulates the magnitude of population displacement and its consequences for policymaking, but crucially also suggests the manifestation of a distinct new human condition. Whereas other, more widely used terms, in particular the “international refugee regime,” capture important aspects of forced migration, “refugeedom” takes account of a much broader realm of sites, policies, and practices, and incorporates the experiences and perspectives of refugees as political actors in their own right.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Very Far from the Homeland“
Beginning with Edward Said’s 1984 milestone “Reflections on Exile,” this essay argues that exile remains the political problem of our time. Stretching back to Hannah Arendt’s and Simone Weil’s writings of the mid-twentieth century, forward through the long history of the dispossession of the Palestinian people, to the present, the essay turns to contemporary readings of the Iliad to make the case that at the heart of the violence of forced exile is the question of human community.
Haun Saussy, “Exile, Horizons, and Poetic Language“
Exile or banishment has long been a professional liability of intellectuals in many cultures. For practical consequences, it matters whether an offender is exiled to another polity, becoming subject to its laws, or banished to a marginal area of a single world empire. Within the Roman and Chinese Empires, banished poets narrate their predicament in ways that reflect not only their personal histories but also the resources of poetic language whereby disgraced and demoted writers can revise the judgments applied to them.
Shiva Balaghi, “A Crooked Path through History: Iranian Exile Art“
By tracing the relationship between the work and the world, Iranian exile art reveals alternative perspectives on key historical moments, from the 1953 coup to the current climate crisis. The artists Siah Armajani, Nicky Nodjoumi, Shirin Neshat, Simin Keramati, Arghavan Khosravi, Pouran Jinchi, and Gelare Khoshgozaran emigrated from Iran between 1960 and 2012. Through a range of media—from painting to sculpture, from political posters to film—these artists have developed a distinct visual language to convey their own exilic experience. Mapping this art offers a cartography of exile shaped by the fraught, overlapping histories of Iran and the United States.
Saladdin Ahmed Bahozde, “Exile and Spatiality“
Exile is space running out of space, an existential draining of spatiality, or permanent elsewhereness and elsewhenness. It is a site of augmenting remoteness and a state of ontological fragmentation. The expelled body perceives itself as a spatial wound burdened with memory without memorability. Political exiling intensifies existential exile by removing the subject(s) from spaces where they could habitually world the world through inhabiting and living auratically. Exiling aims to destroy spatiality, killing the exiled politically and historically. Embodying a damaged life in front of an existential abyss, the exiled is forced to reestablish a dialectics of space and time.
