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Abstract:
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The late Edward Said's influential and widely reprinted essay "Reflections on Exile," which was originally published in Granta in 1984, begins with the claim that "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience" (2001: 173). Said's attitude here is itself strangely compelling. While he goes on to discuss the ambivalence by which exile is dealt with as an enabling condition in the now substantial historical body of exile literature from across the globe, and elaborates on exile's status as "a potent, even enriching, motif' of modernity itself, his meditations on the subject are anchored in a conviction that those in exile live with "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (2001: 173). |
