Constructing Exile

What happens to a community when it is destroyed by a foreign power? How do survivors face the future? Is it all over for them? In Constructing Exile, John Hill investigates how the people of ancient Judah survived invasion and destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Although some of them were deported to Babylon, they created a new identity for themselves, and then, once they were back in Judah, they tried to recreate the past. Hill examines the way that later generations used the experience of the Babylonian invasion to interpret the crises of their own times. He shows how by the time of Jesus exile had become an image Judaism used to understand itself and its story.

What happens to a community when it is destroyed by a foreign power? How do survivors face the future? Is it all over for them? In Constructing Exile, John Hill investigates how the people of ancient Judah survived invasion and destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Although some of them were deported to Babylon, they created a new identity for themselves, and then, once they were back in Judah, they tried to recreate the past. Hill examines the way that later generations used the experience of the Babylonian invasion to interpret the crises of their own times. He shows how by the time of Jesus exile had become an image Judaism used to understand itself and its story.

Using Iranian television as a case study, The Making of Exile Cultures explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to domination by host and home country's social values while simultaneously acting as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and the assimilation of those values.

A Complex Exile shows that the homelessness sector inadvertently reinforces the social exclusion of people who are homeless. Over 235,000 people couch-surf, stay in emergency shelters, or live on the street in Canada every year. However, the very policies, practices, and funding models that exist to house the homeless, promote social inclusion, and provide mental health care form a homelessness industrial complex. These practices emphasize personal responsibility and individualized responses that ultimately serve to subtly exclude people. This book goes beyond bio-medical and psychological perspectives on homelessness, mental illness, and addiction, to call for a transformation in how we respond to homelessness in Canada.

Studying exile and utopia as correlated cultural phenomena, and offering a wealth of historical examples with emphasis on the modern period, Spariosu argues that modernism itself can be seen as a product of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate utopian social schemes to compensate for its exacerbated sense of existential loss.

This book traces the impact of exile in the formation of independent republics in Chile and the Río de la Plata in the decades after independence. Exile was central to state and nation formation, playing a role in the emergence of territorial borders and Romantic notions of national difference, while creating a transnational political culture that spanned the new independent nations. Analyzing the mobility of a large cohort of largely elite political émigrés from Chile and the Río de la Plata across much of South America before 1862, Edward Blumenthal reinterprets the political thought of well-known figures in a transnational context of exile. As Blumenthal shows, exile was part of a reflexive process in which elites imagined the nation from abroad while gaining experience building the same state and civil society institutions they considered integral to their republican nation-building projects.

Our Lady of the Exile is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady Charity in Miami. Drawing on a wide range of sources and using both historical and ethnographic methods, the book examines the religious life of the Cuban exiles who visit the shrine. Those pilgrims are diverse, and so are the motives that bring them. At the same time, author Thomas A. Tweed argues, Cuban devotees of the national patroness share a great deal. Most come to pray for their homeland and to recreate bonds with other Cubans, on the island and in the diaspora. The shrine is a place where they come to make sense of themselves as an exiled people. The religious symbols there link the past and present and bridge the homeland and the new land. Through rituals and artifacts at the shrine, Tweed suggests, the Cuban diaspora "imaginatively constructs its collective identity and transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire." While the book focuses on Cuban exiles in Miami, it moves beyond case study as it explores larger issues concerning religion, identity, and place. How do migrants relate to heir homeland? How do they understand themselves after they have been displaced? What role does religion play among these diasporic groups? Building on this study of one exiled group, Tweed proposes a theory of diasporic religion that promises to illuminate the experiences of other groups that have been displaced from their native land. As the first book-length analysis of Cuban-American Catholicism, Tweed's book will be an invaluable resource to scholars and students of not only Religious Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, but also those who study cultural anthropology, human geography, and Latin American history.

After 1948 many opponents of apartheid were forced out of South Africa. This accessible and readable account draws upon interviews with many of those involved to examine how those activists who came to the United Kingdom developed political organisations, social networks, ideologies and identities that supported their time in exile. It examines the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the African National Congress in exile and documents the violent attempts by the South African government to control exile activity. Finally, it investigates how exiles came to terms with the possibility that they might return.