Exile Literature

Exile Literature

Block Seminar, Instructors, Pavan Malreddy and Abiral Kumar

The twentieth century is marked by movements of people through displacement, emigration, and forced (re)settlements. The rise and fall of socialism, colonialism, dictatorial regimes, and the geopolitics of the Cold War era have led many individuals, ethnic groups, and marginalized communities to leave their homelands for stranger shores. Although much of the exile literature today is appropriated by postcolonial studies, the movement of people is not exclusively a colonial phenomenon. Socialism (Russia, China), Cold War led expansionism (Vietnam, Congo, Cuba), internal colonialism (Scotland, Ireland), and even the post-9/11 War on Terror (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria) have played an instrumental role in the production of exile experience (and literature). This seminar pays special attention to the political backdrop of the literary production on exile, while carefully distinguishing it from diaspora, immigration and/or economic migration. The seminar also reflect on contemporary preoccupation with forms of cosmopolitanisms on the one hand, and the anti-migration policies being implemented by the major global powers under the usual slogans of “Make X Great Again”. The seminar will move through the experience of exile, its political implications, while also taking critical stock of the labour of the migrant, the refugee, and the exile that go into the urban and intellectual infrastructures of the cosmopolitan centers of the world as markers of global capitalism and Neo-imperial frameworks.