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This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of the exilic body in Hollywood cinema have tended to focus on the personal trajectories of émigré actors in the context of the broader history of the industry in which they achieved star status. Significant work has been done in particular on the fate of European women stars in Hollywood but what has been rarely addressed, however, is the way in which Hollywood films imagine the exilic experience via the narratives built around specific stars. This article focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the dominant stars of the 1980s–1990s, whose foreignness, accent and body are used in a remarkably consistent set of aesthetic, generic and narrative practices. The article uses Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of sonority to argue that the sonorous presence of the foreign other in the “host” space produces a new space; it produces the space of the host anew as one in which the foreign other is present despite the discursive denial of the possibility of that presence whilst at the same time producing a new self as distinct from the self before displacement. The article's aim is to highlight the ways in which Hollywood films produce and reproduce foreignness as an impossibility, a presence that cannot be. The use of the foreign star, I argue, is to perform the permeability of the boundary between outside and inside, while also policing it.

The most commonly recited anecdote regarding Dante Gabriel Rossetti recalls the incident surrounding the burial of his bound manuscript of poetry in 1862 alongside his wife Elizabeth Siddal. Buried in an act of contrition encouraged by his brother, the manuscript was retrieved from the exhumed coffin at Rossetti's behest in 1869 by his friend Charles Augustus Howell and returned to the poet in a severe state of decay and smelling of disinfectant. Three of the poems recovered would famously form an integral part of the 1870 Poems. This essay situates Rossetti's action in undertaking the exhumation as a trope for the way his poetry consistently revisits and reconfigures conceptualisations of life and death, often with regards to physical and spiritual embodiment. Without seeking to offer ethical justification for Rossetti's actions in retrieving his poems, I will focus rather on the ways in which his poetic vision is dominated by the language of exile and return, of burial and retrieval, and how these twin concerns are manifest in the poems of the little green book. These three long poems, which it appears he was most eager to recover through the distasteful act, are identified collectively as 'the exhumation poems': 'Dante at Verona', 'A Last Confession', and 'Jenny'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exile is a central theme in Nancy Huston's fictional writing and her novels give voice to a range of experiences of this highly ambivalent condition. This article considers how theories of nomadism developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can elucidate the different expressions of exiled identity in Lignes de faille (2006). I argue that the interest which Huston, her characters and nomadic theory have in music suggest that this creative practice can facilitate the emergence of new paths, directions and nomadic lines of flight. By comparing the exiled states of two characters – Kristina and Sadie – I investigate the potential and limitations of nomadism in situations that transcend purely theoretical contexts. I consider the wider implications of the transformative potential of music and other forms of creative practice within Huston's œuvre as a whole, arguing that writing fiction is Huston's means of 'singing through the wilderness' of her own exiled state [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary career and troubled life of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge (1828-80), Derwent Coleridge's eldest son (S. T. Coleridge's first grandson) has been critically overlooked. After a period of alcohol-related, reckless behaviour at Cambridge University, he was exiled to Australia in November 1850, lest he continue to dishonour his father and the Coleridge name. Despite struggling considerably, he quickly became part of an Australian literary circle and he often contributed poems to Sydney newspapers. This essay analyses the most biographical of his poems that was published in the Australian press, 'The Loafer's Christmas' (1871)-a hitherto unknown poem-looking, in particular, at the dialogues in which the poem engages with his family, especially S. T. Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. I also contextualise 'The Loafer's Christmas' within nineteenth-century Australian culture. Looking at issues of exile, idleness, addiction, family, home(lessness) and religious redemption, this essay explores the ways in which Derwent Moultrie's exile proved to be both a literary liberation and a dead end, trapping him between times and spaces, real and imaginary. In so doing, I show how the lost life and writings of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge can offer us new perspectives on the Coleridge legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main subject of inquiry here is the interrelationship between war, mission and exile in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church at the turn of the twentieth century. The first setting of note is the Anglo--Boer War (1899-1902) when a group of Boer soldiers decided to form the Commando's Dank Zending Vereniging (Commando's Thanksgiving Mission Society) after visiting a Swiss missionary station in the northern Transvaal. Next follows Boer experiences of exile on the islands of St Helena, Ceylon and elsewhere as prisoners of war. A number of these POWs were evangelised and recruited for mission through revivalist sermons preached by their chaplains. After their return, a substantial number of ex-POWs signed up for the DRC's missionary enterprise into wider Africa, most prominently Nyasaland. The missionary experience itself often lasted for several decades. These missionaries did not refer to their life contexts as pilgrimages as such, but they often described the mission field as a place of danger and adventure populated by wild and dangerous people and animals. This article therefore suggests that the missionary careers of the Anglo--Boer War recruits approximate voluntary sacred exile, which in having originated from their forced exile as POWs acquires a pilgrimage-like character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a transnational Israeli writer, Chochana Boukhobza delves into the complex problem of crossing borders in Un été à Jérusalem (1986), a text which focuses on the unnamed protagonist's trip from Paris to visit her family during the summer months in Jerusalem. Although the narrator had resided in Israel previously, she is forced to grapple with her ‘Otherness’ in Jerusalem, especially as a Jew originally from Tunisia. The narrator's crisis of exile is defined by her sense of disconnection to her family, the city, Israeli politics, and women's traditional roles. In this essay, particular emphasis will be placed on the protagonist's penchant for profaning Jewish cultural and religious practices, which is articulated through a series of corporeal transgressions. To launch this revolt against the patriarchal structure of the nation in Israel, the narrator rejects the submissive role assigned to Jewish-Tunisian women, and, in so doing, dismantles traditional gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by situating the semi-autobiographical narrator of George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin amid modernist representations of child philosophers at the imperial 'periphery' and in relation to the figure of the 'scholarship boy' elaborated by Richard Hoggart. It then examines the relation between modernism and exile in Lamming's writing in light of recent work on how Lamming's rise as an author was facilitated by a contest between modernism and rival modes in mid-century British literary life. It further shows that in Castle and related writings, Lamming sets up an opposition in which the scholarship boy, the Caribbean middle classes, British culture, and contempt for blackness appear on the other side of a divide of death from the philosophizing child, the Caribbean peasant, non-British culture, and blackness. It concludes by arguing that Lamming's rendering of this opposition exemplifies how fictions of decolonization could extend and modify the paradigm of thwarted bildung whose centrality to modernist fictions of empire has been illuminated by Jed Esty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Semprún's writing, the translated text is the image par excellence of layered contexts, displaced origins, transferable but not wholly assimilable truths, that the author takes from the experience of exile and makes the stuff of his political and aesthetic vision. The formulation of the reader as 'mon semblable, mon frère' makes the act of translation one of 'courtoisie' and inclusion, especially resonant in relation to fraternity as a core ethical and human value. This article will consider his articulation of that translational vision in the essay Mal et Modernité (1990), before going on to explore how his earlier, bilingually titled novel L'Algarabie (1981) both questions and affirms that vision in the context of ideological breakdown. In particular, it will consider how Semprún extends the layering and displacement of the bilingual or translated text to the possession and haunting of time, place and consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking from departure Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt's divergent points of view on the cultural role of the mother tongue in totalitarian and democratic contexts, this essay investigates the writings of two poets, Yvan Goll and Eugene Jolas, who both wrote poetry in English during their exiles in New York during the Second World War. The essay analyses how issues of belonging and citizenship are approached in their works through the prism of multilingualism for Jolas, and by challenging mono-referentiality in language and proper names in Yvan Goll's Kabbalistic poetry. The essay investigates how both poets and both thinkers tried to reimagine democracy through the prism of multilingualism or mother-tongue expression in their works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Sir James MacDonald of Knockrinsay is best known for his leadership of the 'Islay Rising' of 1615. Various strands of evidence are here brought together to reveal an individual of significance, controversy, and complexity. Sir James lived in relative comfort with King James VI at Edinburgh and London, but for eleven years he was imprisoned in the dungeon of Edinburgh Castle until he made his daring escape in 1615. Although possessed of a natural charisma, Sir James was not the most adept political operator, and his family life was always turbulent. His career is here set against a wider backdrop of upheaval and transition in the Highlands, as many clans struggled for survival. The ultimate failure of the 'Islay Rising' and Sir James's exile in the Spanish Netherlands can be seen as a symbolic end of an era for the clans of the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]