While Jacques Roumain’s classic novel Gouverneurs de la rosée foregrounds the possibility and necessity of return to Haiti, in many other literary versions of Haitian exile such a reconnection is never achieved. The returning wanderer can never just pick up where they left off, and the exile is definitive, unending. The chapter argues that exile for Haitian authors of the twentieth century is not merely a question of space or place; it has temporal dimensions that can compound the sense of separation or loss. Following a consideration of nineteenth-century exile-related poems, the chapter engages with some of the most prominent essayists, poets, and novelists whose works serve as chronicles of the multi-generational experiences of separation from Haiti before, during, and after the Duvalier dictatorships. As the examples show, experiences of exile vary widely and are determined by many factors, including personal circumstance, the place and conditions of exile, changing realities in the homeland, and evolving notions of exile itself, and of the ways in which it is written by successive generations of authors.

“The Book of Isaiah and the Neo-Babylonian Period” by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer investigates the “black hole” in the book that is the Babylonian Exile from three perspectives. First, it analyzes how the Book of Isaiah conceptualizes Babylon. It demonstrates how the Isaianic authors sought to underscore Babylon’s weakness and transitory existence, and aimed to assert that its demise was the result of Yhwh’s supremacy over Babylon’s own deities. Second, it challenges the dating of those texts in Isaiah that are traditionally assigned to the Neo-Babylonian period. References to Babylonian customs and religious traditions, polemic against Babylon, and support of Cyrus should not be used without reflection as dating criteria. Third, it argues that the material in Isa 40–55, traditionally assumed to have been written in Babylon because of its familiarity with Babylonian matters, rather reflects the kind of general knowledge that the people living in the shadow of the Neo-Babylonian Empire would be expected to have.

One of the poetic features of Isaiah is its intertextuality. The authors of the later portions of the book worked with attention to the existing Isaianic texts, so that the book as a whole is woven together by common themes and vocabulary. Furthermore, the book is full of allusions to other biblical books, and was itself eventually a touchstone for later biblical authors. (Sometimes it is even uncertain which text came first!) Hyun Chul Paul Kim, in “Isaiah in Intertextual Perspective,” analyzes the book at each of these levels, and then looks forward to “points of intersectionality” between Isaiah and the modern world.

The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.

Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical and empirical background to the study of long-distance Tunisian activism as well as the guiding questions on which the book rests: What were the conditions that enabled Tunisian politics in France? How do we explain what it meant to oppose or support an authoritarian regime from afar in terms of reconfiguring this activism in a migratory context? The chapter begins by discussing the choice to examine the Tunisian case in France and situates the study as part of the broader political, economic and migratory relationships between the two countries. The chapter then presents the theoretical framework underlying that universe of political practice, namely ‘the trans-state space of mobilisation’, which I locate at the intersection of scholarship on North African politics, social movements and diaspora politics. It concludes by outlining the issues involved in undertaking fieldwork in the wake of the 2011 Revolution and introduces the material on which this book draws.

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.

Music historiography has traditionally been based on ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that the nation state is the ‘natural’ context of analysis. As a result, migration tends to be treated as an exception to the rule of nationhood with its comforting myths of belonging and tradition. By contrast, this chapter argues that modernist music can be regarded as the music of exile. It focuses on the ‘normality of migration’, encompassing both forced and voluntary migration, and it covers areas such as the role of international composition teachers and the ‘dodecaphonic diaspora’, the way serialism came to be associated with resistance to fascism and migration. In addition to presenting individual case studies, it seeks to quantify the commonality of migration, using the composers performed at the Annual Festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), as a statistical basis. What this demonstrates is that, although mobility may not be the norm, neither is it an exception. Furthermore, it is one of the ways in which the transnational network that is integral to musical modernism has come into being.

After three decades of vanguards there was a colloquial turn in Latin American poetry. Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas, César Fernández Moreno’s Argentino hasta la muerte, Carlos Martínez Riva’s La insurrección solitaria and Neruda’s Odas elementales – all published in 1954 – show the abandonment of the oneiric in favor of a less fancy language and new links with popular culture. Juan Gelman’s Gotán (1962) is included in this trend. A decade later, exile marks an unexpected turn: Gelman will not only speak of defeat and death but will also impel exile and death on his lines: it is about not only the political in the poem but the politics of the poem. Therein resurfaces a key American issue: the need to construct a tradition. Gelman’s Hechos y relaciones (1980) and Citas y comentarios (1982) are contemporary with the first publications by Néstor Perlongher (Austria-Hungría, 1980; Alambres, 1987). With his Neobarroso, Perlongher proposes a relationship with the popular born of the curtailment in a domestic lexicon, an extolment of the kitsch and pop. Unlike Gelman, who finds in Europe the breadth of poetry, Perlongher discovers in Brazil the reciprocation of two systems, of Hispanic America and the Portuguese-speaking world.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

For Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. He portrays Ezekiel as denigrated, deceitful, and weak – the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. Yet the carefully constructed scholarly story Wellhausen tells about ancient Israel is structured through fanciful Romantic dichotomies; he maligns scribal culture while evoking a nostalgia for an imaginary oral culture. Wellhausen was deeply influenced by the orientalist fantasies of writers like Goethe and Herder; furthermore, their melancholia about European writing culture continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. Moving away from Wellhausen, I ask how we could read Ezekiel’s weakness, specifically through his face-turning prophecies – not as “diminished” gestures of once-powerful mantic acts, but as creative, rhizomatic acts which expand the possibilities of the prophetic genre?

By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.

There are several factors in the host country and the country of origin that might cause people to emigrate. Pre-existing historical contacts and a favourable economic situation in the country of destination are amongst the primary elements to influence migrants’ choices. This chapter will examine the political and economic developments in England, and in Flemish and Brabantine cities before the mid fourteenth century, and how they created the conditions for the migration of textile workers. It will be argued that the migratory process was driven by the prior intensity of trade relations, the existence of communication and transportation links, and the relative frequency of travel between the countries, as well as the political situation, which led to some involuntary migration too.

This book has examined the impact of the immigrant community on the English economy and the development of its cloth industry. The main hypothesis was to prove that Flemish immigrants had an influence on the development of the English textile industry, which grew exponentially from the mid fourteenth century. While several scholars have previously claimed that the number of textile workers from the Low Countries had probably not been higher than 200, we have seen throughout the book that at least 1,500 artisans immigrated to England between 1351 and 1381. This study has also gone beyond economic questions and touched upon the issues of social integration and cultural influence as well.