The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world. Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

Unsettling the World is the first book-length treatment of Edward Said’s influential cultural criticism from the perspective of a political theorist. Arguing that the generative power of Said’s thought extends well beyond Orientalism, the book explores Said’s writings on the experience of exile, the practice of “contrapuntal” criticism, and the illuminating potential of worldly humanism. Said’s critical vision, Morefield argues, provides a fresh perspective on debates in political theory about subjectivity, global justice, identity, and the history of political thought. Most importantly, she maintains, Said’s approach offers theorists a model of how to bring the insights developed through historical analyses of imperialism and anti-colonialism to bear on critiques of contemporary global crises and the politics of American foreign policy.

From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty's terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan's AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonialist, anti-Semitic, and other ideologies to which the medieval has been and is yoked, collectively formulating concrete ethical choices and aims for future research and teaching.In the face of rising global fascism and related ideological mobilizations, contemporary and past, and of cultural heritage and history as weapons of symbolic and physical oppression, this volume's chapters on Byzantium, Medieval Nubia, Old English, Hebrew, Old French, Occitan, and American and European medievalisms examine how educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals are shaped by ethics and various ideologies in research, collecting, and teaching.

The poems of MY LITTLE BOOK OF EXILES sift through layers of diaspora and return, wrestling with the twin experiences of exile and separation. The diasporas of the collection take place in history, family, and the privacy of a mind as it navigates its daily work. In a set of "Labor Poems," Alter captures moments of working in the snow of Wisconsin, under floodlights on the Kenai bay of Alaska, or in the machine-roar of construction sites in the Bay Area, where he has worked for two decades as an electrician. Another set of poems confront the vision of the Jewish people's homecoming to their ancestral land. A philosopher of the "religion of labor;" and an assassinated Prime Minister are some of the figures which weave in with intimate histories of heartbreak and hope. Coming from a home where the Hebrew Bible was a book of bedtime stories, Alter's work is in conversation with texts as varied as the Hebrew Psalms, the poetry of John Keats and Ezra Pound and the songs of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. The collection concludes with poems exploring the homeland of family made through marriage and fatherhood, the strains and moments of grace that come with them. What can withstand the pressures of distance, the forces from outside and inside that want to pull us apart? The book's strands weave a tapestry of hope even as the poems seek to discover finally what lasts. "'Could I have come from nowhere,' asks this poet, who searches his irretrievable past and mysterious present for meaning. Through gorgeous, ambitious, impeccable lyrics, provisionally and with a deep reverence for mysteries, he finds it again and again. This smart, funny, sad, kind book is an act of salvage, and solidarity, a pleasure to read, a wonderful achievement and a gift to us all."--Matthew Zapruder "In MY LITTLE BOOK OF EXILES, Dan Alter 'gathers all the departure in his arms,' and keeps 'peeling layers off the future of his skin.' This debut collection sings in the form of sonnets, the 'cant i,' free verse, and prose. Syntax enacts a search and return, performs in arrangement and rearrangement the compositions that scored the poet's life. The close attention paid to prosody creates a soundtrack that connects personal and communal narratives of the Jewish Diaspora, recounts travels across Europe and Israel, through familial stories that reflect on labor, the music of Bob Marley and Paul Simon, forefathers and fatherhood. MY LITTLE BOOK OF EXILES will make you wonder where you are going, where you've been, and from where have you come--and is it possible to go back again."--Arisa White "Dan Alter's marvelous collection, EXILES, is a book about origins and ends, origins that recede as we approach them, and ends projected into a future out of the deprivations of the present. In this heart wrenching lover's quarrel with personal and public legacies, Alter's great achievement is his openness to complication and ambivalence, (see his politically fraught homage to Ezra Pound), his willingness to admit emotional attachment to what he often intellectually distrusts, and the way the agitated music of his lines enact a sense of the present moment as an unsettled and unsettling effect of an even more unsettled past."--Alan R Shapiro Poetry. California Studies.

Despite the mass dislocation and repatriation efforts of the last century, the study of return movements still sits on the periphery of anthropology and migration research. Homecomings explores the forces and motives that drive immigrants, war refugees, political exiles, and their descendants back to places of origin. By including a range of homecoming experiences, Markowitz and Stefansson destabilize the key oppositions and the key terminologies that have vexed migration studies for decades, analyzing migration and repatriation; home and homeland; and host, returnee, and newcomer through a comparative ethnographic lens. The volume provides rich answers to the following questions: _ Does group repatriation, sponsored and sometimes coerced by national governments or supranational organizations, create resettlement conditions more or less favorable than those experienced by individuals or families who made this journey alone? _ How important are first impressions, living conditions, and initial reception in shaping the experience of home in the homeland? _ What are the expectations that a mythologized homeland encourages in those who have left? Filling a conspicuous gap in the literature on migration in diverse fields such as anthropology, politics, international law, and cultural studies, Homecomings and the gripping ethnographic studies included in the volume demonstrate that a home and a homeland remain salient cultural imperatives that can inspire a call to political action.

The persecution of the Huguenots in France, followed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, unleashed one of the largest migration waves of early modern Europe. Focusing on the fate of French Protestants who fled to the Dutch Republic, Experiencing Exile examines how Huguenot refugees dealt with the complex realities of living as strangers abroad, and how they seized upon religion and stories of their own past to comfort them in exile.

This volume presents for the first time a study of the interface between exile and travel within the context of exile from Nazi Germany. The nineteen essays share the overarching aim to compare the tropes of travel and exile as generators of a critical discourse and as central categories within German exile, in particular literature, music and film. The essays are guided by powerful questions: How does travel compare to exile, and how much overlap is there between these two categories? How do exiles travel, as practitioners of displacement? Or rather, to what extent does the concept of travel apply to the exilic predicament? Do the terms “exile” and “travel” still have validity in our postmodern era of cosmopolitanism, ever increasing mobility, the embrace of otherness, and tourism? How does exile literature in which travel is thematized compare to the tradition(s) of travel writing? And how are the critical moments of leavetaking, re-membering home, and return imagined and narrated? The essays feature numerous German and Austrian authors, musicians, and filmmakers and lend fresh insights into German Exile and the field of Exile Studies at large.