Giving Voice to Exile in Literature

Giving Voice to Exile in Literature: The Burdens and Privileges of Inheritance aims to provide undergraduate, graduate and professional readers with a nuanced understanding of how the unique status of exile, issues of displacement, complexities of cultural identity formation, the state of in-betweenness (liminality), and alienation shape fundamental human experiences. Its contributors, prominent artists, literary critics, social scientists, medical professionals, students of exile, and an acclaimed bookseller, explore the origins and causes of uprootedness and examine its historical, social, cultural, psychological, intercultural, political, and linguistic consequences. Their essays are informed by a constructive awareness of the tensions between a “purist” approach to exile as forceful/violent banishment from one’s native land as a result of intolerance and that of exile as a metaphor for all kinds of alienation, societal estrangements and psychic dislocations. Most of the essays in this volume bear the imprint of an experiential/scholarly/lyrical mode of composition and are further informed by the contributors’ acute awareness of the imbricated nature of their parents’ exilic experiences and their own creative and scholarly endeavors. By acknowledging the burdensome traumatic travails of their ancestors, the contributors find pleasure and privilege in their filial and professional responsibility to bear witness to the resiliency of the human spirit, transcending exile, which Joseph Conrad called an “unnatural state of existence.” In so doing, they testify to their efforts to metamorphose their inherited sense of exile into acts of commemoration, education and creativity.

Asher Z. Milbauer is Courtesy Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Exile Studies Program at Florida International University. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at the University of Washington. His scholarly work reflects a deep interest in Exile Literature. Among his publications is a book on literary transplantation, Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer; a wide-ranging study on exile and return, “Eastern Europe in American-Jewish Literature;” a co-edited collection of original essays, Reading Philip Roth, and another co-edited edition of original essays, Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost. His experiential-scholarly essay, “In Search of a Doorpost: Meditations on Exile and Literature,” won the Sarah Russo Prize for Literary Excellence for an Essay on Exile. He is the recipient of the “Top Scholar” distinction at FIU.

James M. Sutton, Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, co-edited Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost (Routledge, 2020) with Asher Z. Milbauer. He served as department chair from 2008 – 2016; towards the end of this tenure, he led the February 2016 exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio in Miami. In recent years, he has published articles and chapters relating to Shakespeare in Miami and Slovenia. He is currently editing another collection of essays, concerned with Shakespeare and Exile, to be published by ACMRS Press in early 2026.