EXILE

Leong Yew

Like many of the other terms in postcolonial theory and discourse that popularly suggest detachment from metropolitan or local spaces, "exile" has been deployed as a concept beyond simply a forced removal from a given physical location. Exile in everyday use invokes images of individual political dissidents sent overseas or large groups of people banished to distant lands, forming various diasporas. In these cases there is sometimes a presumption that the exiled are different from casual migrants who forget their original homelands and form new allegiances with the places in which they settle. Exiles retain a sense of (be)longing to/for a real or imagined homeland.

While such a presumption appears to be insufficient for postcolonial politics and theory, an important premise of exile surrounds the act of individual/group displacement and the effect such displacements have on the exiled's perception of his or her current location, the homeland, and intellectual products. The last item being manifested in the form of literary, artistic, political expressions, and so on. In order for "exile" to be politically enabling in postcolonialism, a number of things can occur:

• Physical spaces are important because they are important sites of cultural production; for example, a Nigerian exile living in Britain produces a novel that engages both with her experiences growing up in Nigeria but current residence in Britain. The work becomes one of ambivalence and hybridity, expressing a sense of homelessness, nostalgia, being neither fully a Nigerian nor British writing. Phsyical spaces are however only one aspect of exile. In effect:
• One doesn't need to physically removed from the "homeland" in order to be exiled. Exile can take place in different cultural spaces, especially through processes like colonization and modernization. In this case by living in a place that has become culturally transformed through colonialism, it is possible for exile to occur particularly when one realizes that a traditional language, way of life, religion, tribal practices can no longer be articulated or experienced without the mediation of modernity. This causes a sense of loss and displacement from a traditional homeland.
• As Edward Said stresses, exile can be both "actual" and "metaphoric," "voluntary" or "involuntary." (39) This last point is important because it indicates that physical violence is not the only force to cause exile, but subtler forms of compulsion can do the same as well. This can be seen in the case of intellectuals living overseas for education or research.
• Exile, according to Said in Representations of the Intellectual, is fundamentally tied to the notion of the intellectual. The connection with postcolonialism is not easily discernible in this case because exile becomes a larger political gesture to separate intellectuals from those who "toe the line" and those who remain critically resistant to the authorities. For Said these are "the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsidersand exiles in so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned." (39)

What is important to grasp in postcolonial exile is therefore the profundity of the impact of colonialism and ongoing imperialism. The term itself has to be overdetermined so as to suggest the magnitude of cultural transformations inflicted by colonialism, the type of consciousness exile produces, and responsibility the exile should uphold.

Sources

Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage, 1994.

Related Links

• Erich Auerbach: the Critic in Exile
• Bruce Robbins on Said's "Voyage In"
• Problematizing Said's Exilic Category
• Problematizing the Exilic: Eurocentrism and Elitism
• A Poetics of Exile: Ee Tiang Hong
• Immigration, Emigration and Exile : The Figure of the 'Been-to' in African Literature

Last Modified: 8 March 2002