What happens to a community when it is destroyed by a foreign power? How do survivors face the future? Is it all over for them? In Constructing Exile, John Hill investigates how the people of ancient Judah survived invasion and destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Although some of them were deported to Babylon, they created a new identity for themselves, and then, once they were back in Judah, they tried to recreate the past. Hill examines the way that later generations used the experience of the Babylonian invasion to interpret the crises of their own times. He shows how by the time of Jesus exile had become an image Judaism used to understand itself and its story.
What happens to a community when it is destroyed by a foreign power? How do survivors face the future? Is it all over for them? In Constructing Exile, John Hill investigates how the people of ancient Judah survived invasion and destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Although some of them were deported to Babylon, they created a new identity for themselves, and then, once they were back in Judah, they tried to recreate the past. Hill examines the way that later generations used the experience of the Babylonian invasion to interpret the crises of their own times. He shows how by the time of Jesus exile had become an image Judaism used to understand itself and its story.
Using Iranian television as a case study, The Making of Exile Cultures explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to domination by host and home country's social values while simultaneously acting as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and the assimilation of those values.
This book traces the impact of exile in the formation of independent republics in Chile and the Río de la Plata in the decades after independence. Exile was central to state and nation formation, playing a role in the emergence of territorial borders and Romantic notions of national difference, while creating a transnational political culture that spanned the new independent nations. Analyzing the mobility of a large cohort of largely elite political émigrés from Chile and the Río de la Plata across much of South America before 1862, Edward Blumenthal reinterprets the political thought of well-known figures in a transnational context of exile. As Blumenthal shows, exile was part of a reflexive process in which elites imagined the nation from abroad while gaining experience building the same state and civil society institutions they considered integral to their republican nation-building projects.
To date, most books on Partition have ignored or minimised the Sindhi Hindu experience, which was significantly different from the trials of minorities in Punjab or Bengal. The Making of Exile hopes to redress this, by turning a spotlight on the specific narratives of the Sindhi Hindu community.Post-Partition, Sindh was relatively free of the inter-communal violence witnessed in Punjab, Bengal, and other parts of north India. Consequently, in the first few months of Pakistan's early life, Sindhi Hindus did not migrate, and remained the most significant minority in West Pakistan.Starting with the announcement of the Partition of India, The Making of Exile firmly traces the experiences of the community - that went from being a small but powerful minority to becoming the target of communal discrimination, practised by both the state as well as sections of Pakistani society. This climate of communal antipathy threw into sharp relief the help and sympathy extended to Sindhi Hindus by other Pakistani Muslims, both Sindhi and muhajir. Finally, it was when they became victims of the Karachi pogrom of January 1948 that Sindhi Hindus felt compelled to migrate to India.The second segment of the book examines the resettlement of the community in India - their first brush with squalid refugee camps, their struggle to make sense of rapidly changing governmental policies, and the spirit of determination and enterprise with which they rehabilitated themselves in their new homeland.
This collection brings together two leading figures in the discipline of translation studies. The essays cover a range of fields, and combine theory with practical case studies involving the translation of literary texts.
Cvilizing China's western Peripheries -- The gift of development in pastoral areas -- Sedentarization in Qinghai -- Development in Zeku County -- Sedentarization of pastoralists in Zeku County -- Ambivalent outcomes and adaptation strategies -- Glossary of Chinese and Tibetan terms.
This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or visiting them, even vicariously as the contributors to the volume do) is tantamount to exposing oneself to a difference. One’s response to this difference – either in the form of rejection or, more preferably, acceptance (or a mixture of both) – is not merely an index of one’s tolerance (a platitudinised term itself that all too often hides an attitude of comfortable indifference), but an affirmation of humaneness. Borderlands are paradoxical, if not aporetic, loci. They simultaneously connote territories on either side of a border, in a literal sense, and a vague, intermediate state or region, in a metaphorical sense. Encapsulating the idea of border, the term indicates both inescapable nearness and unavoidable (or perhaps unbridgeable) separateness. The studies included in the volume focus on various aspects of borderland art and literature, on analyses of selected works, and on the peculiarities of cultural and literary representations. Thus, the borderland landscape, both literal and metaphorical, comes to be seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of new, distinct and identifiable themes and motifs, as well as theoretical frameworks.
To what extent can Islam be localized in an increasingly interconnected world? The contributions to this volume investigate different facets of Muslim lives in the context of increasingly dense transregional connections, highlighting how the circulation of ideas about ‘Muslimness’ contributed to the shaping of specific ideas about what constitutes Islam and its role in society and politics. Infrastructural changes have prompted the intensification of scholarly and trade networks, prompted the circulation of new literary genres or shaped stereotypical images of Muslims. This, in turn, had consequences in widely differing fields such as self-representation and governance of Muslims. The contributions in this volume explore this issue in geographical contexts ranging from South Asia to Europe and the US. Coming from the disciplines of history, anthropology, religious studies, literary studies and political science, the authors collectively demonstrate the need to combine a translocal perspective with very specific local and historical constellations. The book complicates conventional academic divisions and invites to think in historically specific translocal contexts.
This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.
