"This book tells the story about an African Jewish community known as the Beta Israel that used to live in the northern part of Ethiopia. They were repatriated to Israel in many waves with the aid of the Israeli government and the Jewish Diaspora. The Beta Israel had struggled and faced hardships in order to live out their destiny which was to migrate to the Promised Land. However, their struggle did not stop there. They have had to struggle again to overcome unexpected and new challenges after their long anticipated migration. The book is organized around these two issues"--
In this one-of-a-kind volume, Iraida López explores various narratives of return by those who left Cuba as children or adolescents. Including memoirs, semi-autobiographical fiction, and visual arts, many of these accounts feature a physical arrival on the island while others depict a metaphorical or vicarious experience by means of fictional characters or childhood reminiscences. As two-way migration increases in the post-Cold War period, many of these narratives put to the test the boundaries of national identity. Through a critical reading of works by Cuban American artists and writers like María Brito, Ruth Behar, Carlos Eire, Cristina García, Ana Mendieta, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ernesto Pujol, Achy Obejas, and Ana Menéndez, López highlights the affective ties as well as the tensions underlying the relationship between returning subjects and their native country. Impossible Returns also looks at how Cubans still living on the island depict returning émigrés in their own narratives, addressing works by Jesús Díaz, Humberto Solás, Carlos Acosta, Nancy Alonso, Leonardo Padura, and others. Blurring the lines between disciplines and geographic borders, this book underscores the centrality of Cuba for its diaspora and bears implications for other countries with widespread populations in exile.
"State of Return theoretically explores the concept of "return" and ethnographically traces different experiences of return migration across the globe with emphases on temporality, kinship, and citizenship. Collectively, contributors show how return significantly reconfigures the lives of people as they move across borders"--
The political changes at the end of the last century in the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation, had deep-reaching repercussions on the interpretation of Russian culture in the time of division between “Russia Abroad” and “Russia at Home”. Ever since, scholars have tried to understand and to describe the interrelationship between the two Russias. In spite of intensive research, numerous conferences and publications, there are still many discoveries to be made and a number of questions to be answered. This volume presents a selection of articles based on papers presented at an international conference on Russian émigré culture that was held at Saarland University, Germany, in 2015. The essays assembled here offer new insights into aspects of Russian émigré culture already known to scholarship, but also to explore new facets of it. As such, it is not the well-known centres and leading figures of Russian emigration that are highlighted; instead the authors give prominence to places of seemingly secondary importance such as Prague, Istanbul or India and to such lesser-known aspects as collections and collectors of Russian émigré art and the impact of cultural activities of the Russian emigration on the culture of the respective host countries.
This book re-assesses director Jean Renoir’s work between his departure from France in 1940 and his death in 1979, and contributes to the debate over how the medium of film registers the impact of trauma. The 1930s ended in catastrophe for both for Renoir and for France: La Règle du jeu was a critical and commercial disaster on its release in July 1939 and in 1940 France was occupied by Germany. Even so, Renoir continued to innovate and experiment with his post-war work, yet the thirteen films he made between 1941 and 1969, constituting nearly half of his work in sound cinema, have been sorely neglected in the study of his work. With detailed readings of the these films and four novels produced by Renoir in his last four decades, Davis explores the direct and indirect ways in which film, and Renoir’s films in particular, depict the aftermath of violence.
A recurring and significant theme in ancient Greek literature is that of returns and returning, chiefly - but by no means only - of mythical Greek heroes from Troy. One main, and certainly the most 'marked', ancient Greek word for 'return' is nostos (plural nostoi), from which is derived the English 'nostalgia'. Nostos-related traditions were important ingredients of colonial foundation myths and the theme runs through both ancient Greek prose and poetry from Homer's Odyssey to Lykophron's Alexandra, also leaving traces in the historical record through the archaeological and epigraphical commemoration of nostoi, which played a central part in defining Greek ethnicity and crystallizing personal and communal identities. This volume offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of nostos in ancient Greek culture, which draws on its contributors' expertise in ancient Greek (and Roman) history, literature, archaeology, and religion. The chapters examine both literary and material evidence in order to achieve a better understanding of the nature of Greek settlement in the Mediterranean zone, and of sometimes equivocal Greek and Roman perceptions of home, displacement, and returning. The special problems and vocabulary of exile are explored in the long Introduction, which offers an incisive yet accessible overview of the volume's key themes and sets its range of contributions clearly in context: while two chapters are concerned in different ways with emotions and personal identity, making use of the theoretical tool of place-attachment, another demonstrates that failed nostoi can be more interesting than successful examples. Evidential absence can be as important and illuminating as presence, and mythical women, underrepresented in this regard, feature extensively in several chapters, which open up a range of new perspectives on nostos.
The wars of the twentieth century uprooted people on a previously unimaginable scale to the extent that being a refugee became an increasingly widespread experience. With the arrival of refugees, governments of host countries had to mediate between divided national populations: some wished to welcome those arriving in search of refuge; others preferred a strategy of exclusion or even expulsion. At the same time, refugees had to manage conflicts of the self as they responded to the loss of nationhood, families, socio-political networks, material goods, and arguably also a sense of belonging or home. While return migration was usually perceived by governments and refugees alike as the best solution to the dilemmas of forced displacement, consensus about the timing and dynamics of how this would actually occur was very difficult to achieve. In practice, the return of refugees to their countries of origin rarely, if ever, produced a wholly satisfactory outcome. Conflicts clearly resulted in forced displacement, but it is equally true that forced displacement created conflicts. The complex inter-relationship of conflict, return migration and the sometimes chimerical, but still compelling search for a sense of home is the central preoccupation of the contributors to the two volumes of the Coming Home? series. Scholars from history, literature, cultural studies and sociology explore the tensions between nation-states and migrants as they have anticipated, implemented or challenged the process of return migration during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first volume – Coming Home? Conflict and Return Migration in the Aftermath of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Civil Wars – covers the period of the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War with a focus on Western, Central and Eastern Europe. This book shifts attention to the colonial and post-colonial framework of the French-North African nexus.
