Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities.

The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the “exile” as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.

Offering numerous fresh insights on migration, diaspora, and exile, this book is as timely as it is thought-provoking. Taking the familiar trope of the 'Mother of Exiles' from Emma Lazarus' public poem as starting point, it combines original work from a transdisciplinary group of scholars who approach migration and exile from the perspectives of social, literary and cultural studies as well as history and philosophy. What emerges is an intense exchange of ideas akin to what Achille Mbembe has called 'world-thinking', which can be truly transformative. -- Astrid Böger, Universität Hamburg

Daniel Stein is professor of North American literary and cultural studies and vice dean for international affairs at the University of Siegen.

Geoffroy de Laforcadeis professor of Latin American, Caribbean and world history at Norfolk State University.

Page R. Laws is professor of English and dean of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University.

Cathy Covell Waegner is an independent scholar.