Browsing by Subject "Exile"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Displaced by Revolution: Loyalists in Limbo within the Spanish Empire
    (Age of Revolutions, 2023-06-08) Chambers, Sarah C.
    Thousands of Spanish subjects were displaced by first the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s and then the Spanish American wars of independence from 1810-1825. Some fled to foreign countries, but many prioritized areas still controlled by Spain, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico. Unlike British loyalists from North America, few received compensation for the losses they had incurred. Displaced imperial administrators did receive pensions valued at two-thirds of their salary until they could return to their former positions. But, with the exception of some in Puerto Rico, civilians, mostly born in the colonies, were not guaranteed assistance. Although Spanish subjects in Spanish territory, they found themselves in limbo, as they were seen as outsiders and expected to return to their places of origin once the Crown had suppressed the revolutions.
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    From Displaced Persons to Exiles: Nationalism, Anti-Communism, and the Shaping of Latvian American Diaspora
    (2016-06) Ankrava, Arta
    This dissertation explores the shaping of the Latvian American exile from temporary settlement in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in post-war Europe, to resettlement to the U.S. following the DP Act of 1948. Specifically, Latvian diasporic discourses of nationalism, transnationalism, and anti-Communism are analyzed through the lens of Latvian-language exile periodicals. These are conceptualized as a transnational space, a locus of intersection of diasporic, national and hybrid, and sometimes competing identities. Building on archival research conducted at the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, the project uses newspaper articles to identify the variety of discourses present in major diasporic periodicals and draws out points of contention as well as agreement on the shaping of the Latvian nation both pre and post USSR dissolution. The dissertation’s main goal is to explore how the Latvian American exile community was shaped by the Cold War, and how Latvia as nation was imagined and re-imagined in diasporic press. Through secondary source analysis of Vietnamese refugee experience later in the twentieth century, this project also aims to question notions of “exile” and “refugee” as such, and interrogates how they were used in relation to different Cold War era anti-Communist immigrant groups to the U.S. Finally, the dissertation also addresses post-USSR collapse Latvian identity politics, including exile and homeland relations, as well as suggesting avenues for future research.
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    The Human Rights Performative: The Belarus Free Theater on the Global Stage
    (2017-05) Kompelmakher, Margarita
    This dissertation investigates the staging of human rights in the theatrical work of the Belarus Free Theater (BFT), a social justice theater company from Minsk, Belarus that has become one of the most prominent human rights theater companies in the world since 2007. Drawing on bilingual fieldwork and archival research conducted over a five-year period in Belarus and the UK, this project reveals how liberal values--such as freedom of speech and individuality--are translated across post-Soviet Europe and the European Union. The chapters in this dissertation trace a historical shift in human rights cultural politics from identity-based aesthetics to ethical aesthetics grounded in the principles of survival, testimony and sensation. These principles have increasingly become the gold standard for cross-cultural exchanges since the Helsinki Accords in the 1970s. I demonstrate how these principles are not ‘objective’ aesthetic judgments but, in fact, part of a colonial and racially charged mode of liberal human rights governance. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights how artist-activists from Belarus make claims to alternative worldviews to mainstay liberal democracy. It argues that cultural institutions must engage with cultural translation in order to avoid falling prey to a form of human rights governance that implicitly positions certain groups as artistically inferior and backwards on a spectrum of political freedoms.
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    Los Campos de la Memoria: the concentration camp as a site of memory in the narrative of Max Aub.
    (2009-08) Dickey, Eric
    This dissertation explores constructions of memory and testimony in the concentration-camp narrative of Spanish author Max Aub. One of the most forgotten chapters of all Spanish Civil War and exile history is that pertaining to the Spanish Republicans who were interned in French concentration camps after the end of the Civil War. The concentration camp occupies a central place of memory and becomes a recurrent symbol and leitmotif that reappears in various manifestations throughout much of Aub's narrative work. In this dissertation, I investigate the symbolic value of the concentration camp as a discursive vehicle, a lieux de mémoire, that allows Aub to reconstruct his traumatic memories of the camp and convert them into narrative memory through writing. I examine the fictionalization of testimony in various literary genres and media, and analyze the use of different narrative strategies of remembrance and memory work to convey the experience of internment. My analysis of the camps goes beyond the traditional psychoanalytical conception of trauma as an individual phenomenon by exploring the collective dimension of trauma and memory. Aub's recounting of his own personal experiences exceeds a mere autobiographical portrait as it speaks in a collective voice that seeks to share the suffering of fellow exiles and camp survivors in order to form a new collective or group consciousness. Writing about the camps represents Aub's way of bearing witness to his trauma at the same time as it is his way of fighting the silence that has surrounded this experience shared by so many fellow Republican exiles. Through his testimonial writing, in both its individual and collective dimensions, Aub succeeds in a long-cherished goal, that of reinserting the memory traces of the Civil War, exile, and the camps back into Spain's historical and literary discourse.