Views from exile: creating political possibility from impasse

Abstract

In this dissertation I develop a framework of exile to examine how novel forms of individual and collective action centered on return, repair, and liberation can counter political problems of impasse. I argue that the exile has three fundamental pathways of action: accept one’s liminal state and resign oneself to the impositions of the powerful, seek refuge in continued flight or evasion, or seek to impress change on the system in which one is caught. In following this final option, the exile seeks to transform the structural conditions that produced their exilic condition. In this dissertation I argue that three thinkers, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Aimé Césaire, offer important insights into building transformation amidst such moments of impasse. I argue that each thinker enlarges the view onto the different impasses and roadblocks that stunt political action from the margins. Baldwin focuses on how the individual is constrained by the force of racial, sexual, and cultural repetitions. Césaire illuminates how the force of historical and cultural inheritance imposes notions of heroic action and rupture that overly circumscribe understandings of liberation resulting in movement that is self-defeating. Finally, Hansberry, shows how entrenched notions of family, property, and home can be challenged and perhaps remade. This dissertation contributes to larger discussions of political change by attempting to elucidate the connective tissue between thought, or internal regeneration and development, and collective actions that can engage the mechanisms of political change. This dissertation claims that the experience of exile shared, yet idiosyncratically lived, by Baldwin, Césaire, and Hansberry, produced a way of seeing that infused their own writing, and from which, we, living in a similar political moment of frustration and stasis, can utilize to develop new political instincts and movements.