When Will Ladislaw
exiled himself from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his return than his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier, but simply a state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind, and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite facility.
But you are fitted for society, and it is shameful to have you
exiled from it.
This is a history written on a numerically and analytically sweeping scale, from the one million prisoners and their families
exiled to Siberia during this period, to Beer's overall suggestion that as the 19th century progressed, Siberia became "a giant laboratory of revolution" (6) and a critical influence on the collapse of tsarism in 1917.
In two recent studies on the geographical dispersal of the various
exiled nuclei of the Florentine Strozzi lineage across the peninsula, Lorenzo Fabbri has demonstrated the opportunities yielded for the study of exile through adopting this particular angle of vision.
Resisting the temptation to rely on traditional categorisations such as race, nationality, colonial status or ethnicity when thinking through the
exiled politics of friendship constructed in Pondicherry illuminates the dynamic and transnational nature of anti-colonialism.
As Margana shows, indigenous sources (if availalable) such as the Babad Mangkudiningratan open up the possibilty to encounter the perspective of the
exiled party, providing an important layer to the story.
Editors Brinson and Hammel present readers with a collection of academic essays and scholarly articles focused on the work of
exiled women writers and journalists and gendered representations in the writing of both male and female
exiled writers.
Paul Zeleza (473) has pinpointed the creative effect of politics on Anglophone writers when he asserts that: "tyranny [a fallout of political intrigues] had created us, imprisoned and
exiled many of us, enraged our consciences, and nourished our imaginations.
(2) In the South African context, exile has been associated with a strategic space characterized by transnational political struggles against "norms of a nation." (3) It is estimated that from the early 1960s, 40,000 to 60,000 South Africans were
exiled, and that between 1990 and 1995 approximately 15,000 to 17,000 former exiles returned to South Africa.