Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article examines the memoir Parisian Days by Azerbaijani French writer Banine, situating it within discourses of exile, gender, and postcolonial identity. Writing from the geographic and cultural periphery of the former Russian Empire, Banine offers a unique lens on the Russian émigré experience in interwar Paris. Her reflections reveal the persistent imperial hierarchies that shape the diaspora and foreground the complex negotiations of identity undertaken by women from colonized regions. This study argues that Banine’s work introduces a counter-memory rooted in cultural hybridity, gendered displacement, and colonial critique. The author crafts a voice that resists both nostalgic imperialism and total assimilation and establishes exile as a site of critical agency and transformation.

Roman Palester (1907–1989) was one of the most promising and well-known composers in Poland during the inter-war period. On more than one occasion he was compared to the father of Polish contemporary music, Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937).1 As one of Poland’s leading conductors Jan Krenz noted: “We met while working on the film Zakazane piosenki [Forbidden Songs]. I remember that Palester then came to Łódź in the halo of Szymanowski’s successor. People would say ‘this is the great Roman Palester’.”2 Yet at the height of his fame, in 1951, he chose to leave his homeland and take up residency in the “free” West; subsequently he was cut off from Poland and his previous success.The 20th century was a time of great cultural, political, and artistic change in Europe with a considerable number of divergent views about what constituted ‘good’ music. Terms such as modernism, nationalism, neo-classicism, socialist realism, serialism and atonality were all used regularly when discussing music and art. There ceased to be a clear or uniform musical style in Europe. Instead a cultural polarisation emerged caused in large part by the division of the world into East and West during the Cold War. How did Palester, a Polish émigré, now residing in the West, effectively a composer in exile, adapt to these circumstances? What connection did his music have with avant- -garde trends, anti-communist sentiments, traditional aesthetics, serialism, etc.? Was Palester’s compositional voice affected by his defection?In order to determine what Palester’s post-defection compositional voice was and how it may have interreacted with events around him, this paper will examine one of Palester’s pivotal compositions, Preludes for Piano (1954). These Preludes are a significant work in Palester’s compositional output as they show a distinct shift towards a more comprehensive use of twelve-tone techniques. These techniques are employed in a variety of different ways and are often coupled with other techniques in order to create a style which is uniquely suited to Palester’s compositional desires.

The article presents an overview of the perspectives on art taken by Polish émigré writers who either settled in the United States or Canada, or who lived on the North American continent for a period of time. The author juxtaposes the reflections on art of Polish émigré poets such as Anna Frajlich, Andrzej Busza and Wacław Iwaniuk, as expressed in their poetry, with the understanding of art as presented in the American essays written by Julia Hartwig and Wojciech Karpiński. Though their texts belong to separate literary genres, together they create a more complex overview of reflections on the special relationship between a piece of art and a writer contemplating it. In this study the author examines the correlation between visual perception and visual thinking of each writer and focuses also on the idea of visual imagination.

The article employs concepts of inspired by Ernst Bloch, and and borrowed from Jacques Derrida. It also draws on Svetlana Boym’s and Vilém Flusser’s vision of the émigré and on Dominick LaCapra’s and Slavoj Žižek’s interpretations of trauma. The analysis is also informed by Karen Jürs-Munby’s and Cathy Caruth’s views on trauma and its representation in theatre. This critical apparatus is put into motion in the particular context of BANDIT: a theatre project developed in the UK by two Romanian émigré theatre-makers. The main focus is on exposing links between the references to trauma contained in the theatre piece BANDIT and the makers’ self-imposed artistic exile in the UK. The article seeks to answer the following question: what has pushed us, the makers of BANDIT, to leave our native country and what is our (new) role (as artists) in the country of emigration? The discussion is carried out within the wider context of the vast waves of Romanian emigration to Western Europe (after the fall of the Iron Curtain). The article critiques the troublesome relation of the contemporary Romanian society to its Communist past and the apparent inability and/or unwillingness to deal with the repressed/traumatic memories of that past. Analysis of BANDIT as performance of lingering trauma also references the historical Percentages agreement between Stalin and Churchill—the informal agreement that established spheres of influence in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Identifying the Iron Curtain as the epicentre of traumatic memory for Eastern Europeans, the discussion about BANDIT also makes a reference to Communist crimes against political prisoners committed in Romanian prisons in 1951–1952, put in parallel with the toxic EU referendum campaign in the UK in 2016. Underpinned by Derrida’s thinking, the article explains how the Romanian émigré-artist (as a paragon of the Romanian / Eastern European émigré in general) has to fashion herself into a that haunts the adoptive culture, using artistic exile as a platform for processing the traumatic memories of an unresolved past.

Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.

The transplantation of Zen from China to Japan during the Kamakura period (1185–1333) depended on a series of intrepid seekers, who journeyed beyond conventional geographical and societal boundaries to discover and appropriate religious customs and beliefs while staying on the mainland that spread and eventually thrived on the islands. The only way to learn the intricate ways of Zen theory was to experience first-hand the relevant people, practices, places, and ritual performances in the Hangzhou/Ningbo region of the northern Zhejiang province. This article first provides a brief synopsis of travelers to and from Hangzhou, including Japanese pilgrims and Chinese émigré monks in addition to some prominent teachers and learners who did not journey but nevertheless exerted a tremendous impact on the transmission process. Then, it analyzes elements of Chinese Chan that were brought across the waters by Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), who ventured to gain enlightenment in the 1220s. He later claimed that he implemented “for the first time in Japan” 日本国最始 practical and conceptual religious techniques, including diverse personal, material, ritual, textual, rhetorical, and societal components. Although a major transmitter of Chan, Dōgen made significant innovations based on his vision of the ideal Zen community, recast for the structures of medieval Japanese society.

The architectural history of healthcare in South Africa remains greatly understudied, as do the consequences of the 1918–19 Spanish Flu, which ravaged its population. Yet that pandemic had great consequences for South African society, spatial planning and the development of healthcare, of which the latter two were still in their infancy at the time. This article explores the link between disease and design in South Africa through the presentation of the histories of selected hospitals, maternity homes, orphanages and a special care school designed by émigré Dutch architects from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is the product of desktop and archival research, site visits and interviews undertaken in both South Africa and the Netherlands. It outlines the disparity of care that was provided for different groups and is a first attempt to identify healthcare ideas transposed into the subcontinent fuelled by the tragic experiences of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Due to this health crisis, communities – structured in terms of language, faith and race – attempted to develop their own facilities for the care of their own. Where communities had no means of their own, charitable organisations tried to fill the void. Over the course of the twentieth century, public healthcare was centralised, but many of the community and charitable institutions persist. By chance or choice, émigré Dutch architects made a disproportionately large contribution to the development of healthcare facilities in South Africa, not only in the number and range of facilities they designed, but also by introducing contemporary ideas into South African healthcare design.

This article presents the role of selected motifs of prayer depicted in the works of first-wave Russian emigrants in the creation of a certain type of national mythology. The starting point of the considerations is a reflection on the status of emigrant literature at the time of its creation, during the period of political changes in the Soviet bloc, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and today. From the beginning, émigré literature has served as a certain treasury of images and symbols, which are treated as necessary elements for maintaining the national identity of emigrants. The article presents selected motifs from the works of Ivan Shmelev’s The Year of the Lord and Pilgrimage, and Boris Zaitsev’s Saint Sergius of Radonezh, showing prayer as an element of ritual, as a collective request, and as an act of deep contact with God. The analysis of the selected examples shows that regardless of the literary form, narrative perspective, or the way the subject was presented, the writers showed prayer motifs in a patriotic context, while mythologizing pre-revolutionary Russia and bringing the idea of “Holy Rus” to life. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been an increased interest in emigrant literature, and the ideas contained therein have proven to be very important for the formation of the new national consciousness of Russians. Today, due to another political change in Russia and its political isolation, émigré literature is of renewed importance in Russian circles. The writers whose works are discussed in this study are regarded as the main Orthodox writers of the twentieth century, and the image of praying Russia is again the basis for building a new national identity. The study concludes with the observation that the value of emigrant literature should be studied in the context of the time of its creation.

Abstract Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar poet and writer Mikhail Naimy (Mīkhāʿīl Nu'aymah) (1889-1988) for the first time to scholarship. By examining the influence of Russian literature on Naimy's literary output, we shed light on the role of multilingualism in generating literary identities and in shaping literary form. Naimy's Russian poetry, we argue, furthers our understanding of the nahḍah as a multilingual movement that synthesized influences from many different languages. We also show how this multilingual orientation served as a bridge between the nahḍah and mahjar literature, by helping Arab writers craft a poetics of Arabic modernism in the diaspora. Alongside documenting an important archival discovery, this research contributes to our understanding of the temporality of Arabic modernism while illuminating its geographically and linguistically diverse substance.

In this study, I explore the way in which a German émigré rose to the status of a cultural hero in Castile, Spain, and how his work of law became one of the three “pillars” of Jewish law. A survey of the Jewish legal landscape in medieval Spain during the fourteenth century reveals a shift in the status of one of the centers of Talmudic and legal (halakha) studies there as compared with the previous century. The fortune of the center in Toledo changed dramatically, and this change is traceable to the impact of one German émigré, Rabbi Asher ben Jehiel. Many scholars have examined Asher’s life and work. However, none have seriously analyzed the change he brought to the legal culture in Castile or examined the mechanism of how this occurred. This study describes Asher’s impact and attempts to expose the processes that brought about this transformation.