Ebook: Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration – Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one’s own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody’s story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

Review

The collection of essays in Professors Catalina Florescu and Sheng-Mei Ma’s volume suggest that we are locals among locals in local societies making up the global mix. As locals, we are each one; locals throughout the globe, are equally one; communities of locals, make up the global; and the global is, though becoming increasingly complex, one. One yet many, many yet one. The sooner we learn to embrace the global as well as the set of all locals, the less we will blindly practice our knowing ignorance, our ignorantly presumed knowing. Perhaps then and only then, if we are fortunate, we may come to know enlightenment. This volume is indeed a timely read, given our current milieu. (Floyd Merrell, Purdue University)

How do migration and translocation 'provincialize' English, the colonial language par excellence, and forge different shades of English tuned to the particular experience of different refugees, exiled, emigrants, and simply travelers? The fourteen contributors to this volume provide a wealth of examples of linguistic transmogrification, alteration and enrichment by drawing on cases selected from the United Kingdom, post-communist Eastern Europe, Iran, the Caribbean, as well as the Chinese diaspora and the refugees arrived into Europe from Northern Africa and Asia. Speaking for the sophisticated reader, this edited collection is both timely and interesting (Lavinia Stan, St. Francis Xavier University)

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile is a strong discursive microcosm focused on the concept of global from a counter-colonial transmigrating perspective. Awareness of cultural plurality as expressed via intersecting narrative voices, real or imaginary places, races and genders, just to name some of the aspects involved in this very complex encounter of minds, reveals the extraordinary power of language as hybrid place of ideological exchange. The volume as a whole is much more than a sum of articles aiming to establish an intellectual dialogue through a series of parallel texts: it is the road to that unfolding tomorrow, it opens perspectives towards an upcoming world of hybrid possibilities. Dislocation, represented through various forms of (im)migration, reveals itself as power of transformation and this volume reflects the hardships of the roads that lead to entering into that painful and yet unavoidable alterity. (Lenutsa Giukin, SUNY Oswego)

The essays in this collection explore one of the fundamental issues of our time, the question of what globalization and forced migration do to the languages we speak natively and that form us as we re/form them. Catalina Florina Florescu has assembled an impressive and moving collection of views about the pluralization of English in works of fiction and testimony around the world, unsettling the idea that there is a single English language and affirming the importance of paying attention to what creative works have to say about the experience of exile and the ways experience is spoken and written. (Julie Rak, University of Alberta)

This new volume on migrant writing, expertly edited by Catalina Florina Florescu, focuses on a wide range of experiences of people settling in the English-speaking world. While all displaced persons have their specificities, Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile brings to light many intriguing similarities in their struggle to be heard and respected in frequently hostile surroundings. The volume makes a valuable contribution to transnational studies (Felicity Hand Cranham, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

The collection of essays Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile edited by Catalina Florina Florescu includes a variety of stimulating insights into the traumas of displacement that stories celebrating transnational migration often tend to ignore. The collection adds novel perspectives from areas often marginalized such as Eastern Europe or Iran and which meaningfully complement and enrich studies of well-established Asian American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Trinh Minh-ha or widely anthologized authors like Gloria Anzaldua and Jean Rhys. (Madalina Nicolaescu, University of Bucharest)

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exlie is a uniquely fascinating and timely collection of essays centered on multiple expressions of displacement: geographical, emotional, and linguistic. It is an invitation to reflection both on why and hoe people move, an affirmation of the fact that movement is only part of our humanity, but also one of its most important characteristics, and a thoughtful journey across and in between boundaries of any kind. Be them filmed and “directed by,” written, or directly narrated, these experiences are fundamental in our becoming as species, and a guide in our understanding and overcoming the walls that may attempt to keep us apart (Alexandru Balasescu, Author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills)

A valuable collection that features exile as cultural journeys into Englishes, adding important stories to both transnational and intercultural studies. (Noemi Marin, Author of After the Fall)