A Logic of Exile: Cultural Distance and the Plasticity of the Mind

Epochs have knowledge systems. Do exiles, too? Literary and aesthetic inquiries are often entangled with the perspective in which they are raised by scholars, a critical map that gives singular weight to how ideas are contextualized. What should be the critical lens for cultural displacement? How should critics examine authors and artists who are in exile, a state of expatriation or emigration, or somewhere in between? Is exile a condition, like other states of being, that produces behaviors that can be measured, linked, and unpacked as a base of cultural study? Are the creative tools that map the imagination (like use of language, stylistic tendencies, and specific thematic devices) of writers and artists shaped by cultural displacement? How does nonnative cultural immersion influence the mind—and, thusly, how the mind codifies experience and reflections into physical representations? In relation to these questions, this article contemplates how exile shapes art, writing, and human experiences.