This article is about Mircea Eliade’s rapport to exile, both his and other Romanians’. His approach of the exilic experience allows an incursion into the “diaspora” semantic field in the study Theorizing Diaspora by Jana Evans Braziler and Anita Mannur and a look at Eliade as a “diasporic subject”. To Eliade, the relationship with homeland and the diasporic identity assume religious significance. He urges members of the Romanian diaspora to hold the native country sacred as a ‘Jerusalem in (...) the Sky’. A strong believer in the salvaging power of cultural creation over the political factor, he wanted his work to be a response to the communist regime in Romania. (shrink)

Eliade and the Doctrine of Mystic Lights Eliade believed that in every religion there are reports about an experience of mystic light. Furthermore, all such reports mention that the person who experienced the light subsequently underwent a deep transformation of her or his spirit and began a new life, the life of a holy man or homo religiosus, which is identical – in its purest form – with the life of a mystic. A clear example of one such transformation is (...) Saul turning into Paul. But a closer analysis indicates, says the Author, that these changes can be of two kinds. They either come suddenly to an unsuspecting and unprepared individual, and that was the case of Saul, or they are a result of concentrated spiritual training, and such a case was described by Gregory Palamas. The former transformation leads to a religious conversion, the latter is the beginning of a new, mystic life. The Author argues that these forms of experience are seeing without using eyes, and as such, they may have served as a paradigm of vivid mental understanding. He quotes Plato and Heidegger to support these views. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of a ‘terror of history’ in the work of historian of religion Mircea Eliade, particularly in his 1948 book The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. The article turns to Eliade’s journals to trace the genesis of this concept, showing that this book which became a foundational text in the history of religions was originally conceived as a work on the philosophy of history. Tracing the incoherences and contradictions of this ‘terror’ in (...) the context of his wartime diary entries, the continuity of Eliade’s thought from his time as an outspoken supporter of the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1930s to his publication of Cosmos and History in 1948 becomes clear. Eliade’s ‘terror,’ it is shown, is conditioned by his despair at the retreat and collapse of the European fascist powers, but is more fundamentally an expression of horror toward the dissolution and loss of identity that he associates with historicity and, indeed, with difference itself. As this article shows, Eliade’s solution was not an ‘eternal return’ but rather an eternal escape from history, a religious oblivion that would collapse all events into ‘archetypes’ and blot out the horror of history and difference. (shrink)

In this study, we want to analyze the relation between two Romanian internationally-renowned men of culture: Mircea Eliade (often considered one of the greatest historians of religion of all times) and Nicolae Steinhardt (whose name and memory have been mentioned by Pope John the Second in his visit in Romania). Though they had about the same age (a difference of 5 years), they had little connections in the interwar period (a few meetings and, later, Steinhardt’s volume The Way of… (...) the Young [În genul… tinerilor] from 1934, where he parodies Eliade, among others). A strong influence (which changed destinies) occurred during 1958-1960, when Steinhardt was imprisoned for having read and spread writings of Romanians found in exile, including the novel Midsummer Night (The Forbidden Forest) [Noaptea de Sânziene (Pădurea interzisă)] by Eliade. After the release in 1964, Steinhardt was continuously watched by the communist Securitate and reports have been written about him, where his main guilt was his friendship with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu, Virgil Ierunca, Monica Lovinescu, et al. Beyond these biographical intersections between Eliade and Steinhardt, there are also connections with regard to the Romanian culture, literary ideas, and visions on religious life. Steinhardt brings appreciations to the scholar in Chicago for the fact that he presents the beauty of the Romanian culture in the Western desecrated world and considers Eliade – and he’s one of the few who does this – influenced in his thinking by Christian ideals (in this direction, memorable are Steinhardt’s appreciations of the role played by Eliade in the Western culture, especially with his volume From Zamolxis to Genghis-Kahn [De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han], but also with his fiction, marking a direct reference to the novella A Fourteen Year Old Photograph [O fotografie veche de 14 ani]). (shrink)

The paper is in itself a statement of facts: that the American has always been a “homo religiosus”, and that religion has shaped the American character starting with the early construction of America and until the current 21st secular century. America today is still indebted to the Puritans’ utopian consciousness of a divine call to restore Paradise on earth. Mircea Eliade helps this reading of America, he himself an exiled that experienced the quest for the Center of the world (...) and of the self. To the eyes of a Romanian, America of the past two decades has revealed a steady growing Eastern Orthodox Church rooted in unspoiled traditions and values, a path worthy of further exploring. (shrink)

Inspired by Hamid Naficy’s view that exile ‘thrives on detail, specificity and locality’, Maria Photiou and Marhsa Meskimmon set out to ‘investigate three associated concepts: house, home and homeland’ in relation to artistic practices that explore ‘departures and homecomings, indeed, homemakings’ (p. 1). Given that 68.5 million people were ‘forcibly displaced worldwide’ in 2017, artistic practices and related exhibitions focused on ‘migration, exile, diaspora and empire’ feel especially timely (p. 2). The continuous thread through this book concerns the way artists (...) hailing from elsewhere tend to have convoluted family histories that complicate narratives surrounding personal identity, thus introducing curatorial puzzles regarding how best to interpret, contextualize and/or situate resulting artworks, which can take decades.In order to frame artworks in terms of homeland, displacement and belonging, each of Art, Borders and Belonging’s ten contributors carefully teases out each artist’s unique identity. Since no two identities are ever identical (even among twins), the notion of ‘identity’ as in ‘identity studies’ is a troubling term. Identity studies should have been called either ‘nonidentity studies’ or ‘difference studies’. When it comes to personal identity, however, the term ‘identity’ makes sense, since each one is characterized by a unique string of extant modifiers meant to particularize some individual, thus approximating the identity between the string and the individual. This book’s essays, which analyze artistic practices in relationship to identity, are ideally suited for courses in Philosophy of Culture, Critical Philosophy of Race, LatinX Aesthetics or Radical Philosophy of Migration. (shrink)

This article elaborates a theoretical framework for making sense of Tibetans in Tibet who live as ‘exiles in their own homeland’. Placing questions of mobility at the centre of anthropological approaches to diaspora, it subjects ‘the fact of movement’ to critical scrutiny. In so doing it calls into question three fundamental assumptions of recent work in both ‘new mobilities’ and the study of diaspora more broadly: first, that people move and territory does not; second, that ‘place(s)’ and ‘movement(s)’ are different (...) sorts of things, and clearly distinguishable; and, third, that movement takes places only in Euclidean space. Beginning by placing recent Tibetan experiences of exile and diaspora in comparative context, it then works through recent deconstructions of the boundary between movement and place, a critique of Western ethno-epistemologies of movement, and Law and Mol’s work on social topology as theoretical orientations that might allow us to make sense of mobile homelands and diasporas in situ. (shrink)

Diaspora, considered as a context for insights into Jewish identity, brings together a lively, interdisciplinary group of scholars in this innovative volume. Readers needn't expect, however, to find easy agreement on what those insights are. The concept "diaspora" itself has proved controversial; _galut, _the traditional Hebrew expression for the Jews' perennial condition, is better translated as "exile." The very distinction between diaspora and exile, although difficult to analyze, is important enough to form the basis of several essays in this (...) fine collection. "Identity" is an even more elusive concept. The contributors to _Diasporas and Exiles _explore Jewish identity—or, more accurately, Jewish identities—from the mutually illuminating perspectives of anthropology, art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German history, philosophy, political theory, and sociology. These contributors bring exciting new emphases to Jewish and cultural studies, as well as the emerging field of diaspora studies. _Diasporas and Exiles _mirrors the richness of experience and the attendant virtual impossibility of definition that constitute the challenge of understanding Jewish identity. (shrink)

Review of Cristian Radu, Vintilă Horia or the Vocation of Wholeness (Vintilă Horia sau vocaţia totalităţii), (Cluj-Napoca: Accent Press, 2011).

Global changes in capital, power, technology and the media have caused massive shifts in how we define home and community, leaving redrawn territories and globalized contexts. This interdisciplinary study of the media brings together essays by accomplished critics to discuss the way film, television, music, and computer and electronic media are shaping identities and cultures in an increasingly globalized world. Ranging from intensely personal to highly theoretical, the contributors explore our complex negotiation of "home" and homeland" in a postmodern world. (...) Contributors: Homi Bhabha, Thomas Elsaesser, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Teshome H. Gabriel, George Lipsitz, Margaret Morse, David Morley, John Peters, Patricia Seed, Ella Shohat, and Vivian Sobchack. (shrink)

Using the tools of normative political theory, this book explores the political relationship between exiles and the communities from which they have fled. It makes two central claims. First, exiles have rights and responsibilities in their homelands and are morally required and permitted to play particular roles in the homeland. Second, in playing these roles, exile politics can perform two corrective functions: it can repair defective political institutions at home and it can compensate for institutional shortcomings in the global domain. (...) In short, exiles engage in a ‘politics from below’ and ‘away’ that produces alternative sites of power and can mitigate the several failings of an international system of states in an unequal world. This normative exploration of exile politics has a few implications. It counters an overwhelming focus, in both political philosophy and public discourse, on the consequences of forced migration for receiving societies—a focus that often treats exiles as passive actors. Recognizing the political agency of exiles reveals another side of the migration story, and allows for a more fulsome exploration of what political obligation and membership mean in an increasingly transnational world. Identifying exiles as important domestic and transnational actors also points to the ways third parties ought to enable the different roles exiles play in their communities of origin and in the international domain. And recognizing exile agency highlights the shortcomings of an international system of refugee protection that focuses on exiles’ humanitarian needs but denies them their political rights and agency. (shrink)

Pour ceux qui s'interrogent sur le fascisme d'Emil Cioran ou plus encore de Mircea Eliade, ce livre dissipera les derniers doutes. Loin du péché de jeunesse, on y découvrira, à partir d'écrits politiques inédits en français et d'archives jusque-là inexploitées, l'ampleur du plaidoyer antisémite et ultranationaliste porté par ces deux intellectuels aujourd'hui mondialement célèbres... mais aussi leur obstination à camoufler, voire à recycler après 1945, une filiation idéologique pourtant indispensable à l'intelligence des œuvres de la maturité. De cet " (...) oubli du fascisme ", Eugène Ionesco fut-il le témoin consentant? Le jeune intellectuel de gauche connaissait parfaitement, pour l'avoir combattu dans les années 30, l'engagement de ses deux compatriotes d'origine roumaine. Comment comprendre dès lors l'étrange pacte du silence scellé après-guerre entre les trois hommes? Amnésie complice ou effet équivoque des solidarités anticommunistes de l'exil? Cet essai, dont le ton n'est jamais inquisitoire, vient lézarder des pans entiers de notre culture en montrant comment la pensée d'un Eliade ou d'un Cioran a pu justifier une des dérives les plus meurtrières du XXe siècle. Au fil d'une enquête historique minutieuse, qui nous mènera du Bucarest de la Garde de fer à Paris, en passant par les refuges diplomatiques de la Seconde Guerre mondiale - où, entre Vichy et le Portugal de Salazar, on suivra les trois écrivains en poste dans diverses ambassades d'un pays allié du Ille Reich -, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine éclaire la face trop longtemps cachée de leurs trajectoires. D'où les deux versants de cette triple biographie intellectuelle qui analyse ensuite avec brio le succès des multiples stratégies sociales et littéraires mises en œuvre pour dissimuler un passé devenu soudain très encombrant. (shrink)

De la identidad literaria salvadoreña como exilio, se examina la obra clásica de nueve autores. Al aplicar una perspectiva psicoanalítica, el ensayo toma como punto de partida una tarjeta que Roque Dalton envió desde Cuba a una amante lejana en El Salvador. La escritura establece la deuda y la memoria como principios rectores para recuperar el pasado. Un compromiso subjetivo con el objeto del amor perdido la patria y la amante dicta el movimiento de la inscripción poética. Esta ausencia del (...) cuerpo a recuperar se aplica en seguida, en primer lugar, a Francisco Gavidia, que funda el indigenismo salvadoreño, utilizando técnicas literarias europeas, con lo cual ignora las lenguas indígenas, luego a Alberto Masferrer, que se retrata sufriendo las tribulaciones y la pasión de Cristo en el exilio, antes de construir un proyecto político de país. En tercer lugar, Arturo Ambrogi percibe en el campesino salvadoreño al poeta medieval localizado en un locus amoenus, encantado por la belleza del campo. Francisco Miranda Ruano inaugura una visión más trágica, ya que su salida de la ciudad para recrear el esplendor del campo concluye con su regreso a los suburbios pobres, antes de suicidarse. En quinto lugar, Salarrué mezcla fantasía y realismo para retratar sus diversas máscaras o personajes, así como para disimular la violencia sexual y racial. Según el proverbio español “el hábito hace al monje”, el ser y los actos se juzgan siempre por la apariencia. Claudia Lars prescribe un movimiento dual, primero para sustituir su nombre real, Carmen Brannon, por su seudónimo literario, y luego para recuperar su infancia de sus habilidades adultas, que ella desarrolla, gracias al legado poético de su padre extranjero. Los hermanos Alfred y Miguel Ángel Espino proponen un patrimonio complejo. Si el primero idealiza el campo en una recuperación nostálgica del vientre materno cuya contrapartida nombra al amante imposible que lo inclina al suicidio, el segundo apunta a restituir una educación verdaderamente americana, sin revitalización alguna de las lenguas indígenas ni de su tierra ancestral confiscada. José Napoleón Rodríguez Ruiz estipula cómo solo un recuerdo lejano recupera un relato testimonial del pasado. Al vaticinar un tema de actualidad -el acoso sexual y la migración, su personaje campesino narra cómo el exilio reinventa su identidad rural. Finalmente, en un retorno sinodal, desde lejos, Dalton replica la nostalgia de Rubén Darío por ser alguien más de lo que es a la hora de recrear sus años de formación como poeta. En resumen, este bosquejo de nueve autores del siglo XX delinea no solo cómo una idea de exilio anticipa la diáspora actual. El ensayo también sugiere cómo los estudios culturales continúan una nostálgica recuperación de la memoria por una revolución sinódica, y reclama la actualidad de aquellos autores consagrados en un canon literario monolingüe. (shrink)

A Forgotten Figure of the Romanian Exile: Luc Badesco. Luc Badesco’s name is not among those generally retained by those who dealt with the Romanian cultural exile in France in the last century. References to this literary historian, who became the first Romanian professor of French literature at the University of Sorbonne, are rare. He became known through his research in the field of French literature, but his presence in the specific activities of the Romanian exile was quite low, which (...) explains the lack of interest of the Romanian researchers towards his personality and his work. I am trying to bring some light on less known aspects of his work in France, insisting on the role he played in the life of prominent figures of Romanian exile, like Emil Cioran, Virgil Ierunca and Mircea Eliade. (shrink)

In this essay, we will follow Tang Junyi’s lead in exploring issues related to Chinese diaspora and Chinese philosophy. While we largely endorse Tang’s call for overseas Chinese to establish themselves in their adopted lands, we will argue for a more nuanced view on the identity of Chinese people outside China: they are not marginalized individuals scattered out of “homeland” China, rather they are people legitimately established in their own respective countries. In this connection, we will also advance a (...) view of future Chinese philosophy as a world philosophy that takes roots in China as well as in the world at large. In our view, although Chinese immigrant thinkers in the past century have played a major role in promoting Chinese philosophy outside China, the importance of such a role is likely to decline along with the success of Chinese philosophy becoming a world philosophy. (shrink)

Existential space is lived space, space permeated by our raced, gendered selves. It is representative of our very existence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the intersection between this lived space and art by analyzing the work of the Cuban‐born artist Ana Mendieta and showing how her Siluetas Series discloses a space of exile. The first section discusses existential spatiality as explained by the phenomenologists Heidegger and Watsuji and as represented in Mendieta's Siluetas. The second section analyzes the (...) space of exile as a space of in‐between‐ness and borders. Lastly, the third section discusses temporality as it relates to the space of exile. Through the analysis of Mendieta's Siluetas, and in light of phenomenological accounts of space and the works of Anzaldúa and Mignolo, Ana Mendieta herself is disclosed as well as the space characteristic of those who can no longer be said to have a “home.” My exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and nature has been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence. The making of my Silueta in nature keeps (makes) the transition between my homeland and my new home. It is a way of reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature. Although the culture in which I live is part of me, my roots and cultural identity are a result of my Cuban heritage.1 As quoted in Gloria Moure, Ana Mendieta (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, S.A., 1996), 108. Ana MendietaLiving in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.2 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 73. Gloria Anzaldúa. (shrink)

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga.

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments (...) to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish’s exilic experience as depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986). For Darwish, the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he realized that he is stuck on a perpetual threshold. Imposed by the sovereign power, this exilic threshold characterizes the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon bereft of their rights as citizens and held outside their homeland and political domain. I wish to argue that, rather than being trapped in this condition, Darwish (...) takes it as a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notions of homeland and political belonging. This involves a contrapuntal approach to the notions of homeland, diaspora, and memory, and acts as a form of resistance. It converts the exilic threshold that keeps the poet neither outside nor inside the political domain into a site of worldliness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term. Elaborating on Judith Butler’s account of cohabitation and diasporic thinking, I argue that the exilic condition Darwish describes can give rise to a political ethic that resists the homogenization of spaces and temporalities, and allows for an alternative sense of political belonging. (shrink)

A myth relates a sacred story, that is to say, it recounts a primordial event that occurred at the beginning of time. But to tell a sacred story is equivalent to revealing a mystery, because the characters in a myth are not human beings. They are either gods or civilizing heroes, and therefore their gesta constitute mysteries: man would not know these tales if they were not revealed to him. Consequently, a myth is a story of what happened—what the gods (...) and supernatural beings did—at the beginning of time. “To recount” a myth is to proclaim what occurred then. Once “told,” in other words, once revealed, the myth becomes the apodictic truth: it establishes truth. “It is so because it is said to be so,” the Netsilik Eskimos declared in order to justify the validity of their sacred history and their religious traditions. The myth proclaims the advent of a new cosmic situation or narrates a primordial event, and so it is always the story of a “creation”; it tells how something has been effectuated, has begun to be. That is why the myth is interdependent with ontology; it deals solely with realities, with what really happened, with what was clearly manifest. (shrink)

" "Each of these essays contains insights which will be fruitful and challenging for professional students of religion, but at the same time they all retain the kind of cultural relevance and clarity of style which makes them accessible to ...

Research on the forced migration of Lithuanians to the east of the former Soviet Union in the 1940s and early 1950s throws up a wide range of issues. Methodologically, most of such studies are similar in terms of the sample chosen, which consists of the former prisoners of gulags and exiles who have returned to Lithuania, but it usually disregards those who stayed. Accordingly, the Lithuanian diasporas that emerged in the east after the forced migration, including in Kazakhstan, have not (...) been studied in detail. In this article, our aim is to answer the questions of how and in what private and public contexts processes of the ethnic identification of the Lithuanian diaspora in Kazakhstan are determined, how ethnic boundaries are drawn, and what cultural and social resources are used for this purpose. As the research revealed, the conceptualisation of ethnicity implied by the Kazakhstan state that has been adopted by our informants eliminates its cultural content, or at most reduces it to forms evident in festive culture, as well as the need and possibilities for its expression. As a result, ethnic identity is constructed on the basis of what is almost the sole criterion: Lithuanian descent in the form of ‘root’ or ‘blood’. For most of our informants, ‘roots’ are just a fact of origin, as shown in the practice of entering Lithuanian ethnicity in personal documents, an officially required practice which does not have and does not presuppose any enactment of ethno-cultural differences. Ethnicity, which is seen as ‘in-rooted’ but also as culture-less and as muted by a doubling of roots among ethnically mixed families of origin, enables a whole spectrum of manipulations of ethnic identity. One such manipulation is attempting to profit from the Lithuanian ethnic identity by turning it into a resource for acquiring benefits. The practice of profiteering from the Lithuanian ethnic identity, and thus its transformation into a resource for gaining benefits in the forms of Lithuanian citizenship and a hope of being repatriated to Lithuania, is probably the most frequent factor in becoming Lithuanian by remembering Lithuanian roots and activating the Lithuanian ethnic identity. (shrink)

This French translation of the original English play, The Endless Column by Mircea Eliade, summarizes the philosophy of artist and philosopher, Constantin Brancusi. Probes the meaning of Brancusi's work and his silence after his well-known India visit. According to the play, the fact that Brancusi did not accomplish his Meditation Monument was due to the difficulty in putting the light of human contemplation into sculpture.

"No one has done so much as Mr. Eliade to inform literature students in the West about 'primitive' and Oriental religions.... Everyone who cares about the human adventure will find new information and new angles of vision."—Martin E. Marty, New York Times Book Review.