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A close study of four French-language poets and the poetry of exile.

Poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past, and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But, how does the exiled, migrant, or translingual poet complicate this narrative? For Armen Lubin, Ghérasim Luca, Edmond Jabès, and Michelle Grangaud, the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease. Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere—from Algeria, Armenia, Egypt, and Romania—this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness, or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held assumptions about the relation between subjects, the language they use, and the place from which they speak.
 

The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition.

Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.