Exile of Freedom: The Nation-State and Exile in Linda Lê's Slander

Abstract

Focusing on the idea of the homeland as a central aspect of exile and using Linda Lê's novel Slander as an entry point, this essay argues that exile often functions as a continuation of the original place, which remains under the control of a nation-state that is necessarily exclusive and constraining. By highlighting these constraints, this essay reimagines exile as a marginal position that could work to destabilize the false homogeneity of the nation-state and a space for the practice of radical freedom.

The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

“…Thang Dao states that diaspora is not the static condition of achieving freedom but a radical site that fosters a reimagining of freedom itself. 64 Acknowledging war diasporas as grounded in the refugee's perpetual move toward potential freedom rather than the outright possession of freedom, one can recognize how the refugee's potential for freedom comes to form the perceptual signifier in what Kaja Silverman calls the "dispiriting apprehension of the otherness of one's self, and the ecstatic discovery, at the site of the other, of one's utmost 'ownness. '" 65 Reeducation as an oblique method of reading postwar refugee experience and writing aims to make sense of the strained circumstances in which people try to "do the right thing" under the wrong conditions.…”