"I feel I am the wandering Jew who has no place to which she belongs. I thought I could settle down, but can't imagine staying. Whenever I bought a bar of soap and two came in the package, I thought there would be no need to buy a package of two because I would never last through the second. Why? Because I knew I was returning to Iran -- tomorrow. So too, I would buy the smallest size of toothpastes and jars of oil. Putting down roots here is an impossibility." These are the words of one Iranian emigre, driven from Tehran by the revolution of 1979. They are echoed time and again in this powerful portrayal of loss and survival. Impelled by these word and her own concerns about nationality and identity, Zohreh Sullivan has gathered together here the voices of sixty exiles and emigres. The speakers come from various ethnic and religious backgrounds and range in age from thirteen to eighty-eight. Although most are from the middle class, they work in a variety of occupations in the United States. But whatever their differences, here they engage in remembering the past, producing a discourse about their lives, and negotiating the troubled transitions from one culture to another. Unlike man other Iranian oral history projects, Exiled Memories looks at the reconstruction of memory and identity through diasporic narratives, through a focus on the Americas rather than on Iran. The narratives included here reveal the complex ways in which events and places transform identities, how overnight radical s become conservatives, friends become enemies, the strong become weak. Indeed, the narratives themselves serve this function -- serving to transfer or transform power and establish credibility. They reveal a diverse group of people in the process of knitting the story of themselves with the story of the collective after it has been torn apart.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 initiated a significant exodus, with more than 700,000 Cubans eventually settling in the United States. This community creates a major part of what is now known as the Cuban diaspora. In Cuban-American Literature of Exile, Isabel Alvarez Borland forces the dialogue between literature and history into the open by focusing on narratives that tell the story of the 1959 exodus and its aftermath. Alvarez Borland pulls together a diverse array of Cuban-American voices writing in both English and Spanish--often from contrasting perspectives and approaches--over several generations and waves of immigration. Writers discussed include Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernandez, Achy Obejas, and Cristina Garcia. The author's analysis of their works uncovers a movement from narratives that reflect the personal loss caused by the historical fact of exile, to autobiographical writings that reflect the need to search for a new identity in a new language, to fictions that dramatize the authors' constructed Cuban-American personae. If read collectively, she argues, these sometimes dissimilar texts appear to be in dialogue with one another as they all document a people's quest to reinvent themselves outside their nation of origin. Cuban-American Literature of Exile encourages readers to consider the evolution of Cuban literature in the United States over the last forty years. Alvarez Borland defines a new American literature of Cuban heritage and documents the changing identity of an exiled literature.

A Cuban poet and exile's recollections of his first twelve years (1948-1960) growing up in prerevolutionary Cuba.

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.

Author Johannes Müller shows how early modern Netherlandish migrants and their descendants commemorated war and persecution and cultivated new religious and political identities in the Dutch Republic, England and Germany.

A Cuban poet and exile's recollections of his first twelve years (1948-1960) growing up in prerevolutionary Cuba.

Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide poetics that attends to the centrality of Caribbean music in retrieving and replaying personal and cultural memories, Hamilton offers a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization.