Abstract

Exile is the dominant theme of our times. It can be found in the forced migration of populations but also in the temporal, cultural and physical alienation of the individual's experiences of the postmodern world. This is a world of unstable, shifting identities dominated, and perhaps most acutely expressed by, the fluidity of the visual image. The essays in this volume examine issues such as remembering and forgetting trauma and nostalgia, time and space, social and sexual exclusion in relation to visual media and new technologies, cinema and the visual arts. The multi-facetted and interdisciplinary exploration of exile and displacement — whether geographical, temporal, corporeal or performative — provides an important analysis of a significant and fascinating aspect of contemporary culture.

Wendy Everett is Reader in French and Film. She is a graduate of the University of Wales, and carried out postgraduate research in London, and Paris, where she also lectured and worked as a freelance translator. Her principal research interests are in European cinema, and recent publications in this field include Revisiting Space (Peter Lang, 2005), European Identity in Cinema (Intellect, 2005), Terence Davies (Manchester University Press, 2004) and The Seeing Century: Film, Vision, and Identity (Rodopi, 2000), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She regularly lectures and gives papers in Europe and the US.

Peter Wagstaff is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bath. His research interests are chiefly in autobiography, from the eighteenth century to the present, and questions of identity in a cross-national context. His other publications include Border Crossings: Mapping Identities in Modern Europe (Peter Lang, 2004) and Regionalism New Europe (Intellect, 1999).