ABSTRACT
The migrant’s sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition. Or again, the Czech writer Milan Kundera, in exile from Eastern Europe in Western Europe, would point to ‘great Jewish figures’ as those who have shown an ‘exceptional feeling’ for what all of Europe now works towards and esteems: namely, a home polity ‘conceived not as territory but as culture’. ‘Diaspora’ has become a key tool in the disciplinary armoury, with studies of the ways in which members of diasporic communities imaginatively preserve and regenerate distinctive identities, and maintain a sense of distinctiveness, even though separated from their ‘home’ terrains and scattered. The cosmopolis, more exactly the world-city as focus of a regional hinterland, might offer a complex supranational domain. The Network of Refuge Cities of the International Parliament of Writers makes this hope more than merely wishful thinking.
