ABSTRACT
In many instances, portrayals of exile fall into a familiar narrative. From the Frankfurt School intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to land in San Diego or Mexico, to Fernando Marcos who was ousted by the historic takeover of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, exile is usually understood as a political condition borne out of externally imposed departure, usually involving force. The hermeneutics of exile, which is simultaneously a “hermeneutics of hope”, is an interpretive choice borne not only out of force and coercion but a deliberate decision to side against certain orthodoxies, normativities, and calcification of power relations. The many forms of exile require assimilating received information about the known world in order to make it hospitable, which is not the same as centric, idealized, or inward iterations of home but rather ex-centric or outward facing towards the experiential world, leading to what Said was fond of calling “worldliness.”.
