ABSTRACT

On a more general level, therefore, the shift in perspective from static to mobile conditions of knowledge production allows us not only to account for the knowledges produced through the experience of displacement, but also, to understand better the structural margins of contemporary institutional academia with its gatekeeping practices, precarity of academic work and the societal role of researchers and lecturers. In the United States, academic, intellectual and aesthetic thought is what it is today because of refugees from the fascism, communism, and other regimes given to the oppression and expulsion of the dissidents. The impact of the experience of displacement on the scholarly changes has been accounted for in the literature, both in the first and the second generation of exile studies, which focused primarily on biographical accounts and the impact the emigres had in their countries of the displacement.