This chapter explores how Rwandan President Paul Kagame has used transnational repression (TR) to maintain regime security by targeting perceived domestic enemies abroad. Kagame’s government uses surveillance, spyware, harassment, intimidation, assassination, and even military intervention to silence critics in the diaspora, especially political opponents, Hutus, former regime officials, and ex-military members. TR is facilitated through official institutions like the Diaspora General Directorate and embassies, as well as through partnerships with host countries, especially authoritarian ones. While Kagame’s regime is praised internationally for successful economic growth and peacekeeping efforts, this masks its authoritarian control, domestic suppression of dissent, and ongoing militarism in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The West’s failure to hold Rwanda accountable stems from guilt over the 1994 genocide and Rwanda’s strategic value in African peacekeeping and resource access. As Kagame reframes authoritarian measures as necessary for national unity and security, his global diplomatic expansion enables continued repression. Rwanda’s TR undermines global human rights norms and Kagame’s authoritarianism, enabled by Western interests, threatens both domestic freedoms and regional stability.

Chapter 9 examines how the Odyssey has been continuously reimagined across nearly three millennia, from Dante to contemporary film and literature. It explores how each generation has found in Odysseus’ journey a framework for understanding war trauma, exile, diaspora, and displacement, demonstrating that the epic endures not as a fixed text but as a living narrative that speaks to experiences of loss, return, and the ongoing struggle to rebuild meaning after catastrophe.

Building on the common conceptions and clarifying definitions provided in Chapter Two, this chapter surveys conceptions of divine absence common across the ancient Mediterranean basin. The chapter groups the data around six themes: (1) divine conflict; (2) imperial conquest; (3) theodicy; (4) exile; (5) a desire for intimacy with the divine; (6) identity formation. For each of the first five themes, the chapter considers examples from both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts. For the final theme, the chapter provides an extended consideration of Ezekiel, which, it is contended, provides particularly fruitful ground for comparison to John’s Gospel. The chapter concludes by mapping points of commonality and difference in perspectives on divine absence to suggest an outline of the symbolic world which John inhabits and through which his narrative of Jesus’s presence and absence could be understood.

Because sainthood requires a renunciation of worldly attachment, it eliminates the need to stabilize relational identity. The saint identifies him or herself in relationship to God, who has no physical form, requires no social context or explanation, and does not change over time. Instability is an essential requirement of relational reiteration; without shifting landmarks and potential mistakes, there is no need to deploy the form. Mary of Egypt is an exception who proves the rule in this respect. When mistaken by Zosimus for a devil, she reiterates the landmarks of her identity to prove her sainthood: not because she needs them but because he does. Similarly, The Seafarer positions the chronological past as integral to the speaker’s rejection of worldly pleasures, and that rejection as equally integral to his ability to arrive at the “hotter” joys of his destination; thus loss itself becomes a crucial social landmark of the speaker’s identity. Rather than trapping the speaker in a state of stasis, it is through the loss of worldly landmarks that the speaker may find his way to a heavenly realm.

The Old English exile elegies attempt to recuperate loss by reiterating an inverted set of social and physical landmarks, mapping the past onto the present. The familiar imagery of the hall, the lord, and the voices of other human beings – the relationships that constitute community – are not absent in exile: instead, in the absence of the “real thing,” each exile must reconstruct and reiterate a set of replacement landmarks to understand their current situation. Similarly, The Ruin navigates the loss of living memory by imagining the past context necessary to fit its subject back into the fabric of a living world. The frequent depiction of the exile elegies as nostalgic, repetitive, or static is not an incidental formal element, but a core response to the loss of relational landmarks. In exile, alienation from the past—the spoliation of memory as well as the loss of community—suspends the relational self in time. Yet the Old English exiles continue to navigate inverted relational landmarks of identity. The solution is not to abandon relational reiteration; it is instead to seek a new point of departure when familiar points of reference are lost.

What is the evolving role of exile in modern Arabic literature? Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading and the shifting figure of the exilic intellectual, the chapter traces the transformation of exile from a symbol of intellectual estrangement and creative agency to a dynamic site of engagement with displacement, fragmentation, and identity, and points to the ways in which exile literature intersects with, yet remains distinct from, refugee and forced migration narratives. Focusing on Palestinian literature, particularly Rabai al-Madhoun’s Masaʾir, it analyzes how exile and return are reimagined in the post-Oslo era through fragmented narrative structures and intergenerational perspectives. The chapter argues that exile literature continues to offer critical insight into the lived experience of displacement, while also challenging rigid legal and national categories. Through its aesthetic innovations and political resonances, exile literature remains a vital mode of witnessing, resistance, and reimagining belonging in the contemporary Arab world.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

This chapter sets out to ask difficult questions and to explore how the context of writing, for example exile in the USA, overdetermines how a writer like Ngugi engages his craft. Has Ngugi’s audience shifted during his stay in the USA and what kind of publics is he seeking to hail in his fiction, essays and memoirs? Who reads him? Ngugi’s forced exiled in Europe and the USA has complicated Ngugi’s writing and especially his return to English. Deprived of direct contact with his target audience and working outside the institutions of learning in Africa, Ngugi has been forced to repurpose his works for a new audience.

The ‘revolution’ that transformed the Department of English at the University of Nairobi was sparked by a short paper by three African staff members, among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o. They argued for its replacement by a Department of Literature centring works by Africans in the first year and proceeding in the next two years through concentric circles of world literature; ‘African literature’, crucially, was construed to include oral tradition. When Ngugi published this document – which was already locally famous – it took on global cultural significance. Makerere was also reconsidering its colonial-era literature syllabus, and the new University of Dar es Salaam was developing a syllabus aligned with the country’s socialist values. All three countries were nation-building in a highly politicised environment that problematised the free expression of ideas advocated by the literature revolutionaries. At Nairobi, a path towards the revolution had been opened by the expatriate department head, and the revolution itself was shepherded by his expatriate successor. Although success seemed inevitable when Ngugi became department chair in 1973, President Jomo Kenyatta and his allies felt threatened by the spread of ideas, and the government’s suppression ultimately drove him into lifelong exile. His call for ‘decolonising’ the African mind still rings out, not yet achieved.

My sense of intimacy with the legend that was Ngugi came from the strong emotional response I had on first reading his A Grain of Wheat while studying English at the University of Ghana. Reading it gave me a sense of the immense emotional power of his writing. This piece uses A Grain of Wheat as a starting point to think through Ngugi’s work in general, tracing the ways in which it took an increasingly satirical turn from the late 1970s after his exile from his native Kenya. This overview of his work is both celebratory and critical, and I try to speculate on why he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in his lifetime.

This chapter is interested in understanding the appropriation of literary templates which African writers like Ngugi draw on; their relevance and limits as they travel into new contexts. How does Ngugi, in the instance of Devil on the Cross, complicate his borrowing and what cultural formats does he draw on to mediate and revise received templates? What do these forms of borrowing tell us about the world of the writer? Ngugi has increasingly turned to allegory in his narration of the postcolonial situation in Kenya. The chapter argues that it is not difficult to see why Ngugi resorts to allegory in his postcolonial narratives in Kenya because, as a writer of praxis, whose freedom of expression has constantly been suppressed by successive postcolonial regimes, Ngugi is always dogged by conditions of fragmentation. He was detained for his writing by the authorities and he wrote his most compelling example of allegorical narrative, Devil on the Cross, in prison. As Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedford gaol, Ngugi wrote Devil in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in Kenya. Both Ngugi and Bunyan fought for the underdog and were scathing of the rich, and they both evoke the image of Lazarus.

In this chapter, I assess whether leaders in good standing receive more support from RIO co-members even as they flee into exile. I first present descriptive information on the role of RIOs in leaders’ exile paths. The descriptive analysis shows that post-1999, African RIOs have been involved in almost all negotiations around member state leaders entering exile, often protecting leaders from imprisonment. I then present two analytic narrative case studies.

This chapter explores Ngugi wa Thiong’ o’s literary responses to detention and exile, focusing on the Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wrestling with the Devil (2018). Ngugi articulates his experiences of dislocation and ideological resistance, denouncing oppression and oppressors in explicit ways. The chapter argues that Ngugi’s adoption of allegorical aesthetics and memoir forms is a direct response to the dislocating effects of detention and exile. Physical confinement and psychological anguish often lead writers to adopt pre-set aesthetics and rigid literary forms. Despite the formulaic nature of allegory and the memoir, Ngugi subverts them to articulate a specific ideological vision for a transformed Kenyan society. The memoir and the allegorical novel testify to intellectual resistance against his detractors, and his determination to create despite adversity. Devil on the Cross, conceived and written in prison, exemplifies the allegorical turn, inhabiting and defying his unjust incarceration. Ngugi’s experiences in detention and exile predict the writing he would produce during this period, blurring the lines between physical and psychological confinement. By exploring the intersection of politics, literature and personal experience, this chapter sheds light on Ngugi’s unique literary trajectory and the ways in which adversity can shape artistic expression.

The tribute attempts to locate Ngugi as a major player within the African literary revolution. It draws attention to how writers like Ngugi used literary imagination to challenge colonial systems of thought, while offering decolonial alternatives and a powerful sense of newness, including the need to privilege writing in African languages. In a sense Ngugi was at the forefront of challenging the mythology of Englishness. For him, literature offered a platform for the critique of dominant ideologies. The tribute argues that Ngugi’s late career was, however, defined by exile and with it the challenge of writing about Africa away from Africa. In his last days, his writing wrestles with the idea of home – its politics and poetics.

This essay offers an overview both of Alejo Carpentier’s writings and González Echevarría’s own work as a literary critic, especially as it pertains to his monograph, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977). He traces the arc of Carpentier’s works, beginning with ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and ending with El arpa y la sombra pointing to recurrent, highly original themes such as Afro-Cuban culture, classical music and jazz, colonial history, and exile, all the while noting Carpentier’s dialogue with a younger generation of Latin American writers. González Echevarría comments on the influence exerted by the concept of “the marvelous real” on Boom writers and magical realism. The essay ends by reflecting on Carpentier’s lies about his biography and points to similarities in his last novel, El arpa y la sombra (1978), between the character Christopher Columbus’s penchant to lie and his foreignness, and Carpentier himself.