Urban Exile

Fresh perspectives on a relevant topic: the ways experiences of exile shape cities.

Migration has transformed urban spaces around the world as new residents form communities, neighborhoods, and art spaces, changing perceptions of these cityscapes among migrants and locals alike. Yet exile research rarely adopts an urban perspective. Urban Exile fills this gap, anthologizing research on exile, cities, and modernities with a focus on the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on examples from a wide range of urban centers in both the Global North and South, contributors from various disciplines share novel approaches and research practices for investigating how exile and urbanity intertwine. Their work illuminates the challenges and benefits surrounding the nexus of exile and urban research, discussing mapping, oral history, queerness, photography, and more.

By selecting exile as a central category for methodological and theoretical investigations of urban culture, the book rethinks the application of this term in a transnational and historical context. Intersectional and international in its approach, Urban Exile collects transformative research on a pressing contemporary issue.