The word `displacement' has a sad connotation. It implies dislocation, disturbance and profound uncertainties. Displacement of people, in the global context, could take varied forms: migration of people on their own volition in quest of better living conditions (development-induced displacement), and involuntary movement of people due to factors that are beyond their control, such as ethnic cleansing, human trafficking and sex trade (forced displacement). Though the migration of people began much before Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt to the land which God "swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob," migration got an imperial impetus when colonization became a rage among the erstwhile colonial powers such as Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal. Colonization, in turn, meant large-scale migration of people from these lands to a new land.

America, appropriately called the New World, was one such land that attracted the immediate attention and the consequent migration of European people. Since then, not only America, but a host of other nations have attracted human migration often because they are abundant in riches and/or opportunities, and also because they offer protection to victims of religious and political persecutions. And then, there is the case of communities that have been isolated or forced to flee their homes within the country due to social discrimination and intolerance (internal displacement).

Such displacements invariably create a sense of rootlessness and the associated identity conflicts among the migrant as well as internally displaced populations of different hues. While the first generation migrants often try to fill their existential vacuum by tracing their roots to their ancestral homeland and its mythical grandeur, the second and subsequent generations seek to find their existential meaning in assimilation with the `new homeland' where they were born and brought up. Displacement has also time and again triggered the creative and literary impulses of a few enterprising expatriates, who—though they have "come unstuck from more than land" and "floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time," as Salman Rushdie avers in Shame—do try to "reflect that world [their homelands]," in spite of being obliged "to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost" (Imaginary Homelands). However, whether such `efforts' by the displaced to deal with their dislodgment from their roots help them get over their existential angst remains a moot question. Displacement and its fragmentary effects on the displaced, then, are the predominant theme of quite a few papers in this issue.

In the first article, "Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March: A Variation on the Picaresque," Ramesh K Misra, the author, takes a close look at the Picaresque elements in Bellow's novel and examines how the protagonist, Augie, a Jewish American, attempts to come to terms with his alienation and reconcile the two extremes of Jewish experience in the contemporary American society whose values baffle him.

In the second article, "Rediscovering Lost Horizons: A Reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz," the authors, Binod Mishra and Pashupati Jha, highlight how Toni Morrison chronicles the African-American experience in a country which her African American characters consider as their own, but where they find themselves treated as outsiders, and how the resultant anguish and their own personal problems set them on a course of rediscovery of their true selves.

In the third article, "Fourth World Literature: Representation and Contestation in Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child and Narendra Jadhav's Outcaste," the author, Raja Sekhar Patteti, draws the readers' attention to the themes of two novels that are representative of the Native American society and the Indian Dalit community and discusses how the central characters of the novels, by exploring and ruminating over their past, seek to discover new identities for themselves and inspiration for the present and the future.

In the fourth article, "Ethnicity and Identity: An Approach to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake," Smita Jha discusses Jhumpa Lahiri's rendering of the issues of ethnicity and identity in her novel The Namesake. The author explains how the question of identity assumes unalike significance for first and second generations of Indian Americans. While the former seek to find solace in their cultural roots, the latter seek to assimilate by absorbing the local culture and lifestyle.

In the fifth article, "Memory, Heroism and Identity: Jane Yolen's Holocaust Fiction for Children," Anna Kurian examines how memories serve to define the identity and heroism of Holocaust victims in two of Jane Yolen's novels. Although remembering something that was as horrendous and enormous as the Holocaust was not an easy option, yet the memories of the survivors act as a powerful tool in reshaping their identities as victims, as heroes and as Jewish Americans, opines the author.

In the sixth article, "Edward Albee's The Sandbox: A Study of the Dysfunctional Family," the author, B Uma Neela critically analyzes Edward Albee's one-act play The Sandbox, which anticipates the much-discussed and much-maligned dysfunctional family that is distinctly American, and compares it with another Albee's play, The American Dream, which also focuses on the disintegration of families in the American context.

In the seventh article, "A Reader sans Reading of Poe's `The Cask of Amontillado,'" the author, D Venkataramanan shows how Poe uses such literary elements as irony, foreshadowing, grotesque humor and symbolism in the story to spellbind the readers and get them into the skin of each character, thus creating an intense experience of reading, where there is no reader but only Poe's story and the characters.

The issue also carries a review of the book, Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics by Elizabeth Grace Winker. The author of the review, Dasarathi Behera, provides a comprehensive appraisal of the book and highlights the salient features of the book, which include the major structural areas of linguistics such as language acquisition, phonetics, and semantics.

R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor