The word “displacement” has a sad connotation. It implies disruption, distress, and profound uncertainties. Displacement of people, in the global context, could take diverse forms: migration of people on their own volition in quest of better living conditions (development-induced displacement); involuntary movement of people due to factors that are beyond their control such as wars, ethnic cleansing, and human trafficking (conflict-induced displacement); resettlement of people as a result of natural disasters like earthquakes or man-made disasters like industrial accidents (disaster-induced displacement); and dislocation of people within the country due to social discrimination or government/economic projects (internal displacement).

Though migration of people began much before Moses led “Bnei-Yisrael” out of Egypt around 1250 BC to the land which God “swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Ex 6:6-8), migration got an imperial impetus when colonization became a rage among the erstwhile colonial powers such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal. Colonization, in turn, meant large-scale migration of people from these lands to a new land.

The colonization of Americas, which began in 1607, is a significant chapter in the history of human migration. The prime motivation behind the race among the colonial powers to occupy vast tracts of land in the New World, as the western hemisphere was referred to then, was their desire to expand their empires and thus their influence in Europe. Especially, the United States of America, with its abundant reserves of raw materials and prospects for trade and livelihood, soon came to be seen as a land of opportunities, attracting the immediate attention and the consequent migration in large numbers of not only people from Europe but also from other nations. Over the past four hundred years or so, millions of people around the world have moved, in pursuit of opportunity and happiness, to the US, making it a “nation of immigrants.” Since then, not only America, but a host of other nations also have attracted human migration often because they are abundant in riches and opportunities.

However, displacements—voluntary or involuntary—invariably create a sense of rootlessness and the associated identity conflict among the migrant populations. 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 impulses of a few resourceful expatriates, who, though they have “come unstuck from more than land” and “floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time,” as Salman Rushdie avers (Shame, London: Vintage, 1995, 87), do try to “reflect that world [their homeland],” in spite of being obliged “to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.” And it is the fragmentary nature of these memories that makes them special and evocative for the diasporic writers: “The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Penguin, 1992, 11-12; emphasis in the original).

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 are the predominant theme of the first two papers of this issue.

Urvashi Kaushal shows how migrants face a life of social alienation and mental disruption in the host country through a study of Neil Bissoondath’s short story collection On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows.

Vivek Kumar Dwivedi discusses, with reference to Tabish Khair’s The Bus Stopped and M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song, the immigrants’ constant struggle to negotiate between two conflicting cultures—the native and the adopted.

Azra Ghandeharion presents an intertextual reading of the novel A Scanner Darkly and its movie adaptation, highlighting the messages/messengers of simulacral identity/reality, pomophobia, consumption-craze, and worlds falling apart.

Sakshi Dogra reevaluates the characters Atticus Finch and Boo Radley, Aunt Alexandra and Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in the light of Slavoj Žižek’s postulations with regard to ethics and politics.

M Chandrasena Rajeswaran and S Padmasani Kannan analyze, combining pragmatics and speech act theory, the dialogues and the conditions that govern them and the pragmatic failure on the part of a few characters and the resultant tragedy in Shakespeare’s Othello.

G Vasishta Bhargavi critically examines Wole Soyinka’s The Road with particular reference to its multiple levels of theme, action, and technique and treatment of philosophical issues of life like death, self-realization, and history.

Tanima Kumari and Rajni Singh discuss how Rita Dove’s poetry collection, On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems, seeks to extol and thus recover African Americans’ role and place in the American nation’s history.

V Kavitha and S Padmasani Kannan explore the vocabulary learning process and the workings of the mental lexicon of ESL learners in India, using word association tests and a qualitative analysis of the results.

Maimouna Al-Ruqeishi and Salma Al-Humaidi assess the effectiveness of alternative assessment tools based on the survey responses of EFL teachers of grades 5-8 in the Omani Basic Education context and discuss the implications of their findings.

Vaishali Jayaprakash Shinde highlights the striking features of advertising language at the phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic levels and its pedagogical implications through an illustration of a few Indian television commercials.

R Venkatesan Iyengar
Consulting Editor