Chosen self-exile and vagrancy, unlike principled exile, enable celebratory uprootedness

Evidence

Exile, in the true sense, is of many kinds besides the purely colonial, and in any case it rarely produces an enduring sense of great pleasure. Exile usually has, as Williams points out, a principle, and the principle prevents one from ‘floating upwards’ and denying the pain. Self-exile and ‘vagrancy’, by contrast, have become more common amongst artists in every successive phase of bourgeois culture since the early days of Romanticism, and as the experience itself has been chosen with greater frequency, the sense of celebration and of ‘the migrant intellect root[ing] itself in itself’ has grown proportionately. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 627

Categorization

• XREF: The chosen-vs-imposed distinction maps onto the ironic-vs-genuine essentialism bind being researched. — connects to: Errantry, unlike exile, reinforces rather than erodes identity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 158; Self-exile imposes accountability to the present readership where exile does not — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 512; Exile describes an attitude toward power, not physical displacement — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 209 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Exile describes an attitude toward power, not physical displacement #expands (0.82) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 209
• Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration #qualifies (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 136
• Uprootedness can precede and enable becoming superfluous #qualifies (0.75)
• Self-exiles answer to their local readership unlike forced exiles #expands (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 222