Exile means state coercion and fear, not professional convenience

Evidence

I do not mean people who live in the metropolitan countries for professional reasons but use words like ‘exile’ or ‘diaspora’ - words which have centuries of pain and dispossession inscribed in them - to designate what is, after all, only personal convenience. I mean, rather, people who are prevented, against their own commitment and desire, from living in the country of their birth by the authority of state - any state - or by fear of personal annihilation. In other words, I mean not privilege but impossibility, not profession but pain. Naked state terror in India has been directed so rarely at the dominant sectors of the literary intelligentsia that it may be difficult for those who have never lived in other zones of underdeveloped capitalism even to imagine the depth, the scope, the persistence of this kind of terror in large parts of the globe. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 134

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens exile/diaspora from lifestyle metaphor back to state-backed coercion
• XREF: Connects to Said’s reflections on exile and to the commodification-of-exile critique in later postcolonial theory — connects to: Exile names state-imposed impossibility, not voluntary professional relocation.

Related

• Exile names state-imposed impossibility, not voluntary professional relocation. (similarity 0.93)
• Exile and diaspora describe displacement, not wealthy migrants anywhere abroad (similarity 0.79)
• Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration (similarity 0.78)
• Actual political exile has been inflated to describe every immigrant’s condition (similarity 0.78)
• Exile describes an attitude toward power, not physical displacement (similarity 0.78)