Forced exiles write to an imagined home readership absent materially

Evidence

It is important to recall here that Rushdie was not, until his recent and macabre sentencing by the Ayatollah Khomeini, an exile but a self-exile. Writers-in-exile often write primarily for readerships which are materially absent from the immediate conditions of their production, present only in the country from which the writer has been forcibly exiled, hence all the more vividly and excruciatingly present in the writer’s imagination because their actuality is deeply intertwined with the existential suffering of exile and with the act of writing as such. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 222

Categorization

• SHARE: A nuance for anyone writing about exiled authors — the material absence of the home readership fundamentally shapes what forced exiles write.
• XREF: connects to: Freest intellectuals stopped writing for an imagined future audience; Self-exile imposes accountability to the present readership where exile does not — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 512

Related

• Self-exile makes a writer accountable to his new, not home, readership (similarity 0.90)
• Self-exile imposes accountability to the present readership where exile does not (similarity 0.87)
• Self-exiles answer to their local readership unlike forced exiles (similarity 0.84)
• Freest intellectuals stopped writing for an imagined future audience (similarity 0.78)