Yet these multiple displacements also evoke a sense of
rootlessness, and in Zhang Dage's recollections and writings we find the tumultuous past wrapped up in nostalgia, emplacing diasporic subjects in their memories.
In the three decades from the 1960s through the 1980s, overseas Taiwanese writers focused on the expression of their suffering from culture shock, racial discrimination, and their sense of
rootlessness. Taiwan broke off diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, but American culture continued to have a great impact on Taiwan and its modernization.
It gives us a peek into the past as we observe the present - a living example of people marked by
rootlessness but supported by the branches of hope.
The snapshots of Ilija's colorful Genoa are gradually replaced by insights into its darker places that house criminality and despairing
rootlessness. The Europeans once knew loss of homeland well but have chosen to forget about it; the people-smugglers who send their customers off to live or die, as luck would have it, have been around for generations.
The
rootlessness Susman attributes to the "Jewish spirit" was a reflection of the fact that the Jews had experienced Europe's descent into nihilism in two ways: in the loss of both their newly adopted culture as Europeans and that of their own Jewish heritage.
She doesn't think of it as
rootlessness, because moving has always involved being closer to friends or family.
I began the book as a short story, more than 20 years ago, and have often wondered what made me keep coming back, sporadically, at long intervals across the years, to its characters and its themes of
rootlessness and loss.
Her 2010 album, The Foundling, is a song cycle that deals with the pain of being abandoned as a infant, the unshakable sense of
rootlessness that led her to search for her birth mother, and her birth mothers decision to not have a relationship with her (chronicled in the disc's harrowing centerpiece, "March 11, 1962").
In a society where spiritual
rootlessness is epidemic, it may be that some will be attracted to a church with deep spiritual roots.
Rootlessness and alienation don't in themselves make a terrorist, just as deprived communities lacking in facilities are not themselves responsible for young people turning fundamentalist religion any more than they are responsible for people turning to drugs or crime.
In fact, some readers might question how Irish a novel is with only "Daniel Murphy" to stake its claim to "Irishness." That is just the point: Irish and American identities have been obliterated both by American
rootlessness and the Iraqi desert.
The problem that I'm addressing with the term 'estrangement', however, differs from this possible loss of meaning and refers to the possibility of a far more radical loss of meaning and
rootlessness. I used the term estrangement in order to challenge us to confront the possibility that we have no longer any deeply meaningful relations with the world: what would such a bleak view mean for our ethical relation to landscapes?
But there is a
rootlessness about him that suggests he will probably move on at the end of it.
Each scene conveys different conceptions and feelings: dissatisfaction, isolation,
rootlessness, tolerance, hypocrisy, alienation, nonconformity and obfuscation.
The idea of "cloud citizenship" is certainly attractive, but it is hard to ignore the nihilistic streak in Saraceno's vision, a permanent
rootlessness that could be as terrifying as it is meant to be radically new.
