When U.S. war resisters turned to Canada as refuge during the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan/Iraq Wars, they not only hoped to forestall deployment to a combat zone but also to build new lives and make a new home abroad. In her empirical study, Sarah J. Grunendahl explores and juxtaposes how well the two war resister 'generations' have been able to establish themselves after all and to what extent they partake in Canadian society. The comparison is instructive for migration and refugee studies altogether: The war resisters in the sample, unlike many other migrant populations, did not have to contend with language and cultural barriers in their destination country, given similarities between the United States and Canada. Sarah J. Grunendahl's research thus allows for an analysis of the effects of residency on migrants' adaptation and participation in the receiving society, isolated from these two common barriers. Further, the study sheds light on how refugees and non-citizens can employ civic engagement to claim a place for themselves and overcome societal exclusion.

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities. The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the "exile" as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.