Whether one thinks of the modern world or of more remote times, both seem to have been affected – if not moulded – by the interaction between the concepts of authority and displacement. Indeed, political and social sources of authority have often been the causes of major geographical displacements, as can be illustrated by the numerous waves of migration which have been observed in the past and which are still present today, such as the transportation of slaves from African to American coasts in colonial times.

If displacement can often be understood as spatial displacement, it can also be synonymous with psychological, social, and even aesthetic displacement, for instance through different artistic means or through the use of stylistic discursive devices. Displacement also entails dis-placement, dis-location, as well as dislocation, or chaos. This suggests that the etymological meaning of the term authority, auctoritas, has to be highlighted, thus referring to the author of a particular work and to the different manifestations of the authorial persona in a work of art.

This collection of essays in two volumes examines the relationships between the concepts of authority and displacement in the English-speaking world, without restricting the analysis to a particular area, or to the field of literature. Some essays do, indeed, deal with literature, from different spatial areas and temporal eras, while others look into these concepts from a more cultural or aesthetic point of view.

Volume Two, Exploring American Shores, includes essays on the place of famous fugitives in American culture (notably through the story of Bonnie and Clyde) as well as on the links between displacement, authority and sculpture on the one hand (Placing and Replacing the Capitol Sculptures), and on the links between displacement and photography on the other, through a study of Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line. In addition to investigations of Louise Erdrich’s novel Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Canadian “landscapes in transit” will be studied to highlight the displacement of the Western landscape tradition in English Canada. The volume concludes with a study of some literary works by several writers of Guyanese origin – first with an essay comparing Martin Carter’s and Léon-Gontran Damas’s literary productions, and then with an essay devoted to Fred D’Aguiar’s novel, The Longest Memory (1994).