Historically used to describe both voluntary departure and enforced banishment from a city, today, "Exile" is perhaps most famously associated with both the Jewish and the Palestinian condition. But exile is also a state of being, one that is creative, critical, and full of meaning-making. This class posits “Exile” as a conceptual framework through which to think through the 21st-century condition of migration and diaspora. Through foundational texts and historic case studies, particularly drawn from East Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, we will consider how exile has been deployed in order to bring together diverse situations under a unifying theory of both individual and collective experience.