The notions of borders and nations implies a form of enclosure: residence within a conventionally defined political entity, and a sense of identity tied to a place—often one of putative origin. But the current world situation vividly reveals to us that there are many individuals who do not reside within their political or geographical unit of origin, but who are displaced, whether through necessity or choice: as refugees from conflict, poverty or (increasingly) from ecological circumstances; as economic or professional migrants seeking better work opportunities and parlaying their qualifications into mobility; as exiles from political, religious or social persecution; or as nomads—people whose social units move physically and spatially and whose identity is tied up with that mobility. Such displacement, whether seen as a symptom or consequence of globalization, or glossed with some alternative rubric, problematizes the very idea of the nation, the notion of citizenship within (politically defined) borders, and, indeed, the very notion of borders itself. It raises ethical questions—the right to move and reside outside one’s place of origin and the corresponding obligation of new host societies to welcome and settle those involuntary displaced by reasons beyond their control; the role of the supposedly “international community” as represented by such entities as the United Nations Organization and other multilateral bodies to recognize and protect the displaced; and the nature of international and human rights law as it applies to the position of those without clear national identities (the “stateless”). The empirical existence of such groups and individuals (estimated to comprise between 3% and 4% of the global population) is incontestable. What is of concern here is their cultural identity, the implications of this for the conventional notion of the nation as a bounded entity, and the forms of expressivity through which exile is negotiated. All displaced or newly sited communities have art as one of the principal ways in which that negotiation takes place—not only through political forms, but equally through the imagination and its embodiment in forms of expression, whether visual, literary, musical or performative, and whether embodied in written form, more ephemeral modes of dance or drama, crafts, paintings, or as oral traditions and song. It is through these means that new forms of identity are created and expressed, through which memory is kept alive and through which new political configurations can come into being. The arts of the displaced, far from being marginal forms of art, in fact raise fundamental questions about the reality or imaginative construction of nations, borders and those who inhabit the more shadowy spaces in between the conventional boundaries of political, social and cultural life.