Hannah's Conclusion
There are issues of differing narratives, however. While the Paris expatriates put out a massive amount of work while in Paris and Ahmed has been extremely productive at both Cambridge and Harvard, Hend was not successful in her own artistic endeavors, despite continually referencing them throughout the novel. She also never forms any deep connections between the artists around her like the rest of the authors mentioned do. However, these deviances are what make Hend so important to this project. Despite her lack of success or coalition, Hend still fits into this group because she does fall under the definition of artistic expatriate and she had all the tools to be successful and sociable. The fact that she didn't doesn't exclude her from this group, rather it paints her as another path that may have been taken by any of the other authors. Hend worries about forgetting herself (and of being forgotten) and the lack of other narratives like hers from the 1920s suggest that there could have been others who left for Paris but never did anything, like Hend, and therefore were forgotten in history, as she fear she will be. Another dissimilarity is the fact that Ahmed also fits under the definition of a political expatriate as well whereas the others don't. Despite this, I included her in this project and stand by that decision because she created so much art as an expatriate that to count her only as a political expatriate and examine her story from a purely political point of view would be to lose the vast majority of what makes the book and her accomplishments amazing. Another notable difference I noticed after class discussion on the subject of heritage during travel was that the Paris expatriates traveled to other places and didn't look back at their home. The vast majority of the work to come out of Paris at the time centered in Paris and what kind of Romantic, romantic, and adventurous things characters (as the authors) could do in a new city, whereas the modern expatriates went somewhere new but continued to write about home and memory. This sense of heritage that was ignored and then focused so intently on can have many meanings and interpretations including the privilege of the Paris expatriates that their history will be recorded anyway to a growth in Ahmed's case to the terror and fear in Hend's case. It's a very interesting observation and I don't have a concrete response to it other than to note that this shift exists.
Despite these differences, however, the conclusion that can be decided upon is that artistic expatriates have a history of moving and banding together as they produce art in areas that have a more liberal publishing scene and more and opportunistic market. Despite the obvious changes that are going to come from time and changing society, this narrative has remained the same in spirit. The most notable change is also a very difficult one to wrestle with and that's a question of if there even is such thing as a specifically artistic expatriate anymore, without a political drive as well. I believe that those who come form a place of privilege and go out specifically to be Romantic can be a strictly artistic expatriate but the examples I've provided of modern expatriates do have some sense of political drive as well and working with narrative such as theirs will continue to be an issue this topic grapples with.
(Also, Prof. Logan, I added in an expanded definition of expatriate after Alex's questions during the class, more further explained differences and a discussion as to "why these authors" as per your suggestions, and included a brief examination of the topic you brought up at the end of the class that dealt with heritage through travel)
