Getting inside the migrants’ world(s): Biographical interview as a tool for (re)searching transcultural memory

Much of the recent research attempts to promote and define the notion of transcultural memory tend to focus on ‘the forms of remembering across nations and cultures’ and on the ‘negotiation of colonialism, decolonization, migration, cultural globalization and cosmopolitanism in literature and other media’. Taking these attempts as a point of departure, this article aims at discussing the narrative biographical interview as an instrument for exploring the complex dynamics and dis(utopian) content of memory on the move, which remains without publicity or representation in art and the media. The claims for ‘history from below’ and for ‘getting into the actor’s world’, emblematic for oral history and biographical studies, are applied to migrants’ biographical narratives to show how the ‘traumatic disruption of life’s continuities’ triggers reflection and social criticism from below on the collectively sanctioned modes of remembering of different cultures/cultural pasts. The article also reveals the emancipatory potential of the biographical interview for developing the culture of mobility of middle- and low-socialstatus people, which is based on shared memories of ‘surviving’ in a variety of (hostile) environments.