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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
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Memory’s role in lending meaning to migrants’ lives
More LessThis article argues that our understanding of the complexity of the links between memory and migration can be enhanced by focusing on the role of experience in lending meaning to migrants’ lives. Realizing the difficulties of providing a comprehensive sociological account of experience and recognizing the potential of works of fiction to enrich sociological imagination, this article will try to capture details of people’s experiences with the help of literature. Using a broad narrative method to analyse the selected British realist novels, this paper aims to discover their representations of the ways in which migrants rely on past experiences in sense-making practices.
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Diaspora, postmemory and the transcultural turn in contemporary Jewish writing
More LessSince ancient times, diaspora has been intrinsically connected to Judaism. Whereas modernization and emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century had promised to end the principal rootlessness of Europe’s Jewish population, the rise of Nazism once again set them back into a diasporic and extraterritorial state. According to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents’ continued dislocation. As the homeland of their ancestors has ‘ceased to exist’, they are destined to remain forever exiled from the ‘space of identity’, even if they choose to return to the former homeland of their parents. According to Hirsch, the expression of this ongoing diaspora gives rise to a special narrative genre that is governed by photographic aesthetics. The authors’ imaginative completion of their parents’ experiences in the work of postmemory imitates the capacity of photography to simultaneously make present and ‘signal absence and loss’. This article will differentiate Hirsch’s approach to artistic representations of diaspora in the aftermath of the Holocaust. By outlining different conceptualizations of diaspora, I will show that in addition to the aesthetics of photography the postmemory of homelessness can also be expressed by means of nostalgic aesthetics and transcultural aesthetics. The article exemplifies all three of these types of aesthetics by investigating works by the contemporary Jewish writers David Mendelsohn, Anna Mitgutsch and Barbara Honigmann. Whereas Hirsch’s photographic aesthetics represents the melancholic insight that a return to the place of origin is impossible, nostalgic aesthetics gives in to the very desire for a ‘final return’ (Hall 1990). Both the nostalgic and the photographic aesthetics intrinsically connect identity to a distinct location and cultural belonging, which the writers attempt to restore through the work of postmemory. Transcultural aesthetics, on the other hand, expresses the interconnection of different places and cultures that arises from living in diaspora. This article concentrates on the transcultural aesthetics exemplified in the autofictional writings of Barbara Honigmann. By voluntarily going into exile, Honigmann refrains from staying attached to a distinct space and from the attempt to assemble her fragmentary knowledge about her parents’ past with regard to an imaginary homeland.
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Getting inside the migrants’ world(s): Biographical interview as a tool for (re)searching transcultural memory
More LessMuch 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.
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The memory practices of immigrant film-makers: Minor cinemas and the production of locality
More LessThis article presents a case study of independent immigrant film-making from the 1980s and the early 1990s in Sweden. The aim is twofold: to analyse the memory practices of exilic and diasporic subjects and to stress that what Zuzana M. Pick has coined as the subjective paradoxes and privileges of exile implies an agential understanding of memory. Hence, the study of memory and migration in relation to film practice before the digital turn calls for a theory of cultural production and an approach in which film is not primarily considered a means for representation but an act in itself.
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Wedding Bellas – migrancy as a dispute to photographic traditions
By Nela MilicWedding Bellas is a digital photography and oral history project that explores a wish to belong to the European borderscape. The photographs are the stories of twelve women who found themselves at a time when they refused to leave. Many have been rejected – by partners, by landlords, by employers – and many have been refused leave to remain in the United Kingdom by the state. The women displayed resilience and resourcefulness in the face of these rejections, sometimes all happening at once, and the burden of those denials made them escape to fantasy. Some opted for equally stable, rooted and good-looking ‘Queen’s subjects’ – a lamp post, a tree, a traffic sign; London landmarks. The artwork presents the brides as physically connected to their rooted British fellows. The images show desperation and illusion as with a true wedding ceremony. The paradox of this loss of reality, due to the pressures of life circumstances, is portrayed in the photographs, questioning if the situation the women are in is imaginary – a concept shared by both the audience and the person in the picture. With the nexus of text and image, the project troubles the perception of refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom today and the role that digital technology plays in that process. It deals with the question of mediation of migrancy through the historic visual representation and mnemonic depictions in photographs that are challenged by the interventions of the migrants themselves in that process.
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See(m)ing strange: Methodologies of memory and home
More LessDrawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the stranger and Anne-Marie Fortier’s approach to remembering home, this article argues for a methodology of memory and migration that would explore individuals’ encounters between lived spatio-temporalities without affirming a migrant ontology. I look to my ethnographic research on diasporic narratives among migrants from the former Yugoslavia in the United Kingdom to ask how recounted memories of home might be bound up in, but not confined to, the experience of migration. Exploring mnemonic journeys that go beyond dichotomies of displaced origins and strange new homelands, I suggest that stories of embodied sensory experience can make visible people’s encounters with forms of difference: both in the past home, which loses its ontological fixity, and in the process of inhabiting a ‘diaspora space’, which comes with its own narratives and trajectories of being a stranger.
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My life abroad: The nostalgia of Serbian immigrants in the Nordic countries
Authors: Sabina Hadžibulić and Željka ManićIn this article we analyse the nostalgia of Serbian immigrants in the Nordic countries. The aim is to determine which features of the past are important to them, and how they influence their lives and interpretation of their current life settings. The research is based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of immigrants’ impressions of everyday life, which have been published as freestyle texts between 2007 and 2015 in the section Moj život u inostranstvu/My Life Abroad of the Serbian daily newspaper Politika Online. The material includes 36 texts referring to the lives of Serbian immigrants in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The analysis shows that the objects of nostalgia are personal experiences related to specific life circumstances, followed by periods in life, momentous events, past selves, and persons. In respect of value direction, bittersweet nostalgic memories are slightly more frequent than positive, followed by neutral memories. Nostalgia has a significant function in their lives. It narrates the values and norms that represent their life guidelines, based on which they envision and construct a better future. Additionally, this is evidence of the need for understanding from and acceptance by their new environments, which provide stimulus to survive and create in the conditions of the unstable present.
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Reviews
Authors: Veronika Zangl and Simon MerciecaThe Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, Siobhan Kattago (ed.) (2015) Burlington, VT and Farnham: Ashgate, 274 pp., ISBN: 9781409453925, h/bk, £90.00
Memories of Belonging: Descendants of Italian Migrants to The United States. 1884–Present (Studies in Global Social History, Volume 17; Studies in Global Migration History, Volume 5), Christa Wirth (2015) Leiden: BRILL, 406 pp., ISBN: 9789004284562 , h/bk, €129.00
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On digital crossings in Europe
Authors: Sandra Ponzanesi and Koen Leurs
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