The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe


Book Description

Increasingly, the European Union and its member states have exhibited a lack of commitment to protecting the human rights of non-citizens. Thinking beyond the oppressive bordering taking place in Europe requires new forms of scholarship. This book provides such examples, offering the analytical lenses of memory and temporality. It also identifies ways of collaborating with people who experience the violence of borders. Established scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, migration and border studies, arts, and cultural studies offer important contributions to the so-called “European refugee crisis”.




Museums and Migration


Book Description

Recent decades have seen migration history and issues increasingly featured in museums. Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration. It presents the latest innovative research from academics and museum practitioners and offers a comparative perspective on a global scale bringing to light geo- and socio-political specificities. It includes an extensive range of international contributions from Europe, Asia, South America as well as settler societies such as Canada and Australia. Museums and Migration charts and enlarges the developing body of research which concentrates on the analysis of the representation of migration in relation to the changing character of museums within society, examining their civic role and their function as key public arenas within civil society. It also aims to inform debates focusing on the way museums interact with processes of political and societal changes, and examining their agency and relationship to identity construction, community involvement, policy positions and discourses, but also ethics and moralities.




Political Memories and Migration


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between political memories of migration and the politics of migration, following over two hundred years of commemorating Australia Day. References to Europeans’ original migration to the continent have been engaged in social and political conflicts to define who should belong to Australian society, who should gain access, and based on what criteria. These political memories were instrumental in negotiating inherent conflicts in the formation of the Australian Commonwealth from settler colonies to an immigrant society. By the second half of the twentieth century, the Commonwealth employed Australia Day commemorations specifically to incorporate new arrivals, promoting at first citizenship and, later on, multiculturalism. The commemoration has been contested throughout its history based on two distinct forms of political memories providing conflicting modes of civic and communal belonging to Australian politics and policies of migration. Introducing the concept of Political Memories, this book offers a novel understanding of the social and political role of memories, not only in regard to migration.




Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration


Book Description

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.




Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement


Book Description

This book explores the border-transcending dimensions of public remembering by focussing on the triangular relationship between memory, monuments and migration. Framed by an introduction and conclusion, nine case studies located in diverse social and geo-political settings feature topical debates and contestation around monuments, statues and memorials erected by migrants or in memory of migrants, refugees and diasporas in host country societies. Written from different disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, art history, cultural studies and political science, the chapters consider displaced people as new, originally unintended audiences who bring transnational and transcultural perspectives to old monuments in host cities. In addition, migrants and diasporic communities are explored as ‘agents of memory’, who produce collective memory in tense environments of intra- and inter-group negotiation or outright hostility at the national and transnational level. The research is conceptually anchored in memory studies, notably transnational memory, multidirectional memory and other concepts emerging from memory studies’ recent ‘transcultural turn’.




Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War


Book Description

A major new study which evaluates the enduring impact of war on family memory in the Greek diaspora.




Memory and Migration


Book Description

Memory plays an integral part in how individuals and societies construct their identity. While memory is usually considered in the context of a stable, unchanging environment, this collection of essays explores the effects of immigration, forced expulsions, exile, banishment, and war on individual and collective memory. The ways in which memory affects cultural representation and historical understanding across generations is examined through case studies and theoretical approaches that underscore its mutability. Memory and Migration is a truly interdisciplinary book featuring the work of leading scholars from a variety of fields across the globe. The essays are collaborative, successfully responding to the central theme and expanding upon the findings of individual authors. A groundbreaking contribution to an emerging field of study, Memory and Migration provides valuable insight into the connections between memory, place, and displacement.




Memory, Migration and (de)colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond


Book Description

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic. Memory, migration and (de)colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of decolonisation. The chapters in this book range across disciplines and time periods to present a vibrant understanding of the ever-changing interactions between Caribbean peoples and colonialism as they migrated within and between colonial contexts. At the heart of this book are the voices of Caribbean migrants themselves, whose critical reflections on their experiences of migration and decolonisation are interwoven with the essays of academics and activists.




Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany


Book Description

This historical study “persuasively links the reception of Yugoslav migrants to West Germany’s shifting relationship to the Nazi past . . . essential reading” (Tara Zahra, author of The Great Departure). During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however. Immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers since the end of the Second World War. In fact, Yugoslavs became the country’s second largest immigrant group. Yet their impact has received little critical attention until now. Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated to Germany as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Christopher Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. Molnar shows how immigration was a central aspect of how Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war.




Remembering Italian America


Book Description

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity examines the life of Italians in the United States and the role of migration and collective memory in the history of the construction of Italian American identity. Employing the concept of communicative memory, the authors explain the processes that gave shape to Italian identity in America and the ways in which a symbolic identity became concretized in Italian American oral histories. The text explores the Italy migrants left behind, transatlantic networks, the welcome received by the Italian newcomers, the socioeconomic fabric of Italian America, and the singular worldview that grew out of the immigrant experience. In exploring the role of memory in the construction of Italian American identity, the book analyzes the commonalities in the lives of immigrants, allowing the Italian American experience to speak to the circumstances of newer immigrant communities and allowing these new immigrant communities to speak to the Italian migrant history. Looking at Italian American culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume brings various theoretical perspectives to bear on "what, why, and how" questions concerning the Italian American experience. This book will be of interest to students of ethnic studies, immigration studies, and American/transnational studies, as well as American history. Winner of the 2022 Italian American Studies Association Book Award