Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender and Migration edited by Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder

Abstract

Emotions have been foregrounded more in the history of migration than in many areas of historical research, as scholars explore how groups found “home” and “belonging” in new places, and how they maintained connections over distance. That the analytical lens and methodologies of the history of emotions enhances understanding of these processes has recently been recognized, not least by the editors of this volume, who are a leading voice on this topic. Emotional Landscapes looks particularly at how the emotion of love was maintained, managed, dispersed, and refashioned as people moved across nations, both permanently and with an expectation of later return. The volume’s introduction, thirteen chapters, and epilogue provide copious examples from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, raising questions not only about individual feelings and families but also about their relationship to the emerging, and ultimately hardened, borders of the nation-state. The emotional landscapes of the title take center stage in chapters that more often consider how migrants unsettle spaces of arrival, and how love is involved in finding place, than they trace the back and forth of transnational movements.The chapters cover considerable ground, exploring migration between Africa, North and South America, Australia, and Europe, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches, from the more traditional analysis of letters as forms for emotional connection to court cases, press reports, oral histories, interviews, and family histories as opportunities to access migrant feelings. The topics covered include bigamy in Argentina, female migrant workers living between Slovenia and Egypt, Berlin as a site for “fateful” love connections between strangers who flocked to the city for work, relationships interrupted by the U.S. deportation regime, and the cross-generational digital divide within Moroccan and Peruvian families in Italy. That those who live apart, often further divided by different languages and cultures, might find their love strained under such circumstances is hardly surprising, but the volume manages to show that love remains central to finding a home and binding people to the nation. A case in point is Elizabeth Zanoni’s chapter about the brotherly love that characterized the Italian–Argentinian diaspora, in which claims to familial affection ameliorated distance and difference between countries as they attempted to construct a singular identity.This volume also shows how the claim of the nation on the love of its inhabitants, such as with patriotism, acts as a challenge to the affective, cross-border connections of migrants. The power of love between individuals is frequently secondary to the priorities of national migration policies. As several chapters in this volume suggest, this pull of the nation on identity can act to undermine, even rupture, familial loves.The rich empirical case studies of this substantive volume are difficult to cover fully in a short review. They bring the sensitivity of the history of emotion to bear on love’s complexity, historicity, and changing nature, as defined and shaped through gender and place. This book will be of interest to historians of love, migration, nation-building and patriotism, and family life. It provides important historical background to questions that continue to have ongoing relevance for lovers, families, and countries.