Memory in motion: ethnicity, hybridity and globalization in self-photographs of Moroccan immigrants in Spain

Abstract

This article aims to problematize memory and migration within a larger socio-cultural context of globalization, taking as a case-study a set of photographs of events which have taken place in an immigrant workers’ organization in Spain. I argue that migrant experiences of transnational displacement can cause cultural memory as a process to be resignified in subaltern bids for empowerment in new contexts. The photograph, as a trace of memory, then, itself a migrant and multi-referential fragment, both reflects and obscures the hybridity and complex temporality of immigrant experience, resignifying cultural memory in terms of the present.