The Mnemonic Imagination and Second-Generation Migrant Experience

Abstract

Drawing on our concept of the mnemonic imagination, this chapter shows how the past is reactivated and pieced together into a relatively coherent narrative in the interests of identity and the effective management of change. In forming the synthetic hub of remembering and imagining, the mnemonic imagination is mobilized in bringing past, present, and future into meaningful correspondence. This chapter illustrates how this happens via an ethnographic case study involving Kia Kapoor, a second-generation Indian woman in her early 30s living in England, who uses her work as a professional photographer to help her negotiate her own difficult past as someone caught between two cultures. The case demonstrates mnemonic imagining at work in a particular cross-generational and cross-cultural context, taking into account how it can be thwarted by various obstacles and how, through considerable resistance and struggle, it can help overcome the consequences of radical sociocultural disruption.