Experience Of Emigration Research Articles

FEMININITY AND COMMUNITY AT HOME AND AWAY: SHIPBOARD DIARIES BY SINGLE WOMEN EMIGRANTS TO NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand experienced a massive influx of European immigrants in the 1870s and early 1880s after the introduction of Julius Vogel's assisted immigration programme. Single women under the age of thirty-five were a significant target group of recruitment schemes. They were expected to contribute to the colony's labour force as domestic servants and balance New Zealand's surplus of male settlers by becoming wives and mothers. Many of these young women had never been away from home until they embarked on their hazardous journey halfway around the world. Elizabeth Fairbairn, a single woman emigrant herself, was the matron in charge of the young women travelling to New Zealand on board the Oamaru in 1877–78. She narrates in her shipboard diary that Christmas Day made many of the single women homesick: “A great many of the girls grew downhearted last night and had such a good cry, poor things I was sorry for them, for the heart does feel things at a time like this and it is the first time a good many of them have been from home” (25 Dec. 1877). Jane Finlayson was one of these homesick “girls” on the same ship a year earlier. On 22 September 1876 she writes in her diary: “After parting with our friends at Greenock and thinking that ‘Whatever be our earthly lot, Wherever we may roam, Still to our heart the brightest spot, Is round the hearth at home’ we came with the tug on board this ship.” Having left their old home, the women emigrants spent three months crammed into an uncomfortable steerage compartment, honing domestic skills such as sewing and knitting. The ship became a temporary home in which the emigrants prepared for their future life in New Zealand. Metropolitan notions of femininity which located women in the private, domestic sphere had to be questioned and modified on board. While the single women's compartment was supposed both to become a home away from home and to represent a domestic setting, the transitional and public nature of shipboard space complicated both of these projects. This ambiguity relates to an image of single women which was similarly contradictory. The single woman emigrant was a figure at the centre of discourses of femininity and community: on her centred hope but also anxiety. Like in other settler colonies, it was imagined in New Zealand that women would exert beneficial moral and religious influence upon male-dominated colonial society. Women were thus expected to act as creators of community, both ideologically through their moral influence and physically by bearing children. However, until they got married, single women also represented a threat: they were often held responsible for the increase in prostitution in New Zealand (Macdonald 180). This illustrates the danger women could embody: again, both ideologically, since prostitution was seen as contaminating the moral character of society, and physically, since deviant sexual activity was often seen as undermining the biological purity of the community. How did such notions of femininity and community travel from Britain to New Zealand? How were they constructed and redefined during the transitional period of the voyage? In order to explore these questions this essay discusses two texts that also travelled, and narrate travelling: the two shipboard diaries by Elizabeth Fairbairn and Jane Finlayson referenced above, which look at single women's experience of emigration from the slightly different perspectives of a matron and a young woman under the care of a matron. The figure of the matron is an ambiguous one within the notion of women as representing both hope and anxiety: she is not married but nevertheless in a position of relative authority compared to the other single women on board. Elizabeth Fairbairn's diary represents her efforts to create unity among the women under her charge by submitting all of them to the same ideology of femininity. However, her text also has to deal with her own complicated status within the social structure of the ship. Jane Finlayson's text aims to contain anxiety and ambiguity by framing subversive and frightening events within the generic conventions of a shipboard diary. It negotiates the position of the single women on board while simultaneously reaffirming this position.

MIGRACIJOS PATIRTIS – PRANAŠUMAS AR TRŪKUMAS LIETUVOS DARBO RINKOJE?

The paper explores how integration of return migrants into the labour market of their home country is influenced by the migration experience – does it give an advantage to returnees? Migration literature tends to focus on individual level factors such as human capital acquired abroad, to explain the success of the integration of returnees while somewhat neglecting the importance of the environment in their home country. This paper demonstrates that such structural factors as information asymmetry between a potential employer and a potential employee (in this case job-seeking returnee) as well as the perception of migration experience in the home country’s labour market should be also taken into account. The paper draws on an empirical study of the Lithuanian case. Consequently, the return migrants are defined as individuals who left Lithuania to reside permanently abroad for a period of at least one year after 1990 but were living permanently in Lithuania when the research was carried out. The main data sources of the research are three representative surveys carried out in 2013: a Lithuanian population survey (N = 1930), a survey of migrants who have returned to live in Lithuania (N = 804), and a survey of Lithuanian employers (N = 1000)52. The research revealed that almost all return migrants have acquired valuable knowledge and skills while abroad, which they expect to use in advancing their careers in Lithuania. As many as eight out of 10 migrants who have returned to live in Lithuania said that while abroad they improved some of their skills. Yet the returnees, in assessing whether the migration experience helped them in their employment in Lithuania, frequently stated that their emigration experience had no effect or even thought that it was a disadvantage and that their new knowledge and skills are undervalued in Lithuania. Correspondingly, over 60% of respondent employers indicated that migration experience would have no effect on their choice of employee, and one in ten employers stated that this would be a disadvantage. As could have been expected, there exists some heterogeneity in assessments of benefits of migration experience. For example, employers are relatively more positive about the experience gained abroad doing skilled work and less positive about doing unskilled work. Companies linked to other countries through their capital, market and business relations are also relatively more inclined to opt for returning migrants. However, it should be noted that more than half of employers do not view even skilled work abroad positively, and most of internationally oriented companies when hiring a new employee would choose one with work experience and education acquired in Lithuania rather than abroad. The paper argues that an important factor for ignoring the experience of returning migrants in the labour market is a somewhat unfavourable attitude towards return migrants and their migration experience present in the Lithuanian society and among employers. More than half of employers in Lithuania and almost half of the population of Lithuania agree with the statement that usually those who have failed abroad return to Lithuania. So, return is like a signal of failure, and employers who support this opinion are more likely to assess the migration experience as a disadvantage rather than an advantage. Thus, in order to better understand the processes of return migration and integration of returnees, attention must be paid to whether the home country’s labour market is returnee-friendly or unfriendly. Regardless of how much human capital return migrants bring from abroad, the successful integration of returnees is unlikely if their migration experience is not considered as an asset by the home country’s labour market. The returnee-unfriendly environment leads not only to the loss of potential benefits of human capital, but also to the unsuccessful reintegration of returnees and, eventually, to their repeat migration. Therefore, the Lithuanian migration policy which aims mainly at encouraging return migration, instead of focusing largely on the migrants themselves and their migration decisions, should devote much more attention to the integration process of returnees and include measures for making labour market more returnee-friendly.

THE ARCHIVAL FOUNDATION OF LITHUANIANEMIGRATION CATHOLIC AND LIBERAL IDEOLOGICALMOVEMENTS: RELEVANCE AND ACCESS

Lithuanian culture facing the challenge of globalization carries an actual ambition of integration the Lithuanian emigrants’ heritage. The archival foundation is a part of it. The great interest in the culture, history and experiences of Lithuanian emigration emerged when Lithuania gained it’s independence in 1990. Now these days are gone. Only narrow circles of academic and public society still concern about the fate of Lithuanian emigration’s heritage.This paper deals with the archival foundation of two main Lithuanian ideological movements, which flourished among Lithuanian émigré after World War II. The problems of storage, relevance and access are discussed.Since the end of the 19th century the Lithuanian ideological landscape has been shaped by the movements of Catholic or liberal orientation. The clash between Catholic and liberal ideological trends increased during the period of the first Lithuanian Republic (1918–1940) and especially during the years of anti-Nazi resistAbstractance. The conflict of the ideologically orientated Catholics and liberals reached its peak during the years of emigration.The research points that despite the ideological disagreement the fate of the archival foundation of two Lithuanian emigration ideological movements is similar. During the years of action most of the ideological institutions’ didn’t pay special attention to the systematic storage of the archival foundation. It should be stated that the archival foundation of two Lithuanian emigration ideological movements is dispersed in the archival institutions in Lithuania and abroad and in the variety of personal archives. The materials kept in the archival institutions are available for the academics and public. The access to the archival documents kept in personal archives could be complicated. However, the fate of the private archives is the question of the ultimate concern. The death of the archive keeper often means the loss of an important and valuable historical and cultural material.

James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie Nels Pearson (bio) JAMES JOYCE AND THE EXILIC IMAGINATION, by Michael Patrick Gillespie. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. xii + 179 pp. $74.95. The subject of James Joyce's exile, or his largely self-willed extraction from an Ireland he famously characterized as parochial and insular, has been a staple of Joyce criticism at least since Richard Ellmann's influential biography of the author in 1959. Traditional notions of Joyce's exile tend to reaffirm an essentially linear narrative, one that sees Joyce's art, and especially his aesthetic innovations, as dependent on an increasingly critical distance from the quotidian mentalité of his homeland. Against this formulation, Gillespie's new study argues that exile—both in general and as Joyce acutely experienced [End Page 452] it—is instead characterized by a cyclical vacillation between "nostalgia and rancor" or a constant shuttling between "feelings of esteem and ridicule for the country that has been left behind" (8). Gillespie uses attentive close readings to show how these simultaneous feelings of longing and censure become "embedded" in Joyce's writing (7), suffusing his characterizations of Irish life from the first stories of Dubliners onward. Although the book begins with a chapter that examines some of the broader issues surrounding exile, such as the important distinctions between forced and elective exile, the different experiences of economic emigration and diaspora, and the long traditions of exile and diaspora in Irish history and literature, Gillespie's main objective is to show that Joyce's personal sense of himself as an exile was central to his "creative process," and that it resulted in a stylistic "equilibrium where rancor and nostalgia exist hypostatically in a both/and interpretative environment" (24, 38). This well-argued point—that almost everywhere in Joyce's work we find these contrasting sentiments embedded in the prose in equal measure and that it is therefore reductive to impose any interpretive model that prioritizes one over the other—is a significant contribution to Joyce scholarship. In Chapter 2, "Dubliners: The First Glimpse of Ireland from Abroad," Gillespie demonstrates that components of the stories usually attributed to Joyce's critique of Irish provincialism—such as Little Chandler's Celtic Twilight aspirations and his inability to contend with Ignatius Gallaher's cosmopolitanism (in "A Little Cloud"), or the sentimental poem on Charles Stewart Parnell that Joe Hynes recites in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"—are actually comprised of equal parts rejection and defense. Gallaher's internationalism is as much hedonistic and empty as it is a desirable contrast to Chandler's confinement, while Hynes's verse, albeit an example of the paralysis of patriotic sentiment, is also quoted at such length that it evokes genuine feeling, not to mention that it suggests Joyce's own early poetic defense of Parnell (the lost poem "Et tu Healy"). "The poem goes on for [eleven] stanzas," observes Gillespie, "taking the reader beyond satire to actual consideration of the work" (54). Something similar could be said of the Michael William Balfe aria sung by Maria in "Clay" or the harpist's rendition of "Silent, O Moyle" in "Two Gallants" (D 106, 54). The chapter concludes by arguing that Gabriel Conroy's belated nostalgia for Irish belonging—his famous desire for a "journey westward" (D 223)—is not just there to "counterbalance … the criticism for Ireland" dished out in the prior stories; rather, it is the final and most prominent example of Joyce's exilic tendency, throughout the collection, to infuse scenes with "bifurcated feelings" about national attachment (56, 59). [End Page 453] In his analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gillespie elaborates on this exilic double consciousness, not only with regard to Stephen's thoughts and impressions but also with regard to the structure and tone of the narrative itself. His thorough close readings reveal how Joyce's "attitudes, fluctuating between sentimentality and bitterness, are subtly manifested even in accounts of the most quotidian moments of Stephen Dedalus's childhood" (69). Importantly, these "contrary impulses" (62) call for "an interpretive methodology that accommodates rather than resolves ambiguity," and they also challenge "the...

The transformation of remittances from consumption to investment: a challenging strategy to accommodate the future

SEER Journal for Labour and Social Affairs in Eastern Europe , Seite 267 - 278

Irish emigration in the 1970s: The ‘problem’ discourse of political elites

Using Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, this article analyzes documented examples of ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse from elite Irish discourse of the 1970s. Noting that elite discourse uses perpetuation strategies of argument to frame emigration as a negative phenomenon, the author suggests that such strategies serve important social functions in regards to creating a strawperson argument for the government and in contributing to the image of the Irish at home. The article calls for a closer look at the ways elite discourse set the terms of debate for private discourse in the range of data collected about Irish emigrant experience.

‘Germs’ in the heart of the other: emigrant scripts, the Celtic Tiger and lived realities of return

During the 1990s and 2000s, the period coinciding with Ireland’s economic and social transformation and ubiquitously referred to as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, the Irish nation transitioned from being an emigrant-sending to an immigrant receiving society. In association with this shift, considerable attention has been devoted to Ireland’s new immigrant groups, including refugees and asylum seekers and more recently to migrant workers from new EU accession states. During the same period, inward migration was consistently comprised of significant numbers of former emigrants returning to Ireland; however, the place and experiences of Ireland’s return migrants has received comparatively little attention from mainstream media sources and is a relatively recent development in scholarship on migration. Taking as its impetus Piaras MacEinri’s (2001) call for scholarship that places Ireland’s history of emigration alongside contemporary immigration, this paper critically explores scripts - media representations and discourses - on emigrants and emigration in the late 1980s and 1990s as they reflect in the lived realities of Irish migrants who returned to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. I argue that these scripts, which bestowed emigrants with characteristics that were subsequently gathered back into the social spaces of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger period, generated a social landscape that was complex to navigate and where lived realities - marked by a devaluation of the emigrant experience and displacement in return - illustrate the contradictions between the representations of emigration in the 1980s and experiences of return. Instead, the lived realities of return highlight the intricate linking of time and space in social exclusions from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Translation and the emigrant experience. A case study

The article offers a discussion of the bilingual collection of poems by Wioletta Grzegorzewska, the Polish émigré poet living in Britain, as an example of the condition of an émigré poet-in-translation. The book, addressed both to her „native” Polish-language readership and to the new, foreign-language readers in the country of her settlement, shows how the status of the émigré poet undermines the distinction between the foreign and the familiar, providing an apt illustration of Salman Rushdie’s view of emigrants as „translated people”. As the detailed analyses of the English translations in Grzegorzewska’s book reveal, the translator not only defi nes her readers, but also, paradoxically, creates the poet he is translating: the translator’s choices are shown to work towards obliterating the poet’s status as an émigré writer and, with British readers in mind, eliminating traces of her linguistic and cultural otherness.

Law, Exile and the Making of a Transnational Constitution: A Life of Eric Stein

My project of an intellectual biography of Eric Stein reconstructs the life of one of the 20th century’s leading scholars in international and European law. Born 1913 in the Bohemian lands of the then Habsburg empire, educated at Charles University in Prague and emigrated to the US in 1940, Eric Stein shaped for more than 50 years the emergence of new transnational order in his native Europe – and actively took part in the evolution of European Law as an academic and professional field since the mid-1950s. The biography of Eric Stein connects the history of international law, the experience of emigration and exile, the evolution of the UN system, the transformation of American universities and research institutions through cold-war-philanthropy and many other aspects of 20th century-history (which are currently re-discovered and are undergoing a profound 'historization') with the narrative of the European 'Integration Through Law' and the emergence of a transnational constitutional paradigm which Eric Stein himself had suggested in his probably most influential article (Stein 1981; see also Weiler 1999). A biography of Eric Stein from a legal-historical perspective contains the potential and the promise to see, through the prism of a long life of legal scholarship and academic networking, the broader contexts of European law, and its close interconnections with international law (see also Stein/Halberstam 2009). It shall offer a unique opportunity to critically reflect not only upon the European Union and its law, but also, in a wider sense, upon transnational law as it stands at the beginning of the 21st century.

Between migration and cross-border mobility: return for development and Europeanization among Moldavian immigrants

This paper links migration, cross-border mobility and return for development, in terms of citizenship, identity and approach to Europeanization. Taking into account the global changes in Moldova, the paper examines the perceptions of migration/mobility, return and identity of the Moldovans engaged in emigration in the countries of the European Union (EU). Using a multi-discipline approach and an in-depth qualitative interview technique, this article analyses from a transnational perspective how migration/mobility and return can support social change and development in Moldova and argues that people who cross EU borders, and who live through the experience of emigration, acquire a pro-European mentality.

(M)Others from the Motherland in Edna O’Brien’s "The Light of Evening" and Colm Tóibín’s "Brooklyn"

From the last decade, interest in the rewriting of received notions of the Irish diaspora and of the great famine in the literature produced in Ireland has notably increased, in an attempt to revise both Irish history and identity. Within this impulse in contemporary Irish literature, two enduring authors stand out, Edna O’Brien and Colm Toibin, whose novels, The Light of Evening (2006) and Brooklyn (2009), focus on the individual experiences of post-famine female emigrants to the United States in their unsuccessful attempts to find better living conditions either in the so-called “Promised land” or in their homeland. Taking O’Brien’s The Light of Evening as a predecessor of Toibin’s Brooklyn, I will argue along this paper that the stories of female emigration unfolded in the two narratives complement each other in ways that, by and large, have passed unnoticed by critics and reviewers. Considering the bond to the land as a metaphor of the bond to the mother, through the present discussion I will also explore O Brien’s and Toibin’s current discourses on emigration in light of their portrayal of the conflictive mother figures that mirror their own motherland.

Опыт российской военной эмиграции в сфере учебно-воспитательной работы с молодежью

One of the most important parts of the educational experience of the Russian military emigration is the 
 
 involvement of young people in the historical and cultural work in the museum, military, memorial, literary 
 
 and publishing field. Active military emigration in education can be regarded as an essential component of 
 
 the historical heritage of the Russian abroad in general and as a field for the development of socio-cultural 
 
 dialogue with the world of our compatriots abroad. Educational activity of the Russian military immigration, 
 
 carried out in the framework of cultural, educational, military, sporting and charitable organizations covered 
 
 a wide range immigrant youth in various countries around the world and helped to maintain the authority of 
 
 the military societies and unions in the society of Russia abroad.

Mobility, return for development and sense of Europe: narratives of Moldavian immigrants returning from the European Union

The article links migration, cross-border mobility and return for development embedded in terms of identity and approach to sense of Europe. Taking into account the global changes in Moldova, the paper examines the perceptions of mobility, return and identity of the Moldovans engaged in emigration in the countries of the European Union (EU). Utilising a multi-discipline approach and an in-depth qualitative interview technique, this article seeks to analyze how mobility and return can support social change and development of the country, and argues that people, who cross EU borders, living through the experience of emigration, acquire a pro-European mentality.

Empowerment without Emancipation

This article examines the centrality of political activism in the identity of Iranian refugees and investigates how they perform and incorporate it by considering the interlocked pressure of international politics, personal networks, and the assistance provided by civil society organizations. The case of Iranian political refugees in Italy and Turkey is of particular interest because of the international visibility of the Green movement, the Iranian people’s historical experience of emigration, and the fact that Iran is a subject of great interest for a number of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It shows how the process of “being a refugee” works not only through classical forms of institutional pressure but also through “unexpected” forms such as NGO efforts to empower refugees politically. Despite the positive value attached to it, in this context political activism can force refugees into preestablished roles, such as “human rights defenders” or “Green movement activists.” Paradoxically, refugees act within a context that dominates them even when it tries to empower them.

Migration, Memory and Hong Kong as a 'Space of Transit' in Clara Law's <em>Autumn Moon</em>

Macau-born and Melbourne-based film maker Clara Law and her screenwriter-producer-director husband Eddie Fong have produced a transnational output of films which are beginning to receive critical recognition as major contributions to contemporary cinema. These ‘films of migration’ explore what Gina Marchetti has encapsulated as ‘the Chinese experience of dislocation, relocation, emigration, immigration, cultural hybridity, migrancy, exile, and nomadism—together termed the “Chinese diaspora”’. The self-imposed ‘relocation’ of Law and Fong to Australia in 1994 was the result of increasing frustration with the rampantly commercial imperatives of Hong Kong cinema and its lack of appreciation for the auteur cinema they wanted to pursue.

A Qualitative case study on the experiences of emigration to Vietnam for Korean older males

A Qualitative case study on the experiences of emigration to Vietnam for Korean older males

What the Bear Said: Skald Tales From New Iceland by W. D. Valgardson (review)

Reviewed by: What the Bear Said: Skald Tales From New Iceland by W. D. Valgardson Birna Bjarnadóttir, Chair W. D. Valgardson . What the Bear Said: Skald Tales From New Iceland. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2011. 130 pp. Preface. Glossary. $19.00 hc. In this collection of fourteen short stories, W. D. Valgardson writes about nineteenth-century Icelandic immigrants and their descendants in New Iceland, Manitoba, placing the experience of emigration at the heart of his subject matter. Some of the stories take place in both the country left and the one arrived to, offering a spectacular view of the vastness of experience in an emigrant's life. Equally captivating are the stories that describe a settler's hard fought attempt to adjust to even the most unforgiving circumstances. All of the stories, however, bear the mark of a folk tale. As stated in the author's preface, the Icelandic folk tale serves as a "model" for these stories. When approaching the above-mentioned heart of this collection's subject matter, the reader may gradually understand the relevance of its literary style. In fact, the style of these short stories may in a large part be responsible for the collection's novelty. There is a certain historical framework at play in What the Bear Said. Coinciding with the great wave of emigration from the European mainland and Scandinavia in the nineteenth century, it was around 1870 when large groups of Icelanders started to leave their country for North America. In October of 1875, the first large group of Icelandic emigrants arrived on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, the site which became the Icelandic reserve, and which is still referred to as New Iceland. By 1876, in this place which for many had been imagined as the promised land, the newcomers from Iceland already faced several hard facts, one of them being a smallpox epidemic. W. D. Valgardson does not hesitate to revisit the site of broken dreams. One of the short stories is simply titled "Quarantine" (65-71), describing the dire circumstances wherein the Icelandic settlers found themselves. During the epidemic, they were literally cut off from all possible remedy in the new and densely hierarchical society. But can a folk tale serve such a subject matter, some may ask. What is a folk tale? In addition to the historical framework that provides the backdrop for these stories, a certain literary heritage makes itself felt. Icelandic folk tales do not only originate from the Germanic/Northern literary heritage. They have their roots in a longstanding tradition of oral storytelling, a tradition the Icelandic emigrants ferried over the Atlantic Ocean in the nineteenth century, and handed down to their descendants. Like the world's folk tales in general, the Icelandic one fosters a fantastic gallery of "characters," all of which make an appearance in What the Bear Said. Some of them— like the trolls and the so-called hidden people—are singular to the Icelandic tradition. The ghosts and elves are—despite a couple of Icelandic character traits—more universal in both nature and behavior. As stated in the collection's preface, the author of these stories is no stranger to the tradition of oral storytelling. [End Page 267] As a child in Gimli, Manitoba, he was introduced to the way in which people gathered, again and again, around a kitchen table and told stories. What he did not know, is that the stories told tended to incorporate some fragments from Icelandic folk tales. With this fusion of the mundane and the fabulous, of reality and the supernatural, the Gimli-stories remained true to the original Icelandic folk tale. But why would the folk tale serve the subject matter at hand; namely, the vastness of an emigrant's experience? As the reader of this collection of short stories discovers, when confronted with the shortcomings of humanity, and/or society's horrific limits towards its people, the folk tale tends to unveil the very depths of the human being's vulnerability. Simultaneously, the folk tale accommodates the human being's hopeful disposition, and her natural inclinations towards some kind of a force we tend to term supernatural. Given the experience of an emigrant...

Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption by Eoin Flannery (review)

Reviewed by: Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption by Eoin Flannery John F. Healy Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption, by Eoin Flannery, 256 pp. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. $69.95. Distributed by International Specialized Booksellers, Portland OR. Eoin Flannery argues that although there "have been a number of survey and single-author publications within this field in recent years, none has produced entirely convincing and/or comprehensive perspectives on McCann's fiction." Many might argue that the lack of academic output concerning McCann is hardly sinful, but rather a consequence of the novelist's capacity to escape easy categorization. If Flannery is correct, then McCann surely deserves a more respectable place in the pantheon of contemporary, as opposed to merely "Irish," writers. The fact is that surveys of contemporary Irish and Northern Irish novelists overlook—or possibly, ignore?—McCann repeatedly. He has, after all, produced numerous works of fiction and has "garnered widespread acclaim, a generous haul of literary prizes, and secured a faculty position on the creative writing programme at CUNY's Hunter College." To highlight the critical wrong of this purported provincialism, Flannery presents a well-written, thoughtful examination of McCann's utopian vision offering "a moment of hope" in McCann's "preoccupation with the ethical currency [End Page 148] of the narrative act." Flannery's study is a fine first comprehensive study of the fiction, an engaging mix of close textual reading and a mélange of theoretical perspectives that shed light on McCann's fiction—even if McCann slips, eel-like, away from neat geographical identification (Irish? expat Irish? Irish-American?) and opts for fictive examinations of "migration, displacement, the durable currency of private stories, and racial politics," rather than more readily categorized topics. Flannery concedes that McCann is "not alone in engaging with the Irish emigrant experience in the US, but the manner in which McCann interblends and historicizes the Irish experience with that of other marginal communities provides an insight into a unique ethical and political vision in his work," a pursuit of the "redemptive possibilities in literary creation"—as evidenced in McCann's explorations of Roma oral tradition, multiple narrators, Nuryev's mythologization, 9/11's mythologizations, and layered personal and family histories that resonate into the future. Flannery presents one of the strongest chapters when he examines McCann's Fishing the Sloe Black River (1994). He provides a careful, detailed, and deliberate examination of each story in McCann's first book in light of the author's early development of this "aesthetic of redemption," and his chapters scrutinizing McCann's three most recent novels—Dancer (2003), Zoli (2006), and Let the Great World Spin (2009). A bit formulaically, but respectably, Flannery opens each chapter with a thoughtful contextualization of each work. Whether engaging with postmodernist, postcolonialist, new historicist, or deconstructive criticism, Flannery is to be commended for masterfully reining in these perspectives for his own study, rather than turning McCann over to a singular theoretical perspective that discredits author and critic in the end. Flannery then capably examines McCann with this new lens (as determined by the subject matter of that particular work), covering these major works and their major characters, events, and movements. Flannery's discussions of Songdogs (1995) and This Side of Brightness (1998) leave me wanting to read more. Flannery's writing here, and elsewhere in the book, is crisp, exacting, and thought-provoking in its vocabulary; also, those novels offer much more for the critic's diet than Flannery reveals. His discussions can be enriching and engaging, but glossing their events and characters obscures so much of McCann's fictional stratification. Does this suggest that a more extensive discussion by Flannery would have been difficult, or that McCann's fiction does not serve Flannery's arguments fully? Hardly. Maybe a more extensive discussion would have become redundant for Flannery—which, in turn, suggests that McCann's earlier novels may not have been as subtle and as suggestive as some of his later fiction. Flannery's discussion of Zoli, in particular his justification for accepting McCann's examination of the other, rings hollow at times. Flannery acknowledges [End Page 149] the ways in which the...

Migração internacional e desenvolvimento econômico

O Brasil é um país com uma longa tradição imigratória, porém a emigração internacional é um fenômeno recente. A inversão migratória começou na década de 1980, quando a saída de brasileiros para o exterior evoluiu de maneira considerável. Esse processo foi continuado nas décadas seguintes, convertendo um típico país de imigração numa nação de emigração. Assim, surgiu a diáspora brasileira, estimada atualmente em 3,7 milhões de pessoas. A diáspora constitui um grande desafio para o país, especialmente em relação às consequências econômicas da emigração, visto que esses movimentos deverão ainda se intensificar. O presente trabalho tem como principal objetivo descrever as vinculações entre a emigração e desenvolvimento econômico de país de origem. Ao apresentar teorias de migração internacional, procede-se a uma análise dos estudos que analisam as consequências econômicas da emigração. A apresentação dessa contribuição teorética e empírica na área da economia de migração é necessária na compreensão do problema brasileiro. O autor formula uma hipótese de que no atual quadro emigratório a economia brasileira deve se beneficiar dos movimentos internacionais.

The Experience of Labour Emigration in the Life of Married Women: The Case of Podlasie, Poland

AbstractIn this paper, I focus on the experiences of female labour migrants, looking particularly at the emigration of married women from a region with a long‐established culture of emigration, in the context of the accession of Poland to the European Union. The paper is empirical in its content and is based mainly on emigration stories and narratives recorded in the form of biography or autobiography. I discuss different stages of the migration process – the decision to migrate; the experience of migration (in particular, with reference to its impact on families, both abroad and at home), and also the consequences of migration for Polish society, particularly with reference to family cohesion and changing gender roles.