Migrant Characters Research Articles

Rites of passage: The coffin ship as a site of immigrants' identity formation in Irish and Irish American fiction, 1855–85

The statue of Annie Moore and her brothers in Cobh, Ireland, is one of the many lieux de mémoire which seek to crystallise the recollections of the Irish exodus to North America between 1845 and 1900. Scholars have examined the monuments erected to commemorate the massive exodus of 1.8 million Irish to Canada and the United States. Hitherto, however, very little attention has been paid to a transatlantic corpus of fiction, mainly written by the so-called “Famine generation,” which recollects the conditions of Irish immigrants to the New World. These novels and stories, by Irish writers at home who witnessed the outflux of population as well as authors who had migrated themselves to escape starvation and poverty, not only describe their migrant characters’ conditions of departure from the homeland and settlement in North American communities. An equally central role is reserved for the transition from home to diaspora, on-board the so-called “coffin ships.” While the texts remember the fearful realities of poor hygiene and high mortality rates on-board, the voyage also has a symbolic function, featuring as a rite of passage for the characters and their sense of ethnic identity. This article discusses several examples of the iconic image of the coffin ship in Irish and Irish American fiction on immigration, written between 1855 and 1885. In these texts, the storms that the immigrant characters have to endure during their passage at sea prefigure the trials the characters will face in the urban New World. Moreover, the coffin ships represent microcosmic Irish “imagined communities” that function as utopian heterotopia where the cultural clashes experienced in the homeland and the pending assimilation in the New World have to be negotiated.

Nas narrativas que atravessam as paisagens do sertão: um estudo sobre o cinema construindo o imaginário em processo

In this Videography, the study of Brazilian identity construction is the reason to discuss how contemporary Brazilian cinema represents the imaginary of its migrant characters, or the onesreturning to their birthplaces. Constant issue in sociology, history, anthropology, geography and literature disciplines, thesection has chosen films in which the road and the displacement are predominant in terms of scenario and action, and in which they are the place of infl ow, evanescence, ephemeral, sociability, discoveries and construction of imaginaries in these films narratives, as in O caminho das Nuvens (2003), by Vicente Amorim, and Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus (2005) by Marcelo Gomes.

Moving Through Social Networks: The Case of Armenian Migrants in the Czech Republic

AbstractThis paper brings attention to the role of social networks in the migration of asylum seekers and explores how the embeddedness of the migrants in social networks both facilitates and constrains their mobility in different phases of the migration process. It reconstructs the migration paths of eight Armenian migrant families who arrived in the Czech Republic as asylum seekers during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty‐first century. By examining the narrated stories of the Armenian migrants it shows that social networks formed an important context for employing various migration strategies in all phases of the migration process, and that the meaning and character of migrants’ social networks changed over time. In the initial phase of decision‐making about migration as well as on their journey, it was mainly weak ties of random acquaintances that played a dominant role. The position of the migrants in those networks was rather insecure. They held a little control over the information they received, but in these vulnerable situations they had to rely on their weak ties, which strongly influenced their mobility. In the arrival and settlement phases the social context of the refugee camp hindered the cultivation of social ties outside the migrants’ circle on one hand, and facilitated development of bonding ties among the migrants on the other. Bonding social networks enabled inclusion of the Armenian migrants into various social spheres especially at the beginning of the settlement process. However, the bounded character of these networks was also recognized as excluding them from access to resources of the dominant society and preventing their social mobility in later phases of their settlement. Thus, bridging networks that provide access to certain resources of the dominant society were sought.

Corruption, migration and the Zimbabwean nation: John Eppel's Hatchings

The paper examines the link John Eppel's Hatchings establishes between migration and organized crime through its representation of an immigrant community as a virus that infects the body of the newly independent Zimbabwean nation. It argues that with the inclusion in his text of refugees, expatriate teachers and researchers, Eppel has constructed Zimbabwe in the image of the postmodern nation expounded by Bhabha, without necessarily subscribing to all its characteristics. The paper discusses a number of issues Eppel explores in his novel, including the involvement of the foreign contingent in the Zimbabwean underworld and the nature of the moral, political and academic aspirations which take Western academics and aid workers to Third‐World countries. It contends, however, that while a critique of the so‐called Third‐Worldism of Western leftist institutions appears consistent with the thrust of the novel, the reductive characterization of its migrant characters only reinforces stereotypes about foreigners which dominate our often xenophobic society.

A Stranger Within the Gates: Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Irishness, and: The Brontes and Religion (review)

Marianne Thormählen's contention in her introduction to The Brontës and Religion, that "the Christian life is a foreign country to most people today" although "to the Brontës it was home" (9) suggests that her exploration of that home has much in common with Kathleen Constable's study of Charlotte Brontë's ties to Ireland. Taken together, however, the two books provide not a map to any lost Brontëan homeland, spiritual or colonial, but rather a context in which to understand the isolated and restless migrant characters who populate Brontë fiction.