Narratives Of Return Research Articles

Digital Migration Infrastructure in return-writing: visualizing the migration landscape of India.

Digitization has carved out the migration patterns of immigrants over the recent years of increased technological interventions in human mobility. Migration infrastructures, which typically refer to the physical, commercial, humanitarian, and governmental modes of operation, are multidimensional in nature. Digital infrastructures are equally important to the physical ones as digital technologies facilitate these migration processes through agents like hardware, software, and mediating actors. Amongst the multiple forms of migration, the concept of return-writing and nostalgia-struck-returnees encompass individuals whose life trajectories run parallel to the homeland. The narrative of return to the homeland emerges aβs a dominant motif in literature due to the rising trends of globalization, the writers' reflection on their own migrant experiences, and publishing trends meeting the demand of the global book market. The objective is to assess the role of digital migration infrastructures in return migrations to India through a close reading of the selected texts and review of postcolonial literary theories by using conditional operation in Python. The study here explores the varied nuances of return migration with a primary focus on the external conditions of travel in migration literature. The paper aims to analyze the genre of return-writing in Indian English literature, through three novels over a period of two decades, i.e., from 2000-2023. The selected texts, beginning with Amit Chaudhuri's A New World (2000), Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh, and Devika Rege's novel Quarterlife (2023), offer a panoramic view of return migration. These novels are extensive in the time period of technological interventions and in depiction of return migration. The Python code examines the extent of existence of a set of digital migration infrastructure keywords by analyzing the content of the novels and creates bar plots and charts to offer a visual representation of the classification results. The resulting trend traces the increased intervention of Digital Migration Infrastructure in the recent migration literature.

Re-mapping the Postcolonial Heritage of Exile in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence

Being exiled entails significant dichotomy as best communicated by Edward Said (2000) in his Reflections on Exile “[exile is] strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (173). This dichotomy between appealing and terrifying lies at the heart of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s narrative of exile and return entitled Admiring Silence (1996). The possibility of reconciling this dichotomy necessitates an examination of the current postcolonial condition and its impact on exile/return. Thus, the fundamental premise of this essay is to interrogate the current state of postcolonialism between narratives of resistance, “writing back”, anger, dichotomies, and narratives of defeat. This uncertain position generates two exilic conditions: an exile, which promises return and emancipation in opposition to a futile exile which generates no possibility of return. A reading of Admiring Silence reveals the current state of the postcolonial condition through questioning the significance of the protagonist’s journey between Zanzibar and England. Keywords: Exile, Return, Home, Gurnah, Admiring Silence

Rebels, Revolutionaries, Returnees: Palestinian Women’s Cinema as World Cinema

Abstract Grounded in Patricia White’s theorization of women’s cinema as world cinema, this article discusses select feature, documentary, and short films of two contemporary Palestinian women filmmakers, Najwa Najjar and Annemarie Jacir. Identifying the transformative and emancipatory processes within Palestinian society and the new Palestinian narratives of return as key elements in their films, this article concentrates on their contribution to the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cinema. White’s theoretical framework allows for the analysis of the feminist and postcolonial concerns of Palestinian women filmmakers, their engagement with the minor form, and the place of their films within global production and distribution contexts. Taking into account the new responsiveness of Palestinian and global audiences, it also allows for the discussion of their increasingly prominent role in Palestinian cinema and their contribution to the struggle of women filmmakers for better conditions within the film industry.

Hans J. Ladegaard, Migrant workers’ narratives of return: Alienation and identity transformations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 156. Hb. £104.

Hans J. Ladegaard, Migrant workers’ narratives of return: Alienation and identity transformations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 156. Hb. £104.

Wine as Represented in Contemporary Cinema

Celebrated gastronomic films like Babette’s Feast (1987), Big Night (1996) or Ratatouille (2007) and many others pose the problem of otherness by calling their characters, as holders of heterodox culinary/cultural identities, to seek integration to the social environment. Many films dedicated to wine take a different path. For some time now, along with the progressive saturation of every possible narrative grip within so-called gastromania, wine has acquired a certain visibility as an autonomous cinematographic subject, inspiring films entirely dedicated to it. This is the case of some emblematic titles: Sideways (2004), a progenitor of the genre, and other titles such as Saint Amour (2016), Return to Burgundy (2017), The Chateau Meroux (2011), Days of Harvest (2010), A Good Year (2006), up to the Rohmerian A Tale of Autumn (1998). These films are configured as great narratives of return (nostos), whose heroes are called by fate (the death of a relative, for example) to retrace their life path, backwards, reuniting, through wine, with their own deepest identity. While a clear trend in culinary movies insists on the spatial problem of the coexistence of characters who cook and eat in different ways, many films dedicated to wine pose the problem in temporal terms, calling the protagonists of their stories to come to terms with an inheritance received from the past (what to do with a château or an inherited vineyard in the French countryside?). Thus, multiple political forms are constituted, aiming towards the dissolution of the conflict between the past and the present, making it possible to reconcile this conflict and to relaunch it towards the future. Following this macro-movement backwards, my paper intends to investigate the political forms that involve the terroir and the vineyard by taking into consideration both the side of production and that of wine consumption (with a specific interest towards food and wine tourism) as they are represented in some emblematic movies: A Tale of Autumn (1998), Sideways (2004), Mondovino (2004), A Good Year (2006), Natural Resistance (2014), Saint Amour (2016), and The Last Prosecco (2017). These films will be taken into consideration for their aptitude to complement one another within a systematic set and as instances of a wider trend that is obviously not exhaustive of all the virtualities that wine may open up in stories. The terroir, in these representations, tends to fade as an ineffable, multi-sensorial and stratified semiotic machine, of which wine, although commonly understood as its main emanation, ends up representing only one of the areas of emergence and perhaps not even the most important one. That is why, in order to experience the “true meaning” of their wine, the heroes of these films can only move to the vineyard, experimenting with its daily customs and practices, for a while... or for a lifetime.

Specters and Cryptonyms of Return. Polyphony in the Postmemorial Novel Sefer by Ewa Lipska

The article discusses polyphonic narrative strategies typical of postmemorial prose on the exampleof Ewa Lipska’s novel Sefer, framing it through references to Bakhtin’s categories of polyphony,non-co-presence and the two-voice word, on the one hand, and to concepts of postmemory (MarianneHirsch’s category) and hauntontology (Jacques Derrida’s concept), Nicolas Abraham andMária Török’s cryptological theory, and the Freudian metapsychology of the secret, on the other.The polyphonic nature of the text refl ects the dynamics of intergenerational transmission of trauma,revealing a subjectivity haunted by traces of violence that take the form of extensive allusions andtextual tropes. Lipska deconstructs the postmemorial model of the narrative of return, questioningthe reparative abilities of acts of imagination.

Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe

This introduction to the thematic cluster “Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe” identifies and analyzes its core concept—the narrative of return. Families of today are talked about differently, and how they are narrativized matters. The narrative that stresses that family is under threat and in need of defense or a special form of care, figuring care as restitution of the natural, traditional, or proper family, is termed the narrative of return. The trope of return is strongly normative and non-descriptive, as it relies on mythical temporalities that ought to be restored in our present. The article first defines the choice of concepts—narrative, return, care, and threat. Second, it applies this conceptual frame in the transnational context, particularly within the transnational anti-gender campaigns in the populist moment. Third, it focuses on the postsocialist part of Europe, where, as the entire thematic cluster aims to demonstrate, the narrative of return has gained particular currency. In eastern Europe, these narratives are integral to larger projects of restoration of national agendas and serve as a tool of double emancipation: from the Soviet past and from the present European Union. Political actors using narratives of return advocate and successfully push through fundamental changes in the political frameworks and value systems of the postsocialist countries. In sum, the introduction aims to demonstrate the conceptual background of a political tool.

Narrative(s) of Return and the Gendered Memory Politics of Post-1989 Transformation: Populist Familism, Catholic Fundamentalism, and Liberal Feminism in Poland

This article has two main objectives. First, it proposes an analytical framework for how to explore “narratives of return” as policy proposals and tools of memory politics. Second, it reveals coexisting versions of “return” advocated by three Polish political actors: the populist right-wing Law and Justice party (“Return” to the Nation), Catholic activists (“Return” to Religion), and representatives of liberal feminism (“Return” to Women’s Rights). The case material consists of four policy proposals relating to either family or women’s reproductive rights. The article shows that all analyzed political narratives of return have used some variation of the discourse on victimhood, and all of them mean to terrify and raise fear. The policy proposals draw on Polish collective memory and, specifically, on the politics of memory of the post-1989 transformation.

Overlooked and Undeserving: Older People in Narratives of Return in Post-1989 East Germany

The German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) opposes diverse family lifestyles by promoting the return to a family model of father, mother, and children. This “Narrative of Return” paves the way for the party’s anti-gender, anti-childlessness, and anti-immigration agendas. This article examines how narratives about families as promoted by the AfD reflect or address experiences of the post-socialist transformation in East Germany. It turns out that Narratives of Return (NoR) overlook the elderly as acting individuals and disregard the ways they engage with their families and how they continue to organize their lives autonomously in old age. NoR instead depict older people as an anonymous group of supposedly undeserving pensioners, who benefit from society and family without having any function in them. However, discourses on care for the family can be traced down to a micro-level that confirms how care for the family is, in fact, care for older people. The article presents two selected life stories of advanced-age East Germans to substantiate this claim. The life stories reveal that older people themselves believe in various notions of family, despite being served with NoR in the recent past. Experiences in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) even seem to prevent older people from again falling for totalizing schemes that order and prescribe uniform (family) experience. Consequently, it is not to be expected that NoR will succeed in closing discourses on care for the family easily.

Families in Times of Crisis: Narratives of Family and Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Slovakia

Societal narratives about families, ranging from individual discourses to public discourse, do not always reflect the reality of family lives. This is also valid for Narratives of Return (NoR), which propose a return to a “natural” family order and lean on conservative ideological values. However, such a notion does not rely on actual past and present social practice but tries to reshape it. It deliberately omits the variety of existing forms and relationships present among families. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia, many processes, patterns, and problems in society became more visible. The crisis put particular pressure on families and intergenerational relationships, mainly regarding care. This paper analyses micro-narratives about families, relationships, and care, juxtaposed to actual practice, during the pandemic. We rely on data from a two-year-long ethnographic research project using online surveys, ethnographic interviews, and autobiographical texts. We compare these data with political discourse and its presentation in media, where we looked for aspects of NoR. It seems that the political discourse was primarily focused on securing public health but was at the same time oriented towards particular problems (such as natality or abortions), constructing an ideological narrative with specific family structures in mind (in accordance with NoR). Simultaneously, it put older adults at the forefront as a uniform social group that was vulnerable and dependent on others, omitting their function as caregivers of the youngest generation in the family.

Restoring What Never Existed: The Role of Familism in Narratives of Return in Hungary

This study seeks to provide insight into the mechanisms of familism in the landscapes of Hungarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public and higher education, and academia. By contextualizing the growing importance of familism as a governing ideology and an effective political tool used by the current government, aiming to offer an alternative to the insecurities rooted in economic restructuring and cultural transformation in eastern Europe in the last few decades, we show how “academic familism” and “NGO-familism,” often intertwined, reproduce the ideological underpinnings of the Hungarian neoliberal gender regime. The article’s novelty is in, first, revealing how recent institutionalization tendencies show that Hungarian academia, especially in the social sciences, is shifting to reproduce and legitimize familism, risking the autonomy of science even in the short term. Second, the study highlights the fact that besides some government-friendly NGOs dedicated to promoting familism, the ideology of the importance of families is strengthened even by some bottom-up civil organizations that campaign for a more inclusive family concept as a reaction to the government’s idealization of nuclear, heterosexual, and marriage-based family formations.

Preaching the “Traditional Family” in the Romanian Parliament: The Political Stakes and Meanings of a Hegemonic Narrative

In this article, we examine a decade of parliamentary debates related to the topic of family to understand the reasons and the rhetorical strategies that drive the support of Romanian MPs for the traditional family. Starting from four themes identified in the literature as relevant for the topic of family—national identity, religion, heteronormativity, and children—we identify the dominant definition of the “traditional family” as that of the Christian Romanian family founded and defended by ancestors—that is, union between a man and a woman for the purpose of reproduction—as the only place that can guarantee that children will grow up in a healthy and moral environment. This hegemonic narrative is enhanced by the anti-gender campaign repertoire and strengthened by populist logic, aiming to restore true Romanian values—Christian, ancestral, and national—in opposition to contemporary Western relativism and the alleged colonial cultural project of gender equality+ politics. The decadent present, threatening national identity, the continuity of the people, Christian values, the natural gender order, or the safety of children, can be saved only by returning to the traditional family, which functions as a hegemonic signifier re-imposing, in the logic of the narrative of return, a nationalist, conservative, and religious definition of the family, based on biological and natural foundations and necessarily heteronormative and chauvinist.

Caring for the Child, Caring for the Family: The Clash over the National Strategy for the Child (2019–2030) in Bulgaria

The article explores the different meanings behind the narratives of “family,” “childcare,” and “child protection” in public discourses against the National Strategy for the Child (NSC) 2019–2030 in Bulgaria. These meanings are seen as reflecting the intertwining and cumulative effects of transnational and local influences in the anti-gender movement. Using frame analysis as an approach in social movement studies, the aim is to analyse the main ideas of NSC opponents—conservative far-right non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens who joined the discussion during the public debate on the Strategy in January 2019. We differentiate between the discourses of the NGOs and the critical citizens, paying attention to the way they use the narrative of return—return to traditional family forms and child-rearing models. The conservative NGOs declared themselves to be defenders of Bulgarian children and families against the liberal policies of the European Union (EU) and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lobbies. The citizens’ discourse is directed against the child-centred philosophy of the Strategy, seen as a threat to both the children themselves and parents’ rights, but it rarely mentions LGBT and gendering as a danger. The discussion revealed the deep distrust of citizens and parents towards the state and its institutions, which was amplified and instrumentalized by the far-right NGOs who mobilized and organized a mass social movement against the Strategy.

From Gender Re-Traditionalizations to Anti-Gender Mobilizations: Care for Family in Serbia and Croatia

This article focuses on the cases of Croatia and Serbia to demonstrate how the heteronormative model of family and the constructs of “protection of family and children”—which are central to anti-gender mobilizations—can be traced to the 1990s heteronationalist discourses of family in both countries. The authors argue that the crucial link between these two discourses is that they both increasingly problematize diverse family forms and imbue “traditional family” with special value as the structure that is “best for children” and therefore merits special legal and policy protection, with a view to its restoration as society’s unquestionable cornerstone. The analysis of narrative content in parliamentary and public debates about family-related laws and policies in Serbia and Croatia between the 1990s and the 2020s is guided by the following questions: What are the continuities in the legal framework and narratives on the family in post-socialist Croatia and Serbia compared with the period of socialist Yugoslavia? Who are the actors who create narratives of return to a traditional family in post-socialist Croatia and Serbia, and how do these actors define family and care for the family? The article calls attention to how what is “old”—narratives of return to the traditional family—forms the backbone of religious-conservative oppositions to gender and sexuality rights, including the most recent wave of anti-gender mobilizations.

Review of Ladegaard (2023): Migrant Workers’ Narratives of Return: Alienation and Identity Transformations

Review of Ladegaard (2023): Migrant Workers’ Narratives of Return: Alienation and Identity Transformations

Rediscovering Identity: Autobiographical Memory and Media Discourses of Russian-Germans in Germany and Russia

This paper compares the processes of rediscovering identity in autobiographical memory and media discourses of Russian-Germans living in Germany and in Russia. According to R. Brubaker, the Russian-Germans are viewed as a transnational group with a specific “hybrid identity”, whose identification varies depending on the cultural project, which they are involved in. In Germany and Russia, the boundaries of this identification are the politics of memory of the host society and the dominant narratives regarding this group as repatriates (Germany) and as a diaspora with its own culture (Russia). Our analysis, which was based on the methodology of the critical discourse analysis by S. Jäger, revealed that such a dominant narrative in Germany is the “narrative of return”. In Russia, however, there are two discursive threads: the image of Russian-Germans as a repressed group and the narrative about the outstanding role of Russian-Germans in the history of Russia. The curves of autobiographical and family narratives of the three generations of Russian-Germans in Russia and Germany were analyzed and compared according to the biographical method of F. Schütze. People aged 30–50 were the most open to the influence of collective “standardized” narratives both in Germany and in Russia. Despite the fact of living in Russia, those respondents who were preparing to repatriate to Germany actively reproduced the “return narrative” and used international mnemonic frameworks to structure their autobiographical and family story. Our study showed that the influence of the discursive media environment on the autobiographical and family memory of Russian-Germans living in Germany and Russia depends on the respondent’s individual life experience (the curve of their biography), age, and some peculiarities of their family history.

Glenway Wescott's Narratives of Queer Drift

This essay argues that Glenway Wescott — an American author widely read in the early twentieth century but virtually unknown to literary scholars today — poses a problem for many of the narratives we tell ourselves about both queer identity and modernist literary history. On the one hand, the wandering, nonlinear plots of much of his fiction run counter to the narratives of urban migration, rural stasis, and ex-urban return that shape most scholarship on sexual geography. On the other, Wescott's tendency to borrow aesthetic practices from a wide range of literary schools and movements makes it difficult to locate him within the narrative of American literary history. Reading Wescott's writings — particularly those in his short story collection Good-Bye Wisconsin (1928) — as examples of what the essay terms queer drift, the author argues that Wescott's life and corpus destabilize the narratives we often use to make sense of both modern sexual identity and modernist literary aesthetics. In fact, this is why his work warrants more critical attention than it has traditionally received: it provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between queerness, geography, and narrative form.

The migration heritage corridor: transnationalism, modernity and race

ABSTRACT Currently, heritage practice brings a nation-centric lens to the heritage of migration, privileging narratives of arrival and settlement over narratives of return, circulatory transnational flows, and cross-border connectivity. Drawing on the case of Chinese migration to Australia in the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, the ‘heritage corridor’ concept is proposed here as an aid in conceptualising a heritage that escapes the nation-state frame of reference. The aspirational modernity of Chinese migrants in this period led them to construct new houses, schools, and infrastructure in their home villages in China using money earned in Australia, even though in Australia at this time Chinese migrants were characterised as premodern misfits by a white majority that saw itself as modern and progressive. In relegating Chinese migrants to the past, white Australia conferred on them a state of non-belonging that I argue is perpetuated in the country’s heritage system by a form of structural racism which, embedded in site listing processes, minimises the visibility of Chinese Australians in the heritage record.

Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel

Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these fictional portrayals tend not to sentimentalize return. The protagonists who return more often follow economic or professional trajectories. In novels like Tao Lin's Taipei (2013), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Han Ong's The Disinherited (2004), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son (2001), and Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised (2018), return to Asia intensifies rather than vitiates material structures of alienation. What we find is that they tend to undermine an emerging Twenty-first century racial form that welds the Asian to neoliberal flexibility, even if they often forego critique. This article will describe contemporary Asian/American return fictions in contrast to earlier manifestations of the genre and explore their problematic relationship to categories like Asian American and Anglophone Asian fiction.

Empathy from the Margins: Observing Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) Events in a Reform Jewish Congregation

The socialization of the Ethiopian Jewish community, known as Beta Israel in Israeli society, is marked by performing cultural customs and rituals to establish its unique tradition and collective ethnic narrative. The Sigd is a holiday that is celebrated on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Heshvan, when the community marks its devotion to Zion by renewing the covenant between the Jewish people, God, and the Torah. This narrative of return to the homeland is also expressed and framed in a tragic context by observing a Memorial Day for the members of the Ethiopian Jewish community who perished during their journey to Israel from Sudan. These two commemorative dates support the narrative of Beta Israel and advance its public recognition. This ethnographic study examines why and how these practices were mentioned and performed in an Israeli Reform Jewish congregation, a community that does not include Ethiopians members, and has a religious and cultural character that is different from the traditions of Beta Israel. Both the Reform community and the Ethiopian community deal with stereotypes and institutional and public inequality in Israel. I argue that their solidarity is constructed and based on social perceptions and experiences of social alienation and immigration traumas. This political motivation to mark the narrative of the ‘other’, particularly as an excluded religious group that fights against the Orthodox Jewish monopoly in Israel, marks the Reform community as an egalitarian agent that gives voice to the marginalized. The fact that most Reform congregants are ‘sabras’ (native) Israelis sheds light on how their perception as a majority, and not only as a minority, produces a critical statement about Zionist immigration and acclimatization.