Narratives Of Return Research Articles

Evangelia Kindinger, Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives.

Evangelia Kindinger’s first book is an important contribution to Greek Americana as it is the first volume dedicated to the analysis of eight autobiographical return narratives of this ethnic literature. The author brings to the fore these lesser studied works written by Greek American authors and adopts an interdisciplinary prism for their analysis. Well-read and thorough, Kindinger manages to define a new sub-genre of travel writing, the return narrative, with an overall critical exploratio...

The Valley of Dantig and the myth of exile and return

AbstractThe valley of Dantig in Amdo plays a central role in Tibetan Buddhist historical literature as the place where the monastic code was maintained during the tenth century after the dissolution of the monasteries in central Tibet. This article shows that a manuscript (now kept at the British Library) carried by a Chinese pilgrim monk through this region in the 960s, which mentions Dantig, is the only direct documentary evidence of Tibetan monastic culture in this region at this time. The authors also show how the nameDantig, which has been previously unexplained, derives from theSudāna Sūtra, a Buddhist narrative of exile and return that is directly relevant to the aspirations of the refugee monks from central Tibet who settled in the region.

Rebooting and Rerouting: Women's Articulations of Frayed Careers in Science, Engineering and Technology Professions

This paper expands on previous work about women's non‐linear and frayed careers by examining the experiences of women who have attempted to return to science, engineering and technology (SET) professions in the UK and Republic of Ireland after taking a career break. These women potentially offer an important perspective on gender and career, because of the deep‐rooted, gendered associations of science and technology with masculinity. Drawing on qualitative interviews with women SET professionals, the paper identifies three narratives — Rebooting, Rerouting and Retreating — which women use to talk about their careers. Some of these women present themselves as career changers, having often made compromises and trade‐offs, while others, who have returned to their substantive professions, focus on continuity in their career narratives. The precarious nature of their careers is also apparent and in some cases leads to opting out or retreating. The paper concludes by exploring how women's scientist and technical identities persist, even among those who had not returned to work, and are drawn on in narratives of return and career change.

Evangelia Kindinger's <i>Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives</i>. American Studies Monograph Series 257

Evangelia Kindinger's <i>Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives</i>. American Studies Monograph Series 257

Exile, Return, and Nationalism in <em>A Goodland</em>

nada awaar Jarrar Grew uP in lebanon but leFt durinG the civil war oF 1975-1990, living in exile in Australia, england, United states, and France. she eventually came back to Lebanon in 1995 and has been living ever since. she writes in english and her work belongs to Lebanese women's writing on the subject of war and to the literary corpus of Anglo-Lebanese women's literature in exile. Jarrar's most recent book was published in 2010 and written while she was residing in Beirut during the 2006 israeli attack on Lebanon. A Goodland, a narrative of return, is about a Lebanese woman who was forced to leave Lebanon because of the war when she was adolescent, but because she suffers from restorative nostalgia, she returns to Lebanon. However, while she is the 2006 war breaks out, but this time she decides to stay. throughout the novel she tells us about her journey home; she is puzzled as to why she wants to come back to Lebanon and why she is so attached to her homeland. throughout the novel she keeps seeking answer to this question. Layla, the protagonist, is eventually at peace with herself because she finds love, friendship, and her national identity.this paper studies notions of exile, nostalgia, return, and nationalism in A Goodland, in which the protagonist undergoes a quest for both her personal and national identity. Her individual identity overlaps with her national and Arab identity. My analysis benefits from various theoretical insights. in his concept of minor transnationalism, Ali Behdad declares that discourse of displacement is split into two schools: writers who valorized, if not romanticized, the seductive power of geographical displacement (qtd. in Lionnet and shu-mei 225) and others who focus on the actual experiences of displacement, experiences that often entail a horrendous sense of homelessness, political and economic disenfranchisement, and even physical and psychological abuse (226). i contend that Jarrar combines both representations in her novel: the valorized and the naturalistic. i also draw from postcolonial theorists edward said, Benedict Anderson, and salman Rushdie, and critics who deal with exile and nostalgia, mainly svetlana Boym and Leo spitzer. Finally, i deploy Miriam Cooke's concept of humanist nationalism and Beirut decentrists. Jarrar, like the Beirut decentrists, promotes collective national identity, and nonviolence.exile and nostalGiaGrinberg and Grinberg discuss the impact of exile on the emigrant sense of identity from a psychoanalytic perspective. they argue that migration can be seen as trauma and crisis (Grinberg and Grinberg 11). Moreover, Zahia salhi describes diasporic writing as an expression of the pains of exile as it is loaded with the endless search for identity, loss, and longing (salhi 4). the above two quotes clearly summarize Layla's predicament. When Layla arrives in Adelaide, south Australia, she is not happy about leaving her home and settling in a new country. Unlike Layla, her parents seem to have adjusted smoothly to the new Australian life. she tells us that there were moments also when my own life seemed illusory and undeserved (Jarrar, A Goodland 10). exiles may reject everything the new country has to offer-anything that is different from their own customs, language, work, and (Grinberg and Grinberg 158), and that is what the protagonist goes through. Layla is aware of two cultures, two settings, two homes, and she experiences what edward said calls a contrapuntal consciousness, which is characterized by a plurality of vision giving rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions (said 186). As a result, she acquires Bhabha's third space (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 36). even though she is more attached to Lebanon, she has acquired features from the Australian culture and becomes a hybrid. Hout comments that for Layla Australia provides 'effective' type of legal belonging, whereas Lebanon is the source of 'affective' citizenship, which she hopes to prove by contributing to this latter's post-war reconstruction, both as educator (at the American University of Beirut) and as a loyal citizen (Hout 186). …

FromParis toPuebloand Back: (Re‐)Emigration and the Modernist Chronotope in Cultural Performance

In this article I examine ethnographic data collected during the rehearsals and performance of a play created by a group ofSpanish seniors at a social center nearParis. The play recounts aSpanish immigrant's return to her pueblo fromFrance after years of living abroad. Drawing onBauman's (1992, 2011) notion of “cultural performance,” I approach the play as a reflexive event that stages the most significant meanings of the community by and for whom it is created—meanings that include the modernist chronotope that dominates it. This particular chronotope—in whichFrance is associated with progress and sophistication, andSpain is associated with backwardness and provincialism—serves as an organizing framework for the community as they represent and make sense of their experience of migration. On an individual level, however, the narrative of return does not necessarily manifest this particular chronotopic structure. To illustrate this divergence, I present Fina, an actor in the play and the author of an autobiographical monologue included therein. By juxtaposing these distinct articulations of the same narrative—one communal, one individual—I show how processes of identification may be linked to chronotopic variation depending on the scale at which they occur.

‘Settling back’? A biographical and life-course perspective on Ireland's recent return migration

This paper uses a biographical and life-course perspective to explore some of the key narratives of return among return migrants to Ireland, focusing in particular on the themes of family, child-rearing, relationship breakdown and ‘settling down’. The ways in which return migrants use the concept of life-course transitions in order to make sense of and narrate their migration stories is explored. I argue that their narratives reflect a normative association of life stage with place, and that return migration reflects the ways in which key events in the individual life course transitions and family life cycles of 1980s emigrants have intersected with processes of economic and social transformation in Ireland. This occurs within the context of heteronormative and kinship-based ideals of Irish culture and of powerful myths of return. The data used in the paper is taken from the Narratives of Migration and Return research project, a north-south cross-border project which assembled an oral archive of 92 return migrant life narratives. In the paper, I draw on 33 of the interviews conducted in the south, which focused on the cohort of return migrants who had emigrated in the 1980s.

Song Style as Strategy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship in The Idan Raichel Project's Ethiopian-influenced Songs

Over the past decade, the State of Israel has approached pariah status in political debate, and its cultural sector and economy have been subject to boycott. Nevertheless, one multi-ethnic band has cultivated critical acclaim and a transnational audience by preaching integration and co-existence. This band, The Idan Raichel Project (IRP), advocates an Israeli society that accepts minorities and incorporates this worldview into a syncretic musical style that draws from the diverse influences of Israel's citizens, particularly from its Ethiopian minority. Yet, the IRP has drawn critique for enacting a hierarchy within the band between labour and management. Meanwhile, the IRP's approach to nationalist discourses is conventional, with the main discourses and apparatuses of the State—the military, the status of Israel as Jewish homeland—remaining uncontested. This article engages the dialectics of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the IRP's Ethiopian-influenced songs. Through close analysis, I will argue that songwriter-producer Raichel projects a progressive nationalist ideology, framing Ethiopian-Israeli social problems within national/ist Israeli narratives of Home and Return. The band's musical texts might thus be considered a contact zone where struggles over power and exclusion are negotiated and contested in a public, global forum. Raichel's representation of Ethiopian music and musicians enacts a set of power relations that promotes nationalism and cosmopolitanism simultaneously. Through the analysis of three songs, I will argue that the IRP deploys a particular style of ‘discrepant cosmopolitanism’ as a deliberate political strategy, positioning the band's elite audience above polarising discussions of conflict and state legitimacy.

The child who was left behind: ‘Dynamic temporality’ and interpretations of history in transnational adoption

This article draws on psychological theory relating to the emergence of self and subjectivity to examine transnational adoptee experiences of their own circulation as children. The article juxtaposes state policies and adoptive parent discourses that standardize adoption as a unidirectional process that requires a clean break from the past, and more complex renditions by the adopted themselves of subjectivity as a temporally dynamic and open-ended process of coming into being. Drawing on narratives of return by adoptees born in Ethiopia, India, and Korea who were adopted by parents in Sweden and the United States, the article suggests that their experiences in the orphanages, hospitals, and families from which they were adopted complicate understandings of what it means to circulate, while opening up standardizing descriptions of family, childhood, and belonging.

Structural Narrative Analysis

U.K. retirees who move to the Costa Blanca in Spain can be described as “lifestyle migrants.” “Lifestyle migration” has recently been conceptualised as “a quest” for a better life and migrants reflect and construct their experiences through common quest narratives. For many, the quest is fulfilled and they find a new home in a new country. However, for some, the quest is not a success and they return to the United Kingdom. Migrants for whom the quest is not fulfilled also reflect and construct their experiences through shared narratives and these can be understood as narratives of voyage and return. The focus of this article is on how a structural analytical narrative approach centering on the plot typologies, the quest, and voyage and return can illuminate decision making processes and experiences of migration and settlement for a sample of retired British women living in the Costa Blanca in Spain.

Writing back: American expatriates' narratives of return

The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad. Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein. Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the returning absentee by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.

Politics of Return: Homecoming Stories of the Vietnamese Diaspora

Intrigued by the question of diasporic return, this article is concerned with the cultural politics of what I call “homecoming stories” of the Vietnamese diaspora. In order not to be confused with the imaginary returns that have been practiced in many Vietnamese-US writings, such as Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge (1997) or Kien Nguyen's The Unwanted (2001), this article focuses instead on Vietnamese-US narratives about the experience of physical returns by looking at Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala (1999) and Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams (2005). Understanding that ethnic memoirs are not to be read only as testimonies of war and personal traumas, this article argues that these two texts represent what critic Rocio G. Davis calls “relational life writing” that aims to intervene in the contested terrains of trans-Pacific memories and geopolitics. It further argues that Pham's and Lam's homecoming stories not only reconfigure the “refugee subjectivity” of Vietnamese diaspora but also recast Asian American studies in diasporic contexts by taking the aspirations and concerns of Vietnam seriously, although their journeys “home” are by no means patriotic returns but only temporary visits. These return narratives are significantly framed in the contentious memories of war and survival and are triangulated in the complex relations between the United States, Vietnam, and Vietnamese America. Via a critical reading of Catfish and Mandala and Perfume Dreams, this article seeks to engage with the ongoing conversations about transnational Asian American studies by working through the issue of Asian-US relations.

Return of the native: Swades and the re-thinking of diaspora

This paper looks at Ashutosh Gowariker's film Swades: We the People (Homeland, 2004), a cinematic narrative dealing with a non-resident Indian's return to his homeland, to argue that this film challenges the paradigm Bollywood films have set for representing the Indian diaspora by questioning the idea of originary bond between the diasporic subject and his homeland. I argue that Mohan's return is not, unlike his Bollywood predecessors, determined by either a metaphysical cultural re-turn to an idealized homeland or an expression of what Aihwa Ong terms as ‘flexible citizenship.’ Rather, the filmmaker locates this narrative of return within the context of the material and the everyday. The paper argues that the filmmaker accomplishes this by destabilizing the discourse of oedipalic and homing desire that has been used by Bollywood cinema to dramatize the diaspora's belonging to the motherland. Deploying the character of a foster-mother and the spatial metaphor of a caravan, Swades brings in the element of praxis or thought-action to engage with the Gandhian politics.

The Past is Present: Pied-Noir Returns to Algeria

While Algeria has long been a popular subject for travel writers, since its decolonization in 1962, the travelogues documenting journeys to Algeria have predominantly become returns and reunions with the homeland. Immediately after their exile from Algeria during and after the war for independence, the Pieds-Noirs, or former French citizens of Algeria, began returning to their homeland in their memories, literature, and recently, their films. Early return narratives were almost always filled with nostalgic descriptions of familiar places and sensations in an effort to bridge over the ruptures with the past. By transposing the colonial past onto the present, the travelogues effectively stop time in the homeland. However, more recent returns often demonstrate the instability of the past. Through a study of Marie Cardinal's Au pays de mes racines and Hélène Cixous's Si près, this article investigates how Algerian return narratives have begun to deconstruct themselves, and yet the past is ever present within them.

‘Diverse Mobilities’: Second-Generation Greek-Germans Engage with the Homeland as Children and as Adults

This paper is about the children of Greek labour migrants in Germany. We focus on two life-stages of ‘return’ for this second generation: as young children brought to Greece on holidays or sent back for longer periods, and as young adults exercising an independent ‘return’ migration. We draw both on literature and on our own field interviews with 50 first- and second-generation Greek-Germans. We find the practise of sending young children back to Greece to have been surprisingly widespread yet little documented. Adult relocation to the parental homeland takes place for five reasons: (i) a ‘search for self’; (ii) attraction of the Greek way of life; (iii) the actualisation of the ‘family narrative of return’ by the second, rather than the first, generation; (iv) life-stage events such as going to university or marrying a Greek; (v) escape from a traumatic event or oppressive family situation. Yet the return often brings difficulties, disillusionment, identity reappraisal, and a re-evaluation of the German context.

Narratives of ‘Innocent Irish Childhoods’: Return Migration and Intergenerational Family Dynamics

There is growing recognition of the significance of circular and return migration in contemporary global migration flows. Although many return moves involve adults accompanied by their children, these migrant children are a relatively invisible and under-researched group. In this article I explore the experiences of children who have moved to Ireland with their Irish return-migrant parent(s)—a group who were born and spent part of their childhoods in Britain, the US and elsewhere, and who, as part of the Irish return-migration phenomenon of the late 1990s–2000s, have moved ‘home’ with their parent(s) to a country with which they have strong, yet often ambiguous, ties. Using participative research methods with children and parents in some of these families, I explore the interrelation of notions of childhood, identity and place in the return narratives of both the parents and the children. Irish return migration is often constructed in terms of home-coming and is assumed to involve the unproblematic reinsertion of Irish nationals in their home country. I argue that, related to this, the notion of ‘innocent Irish childhoods’ permeates familial narratives of return migration. Adult return migrants construct their own and their children's migrations around this particular idyllisation. I reflect on the ways in which children in return-migrant families relate to this notion, and may challenge but also reproduce these idealised narratives of return. In this way, I show that involving children as active research participants can highlight internal dynamics in migrant families and challenge hegemonic constructs of return migration.

Why stories matter: the political grammar of feminist theory

Why Stories Matter is a powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory. Clare Hemmings examines the narratives that make up feminist accounts of recent feminist history, highlights the ethical and political dilemmas raised by these narratives, and offers innovative strategies for transforming them. Drawing on her in-depth analysis of feminist journals, such as Signs , Feminist Review , and Feminist Theory , Hemmings argues that feminists portray the development of Western feminism through narratives of progress, loss, and return. Whether celebrating the move beyond unity or identity, lamenting the demise of a feminist political agenda, or proposing a return to a feminist vision from the past, by advancing these narratives feminists construct a mobile “political grammar” too easily adapted for postfeminist agendas. Hemmings insists that it is not enough for feminist theorists to lament what is most often perceived as the co-optation of feminism in global arenas. They must pay attention to the amenability of their own stories, narrative constructs, and grammatical forms to broader discursive uses of gender and feminism if history is not simply to repeat itself. Since citation practices and the mobilization of affect are central to how the narratives of progress, loss, and return persuade readers to suspend disbelief, they are also potential keys to telling the story of feminism’s past, present, and future differently.

In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian American Memoirs of Return

This article brings Iranian American return narratives into dialogue with reinterpretations of Freud’s analysis of melancholia in the works of Judith Butler, Jonathan Flatley, David Kazanjian, David Eng, and Shinhee Ham, among others. By refusing to relinquish Iran as a physical, geographical location, these narratives reverse the one-way motion of migration and assimilation, undermine the model-minority stereotype, and contradict the subtext of dominant Western discourses around Iran—that it is a place every sensible Iranian would leave behind if given the opportunity. Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again, Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, and Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky each seek confrontations with loss, contesting the relationship between the past and its remains by bringing personal and historical memory into direct encounters with present-day Iran. In this way, they articulate versions of Walter Benjamin’s call to interrogate the tensions among history, memory, and the present, to “brush history against the grain.” Seen as melancholic acts of rebellion, with failure necessarily embedded within from the start, Iranian American memoirs of return raise a series of questions: What happens at the site of return, when subjectivity fragmented by migration and assimilation seeks to recover a lost sense of coherence? How does the text itself become a geographical location in which narrative strategies are employed to bring the past into dialogue with the present? What creative potential is unleashed through a melancholic engagement with history, trauma, and memory, and what new forms of community and resistance become available as a result? This article takes up these sites of inquiry and sketches the contours of return narratives as a new archetype of ethnic American literature.

Vulnerable Observation in <em>An Island Called Home</em>: Ruth Behar's Story of the Jews of Cuba

An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba , Ruth Behar's 2007 memoir of her journey to Cuba to reconnect with the Jewish community her family had left behind in 1959, reveals a multilayered intersection between genres of life writing, ethnography, and cultural criticism. The text, a collage of historical data, personal essays, interviews, and photographs by the Cuban photographer Humberto Mayol, reveals stories of survival of the Jews in Cuba through the lens of the author's negotiation with her own Jewish identity. In this essay, I read An Island Called Home as a document that straddles several life writing genres (travel writing, the narrative of return, the family narrative, and personal criticism) and, crucially, embodies Behar's decades-long engagement with the epistemological paradigms of her profession, her identity, and sense of connection with Jewishness in the Latin American context. I argue that this text culminates Behar's central ethnographic project, which evolved from the engagement with an individual family story to one that necessarily included the Jewish community in Cuba.

Vietnamese Return Narratives in Australian Public Culture

In the period following the end of the Vietnam War (1975-), diasporic Vietnamese cultural producers have created diverse representations of Vietnam for both diasporic Vietnamese and western audiences outside of Vietnam. Often strongly nostalgic, these representations range from the California-based Paris by Night concerts that circulate in the diaspora by video to the many English-language memoirs that have become popular with a general readership.1 However, following the widespread economic and political reforms that accompanied the policy of doi moi2 in Vietnam from 1986, and especially since the opening up of Vietnam to western and diasporic Vietnamese tourism during the 1990s, a distinctly new mode of representation has emerged: the narrative of return. This narrative mode appears across a range of genres and media, from TV documentaries to popular memoirs, and routinely confronts western audiences with strikingly contemporary representations of the impact of globalization on Vietnam, often narrated...