Migration Stories Research Articles

Sacred Stories of Elite Power and Mexican Migrants

Sacred Stories of Elite Power and Mexican Migrants

Affective Authenticity

This article develops the concept of “affective authenticity” to explore the experiences and reception of US-based African migrant musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews, archival sources and musical analysis, we trace the migration stories of South African singer Letta Mbulu and the ways in which she negotiated conflicting demands for “authenticity” in her musical performances on the American stage. Affective authenticity represents a heterogenous, explorative sound, reflecting pan-African politics and aesthetics that created the very conditions for African and African American musical collaborations. This aesthetic was countered with expectations for “scientific authenticity:” an ethno-linguistically circumscribed performance that catered to colonial ears and conceptualized African musics as insular, ancient and unchanging – an aesthetic held and policed primarily by (white) music critics. Through analysis of the Yoruba hymn Ise Oluwa (1927) and its “translations” in Mbulu’s performance on the soundtrack for the television show Roots (1977), we show the careful balance of voices, texts, instruments, and rhythms African migrant musicians perform in order to adhere to conflicting demands for authenticity, and the rebuke they experience when they transgress them. We also place conceptualizations of affective and scientific authenticity applied to popular music in broader discourses occurring during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the decolonization of Africa, and the entrenchment of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Analyzing the Theme of Forced Migration in Amit Majmudar’s Partitions through the Lens of Everett Lee’s Pull-Push Theory

Partitions, the novel written by Amit Majmudar, provides a vivid insight into the complex forces behind forced migration that are based on Everett Lee’s Pull-Push Theory. The novel revolves around two main characters – Keshav and Shankar whose lives are destroyed due to India’s partition in 1947. Our qualitative case study investigates numerous “pull” and “push” factors in order to understand what triggers this process of migration. The current study aims to explore by employing textual analysis and utilizing theoretical frameworks to dissect how socio-political, economic, and cultural forces define decisions made by the characters we meet throughout the story. The results illustrate the complexity of migration stories and emphasize the importance of placing individual biographies within a larger context. This effort helps in understanding deeper levels of forced migration studies and how they can influence historical perspectives and contemporary global issues, as described in this research.

ARTICULATING TRAUMA IN SHAUN TAN’S THE ARRIVAL

As a “trans” form of literature, according to Knowles, Peacock and Earle, the graphic novel offers a suitable medium for narrating transitional experiences. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) demonstrates this by telling a universal yet diverse story of migration and trauma, employing a dreamlike combination of realism and fantasy, and the immediacy of visual expression to represent precarious situations, states and emotions which are almost unrepresentable. A complex dialogue among images and pages, and the slow movement from panel to panel enable the reader to gradually understand the shifts inherent in migrant and traumatic experiences. As words would monopolise attention in Tan’s view and situate the narrative in a particular language, a conspicuous lack of words allows the narrative to communicate across cultures, simultaneously signalling the difficulty of verbally articulating trauma. Relying on studies of the graphic novel and trauma, this paper explores Tan’s narrative strategies for conveying trauma, and portraying migration as a shared and timeless experience. At the same time, the paper examines Tan’s promotion of cross-cultural and cross-species empathy and solidarity, thus avoiding what Stef Craps sees as one of the pitfalls of trauma theory.

A Flicker of Hope: A Story of Migration by Cynthia Harmony (review)

A Flicker of Hope: A Story of Migration by Cynthia Harmony (review)

Actor in History: A Hasidic Tsadik's Journey from Uman to Brownsville

Abstract: Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel Rabinowitz (1860–1938) was one of the first Hasidic rebbes of stature to come to America. An Orthodox Jewish leader and author with uncommon historical consciousness, he strove to revitalize religion as an existentially vital facet of being. Keenly attuned to the complexities of moments of transition, he reflected on his own experience of migration. His response to modernity differs from that of most traditionalist communal leaders of his day—both those who stayed in Europe and those who came to America. In the New World, now in his sixties, his understanding of Jewish history and the ongoing transformation of modern Jewish society and self continued to evolve as contemporary challenges demanded new responses. His life and works—written in Hebrew in a strikingly modern idiom—add important dimensions to the story of Hasidic migration, resettlement, and spiritual revival during a volatile historical era. Retracing his long path from Ukraine to New York, from the "valley of slaughter" to the goldene medina , through close readings of ego-documents and other resources that have received little attention to date, this paper considers his importance as a Hasidic figure worthy of note.

Photo albums: deconstructing narratives of the self, migration, and movable memories

Photo albums, as personal and cultural material objects, are intertwined with ideas about identity and memory. At the same time, the importance of memory in how we shape and make sense of our place in the world that is enhanced through evocative objects such as personal photographic archives (ranging from traditional family albums, to selfies on mobile phones, and beyond) becomes more pronounced in the context of the Anthropocene era in which diverse and unequal global movability (e.g., displacement, border crossing, and migration) has become a defining feature of who we are. Connecting between anthropological studies of border-crossing and migration art, this project explores how in the absence of a photo album, alternative modes of visual archives tell the migrant stories of affective connections to family homeland the past and the present Focusing on specific examples from the burgeoning body of alternative visual artwork by contemporary migration artists in Europe and the US this paper examines how identity and otherness are entangled in an ongoing process of becoming and unraveling as sociocultural norms. Beginning with Appadurai’s observations on how migration of objects precipitates the experience of border crossing this paper looks at how migration art activism empowers modes of resistance to normative exclusionary discourses and current anti-migration practices.

‘If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep’: The Power, in and of, Dreams

Dreams are subjective, personal, political and public. This essay is my dream, my subjective story, my migrant story, my longing, my theology of dreams. Dreams are depicted as divine intrusions in human lives and inform us when engaging with powers and principalities. A political theology of Amos’s dream of a basket of summer fruit (a decolonial image) is presented as a wakeup call for the Christian church, and all people, not to succumb to interpretations of abundance, prosperity, blessing and auspiciousness. Rather, we must stand up for the values of Jesus Christ by contesting the oppressive systems and structures around us.

Finding home: Participatory geospatial mapping with Rohingya refugees

Despite decades of using community-based participatory mapping techniques, few studies have documented the oral histories of refugees and other displaced populations suffering from geographical injustices. This study fills the gap by documenting the process of participatory geospatial mapping with Rohingya refugees, a stateless ethnic minority group who fled to Bangladesh in response to ethnic violence in Myanmar, to collect their spatial narratives and migration stories. In this study, participatory mapping exercises were conducted using Google Earth Pro to collect qualitative data from 52 Rohingya adolescents and adults living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar about their migration experiences. Findings were organized into six key themes including 1) Discrimination and unfair treatment in Myanmar; 2) Forced removal from land and houses being burned by the military; 3) Leaving family and livestock behind; 4) Dangers of migration; 5) Feelings of safety and security in Bangladesh; and 6) Positive elements and happy memories from home. Results from this project indicate that participatory mapping exercises can lend agency to those who have suffered geographical injustices as it helps to process trauma; validate and reframe lived experiences; empower marginalized voices to spur action towards change; and can provide insights to policy makers.

TRANSLATING TAYEB SALIH’S PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA AS REPRESENTED IN HIS NOVEL SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH: A SEARCH FOR BELONGINGNESS

Tayeb Salih, a prominent British author of Arabic language and origin is regarded as a pioneer who carved an identity of African-Arab literature globally. Salih acclaimed in one of his interviews in the Arabic press that he attempted to reshape the East and West relationship conceived by the world. He stated that the West romanticizes the idea of the East-West interaction merely as an emotion whereas it is an unresolved conflict that leads a trauma related to loss of identity, belongingness, and existentialism (Salih, 1929). Denys Johnson-Davies, an accredited translator, credited with making Arabic literature accessible to readers of the English language, who also translated Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) regards the author and this literary piece as an intelligent work on East-West conflict produced by any Western or non-Western author. Season of Migration to the North provides a tapestry of events, multi-layered interpretations, traumatic outbreaks, struggles to identify with the world and finally succumbing to the pain. It is not a simple story of physical migration and the life of an African on the European land. It is an embodiment of an emotional, spiritual, religious, and mental search for belongingness. This present research is an attempt to capture the journey of the protagonist Mustafa Saeed and his life from his birth as a slave in the then colony of Britain, Sudan to his migration to Britain as a free individual. The rollercoaster of events that shape him and his destiny. Did he manage to break the clutches of his birth and slavery? Did he attain freedom from his belongingness to a British colony? Did he get peace to fly away from his roots is what makes this novel an extremely viable research material. The authors attempt to explore the psychological trauma and translate the author’s search for belongingness and understand the East-West relationship from his perspective.

Australian Selectors in the Nineteenth Century and Discrepancies in Imaginings and Realities: Critical Family History

Queensland became an independent state in 1859, separating from New South Wales. Almost immediately, an ambitious plan on migration was embarked upon in order to attract emigrants to Queensland, above all other possible colony destinations in the British Empire. Henry Jordan was instrumental as the Emigration Commissioner (1861–1866) in devising the land order scheme and Richard Daintree, as Agent-General, wooed, through modern techniques on never-before-seen photography in colour, small capitalists to the isolated outreaches of Queensland, where settlement was encouraged. Life there for those that migrated was, however, vastly different from what either they knew in Britain, or what they expected. But, ultimately, they settled, took possession of considerable stretches of lands, as selectors, or pastoral land owners, with disregard for the indigenous populations there. In this article, I examine one migration story on an ancestor in the nineteenth century, Andrew Milne, from London to Queensland, through the lens of critical settler family history theory. I take up the challenge for historians to question who their ancestors were, since the past is telling of the present, and the perceptions that are longed for in the future selves. Namely, in the construction of the future self, an individual must also confront their past, and the lives of those that preceded them. In particular, in the case of Australia, settlement, colonisation, and the possession of land are not benign, and are not isolated events, but have an impact on the present and future lives of both descendants of those that possessed the land, and those from whom it was taken away. The legacy of racial segregation (through the Stolen Generations), and despite the attempt to ‘close the gap’ since 2008, Aboriginal peoples in Australia still suffer the consequences of objectification and dehumanisation to which they were subjected. The consequences are not only financial and economic, but are visible in health, education, social status, and in their mistrust of public services.

Radio geopolitics: Imaginative geographies of Europe's migration ‘crisis’ on BBC Radio 4

Geographers have examined the history, materiality, and geopolitics of radio but there has been relatively little interest in contemporary radio broadcasting and its capacity to shape geographical imaginations. This is surprising given the ubiquity and popularity of radio, and its enduring role in communicating global news and current affairs to mass audiences. This article reflects on the power of media to represent people and places, and regulate imagined communities of identity and belonging by exploring how BBC Radio 4 constructs imaginative geographies of forced migration to, and refugee settlement in, Europe between January 2014 and March 2019. It joins recent efforts in geography to engage in methodologies of listening through a thematic analysis of 172 radio broadcasts that reveals two contrasting imaginative geographies of migration: first, a geopolitical imaginary of ‘crisis’, exemplified in news broadcasts, that reports from a top-down, state-centric perspective and is articulated by ‘expert’ voices, principally politicians; and second, a place-based, immersive, multi-sensory imaginary, exemplified in ‘feature’ programmes, that explores personal stories and experiences ‘on the ground’, and is articulated by multiple voices, most notably refugees. Radio 4 emerges as a diverse and contradictory space of journalistic storytelling which invites multiple ways of listening to, understanding, and imagining people on the move. By focusing on Radio 4 and the audible story of Europe's migration ‘crisis’, the article demonstrates how imaginative geographies are constructed through sounds and the spoken word, and evidences radio's imaginative, discursive, and sonic power.

Predictors of Engagement in Virtual Reality Storytelling Environments about Migration

Virtual reality (VR) environments provide a high level of immersion that expands the possibilities for perspective-taking so that people can be in the shoes of others. In that regard, VR storytelling environments are good for situating people in a real migration story. Previous research has investigated how users engage in narrative VR experiences. However, there is a lack of research on the predictors of engagement in VR storytelling environments. To fill this gap in the literature, this study aims to identify the predictors of engagement when VR is used as a medium to tell a migration story. A structural model based on hypotheses was validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with data from the interaction of 212 university students with a tailor-made VR experience developed in Unity to engage people in two migration stories. The results show that our model explains 55.2% of the variance in engagement because of the positive influence of immersion, presence, agency, usability, and user experience (UX).

Between a Polish Shiksa and a Jewish Woman: Ambiguous Identities in Eva Mekler's Novels

Abstract Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The Polish Woman (2007), set in Poland, Germany, and the United States, this article considers Mekler's constructs of Polish Jewish and Polish Jewish American identity that the author situates at the fraught intersection of gender, Polishness and Jewishness as she reflects on diasporic variations of the Polish Jewish American migration story. Mekler, a Jewish American writer born in Poland immediately after World War II, deploys the trope of passing as Polish or passing as Jewish and engages the second generation's memories of the Holocaust as she explores the effects of war trauma on her female characters. Permanently positioning her characters, some of whom come from secular assimilated Jewish families, between Polishness and Jewishness, she rejects any possibility that they could identify themselves simultaneously as Polish and Jewish. They may only exist within the troubled spaces of confrontation between their performance of hybrid identities and the Nazi racial laws, anti-Semitism, suspicion of passers, Jewish anti-Polishness, and Holocaust trauma.

CREATING THE IMAGINATION OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY: GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA

In Turkey, new trends, which are alternatives to traditional art production in terms of method, material and subject, started to become visible as of the end of the 1970s. In the activities carried out under the leadership of the State Academy of Fine Arts and accompanied by the intellectual efforts of the Academy teachers based on philosophical discussions in the West, graduate students they had the opportunity to exhibit new and different productions and to be visible. In this generation, many artists who adopted new and different trends, beyond the classical painting and art education in the Academy curriculum; One of them was Gülsün Karamustafa. In addition to bringing local political and cultural elements to her artworks over the years, the artist has exhibited a diversity of materials and attitudes; It has continued her production process uninterruptedly by carrying it to the international level and has become one of the important names of Turkish Contemporary Art. Karamustafa's studies, which have developed around the issue of migration-based cultural hybridity, which emerged in the socio-political field of Turkey after 1980, have a quality that makes sociological readings possible in the context of the political and cultural structure of the country. Listening to the migration stories of her family since childhood; The political background of her family members and her contact with Istanbul, which had a very active sociological atmosphere during her youth, enables the artist to create the main themes in her artworks. The imagery shaped by the period and environment in which she lived, in the context of a cultural transformation-based objectivity, leads to the emergence of products in Karamustafa's artworks, in which subjects such as migration, cultural hybridity, identity, arabesque and kitsch are mostly discussed. The artist has produced a sincere and original art production by simultaneously transferring social issues that she blended with her personal history in line with multiple materials and artistic expression. This study aims to evaluate Karamustafa's work, her life and the social memory of the period she lived in, that period’s cultural structure, political readings and her testimony in the context of cultural hybridity.

Recollecting The Unforgettable: Interrogating Migration, Trauma and Identity In Select Tripura Bengali Poems

The human mind retains the sequences of episodes that include prior experiences, memories and narratives. The traumatic memories of past are the one which stays in the subconscious and the recollection of those events formulates images of terror. Partition of India is one such event which incorporates narratives of multiple experiences of migration and separation. Tripura a small hilly state of North East India has seen the flood of migrants even before the major India Pakistan division took place. Most of Bengalis settled in Tripura have their roots in East Pakistan or which is after 1971 known as Bangladesh. Many decades have passed but they are still carrying their stories of migration and passing it to generation after generation. The trauma of separation from homeland becomes part of their memory and gets registered by the help of literature. This paper aims to examine select poems of Tripura which focuses upon the relation of migration and memory.

Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film ed. by Esteban E. Loustaunau and Lauren E. Shaw (review)

Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film ed. by Esteban E. Loustaunau and Lauren E. Shaw (review)

The ‘Confessional’ Voice in Food Journalism: Decentring Narratives in the Whetstone Radio Collective

This article discusses the use of personal narratives in food media and journalism with a particular focus on podcasting. It situates the research amongst the abundance of lived experiences both in food content and in podcasting, two spaces that have been regarded as providers of the intimacy required to challenge impartiality practices in journalism. Given that the growth of podcasting has arguably failedto include enough non-mainstream voices, our primary research is based on four series of the Whetstone Radio Collective, a media organisation that aims to tell the stories of marginalised communities. Using content and thematic analysis, it establishes that the innovative use of first-person narratives of the hosts—who are overwhelming people of colour and embody stories of migration and displacement that mirror the food stories—is accompanied by conventional journalistic sourcing of experts who are already established voices based in the Global North. A recentring agenda is most obvious when it reclaims histories such as that of black farmers in the US, when it situates the consumption of foods as part of the global trade that drove the colonial project, or when it delves into and criticises foodways such as the social architecture of kitchens.

REMINISCING AND RECOLLECTION OF LIFE IN ILIJA TROJANOW’S NOVEL THE WORLD IS BIG, AND SALVATION LURKS EVERYWHERE

IIija Trojanow, one of the Bulgarian writers of Contemporary German Literature, penned the story of the Luxow family's migration from Bulgaria to Germany in his first novel, "The World is Big, and Salvation Lurks Everywhere" (Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall, 1996). Employing self-reminiscences ingrained in his autobiographic memoir, the author reveals how the oppressive communist regime of the 70s affected society in the novel's story of the Luxow family. The novel is composed employing modern and post-modern narration techniques. The past is rendered in the story of Alex Luxow, the main character, who loses his family in a traffic accident in Germany and cannot recall past events before this accident. In addition, the main character's journeys in tandem with his godfather Bai Dan, who helps him in the healing process both physically and spiritually, indicate the search for an individual and cultural identity. This study discusses how the main character's memories of the overshadowed past are revived and what they point to while surpassing individual/cultural boundaries in the context of memory objects in autobiographical and collective reminiscences.

Unbound Bible

The triad of Spirit, Word, and Community is a model that often represents Pentecostal hermeneutics. Focusing on the Word—a particularly elusive term for the Pentecostal hermeneutics—this study suggests some insights from an ethnography among Latin Pentecostal networks in the Nordic countries. Despite holding the Word with high regard, it exists as an “unbound Bible.” The Word is multiform: the Bible as an artifact, the relational divine agent, and a message. Many interpretative practices shape and limit the content of this unbound Bible. These interpretative practices include an analogical narrative reading that associates migration stories with biblical content, transnational and multilingual contexts, and a fragmentary and recursive reconfiguring of biblical texts for proper occasions. This study contributes to understanding migrant hermeneutics and discusses the Pentecostal triadic model of Spirit, Word, and Community.