Migration Narratives

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and representation in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in border studies, the volume shows how borders, borderscapes, and migration are approached in public and private spheres as a part of the political aesthetics of the border. Claiming that aesthetic images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political negotiation of borders, the volume addresses issues such as encounters with borders in material and digital spaces, migration, and border-crossings.

The contributions explore narrative and images in literary and media texts, documentaries, and border art, as well as borderland identities, migration, and trauma in geographical contexts including Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, Mexican-US borderlands, and Chinese borderlands.

This programmatic paper is about rethinking and decolonizing intercultural education in our work and teaching (a) with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in particular who are among us – and how they view, relate to their countries of origin and the communities, life worlds and identities they’ve left behind. And (b) our engagement with students in a host of countries, many of whom who are potential migrants, to guide them more critically in their thinking about possible exodus. It explores key dialectical oppositions. In TEFL and elsewhere, ever more educators are teaching migrants and preparing lessons about migrants and ‘Human Flow’ (tinyurl.com/weiflow), and also helping to prepare students of all ages in a slew of countries for future envisioned migration, homeland adieu. The GISIG/LiTSIG IATEFL PCE in Manchester April 2020 (postponed to the Harrogate GISIG PCE June 2021 https://gisig.iatefl.org/pce-2021/) is centered on a spectrum of teaching ‘migrant narratives’, fiction and non-fiction, a timely focus in current global issues inside teaching English as a foreign language. Breaking down binaries should be our guiding watchword. Equity cum togetherness, solidarity not stigma. Countering our ‘me-first society’ and its ‘possessive individualism.’ The galvanizing vision and its radical praxis in im/migration teaching, research and policy should and can strive proactively to turn walls of exclusion for potentially traumatized, marginalized and vulnerable migrants and the disadvantaged in any society into bridges of social and socialist solidarity, horizontality, autonomy and the need for open borders..
      Yet the focus here is to highlight a controversial aspect of present-day migrant upsurge often neglected in analysis: its iterated deleterious blowback back home in the countries of emigration outflow, in terms of demographics, skills, expertise and talent drain, national implosion, also encompassing the downsides of exodus of educational migrants, both students and academic colleagues (Bothwell 2020 tinyurl.com/recruit999). The article seeks to stimulate a broader rethink of critical public pedagogy (CPP) on migration and its myriad aporias (tinyurl.com/apo987), its irresolvable internal contradictions, to stay or to leave, and the dialectics between those positions.

This book describes an American town that became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, where the Mexican population increased by over 1000% and Mexicans became almost a third of the town. We explore how the descendants of earlier migrants interacted with Mexican newcomers, describing how experiences of and stories about migration unfolded across institutional spaces—residential neighborhoods, politics, businesses, public spaces, churches, schools, community organizations. We emphasize the ongoing changes in prior migrant communities and the interactions these groups had with Mexicans, showing how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways. The book richly represents the voices of Irish, Italian, African American and Mexican residents. The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate histor...

This article investigates the narrative function of prominent Muslim travellers (both historical and fictional) across the Indian Ocean to South Africa in the seventeenth and nineteenth century respectively. Ishtiyaq Shukri, author of The Silent Minaret, juxtaposes the figure of Sheikh Yusuf with the protagonist Issa Shamsuddin of the narrative present to critique contemporary politics, both in post-apartheid South Africa and in the global North and its ‘war on terror’. Sim- ilarly, Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit sheds light on the difficult choices faced by the main protagonist, Michael Ali, by drawing on the migration narra- tive of the Sufi Imam Ali Ali from India to South Africa in the 1890s. Both authors highlight the continuous history of imperial pursuits in the Indian Ocean world and their devastating effects in the past and the narrative present.
Keywords: Indian Ocean travel; Sheikh Yusuf; literary representations of Muslim diaspora in South Africa; Ishtiyaq Shukri; Achmat Dangor

Presentazione in occasione della 2a conferenza "Ritorno a Oropa dei Piemontesi nel Mondo", Oropa, 15 luglio 2017
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Paper drafted on the occasion of the 2nd conference entitled  "Ritorno a Oropa dei Piemontesi nel Mondo" (Return to Oropa of the Piedmonteses in the world)

Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the border traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.

The debate(s) on the relationship between art, activism and academia is as old as knowledge-production itself. In keeping with this volume's focus on reflexivity and representation, this contribution asks what role filmmakers, curators and artists play as knowledge producers and as knowledge-brokers when working on politicized issues such migration and/or ethnicity. This chapter looks at three European experiences that sit on the seam of curatorial practice, testimony and activism and address the (visual) narratives of minority groups. Exploring the emergence of these initiatives and drawing upon interviews with the curators and artists behind them, this chapter takes stock of ongoing debates on the complex relationship between political and artistic representation on minority groups. Adopting Mitchell's (1995) approach to representation that sees it as always being "of someone, by someone, to someone", particular attention is given to the implications of what kind of stories are told, for whom they are told, and of who does the storytelling. [F]rom the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.

This article lays ground for the concept of ethnic trauma for understanding the crisis of migration and its aftermath. The analysis is based on autobiographical stories recently published by the online community of the women who immigrated to Israel from the USSR/FSU as children or adolescents (Generation 1.5) in the early 1990s. Despite its self-selected nature, this story-telling project captures many generic features of the Russian-Israeli (and other) immigrant experiences. These stories form a collective narrative featuring trauma, coping and eventual victorya discursive plot quite typical for contemporary Israeli therapeutic culture. In the age of identity politics, ethnic trauma becomes a political tool deployed in the struggle for recognition by different immigrant and minority groups. The discourse of trauma, resilience and overcoming/catharsis incorporates immigrants in the local discourse, letting them negotiate their identity and claim full belonging. Thus, ethnic trauma emerges as a political resource to support immigrants' claims of equal rights and demands for symbolic reparations.

Translation services in migratory contexts have not been traditionally depicted as an advantage for British society. In fact, the provision of such services in these contexts has been seen as a social and economic burden. In this paper, we aim to connect how the translation and migration narratives that have emerged in the UK over the years have impacted on the provision of translation by the ministerial department responsible for immigration in this country, i.e., the Home Office (HO). As a first stage of an on-going project, the methodological concept of domain is used to investigate the provision of translation services during EU immigration procedures at the HO from a descriptive standpoint. Here, we will examine to what extent translations are available at this key administrative stage at the outset of the migratory experience when migrants, with and without language barriers, need to communicate their narratives correctly in order to be granted EU residence documentation. Our initial findings suggest that both EU migration and translation narratives seem to have influenced an HO translation policy of non-translation, a policy that needs to be further addressed in the near future.

This chapter brings together the concerns of border aesthetics and ‘post-national’ imagology. Setting out to map images of Northernness in contemporary migrant literature that features viewpoints originating from the global ‘South’, it discusses the border processes implied by stereotypical images of the other and of the self. It addresses a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written in Norwegian by migrants arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including testimonial narratives by the child refugee Amal Aden and ‘illegal’ migrant Maria Amelie, along with semi-autobiographical novels by Romeo Gill and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Migrant narratives negotiate discourses of arcticity, winterliness, nordicity etc., known from imagological research on Northernness. The chapter asks to what degree various topoi of Northernness contribute to the bordering processes in the texts, or whether these narratives produce new images of Northernness and new vocabularies for addressing the border-crossing. The narratives deploy chiastic switchings between North and South, circling disorientations, entropic white-outs and liberating and destructive verticalities in order to figure the border in new ways at different points of their physical and symbolic journeys. The ambivalence of these images shows that they are related not merely to borders but also to the epistemological borders negotiated.