Migration Narratives

Speculating the various dimensions of exile in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners Edward Said in his essay Reflections on Exile begins with the lines, "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a

Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) adli romaninda Jamaika (Bati Hint) ve ardindan takip eden neslin yasamlarini 1950’lerde dogrudan deneyimler araciligi okuruna sunar. Selvon, 1948’de Windrush olarak da bilinen dev goc dalgasinin ardindan Karayipli gocmenlerin savas sonrasi Londra’da yasadiklari buyuk beklentiler ve gercekler arasindaki gerilimi elestirel bir acidan isler. Bu makalenin amaci, The Lonely Londoners’da temsil edildigi gibi Bati Hintlilerin Anavatan’a gocunu arastirmak, ve bu eserin Karayipler ve siyahi Ingiliz yazininin tanitimina ve gelisimine olan katkisini ortaya koymaktir. Calismanin ilk kismi romanin sosyo-tarihsel arka planina odaklanirken, ikinci kismi esas olarak gocun temsilini ve romandaki Karayip toplumu uzerindeki etkilerini ele almaktadir. Calismanin son kismi ise, Selvon’un The Lonely Londoners’daki kendine ozgu anlati tarzi ile Ingiliz toplumunun donusumune ve Anavatan’daki alt kimligin kabulune olan katkisini tartisacaktir.

This paper focuses on the challenges faced by West Indian immigrants in London as reflected in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. It brings to the consciousness of the reader, the eventual sense of failed promise which migrants experience on arriving the supposed “Promised Land” in the West. The reading of this paper is a form of therapy which has the ability to reduce obsession with the West and subsequently, the rate of migration to the West. To achieve this, the research employs the pychoanalytical theoretical framework and further employs the use of secondrary sources of data in its analyses The study projects that the West Indians' experiences of racism, rejection, cultural dislocation, stereotyping, disillusionment and culture shocks in alien lands can be seen as other forms of trauma. Trauma in the senses mentioned above ends up creating neurosis for its textual characters who in real life situations are ultimately patients. Therefore, there is a need to analyze an...

Margarito’s Forest is a story of Maya culture and wisdom passed from one generation to the next. This beautifully illustrated bilingual book in English and K’iche’ is based on María Guadalupe’s memories of her father, Don Margarito Esteban Álvarez Velázquez. It follows Don Margarito’s lifelong work of planting and nurturing trees after his village in Guatemala is chased from their ancestral land by a right-wing military. The Maya carry their love for the forest with them, creating a beautiful forest in the mountains. The lovely illustrations (made with Maya children) show Maya children learning to plant trees and to nurture them until the trees are tall and sturdy. The book can provide opportunities for a conversation with children about their own community and the impact of the heavy carbon footprint that is threatening ecosystems everywhere. Both at the end of the book and available freely online, there are helpful study questions crafted with Maya educators for teachers, librarians and parents. Also available for free use online are audio recordings of this story by native K’iche’-, Mam-, and Guatemalan Spanish-speaking actors. http://hardballpress.com/margarito.html Additional free teaching resources available: https://www.margaritosforest.com

Die Frage, inwieweit sich Historiker literarischer Techniken bedienen und ob die Erklärungs- und Überzeugungskraft ihrer Darstellungen auf vorgegebenen narrativen Strukturen basiert, ist von Geschichtstheoretikern und Historiographiehistorikern der letzten Jahrzehnte viel diskutiert worden. Entsprechend hat sich die Untersuchung historiographischer Werke mit literaturwissenschaftlichen Methoden zu einem komplexen und zunehmend verwirrenden Feld entwickelt. Es gibt freilich keinen Grund zu glauben, narrative Strukturen seien in der Archäologie von geringerer Bedeutung. Trotzdem sind narratologische Überlegungen erst in den letzten Jahren auch auf die Geschichte der Archäologie angewendet worden. Der Nutzen dieser Ansätze lässt sich besonders gut am Beispiel archäologischer Wanderungserzählungen aufzeigen. Weil diese Darstellungen in der Regel weite Zeiträume abdecken und verschiedene historische Akteure und Räume zusammenfassen, greifen Archäologen auf spezifische Erzählstrategien zu...

SAMUEL SELVON, as a West Indian author who immigrated into the Western country, found himself in a problematic position as a writer. Oscillating between several different cultural traditions with unequal power relations ascribed to them, he had to face the difficulties of finding an appropriate way of expression, which would reflect the plurality of his experience while still being graspable and comprehensible to wider audience, yet resisting mimicry of the dominant culture. Language and literary form become, side by side with the topical themes, essential tools in this quest. The three novels of the Trinidadian-born author Samuel Selvon to be discussed in the following text are The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). The publishing dates suggest the width of the time-span that covers writing of this ‘trilogy’ of expatriate novels. Although I am using the expression ‘trilogy’ here, I do not want to imply that I perceive the three novels as seq...

Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit deploy child and youth protagonists to offer nuanced perspectives on contemporary nationhood in Nigeria and South Africa respectively, displacing the adult, and mostly male viewpoints that have dominated novelistic portrayals of postcolonial nationhood for decades. These protagonists are portrayed symbolically in the context of the biological family, which can be read in allegorical and metonymic ways to represent the nation as a social unit. This article explores the portrayal of these protagonists and their families for the ways in which they may reflect national anxieties in general, and the problems of recent socio-political transition in particular. It also highlights how the breakdown of the family, as well as the different pathways undertaken by characters may represent simultaneously dystopian and auspicious futures for Nigeria and South Africa. 

This Working Paper provides an overview of social science literature on narratives, with a particular focus on narratives on migration (MiNa). The paper starts by tracing the emergence of the concept of narratives in a range of social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology and media studies), and then outlines a working definition of the concept for use in the BRIDGES project.<br> We then map key literature about the emergence and sources of narratives; their psychological, social and political functions; and the factors influencing their spread and prevalence. We go on to explore how the concept has been applied to understand the dynamics of mobility, displacement, integration, public attitudes and political mobilisation in migration studies. We examine some of the key themes of the literature in relation to gender, a key dimension of the BRIDGES project, and then set out a number<br> of trends that might be expected to shape the content and di...

During the 1790s James Montgomery, editor of the Sheffield Iris newspaper, was twice confined to York Castle Prison on dubious charges of treason and sedition. Whilst a prisoner Montgomery composed a collection of poetry, later printed in 1797 as Prison Amusements. The collection’s stand-out poem was a two part epistle titled ‘The Pleasures on Imprisonment’. The first instalment labours Montgomery’s horror at being locked away in York Castle Prison. He soon finds that his fellow prisoners are neither dangerous criminals nor feared radicals but merely thoughtful men and women of dissenting opinion. This essay presents discrete contextual evidence for the simultaneous personification of York at the end of the 18th century as both an idealistic platform from which London government could be challenged and as a panoptical city associated with punitive surveillance and incarceration designed to protect and promote traditional government hierarchies. The essay explores the extent to which...

This Working Paper provides an overview of social science literature on narratives, with a particular focus on narratives on migration (MiNa). The paper starts by tracing the emergence of the concept of narratives in a range of social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology and media studies), and then outlines a working definition of the concept for use in the BRIDGES project.<br> We then map key literature about the emergence and sources of narratives; their psychological, social and political functions; and the factors influencing their spread and prevalence. We go on to explore how the concept has been applied to understand the dynamics of mobility, displacement, integration, public attitudes and political mobilisation in migration studies. We examine some of the key themes of the literature in relation to gender, a key dimension of the BRIDGES project, and then set out a number<br> of trends that might be expected to shape the content and di...

Author(s): Floyd, Elizabeth | Advisor(s): Boscagli, Maurizia | Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between the rebuilding of London after WWII and how the material aspects of the city represent and complicate notions of British middle-class subjectivity in the period. With decolonization and the general recognition of the United States as the new international military and cultural force, the British Empire was rapidly declining and no longer relevant in the modern world. Thus, “Britishness” had to be redefined because it was directly tied to the pre-war structures of empire and cultural imperialism. While a new national British identity was supposed to represent the entire country, it was particularly important for the middle class. The Labour party saw the rebuilding of London to posit a new, completely modern Britain that could erase its imperial past. Alternatively, the Conservative party saw rebuilding as a way to perpetuate a past British identity that would ...

This article provides an intersectional analysis of Loving this Man (2001), the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian writer and sociologist Althea Prince. The analysis approaches different aspects tackled in the novel, mostly connected to the complexity of the migration experience and to gender and race politics in the different contexts where the story is set, namely, an unnamed Caribbean country and Canada. Loving this Man revises the vital experience and the achievement of a sense of identity of Sayshelle, a yound Caribbean woman who migrates to Canada at the end of her teenage years. An adult Sayshelle narrates her life, beginning with her childhood and early adolescence in the Caribbean to, in the second part of the novel, delve on her early youth experiences in Canada. Both periods and contexts are strongly influenced by gender and race politics: in the Caribbean because of the continuance of social structures inherited from colonialism and with a strong patriarchal com...

Digitally mediated communication in the public sector has changed how citizens and authorities communicate. Within this digital context, it has been identified that language problems may be an underlying cause of social exclusion for migrant groups (see Khorshed and Imran, 2015, p. 347), which seems to indicate that the lack of language proficiency in the host country’s language may give rise to new forms of digital divides in migratory contexts. Bearing this in mind, here we contend that, for migrants with language barriers, access to key digital services within the public sector can happen through translation provision, which may be used as a tool to digitally empower them. Thus, based on this logic, in this paper the digital empowerment (Mäkinen, 2006) of migrant communities is explored assessing to what extent the implementation of translation policy empowers migrants’ digital communication with the host country’ authorities within the public services. To this end, we will focus...

This article examines the grassroots Black internationalist organizing of the British Black Panther Movement (BBPM). The BBPM, which was inspired, although not founded, by the U.S. Black Panthers, was a London-based antiracist movement composed mainly of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom. The British Panthers led hundreds of campaigns for housing, education, health, legal aid, employment and against police brutality from 1969 to 1973. These pages reconstruct the day-to-day organizing efforts of the BBPM, revealing a highly active movement that focused on bridging local people’s experiences of racism with the movement’s membership in diasporic networks. Analysis of oral histories and forty-four issues of movement newspapers collated from across six archives demonstrates that the BBPM also raised awareness of British institutional racism and police brutality in the absence of public recognition of these issues. In so doing, this article introduces signifi...

This paper explores a hitherto unexplored issue in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and namely the meaningfulness of the fact that two of the main characters in the novel, the Englishman Alfred Archibald Jones (Archie) and the Indian Bengali – Samad Iqbal, go through an extreme dystopian experience leading to their discovery of multiculturalism during World War II in the spaces of a defunct British tank and of a little Bulgarian village near the Greek and Turkish border. The paper examines some of the cultural incongruities in the novel, which renders the “Bulgarian” experience there locked in a dystopian space generated by the Bulgarian village as well as delineates the transformative significance of this experience in Archie’s and Samad’s awakening to multiculturalism.

Indian Ocean literature has captured the porousness and fluidity that configure the Indian Ocean space through narrations in which history and memory, both individual and collective, blend to voice the uninhabited silence forged by unsettled colonialism. M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets (1994) and Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea (2001) are perspicuous exponents of the undertows that lurk behind the troubled existence of uprooted individuals for whom the act of telling stories becomes their means of survival. Given the old age of the protagonists of both novels, Pius Fernandes in The Book of Secrets and Saleh Omar in By the Sea, this article examines the power of narration from the perspective of narrative gerontology. Imbued with the spirit of Scheherazade's The Arabian Nights, itself an Indian Ocean literary reference, Pius Fernandes and Saleh Omar biographical accounts become the source of their literal / literary survival.

Indian Ocean literature has captured the porousness and fluidity that configure the Indian Ocean space through narrations in which history and memory, both individual and collective, blend to voice the uninhabited silence forged by unsettled colonialism. M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) are perspicuous exponents of the undertows that lurk behind the troubled existence of uprooted individuals for whom the act of telling stories becomes their means of survival. Given the old age of the protagonists of both novels, Pius Fernandes in The Book of Secrets and Saleh Omar in By the Sea, this article examines the power of narration from the perspective of narrative gerontology. Imbued with the spirit of Scheherazade’s The Arabian Nights, itself an Indian Ocean literary reference, Pius Fernandes and Saleh Omar biographical accounts become the source of their literal / literary survival.

A literary criticism of the book "White Teeth," by Zadie Smith is presented. It explores how the author come to a notion of Great Britain as vanquished due to its continuing internal hegemony. It highlights the multiple histories, multiple truths that the novel depicted for the future of region. It examines how the author describes the social conflict in the region and it is concluded that the author's construction of decay is the death of an idea.

Sanayilesme sonrasi, Britanya esi benzeri gorulmemis bir sekilde gelismeye basladi ve sadece ulkenin fiziksel yapisi degil toplumun kulturel ogeleri de degisti. Şehirler daha fazla buyudu, yeni fabrikalar ortaya cikmaya basladi ve eski evlerin yerini modern yapilar aldi.. Hammaddeye olan ihtiyac yeni topraklari kesfetme ve uzak bolgelere yolculuga yol acti. Uzak topraklarin ilk ziyaretcileri farkli meslek gruplarindan insanlar, din adamlari ve tuccarlardi. Adim adim kolonilesme ortaya cikmaya basladi, somurgeci uzak uluslarin kaynaklarini somurmek icin yerlesmeye basladi. Somurgecilik o kadar etkiliydi ki somurulen ulkeler degersizlestirildi ve o ulkelerin yerlileri kolelestirildiler. Somurulen ulkelerin vatandaslari kendi ulkelerinde kole olarak calistirismaya mahkum edildiler isgalciyle daha alt bir duzeyde gorulduler. Kolonilesme sonrasi donemde, somurulenler is, daha iyi egitim ve karinlarini doyuracaklari yiyecek arayisina basladilar. Somurulen ulkelerdeki bir cok yazar, koloni...

This paper investigates the resistance of immigrants to cultural dominance of London society in The Lonely Londoners, a postcolonial novel by Sam Selvon. The Lonely Londoners (1956) depicts the miserable life of Caribbean people who migrated in hope to find better condition of living than their countries. The paper furnishes a theoretic ground for analyzing the discourse of the novel which presents the subject of resisting dominant culture throughout events and language used by the novelist. The paradigm of immigrants, their trauma and shock have always been the spot line of discussion after WWII. Through the colonial history there was a dominant discourse of Western cultural superiority imposed on colonized, with the postcolonial era a different discourse emerged through intellectual presentations such as Fanon, Said, Bhabha ideas and others who enlightened literary theory and criticism and theorized resistance and cultural identity. Thus, this paper will critically analyze the dis...

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.

In this paper a pre-translation framework developed for public service translation is presented. The framework was developed from a sociological standpoint "whereby translation practice can be viewed in relation to people and institutions involved in it or affected by it" (Taibi & Ozolins, 2016, pp. 63-64) with the aim to provide contextualization and understanding that precedes the actual translation stage. After outlining the framework, its usefulness in obtaining key pre-translation information is showcased through an application form in the Spanish immigration context, i.e. an authentic public service text. Lastly, the paper shows how the information gathered based on the framework will assist in proposing an effective English translation of this application form in the future.

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.

This article is a critical study of Fiʾrān Ummī Ḥiṣṣa (Mamma Ḥiṣṣa’s mice, 2015), the third novel by the Kuwaiti author Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī. Through the allegory of the plague spread by rats, the novel delves into the history of the sectarian tensions in Kuwait from the late 1980s to the dystopic future of 2020. The article focuses in particular on the narrative role performed by storytelling and the recovery of collective memory as antidotes to the autoreferential language of the sectarian groups that put the country on fire.

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.