Tales of Transit

Michael Boyden is Assistant Professor of American Culture at Ghent University College, Belgium Hans Krabbendam is assistant director of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg and author of Vrijheid in het verschiet. Nederlandse emigratie naar Amerika, 1840-1920.

"Tales of Transit provides a fascinating perspective of the agency, reflections, and translations of dynamic men and women crossing the Atlantic to many destinations in the Americas. They critiqued “home” as an unsatisfactory space, at transit/transition places translated experiences for relatives, on the voyage negotiated with companies and sailors, after arrival worked, self-positioned, and participated in reciprocal transcultural exchanges. For many, lives remained in spatial process as they moved on, returned, migrated again, crossed social, linguistic, and emotional dividing lines. The authors present a social-cultural history at its best: through the eyes, experiences, and writings of actual women and men engaged in complex trajectories." Dirk Hoerder, Prof. emeritus, History, Arizona State University |"Taking as its key concepts liminality and contacts zones this volume shows how migrants, mediators and ties changed, and moved back and forth between being visible and invisible, or both at the same time. Together the contributions to this volume bring out what the rules and rituals of engagement, disengagement and re-engament were on the way from ‘here’ to ‘there’, thus taking a novel approach to transatlantic migration between 1850-1950." Marlou Schrover, Professor of Migration and Social Differences at Leiden University