Andor Skotnes - Böcker

Migration and Identity is the third volume in the series International Yearbook of Oral Histories and Life Stories. Its theme is of special concern at a time both of massive worldwide migr ation and of apparently intensifying national, ethnic, and racial conflicts. The essays in this volume examine how the identities of migrants are shaped not only by gender, class, and ethnicity, but also by the experience of migration itself; and how migration is thus a crucible for both individual development and wider social change today. Guest-edited from the United States and with a special relevance to the Americas, this volume spans the whole complex global web of migratory patterns with contributions linking Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, without losing the particularities of local and personal experience.The aim of the International Yearbook is to increase our understanding of the recent past and the changing present. It sets out to present and interpret autobiographical testimony, whether in the form of written autobiography, oral history, or life story interviews. Each issue forms a coherent volume focusing on a single theme. The two previous volumes are Memory and Totalitarianism (volume one, 1992; special editor Luisa Passerini) and Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories (volume two, 1993; special editors Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson).Edited by an international group of leading scholars, the Yearbook is genuinely interdisciplinary and intellectually stimulating. It will appeal to students in many areas, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and anthropology.

In A New Deal for All? Andor Skotnes examines the interrelationships between the Black freedom movement and the workers' movement in Baltimore and Maryland during the Great Depression and the early years of the Second World War. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that such "border state" movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 1930s, deepening commitments to antiracism led Communists and Socialists in Baltimore to launch racially integrated initiatives for workers' rights, the unemployed, and social justice. An organization of radicalized African American youth, the City-Wide Young People's Forum, emerged in the Black community and became involved in mass educational, anti-lynching, and Buy Where You Can Work campaigns, often in multiracial alliances with other progressives. During the later 1930s, the movements of Baltimore merged into new and renewed national organizations, especially the CIO and the NAACP, and built mass regional struggles. While this collaboration declined after the war, Skotnes shows that the earlier cooperative efforts greatly shaped national freedom campaigns to come-including the civil rights movement.

The theme of Migration and Identity is of special concern at a time both of massive worldwide migration and of apparently intensifying national, ethnic, and racial conflicts. Problems of migration and the resulting reconfigurations of social identity are fundamental issues for the twenty-first century. This volume spans the whole complex global web of migratory patterns with contributions linking Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, without losing the particularities of local and personal experience.This paperback edition in the Memory and Narrative series explores these issues and the sustaining or abandoning of memory and identity as people move between fundamentally different cultures, in a number of recent social settings, from a number of methodological perspectives. These focused "case studies" offer glimpses into the interior migration experiences, into the processes of constructing and reconstructing identity without forgetting that, both theoretically and empirically, the problem of identity is complex and multifaceted. All of the essays rely heavily on oral history and personal testimony, highlighting the experience of individuals and small groups, without ignoring the tension that exists between the local and the global.Memories of oppression or totalitarianism are one of the driving forces behind some of these migrations; and the transmission of memories and myths between family generations is one of the ways in which migrations are interpreted. In looking both backward and forward, Migration and Identity, offers an acute view of migratory patterns and their impact on the newcomers and the local cultures. It will be of interest to cultural and oral historians and researchers of concerned with migration and integration.