Migrations and Identities – serie

After 1600, English emigration became one of Europe’s most significant population movements. Yet compared to what has been written about the migration of Scots and Irish, relatively little energy has been expended on the numerically more significant English flows. Whilst the Scottish, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish and Black Diasporas are well known and much studied, there is virtual silence on the English. Why, then, is there no English Diaspora? Why has little been said about the English other than to map their main emigration flows? Did the English simply disappear into the host population? Or were they so fundamental, and foundational, to the Anglophone, Protestant cultures of the evolving British World that they could not be distinguished in the way Catholic Irish or continental Europeans were? With contributions from the UK, Europe North America and Australasia that examine themes as wide-ranging as Yorkshire societies in New Zealand and St George’s societies in Montreal, to Anglo-Saxonism in the Atlantic World and the English Diaspora of the sixteenth century, this international collection explores these and related key issues about the nature and character of English identity during the creation of the cultures of the wider British World. It does not do so uncritically. Several of the authors deal with and accept the invisibility of the English, while others take the opposite view. The result is a lively collection which combines reaffirmations of some existing ideas with fresh empirical research, and groundbreaking new conceptualisations.

This book provides a social, cultural, and political history of migration, ethnicity, and madness in New Zealand between 1860 and 1910. Its key aim is to analyse the ways that patients, families, asylum officials, and immigration authorities engaged with the ethnic backgrounds and migration histories and pathways of asylum patients and why. Exploring such issues enables us to appreciate the difficulties that some migrants experienced in their relocation abroad, hardships that are often elided in studies of migration that focus on successful migrant settlement.Drawing upon lunatic asylum records (including patient casebooks and committal forms), immigration files, surgeon superintendents reports, asylum inspector reports, medical journals, and legislation, the book highlights the importance of examining antecedent experiences, the migration process itself, and settlement in the new land as factors that contributed to admission to an asylum. The study also raises broader themes beyond the asylum of discrimination, exclusion, segregation, and marginalisation, issues that are as evident in society today as in the past.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Creolizing Europe critically interrogates creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the cultural and social transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. Exploring the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking post/coloniality, raciality and othering not only as historical legacies but as immanent to and constitutive of European societies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on ‘hybridity’, ‘mixed-race’ and the ‘Black Atlantic’ with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant’s creolization. Further, through a comparative methodological angle, the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe’s colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. ‘Europe’ thus becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. While not all the contributions in this volume explicitly address Edouard Glissant’s approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking. All of the chapters explore the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization to the European context. As such, this edited collection offers a significant contribution and intervention in the fields of European Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies on two levels. First, by emphasizing that race and “cultural mixing” are central to any thinking about and theorization on/of Europe, and second, by applying Glissant’s perspective to a variety of empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, race, racism, sexuality, gender, cultural representation and memory.

Between Britain’s imperial victory in the Second World War and its introduction of race-based immigration restriction ‘at home,’ London’s relationship with its burgeoning West Indian settler community was a cauldron of apprehension, optimism, ignorance, and curiosity.The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945–1965 revisits this not-quite-postcolonial moment through the careers of a unique generation of West Indian artists that included actors Earl Cameron, Edric Connor, Pearl Connor, Cy Grant, Ronald Moody, Barry and Lloyd Reckord, and calypso greats Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Colonial subjects turned British citizens, they tested the parameters of cultural belonging through their work.Drawing upon familiar and neglected artifacts from London’s cultural archives, Amanda Bidnall sketches the feathery roots of this community as it was both nurtured and inhibited by metropolitan institutions and producers hoping variously to promote imperial solidarity, educate mainstream audiences, and sensationalize racial conflict. Upon a shared foundation of language, education, and middle-class values, a fascinating collaboration took place between popular West Indian artists and cultural authorities like the Royal Court Theatre, the Rank Organisation, and the BBC. By analyzing the potential—and limits—of this collaboration, Bidnall demonstrates the mainstream influence and perceptive politics of pioneering West Indian artists. Their ambivalent and complicated reception by the British government, media, and populace draws a tangled picture of postwar national belonging. The West Indian Generation is necessary reading for anyone interested in the cultural ramifications of the end of empire, New Commonwealth migration, and the production of Black Britain.

This book explores Jewish refugee movements before, during and after the Holocaust and to place them in a longer history of forced migration from the 1880s to the present. It does not deny that there were particular issues facing the Jews escaping from Nazism, but in this enlightening study the author emphasises that there are longer term trends which shed light on responses to and the experiences of these refugees and other forced migrants.Focusing on women, children, and ‘illegal’ boat migrants, the author considers not only British spheres of influence, but also Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, South Asia, Australasia. The approach adopted is historical but incorporates insights from many different disciplines including geography, anthropology, cultural and literary studies and politics. State as well as popular responses are integrated and the voices of the refugees themselves are highlighted throughout. Films, novels, museums and memorials are used alongside more traditional sources, allowing exploration of history and memory. And whilst the importance of comparison underpins this book, it also provides a detailed history of many neglected refugee movements or aspects within them such as gender and childhood.Written in a lively and committed style, the book is accessible to both a general as well as a specialist audience, and will be of interest to those interested in the Holocaust, migration and generally in the growing crisis of ordinary people forced to move.

Between Britain’s imperial victory in the Second World War and its introduction of race-based immigration restriction ‘at home,’ London’s relationship with its burgeoning West Indian settler community was a cauldron of apprehension, optimism, ignorance, and curiosity.The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945–1965 revisits this not-quite-postcolonial moment through the careers of a unique generation of West Indian artists that included actors Earl Cameron, Edric Connor, Pearl Connor, Cy Grant, Ronald Moody, Barry and Lloyd Reckord, and calypso greats Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Colonial subjects turned British citizens, they tested the parameters of cultural belonging through their work.Drawing upon familiar and neglected artifacts from London’s cultural archives, Amanda Bidnall sketches the feathery roots of this community as it was both nurtured and inhibited by metropolitan institutions and producers hoping variously to promote imperial solidarity, educate mainstream audiences, and sensationalize racial conflict. Upon a shared foundation of language, education, and middle-class values, a fascinating collaboration took place between popular West Indian artists and cultural authorities like the Royal Court Theatre, the Rank Organisation, and the BBC. By analyzing the potential—and limits—of this collaboration, Bidnall demonstrates the mainstream influence and perceptive politics of pioneering West Indian artists. Their ambivalent and complicated reception by the British government, media, and populace draws a tangled picture of postwar national belonging. The West Indian Generation is necessary reading for anyone interested in the cultural ramifications of the end of empire, New Commonwealth migration, and the production of Black Britain.

This book provides a social, cultural, and political history of migration, ethnicity, and madness in New Zealand between 1860 and 1910. Its key aim is to analyse the ways that patients, families, asylum officials, and immigration authorities engaged with the ethnic backgrounds and migration histories and pathways of asylum patients and why. Exploring such issues enables us to appreciate the difficulties that some migrants experienced in their relocation abroad, hardships that are often elided in studies of migration that focus on successful migrant settlement.Drawing upon lunatic asylum records (including patient casebooks and committal forms), immigration files, surgeon superintendents reports, asylum inspector reports, medical journals, and legislation, the book highlights the importance of examining antecedent experiences, the migration process itself, and settlement in the new land as factors that contributed to admission to an asylum. The study also raises broader themes beyond the asylum of discrimination, exclusion, segregation, and marginalisation, issues that are as evident in society today as in the past.

Migrant Representations pairs twenty-four carefully selected histories in order to compare how migrants themselves – Irish labourer, Lithuanian refugee or Indian doctor – and their social investigators capture in words and images defining private and historical moments. These comparative case studies from the 1780s to the 2000s explore how migrants constructed their own narratives of mobility and settlement through procedures of reflecting, remembering and recording. Moreover, these studies examine how speech, writing, and picture were used, for instance, by a missionary, social scientist or activist to make ‘outside’ representations of the migrant. Such life-stories, social surveys, and pictures emerge as alternative archives. Leese’s transnational, cultural history considers life-story forms and their uses; the tension between external surveillance and self-observation; the power of narratives to afford legibility and acknowledgement. Leese argues that, historically and in the present, first-person migrant stories and outsider investigations create a continuous charged exchange of views where both migrant and observer negotiate position, authority, authenticity, and potential advantage. Within the history of migrant representations this exchange generates a persistent, subversive strain of opposition and critique. Such self-observations, observations of others, and images never settle.

Advancing public dialogue surrounding the issues of migrants and refugees, the volume explores the dynamic representations of the recent movement of people from and through the Balkans. It investigates how people within the Balkans view their others, how the West regards the Balkans, and how emigrants from the Balkans reflect upon their experiences as members of cosmopolitan diasporic communities. Highlighting latent tensions between center and periphery and furthering the discussion of racialization related to the Balkans, the collection exposes contradictions in social values, which give rise to national anxieties. Approaching mobility from multiple disciplines, the volume examines several instances of border flows in media, literature, and culture in general, flows of ideas and people. To analyze mobility to, from, and in the Balkans requires one to address the issue of difference, otherness, and race as it relates to South East Europe and as it is understood and reproduced in both transnational and local forms. The racialized category of “migrant” necessitates an understanding of how transnational concepts of race translate into constructs of whiteness and blackness and inform subject positions of the individual and motivate discourses of racialization within communities.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Global Trespassers is the first critical study of cultural representations of minoritized migrant figures permitted to remain and encouraged to prosper in the Global North. In pursuing ‘good immigrant’ figures across a range of fiction, film, memoir, and monodrama since the 1990s, John McLeod exposes the suspect social and cultural dynamics that govern the admission of selected migrant or mobile lives under strict conditions. Working with the double meaning of ‘sanction’ (both permission and prohibition), Global Trespassers uncovers the mendacious, mercurial border logics that fix such figures in prefabricated identities and relations while foregrounding representations of ‘good immigrants’ who trespass outside the constraints of their concession and challenge such modes of assimilation. Examining three global domains where minoritised mobile figures are readily sanctioned – the adoptive family, the sporting arena, the world city – McLeod critically assesses the extent to which trespass makes possible the insurgent rethinking of human personhood and relationality across the ready-made lines of kinship, race, and culture, as expressed in an eclectic variety of key contemporary cultural texts by Stephen Frears, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Deann Borshay Liem, Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester, Joseph O’Neill, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Tash Aw, and others.

Though forced displacement constituted a central and pervasive feature of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ effecting tens of thousands of citizens, remarkably it has been afforded little more than a footnote or fleeting reference in most accounts of the conflict. This book seeks to ‘end the silence’ surrounding this neglected and ubiquitous aspect of the conflict. Based on 88 in-depth qualitative interviews with victims and survivors, and extensive secondary research, this fascinating study provides the first comprehensive examination of forced displacement in Northern Ireland. The analysis presented captures the unique perspectives of those forcibly uprooted over the course of the 30-year conflict and places on historical record their stories and experiences. This thought-provoking work challenges and broadens prevailing understandings of conflict-related violence, harm, and loss in Northern Ireland to demonstrate the centrality of forced movement, territory, and demographics to the roots and subsequent trajectory of the Troubles. In doing so, it shows that to fully understand the eruption and outplaying of the Troubles and its elusive peace, engagement with and understanding of the legacy of forced displacement is crucial.

The highly-charged debate over Morocco’s diasporic minorities in Europe has led to a growing interest in the literary production of these ‘new’ Europeans. This comparative study is the first to discuss together a body of texts, including contemporary Judeo-Moroccan literature, written in French, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch, which have never been studied as a group. Faced with such a variegated field of literary production, the aim of this book is not to tie individual works of literature to their ‘national’ place of origin, but to re-conceptualize the idea of a ‘Moroccan’ literature with regard to the transnational and multilingual experiences from which it arises. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical insights, from Fatima Mernissi’s concept of female subalternity to Abdelmalek Sayad’s principle of the immigrants’ ‘absent’ history, this book allows for the re-evaluation of the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. A careful analysis of the literary techniques used in the texts under scrutiny here highlights their poetic qualities, without bypassing their political relevance with regard to the intercultural relations between Morocco and Europe as they are presently unfolding across the Mediterranean, and beyond.

Though forced displacement constituted a central and pervasive feature of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ effecting tens of thousands of citizens, remarkably it has been afforded little more than a footnote or fleeting reference in most accounts of the conflict. This book seeks to ‘end the silence’ surrounding this neglected and ubiquitous aspect of the conflict. Based on 88 in-depth qualitative interviews with victims and survivors, and extensive secondary research, this fascinating study provides the first comprehensive examination of forced displacement in Northern Ireland. The analysis presented captures the unique perspectives of those forcibly uprooted over the course of the 30-year conflict and places on historical record their stories and experiences. This thought-provoking work challenges and broadens prevailing understandings of conflict-related violence, harm, and loss in Northern Ireland to demonstrate the centrality of forced movement, territory, and demographics to the roots and subsequent trajectory of the Troubles. In doing so, it shows that to fully understand the eruption and outplaying of the Troubles and its elusive peace, engagement with and understanding of the legacy of forced displacement is crucial.

The highly-charged debate over Morocco’s diasporic minorities in Europe has led to a growing interest in the literary production of these ‘new’ Europeans. This comparative study is the first to discuss together a body of texts, including contemporary Judeo-Moroccan literature, written in French, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch, which have never been studied as a group. Faced with such a variegated field of literary production, the aim of this book is not to tie individual works of literature to their ‘national’ place of origin, but to re-conceptualize the idea of a ‘Moroccan’ literature with regard to the transnational and multilingual experiences from which it arises. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical insights, from Fatima Mernissi’s concept of female subalternity to Abdelmalek Sayad’s principle of the immigrants’ ‘absent’ history, this book allows for the re-evaluation of the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. A careful analysis of the literary techniques used in the texts under scrutiny here highlights their poetic qualities, without bypassing their political relevance with regard to the intercultural relations between Morocco and Europe as they are presently unfolding across the Mediterranean, and beyond.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Global Trespassers is the first critical study of cultural representations of minoritized migrant figures permitted to remain and encouraged to prosper in the Global North. In pursuing ‘good immigrant’ figures across a range of fiction, film, memoir, and monodrama since the 1990s, John McLeod exposes the suspect social and cultural dynamics that govern the admission of selected migrant or mobile lives under strict conditions. Working with the double meaning of ‘sanction’ (both permission and prohibition), Global Trespassers uncovers the mendacious, mercurial border logics that fix such figures in prefabricated identities and relations while foregrounding representations of ‘good immigrants’ who trespass outside the constraints of their concession and challenge such modes of assimilation. Examining three global domains where minoritised mobile figures are readily sanctioned – the adoptive family, the sporting arena, the world city – McLeod critically assesses the extent to which trespass makes possible the insurgent rethinking of human personhood and relationality across the ready-made lines of kinship, race, and culture, as expressed in an eclectic variety of key contemporary cultural texts by Stephen Frears, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Deann Borshay Liem, Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester, Joseph O’Neill, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Tash Aw, and others.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.Migrations of the Human examines how contemporary narratives of migration challenge established ideas of citizenship, belonging and the human itself. Drawing on decolonial thought, postcolonial critique and deconstruction, the book explores how the figure of the migrant unsettles the dominant philosophical and political frameworks inherited from colonial modernity.Through readings of literary texts, documentary film, visual art and theory, the study traces a series of “decolonial subjectivities” that emerge from past and present histories of migration across the Caribbean, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. The book engages thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant and Walter Mignolo alongside works by Toni Morrison, Amitav Ghosh, Patrick Chamoiseau, J. M. Coetzee, Shailja Patel and Behrouz Boochani. It examines how migrant narratives reimagine community, rights and political belonging in a world marked by displacement, ecological crisis and intensifying border regimes.The book argues that migration is not merely a humanitarian or economic issue but a transformative philosophical event that forces a rethinking of what it means to be human beyond the colonial category of “Man”. By foregrounding the experiences and representations of migrants, refugees and subaltern communities, Migrations of the Human offers a new framework for understanding contemporary struggles over citizenship, democracy and planetary coexistence.Wide-ranging and theoretically ambitious, it presents migration as a powerful site for imagining new forms of human community in the twenty-first century.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the process of German reunification, the city of Berlin commissioned a working group to create a “Memorial Book for the Jews of Berlin”, recording their persecution under the Nazi regime. Alongside the necessary archival research, the group also contacted “former Berliners” – Jewish refugees and their descendants – across the globe. The response was overwhelming: In hundreds of letters, documents, and poems, the correspondents asked the city to take note of their life stories their experiences, and above all their relationship to their former hometown. They describe their childhood and youth in Berlin, the rise of antisemitism and hatred, and the loss not just of property, but also of a feeling of belonging. They report on life in the countries of emigration and show a deep interest in the development of a new, democratic Germany that needs to be made aware of the fate of its Jewish community. The book offers a deep reading and a framework for an understanding of these letters and the emotional “luggage” they contain: feelings about the city of Berlin and about the afterlife of a lost Berlin in the memories of the émigré families.

Migrant Representations pairs twenty-four carefully selected histories in order to compare how migrants themselves – Irish labourer, Lithuanian refugee or Indian doctor – and their social investigators capture in words and images defining private and historical moments. These comparative case studies from the 1780s to the 2000s explore how migrants constructed their own narratives of mobility and settlement through procedures of reflecting, remembering and recording. Moreover, these studies examine how speech, writing, and picture were used, for instance, by a missionary, social scientist or activist to make ‘outside’ representations of the migrant. Such life-stories, social surveys, and pictures emerge as alternative archives. Leese’s transnational, cultural history considers life-story forms and their uses; the tension between external surveillance and self-observation; the power of narratives to afford legibility and acknowledgement. Leese argues that, historically and in the present, first-person migrant stories and outsider investigations create a continuous charged exchange of views where both migrant and observer negotiate position, authority, authenticity, and potential advantage. Within the history of migrant representations this exchange generates a persistent, subversive strain of opposition and critique. Such self-observations, observations of others, and images never settle.

Migrant Emotions explores the interrelationships and tensions between mobility and immobility, emotions, affects and experiences, inclusion and exclusion, as well as narratives and representations in both local and global discourses. The overall objective of the volume is to underscore the significance of emotions in the analysis of mobile lives in the past and the current socio-political climate. The book provides a new framework that brings together the study of emotions and migration by focusing on the feelings or emotions of exclusion and inclusion through a range of theoretical lenses. Specifically, it offers a series of complex, interconnected studies on diverse experiences, responses, and voices of migrants (including, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, and others on the move) both in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and across the continents, including Europe (Molesini, Daniel, Stock, Castillo Goncalves, Cancian, Leese), Africa (Cancian, Kilpeläinen and Zechner), Asia (Mutiara, Paul, Ridgway), and Oceania (Heckenberg). Integral to the volume’s original objective is an emphasis on the global diversity of contributors and studies and the global reach of readership for purposes of comparison.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.From Rupture to Refuge is a wide-ranging study of both contemporary refugee fiction and memoir. From international best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Christi Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo, to memoirs by Zoya Phan and Clemantine Wamariya, it follows refugees as they narrate their experiences and memories of homeland, war, escape, camp, and finally finding refuge.Tracing literary connections between this wide body of 21st Century writing, the book provides an overview of a genre of writing and a detailed textual analyses of thematic and poetic intersections. It also introduces the concept of ‘narrative displacement’, uncovering the ways in which refugees are discursively displaced from their own tales as well as being displaced spatially. Sloane argues that in writing and recording, refugees replace themselves at the centre of their own life stories.From Rupture to Refuge will be of particular interest to scholars of refugee writing, migration studies and displacement, as well as life writing and contemporary fiction more broadly.Peter Sloane is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Buckingham, specialising in prose fiction and non-fiction, as well as global cinema.

Refugees Across the Arts offers an expansive, interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary refugee representation across literature, film, visual art, and performance. From Palestinian refugee poetics and Venezuelan diasporic anthologies, to animated documentaries, theatrical pedagogy, and arts-based solidarity initiatives in Warsaw, this collection highlights the global breadth and human complexity of artistic responses to displacement in the 21st century.Spanning multiple genres and cultural contexts, the essays foreground refugee voices and agency while challenging reductive tropes of victimhood and spectacle. Drawing on concepts such as “refugeedom,” “narrative displacement,” and “messy belongings,” the contributors interrogate dominant humanitarian discourses and expose the entanglements of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in refugee representation.The volume brings together scholars from across the Humanities to consider how storytelling – whether in writing, image, or performance – can bear witness, foster solidarity, and reclaim space for lives dislocated by conflict, crisis, and climate change.Refugees Across the Arts will be essential reading for scholars and students of refugee studies, migration and diaspora, contemporary world literature, film and visual culture, and the politics of representation.Katie Brown is an Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at University of Exeter. Peter Sloane is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Buckingham.

Advancing public dialogue surrounding the issues of migrants and refugees, the volume explores the dynamic representations of the recent movement of people from and through the Balkans. It investigates how people within the Balkans view their others, how the West regards the Balkans, and how emigrants from the Balkans reflect upon their experiences as members of cosmopolitan diasporic communities. Highlighting latent tensions between center and periphery and furthering the discussion of racialization related to the Balkans, the collection exposes contradictions in social values, which give rise to national anxieties. Approaching mobility from multiple disciplines, the volume examines several instances of border flows in media, literature, and culture in general, flows of ideas and people. To analyze mobility to, from, and in the Balkans requires one to address the issue of difference, otherness, and race as it relates to South East Europe and as it is understood and reproduced in both transnational and local forms. The racialized category of “migrant” necessitates an understanding of how transnational concepts of race translate into constructs of whiteness and blackness and inform subject positions of the individual and motivate discourses of racialization within communities.