Abstract
This book engages with human mobility both as social ‘movement’ and as emotionally ‘moving’ memories and responses. It is a thoughtful contribution to the field of memory studies, which draws on authors working in a diverse range of contexts, who trace how memories and memory cultures criss-cross over various boundaries, most significantly nation-state boundaries. These authors present and interpret stories of human travel that involve both voluntary migration and tourism and involuntary forced displacements experienced by refugees after wars and genocides. In the words of the editor, Sabine Marschall:
More specifically, this volume examines the intersection of travel and migration through the analytical lens of memory. Personal and collective forms of memory drive return trips ‘home’ and many other types of touristic mobility by migrants and members of diaspora. (p. 3)
The editor also locates the book within the context of memory studies as a growing field of research and intellectual enquiry over the past two decades and the recent constitution of the International Memory Studies Association. The pioneering work of Pierre Nora and his conceptualization of lieux de memoires (sites of memory) is acknowledged, but this book aims to go beyond Nora to stress the empirical and conceptual importance of human mobility across sites and spaces. Many of the authors follow the arguments of Astrid Erll (2011) and Ann Rigney (2005) for the need to analyse the ‘dynamics of memory’ expressed through ‘travelling memory’ (p. 18). Significantly, the book not only focuses on departures away from ‘homelands’ and efforts to live in new ‘hostlands’ but also explores various forms of return travel by first and second generations and their differing memory practices. There is therefore an explicitly transnational focus, which draws on personalized memories and how they historically intertwine with cultural and other collective patterns. While forms of mobility between homelands and hostlands are described, there is also an important stress on ‘imaginary returns’ that most people cultivate prior to directly experiencing the actual return to a prior homeland. The book’s central argument is described by the editor as:
Memory mediates between past and present, home and hostland, as those who return – provisionally or permanently – systematically search for what is familiar and traces of their remembered past and compare what they see with what they recall. The re-counter of home and its accustomed places and social relations can be a profoundly significant experience for migrants, resulting in shifts of consciousness and their sense of identity and belongings. (p. 10)
The editor provides a solid introduction with a literature survey that is interdisciplinary and sensitive in its approach. But the assertion that memories are ‘the foundation of individual and group identity, as well as the person’s consciousness and sense of self’ (p. 3) is debateable. In my view, memories are profoundly involved in identity formation; however, they are not ‘foundations’ but traces of how the ‘intersubjective’ (social) and ‘intrapsychic’ (drives) intersect to frame remembering, forgetting, and silencing into patterns of memory. Nevertheless, Marschall’s (2017) prior work has usefully involved ‘homecoming frameworks’ and a range of conceptions of ‘home’ that continue to be illustrated in this edited collection. The pain and/or joys of home and other emotional dimensions that suffuse movements – away from or back to home – is discussed in creative ways by the editor and many of the volume’s authors. The book also aims to address a lacuna involving how:
Neither tourism authorities nor academic scholars have paid attention to the volume, types, distinct characteristics and effects of migrant and diaspora travel (apart from home visits) and especially the ways in which their touristic contribution might differ from those of other tourists. (p. 17)
The book is clearly structured with introductory and concluding chapters by the editor and 11 articles written by authors who are themselves migrants or members of various diasporic networks across the globe. The articles are grouped into a first section that focuses on memory practises in former homes and homelands and a second section that explores forms of return to places of personal, family or cultural significance to migrants, refugees and members of diaspora. There are inevitable overlaps across sections as authors grapple with the ways in which memories are configured and mediated through the past/present and personal/collective dynamics and border crossing travels.
The first chapter by Rosie Roberts provides an interesting account of ‘travelling memories’ and, contrary to the fixed ways in which boundaries tend to be defined, her emphasis on the ‘fluidity of boundaries’ highlights people’s ‘in-process’ negotiating of their senses of place and identities. Roberts also asserts that ‘travelling memories are always lived locally’ (p. 36), through the ways people need to anchor themselves in spaces to meet various needs, wants and desires. In a similar vein, other authors focus on material culture, such as Carel Bertram’s exploration of Armenian food and meals in several contexts being imagined as having ‘dinner in the homeland’ (p. 189).
Several of the contributors also draw on insights from leading scholars. For example, Burcu Cevik-Compiegne and Josef Ploner provide a compelling account of ‘revisiting Gallipoli’ by several generations in Australia. The authors make useful references to Paul Ricoeur and Homi Bhaha and deploy James Clifford’s argument that ‘diaspora is different from travel, diaspora discourses bend together both roots and routes to construct “alternative public spheres” and forms of identification outside the space of the nation-states or homelands’ (p. 100). And Bertam Gordon’s account of war memories and tourist practises in France draws on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘post-memory’, which was originally conceived in relation to Holocaust first- and second-generation transmission of memories. Gordon rightly argues that post-memories have an extensive impact in the lives of many second generations after other genocides, wars and forms of mass violence. Moreover, the conceptual frame ‘memoryscapes’ is increasingly used to think through the intricate relationships between various spaces and their framing influence on memories. Farid Miah and Russel King, in their account of Bangladeshi migrants in Britain, and Nilay Kilnic and King’s analysis of Turkish migration to Germany provide compelling examples of memoryscapes and their impact across migrant generations.
On self-reflexive practises, I especially liked the honesty reflected by Aaron Maizel in his expression of generational differences in the meaning of Holocaust sites of violent displacement and killing. Moreover, his emphasis on the veracity of ‘silences of death’ is pervasive and still ‘haunts’ survivors and their children across differing places and periods of historic violence. Maizel uses the post-memory concept in a more nuanced fashion, allowing for agentic variations by all generations. The structuring of transmitted inter-generational legacies is potentially determining and the afterwardsness of trauma matters. Yet it is crucial that scholars do not to reduce emotional legacies to trauma; hence, I appreciated how many authors explored the wide range of difficult emotions and behaviour patterns transmitted across generations. Consequently, many authors give conceptual weight to the agency displayed by all generations. For example, how migrant generations dealt with their difficult legacies of a violent past in the present, especially when children faced parental prescriptions and desire to return to lost homelands was not always shared by their children. As much as survivor parents never want to transmit legacies of loss, pain and other difficult emotions, inevitably, despite their best parental efforts, they will unconsciously transmit unresolved psychic troubles. Briefly put, more research is required on the cultural and localized variations of intergenerational memory dynamics in different global contexts.
In addition, the recent work of Hirsch and other authors – some are in this book – also explore ways to analyse the ‘connective’ dimensions of memory which have expanded through the digital revolution of the past three decades. These technological innovations open up more opportunities to publicly disseminate memories and memorialize online, but these digital platforms also come with new ethical and political risks that memory studies scholars need to carefully consider.
In conclusion, this fascinating book has useful points with evocative personal stories that amplify their analysis of memory and mobility themes. It empirically provides further evidence to support the arguments of Astrid Erll and other memory theorists who place greater conceptual emphasis on movements and intersections between subjects, objects and spaces. However, there are unanswered questions that memory studies scholars need to work on, such as ways to explain how the entangled material and immaterial manifestations of travelling memories remain exposed to essentialist ethnocentric and racialized courses. Moreover, without sliding back into economic determinism, I think memory studies needs to pay more attention to the force of poverty and expanding economic inequalities in framing memory patterns. This applies to many countries in the global South, such as South Africa, where economic inequalities have deepened and widened since the beginning of post-apartheid democracy in 1994.