Download Free Remembering Home In A Time Of Mobility Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Remembering Home In A Time Of Mobility and write the review.

Memory, nostalgia and melancholy have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. Numerous critics of globalisation, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism have posited an overwhelming feeling of homelessness not only among people who have been displaced from their original home/lands, but also among those who feel estranged from their places of origin due to rapid social change or environmental decline. Arguably, homesickness is prevalent in today’s developed world, and can be – and sometimes indeed is – felt even for times and places unrelated to someone’s personal roots. Memory has been mobilised to justify recent conflicts, to question mainstream interpretations of past events, or to demand compensation for the suffering of earlier generations. Nostalgia has been employed as a “utopia in reverse”, revealing more about our unattainable “ideal present”, than about the elusive “lost” past it invokes. A corollary of nostalgia in the late modern politics of loss, melancholy has been a way of dis-identifying from both the horrors of recent history, and the growing insecurities of the present. The volume raises complex questions related to the ways people have coped with displacement and time-space compression, arguably the two most manifest symptoms of late modernity. How do we grapple with the traumatic experience of the loss of home? What strategies do we use, and what is their underlying politics? How do they intersect with identity positions, such as gender, class and sexuality? How might they contribute to the preservation of national cultures? How has our understanding of home changed in a time of mobility and flow? Spanning multiple Eurasian and Northern American cultural contexts, the book is of interest to an international academic readership within the fields of cultural studies, memory studies, gender studies, literature, art, performance, film and media studies.
With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.
"This collection explores the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking across Europe in flux. It brings together scholars from Spain to Estonia, Hungary to Britain, in order to trace European filmmakers' diverse responses to the interlinked upheavals and emergencies of the past three decades."--
Mosaic Fictions is the first book-length critical analysis of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. Exploring published and archival writings, the book focuses on the extensive contributions of Jewish Canadian authors as they articulate the stakes of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in the language of a nascent North American multiculturalism. Placing Jewish Canadian writers within overlapping North American networks of Jewish, Black, immigrant, female, and queer writers challenges the national distinctions that dominate current critical approaches to Anglophone Spanish Civil War literature. Reframing the narrative of Spain’s noble but tragic struggle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the book demonstrates how marginalized North American supporters of the Spanish Republic crafted narratives of inclusive citizenship amidst a national crisis not entirely their own. Mosaic Fictions examines texts composed between the war’s outbreak and the present to illuminate the integral connections between Canada’s developing national identity and global leftist action.
Gender and love are so intimately interconnected that it sometimes seems as though they bring each other into being. But their relationship is shifting as human society develops new understandings of identity, gender and the self. The chapters in this volume explore the convoluted and ever-changing nature of love, gender and identity from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, bearing testimony to the perennial appeal of this field of inquiry. There are chapters on the historical constructions of love and gender; the philosophical aspects; the faultlines in twenty-first-century heteronormativity; and the challenges of love from and within the margins. Gender and love are interdisciplinary and this volume will appeal to scholars from all disciplinary protocols.
Amy Bovaird suffers from Retinitis Pigmentosa, a hereditary eye disease that progressively steals her vision. Unwilling to accept that she is truly losing her eyesight, Amy resists when the Bureau of Blindness schedules a mobility specialist to train her to use a white cane. Mobility Matters: Stepping Out in Faith chronicles a partnership between Bovaird and her blind instructor as she begins to navigate using a whole new system of "seeing." Will her faith prove strong enough to allow her to move forward and accept herself as she is?
This volume focuses on the process of return migration, from a holistic and policy-oriented perspective. Studies in return migration, which remains a vibrant field for academics, researchers, and policy-makers, have provided a large body of knowledge on particular issues, but generally fall along two lines: they are either broad macro analyses and models (especially economic ones) or narrow ethnographic views (anthropological, sociological, or psychological). This volume attempts to chart a course between these two approaches, combining returning migrants’ life trajectories, as seen by themselves, with analysis of the structural processes that have taken place in the last three decades in Europe and in Poland, as a new EU country. In analyzing the social and cultural changes reflected in the biographies of returning migrants, the author uses a framework based on an original synthesis of Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological approach, focusing on the returnees’ “life words,” with the social realism of Margaret Archer, focusing on the concerns and projects of individuals interacting with social and cultural structures.
This book explores the formative role of mobilities in the production of our close relationships, proposing that the tracks—both literal and figurative— we lay down in the process play a crucial role in generating and sustaining intimacy. Working with diaries, journals and literary texts from the mid- to late-twentieth century, the book pursues this thesis through three phases of the lifecourse: courtship (broadly defined), the middle years of long-term relationships and bereavement. Building upon the author’s recent research on automobility, the text’s case studies reveal the crucial role played by many different types of transport—including walking—in defining our most enduring relationships. Conceptually, the book draws upon the writings of the philosopher, Henri Bergson, the anthropologist, Tim Ingold and the geographer, David Seamon, engaging with topical debates in cultural and emotional geography (especially work on landscape, memory and mourning), mobilities studies and critical love studies.
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.
This is a study on the creative appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by mobile Africans and the communities to which they belong, home and away. With a focus on Cameroonian migrants from Pinyin and Mankon who are currently living in Cape Town and the Netherlands, this book examines the workings of the social fabric of mobile communities. It sheds light on how these communities are crafting lives for themselves in the host country and simultaneously linking up with the home country thanks to advances in ICTs and road and air transport. ICTs and mobilities have complemented social relational interaction and provide migrants today with opportunities to partake in cultural practices that express their Pinyin-ness and Mankon-ness. Pinyin and Mankon migrants are still as rooted in the past as they are in the present. They were born into a community with its own sense of home, moral ethos and cultural pride but live in a context of accelerated ICTs and mobility that is fast changing the way they live their lives. Drawing on this detailed ethnographic case study and related literature, Henrietta Nyamnjoh argues that while ICTs continue to enhance mobility for those who move and for those who stay put, they have become inextricably linked in forging networks and reconfiguring existing ones. Contrary to earlier studies that predicted radical social change and the passing of traditional societies in the face of new technologies, ICTs have been appropriated to enhance the workings of existing social relations and ways of life while simultaneously pointing to new directions in ever more creative and innovative ways.