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- Convenors:
-
Tsypylma Darieva
(ZOiS, Centre for East European and international Studies, Berlin Humboldt University Berlin)
Riina Isotalo (University of Helsinki)
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- Discussant:
-
Anders Stefansson
(University of Copenhagen)
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 0.24
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
Homecomings and returns recently referred to 'silent migration' seem to be increasingly significant for global mobility. The question is how homecomings become visible in legal, cultural and social life of both home and host lands. How do returnees modify the public space in a new old home?
Long Abstract:
Homecomings and returns recently referred to 'silent migration' and 'structurally invisible' movements (Stefansson 2004) seem to be increasingly significant for global mobility (Levitt 2007) as an emotive moment in a migrant's life cycle or as an imaginative project based on diasporic memories of expulsion. Homecoming and return produce diverse long- and short-term visits: heritage tourism, sacred journey, repatriation, work contract, remittances, and political activities of many levels. Not only people are involved in these processes but also commodities, soil, bones, stones and artefacts. On one hand we deal with the process of de-mythologising the myth of return, on the other hand with the de-diasporisation of transnational belonging.
This workshop sheds light on intersections and controversies of 'return' and 'homecoming' by problematising the interplay between multi-placement and displacement and by questioning the issue of structural invisibility of homecomings. The question is how return migration and homecoming become visible in legal, cultural and social life of both home and host lands. How do 'homecomings' as 'future projects' redefine the sense of place, the relations between migrants and the real or symbolic homeland? How do people relate 'homecoming' to repatriations directed to areas other than those considered 'home'? How do returnees change and modify the public space in a new old home? We welcome papers based on ethnographies as well as theoretically informed contributions on homecoming and return in transnational age.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how nostalgia for the homeland is sometimes transferred to the children of migrants and can lead to ‘roots-migration’, the relocation of the second generation to the country of origin. It describes how notions of ‘roots’ and belonging change once the idealised homeland transforms from imagined to real.
Paper long abstract:
Homecomings among migrants have usually been discussed in relation to first generation migrants, many of whom see the return to their homeland as primary goal of migration and orient their lives entirely towards the return, not only by way of concrete investments such as the acquisition of land in the village of origin, but also through the discursive celebration of nostalgia for the homeland. This paper discusses the impact which these nostalgic relations and lively transnational connections to the homeland have on members of the second generation, the children of migrants born in the host country. Drawing on research among second-generation Italians in Switzerland and southern Italy, and expanding upon theories of transnationalism, the paper illustrates how the parents' nostalgia for the homeland is sometimes transferred to the second generation. This nostalgia, coupled with lively transnational relations, leads some members of the second generation to relocate there, a phenomenon I conceptualise as 'roots-migration'. However, once they settle in southern Italy, the realities they encounter sometimes dramatically contrast the idealised images of the homeland constructed by their parents and reconfirmed during the short holiday visits during childhood. The paper describes how the second generation deals with the discrepancies between their images of the homeland prior to migration and the actual realities they meet once they settle there. Furthermore, it explores how notions of belonging and 'roots' can be constructed and reified by nostalgia for the homeland, and how 'roots' can be lost when the homeland is transformed from imagined to real.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will delve into a systematic analysis on the interplay between the return migrations and homecomings. It will focus on the selection of criteria that would allow to distinguish between the two entangled phenomena. The paper will be based on available empirical data and research on return migration.
Paper long abstract:
the paper will delve into a systematic analysis on the interplay between the return migrations and homecomings. It will begin with presentation of the wider context of the discussed phenomena, i.e., that of globalization and how this process augments frequent transfers between numerous localities, and the development of transnational spaces. This will be followed by recollection of the noticed forms of return migrations; the issue of the return migrations' registration will also be addressed. The paper will focus on the selection of criteria that would allow to distinguish between the two entangled phenomena. The paper will be based on available empirical data and research on return migration.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will deal with the “homecoming” of the Croats from Serbia into Croatia after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991. It will discuss the redefinitions of home, homeland, and belonging of the migrants in the process of their incorporation into Croatian society.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation will deal with the "return" of "(co-)ethnic migrants" into their "ethnic homeland". Co-ethnic migrations were engendered by the reconfiguration of political landscape after major 20th century-wars and the demise of the communist regime in Europe at the end of the last century. Both of these resulted in transitions from multinational empires or states to new nation-states in which some ethnic groups were overnight transformed into national minorities. Many of them resettled - more or less forcibly - in their "ethnic homelands", that is in the countries in which their ethnicity represents the majority of the population. The list of such population displacements in the European history can hardly be exhausted (to name just a few: during and after World War I, Balkan Muslims and Greeks were exchanging their areas of settlement; after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the German Kaiserreich and the Soviet Union ethnic Germans from those areas resettled in Germany, etc.).
In particular this paper will deal with the "homecoming", i. e. the resettlement of the Croats from Serbia in Croatia after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991. Did they indeed "return home" as the State apparatus put it? Or was their "return" controversial and their expectations of their new homeland deceived? How did they, in the process of incorporation into the Croatian society, redefine their sense of belonging and their relationship to the homeland where they came from (their real homeland) and the homeland they settled in (previously the symbolic homeland)?
Paper short abstract:
This ethnographic paper explores some of the contextually contingent forms that the cultural interventions to village life that displaced Bosnians make in their homecomings. The villages themselves are conceptualised as 'non-places' rendered as such by domicide and the contradictions of post-war policy.
Paper long abstract:
The legacy of the Dayton Peace Agreement that brought an end to war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been contradictory, simultaneously providing incentives for displaced people to reclaim property but not to 'sustainably' return. Rather, return is often a dynamic and open-ended process that may extend over long periods of time and may involve mobility between multiple places (Richmond, 1996). Consequently, in many cases villages have developed 'non-place' qualities. Resembling the airport lounge, they are more akin to sites of traveling than sites of dwelling. They are characterized increasingly by a deterritorialization of the relationship between place, culture and identity. And, the emerging social and material forms of village life are significantly extra-locally defined, as newly implanted 'historic' local cultural references compete alongside an array, or in Auge's terms, an 'excess' of the symbols of international aid donors, alien religious architectures and rememberences of diasporic communities. This ethnographic paper explores the Bosnian village homecomings of displaced Bosnian villagers, both Bosniac and Serb, now residing in Australia. In particular, it argues that the forms that the cultural interventions they make in contemporary village life are contingent upon the contrasting social conditions of their displacement. In this case a comparison is drawn between welfare dependent people subjected significantly to Australia's program of multicultural immigration management, participants in 'Bosnian Virtual Villages' and a young Bosnian middle-class that valorizes the cosmoplitanizing dimensions of the refugee experience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses homecoming in relation to the redevelopment of Protea Village, a neighbourhood in Cape Town razed during apartheid. It traces how activities related to the return have resulted in new connections being forged between the returnees and the current residents.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses homecoming in relation to the redevelopment of Protea Village, a neighbourhood in Cape Town that was razed during apartheid. Former residents, who were forcibly resettled in townships on the outskirts of the city, won their land back through the land restitution programme in 2006. They are in the process of planning the redevelopment of the area to which eighty-six families will return. Given the location of Protea Village, in a prosperous neighbourhood, on the doorstep of the internationally renowned Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, the planned return of the community is anything but silent or 'structurally invisible' (Stefansson 2004). On the one hand, those who support it hail the proposed redevelopment as a chance to right wrongs of the past; to reverse the spatial legacy of apartheid and to put the 'new' democratic South Africa into practice. On the other hand, some of the current residents in the surrounding areas contest the redevelopment, and have taken the former residents to court. While relations between some former and current residents are thus tense, the paper shows how outside of formal processes, various activities and events related to the return - an on-going process with both abstract and concrete stages - have resulted in new connections being forged between the returnees and the current residents. In these new relationships and linkages, 'homecoming' is significant as a highly emotive category that both former and current residents can relate to.
Paper short abstract:
Looking at recent impact of the US American Armenian diaspora on the local society in Armenia this paper will focus on interplay between a nostalgic homecomings and pragmatic development programmes.
Paper long abstract:
Looking at the recent impact of the US American Armenian diaspora on the local society in Armenia this paper will focus on interplay between nostalgic homecomings and pragmatic development programmes. In this case we deal with members of an established and "rich" Western diaspora who "move" to Armenia for temporal visits keeping their strong ties to the US adopted homeland. By transferring economic and social capital into a poor land the Armenian Americans get a feeling to be re-incorporated into the sacred homeland, but in very different ways. One example of such transnational incorporation into the Armenian society is a successful environmental project on the reforestation of the Armenian landscape. The motivating forces in the decision to invest in Armenia, seem to be diversifed, whereby not only a national patriotism but also the idea to reconnect a lost homeland to the global environmental politics, as well as economic and individual interests nourish the idea of a symbolic return. The question is to waht extend and how do transnational returnees reshape the public space in a postsocialist society and what kind of relationships are establishing between newcomers and locals beyond the ethnic and cultural intimacy?