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Paper short abstract:

Memories migrate together with the people who carry them. Migrants’ long journeys confront long-held memories of past contacts both among the migrants’ themselves and the people amidst whom they live, work or happen to reside.

Paper long abstract:

Long Journeys, African Migrants on the Road is the title of a volume Robert McKenzie and I co-edited for Brill which will appear in the Spring of 2013. The volume focuses on migrants' narratives of their own migratory process or project , most narratives being uttered and recorded on the road, on the places of transit and temporary, residence. Throughout, the impact of accumulated individual and social memory of migration impacts with the migrants' own narratives and those of the people among whom they live, work or happen to reside. Particular care and sense of responsibility, surrounds the recording of such migrant testimonies as they offer precious insights on the making and unmaking of human memory, and on its shifting representations of migration according to different time and place. Migrant memories are testimonies where what is to be challenged is not the validity of the testimony itself, but the ability to provide the kind of listening context which is necessary to receive, in A. Sayad's terms, what continues to be at the perilous junction between the sacred and the prohibited.