Paper short abstract:

Historical ethnography of migration from Europe to America draws on recorded oral history interviews that capture a range of senses and affects. A historical sensorium of migration with humans intertwined with things and Ellis Island is a vibrant memory object refracting (trans)national identities.

Paper long abstract:

Oral history interviews from The Ellis Island Oral History collection are the source of my historical ethnographic account of migration through affects and senses. The “histories as usual,” especially those focusing on immigration through Ellis Island, assign a particular structure of feeling to the Great Migration from Europe to America at the start of the twentieth century defined by sentimentalized hardship and grit of immigrant life. Rather, a more sensuous and nuanced tone emerges in the analysis of narrations recorded in these interviews. The sensory recall of individuals offers access to an inter-text mediating the sensorium that involved both human and nonhuman participation in this rich archive and provides an interpretive framework for transnational memories shaped through American symbols and experiences of transatlantic crossings. The narrations articulate a complex representation of active imagination that engaged the immigrants’ subjectivities as they shape identities and identity processes of both individuals and multiple communities they invoke. The ontologies that emerge in the interviews involve the world of humans intertwined with things, the material and immaterial objects (melodies), places and shifting temporalities through representational and non-representational dimensions, setting the tone and atmosphere. The “machinic” processing of immigrants was an ambience defining the experience of migration through the body and senses; in recalling the event of migration, the affects were manifested in the narrations. An interpretive close reading of particular interviews and an aggregative reading and analysis of groups of interviews are combined to draw on the experiences of Southern and Central Europeans in particular.