Movement, Migration and Refugees NUBS 2.05
Jul 06, 2023 13:30 - 15:00(Europe/London)
20230706T1330 20230706T1500 Europe/London 7.2. Transmission and emotion NUBS 2.05 MSA Conference Newcastle 2023 conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
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Restorying Migration: Displacement, Memory and Counter-histories in Comics Form
Individual paperMovement, Migration and Refugees 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/06 12:30:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 14:00:00 UTC
The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War in 1923, ratified the first forced population exchange in modern history, displacing over 1.5 Muslims and Orthodox Christians between Greece and Turkey. In the aftermath of World War II, this Treaty provided a model for forced population transfers in other parts of the world: for instance, East Germany, India and Pakistan and Palestine. While sharing many underlyingly characteristics, the experiences from these forced migrations have rarely been brought together in a comparative framework. By drawing attention to three graphic narratives: Small Lives by Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou; This Side, that Side curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh; and Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq, this paper probes into the legacies of forced displacement, in Europe and beyond. The aims of the paper are twofold: firstly, by drawing attention to the ways in which comics can act as a form of archiving the everyday and recollecting marginalized voices, the paper argues for comparative histories of migration as a means to turn current migration crisis narratives into the moments of critique. Secondly, it shows the ways in which critical engagement with comics form as a way of story-telling can provide tools for (re-)shaping our understanding of forced migration.
Presenters
KG
Kristina Gedgaudaite
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow At The University Of Amsterdam, University Of Amsterdam
The role of digital and traditional media in shaping cultural memory of deported illegal immigrants
Individual paperMovement, Migration and Refugees 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/06 12:30:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 14:00:00 UTC
This study integrates memory studies with communication studies. It aims to examine the ways different actors operate in traditional and digital media when they participate in memory work and in shaping cultural memory narratives. The case study I focus on is a relatively obscure chapter in the Israeli collective memory that took place between 1946-1949: the capture of Jewish immigrants on their way to pre-state Israel, their deportation to displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and their lives in the camps.
The study aims to contribute to the sub-discipline of media and memory by answering questions about cultural memory, memory work, and intergenerational memory. Furthermore, it aspires to highlight commemorative and non-commemorative practices in mnemonically oriented media platforms. Also, it aims to examine the ways in which the same past events are told and mentioned in different arenas and by different memory mediators. It suggests that the unique characteristics of each media platform influence the memory work done within it. 
This study's innovation is in three key aspects. First, as mentioned, it turns the spotlight on a relatively less discussed chapter in the Israeli collective memory. Second, it examines three platforms in which cultural memory is shaped and different agents of memory operate: newspapers, a Facebook group, and literary works. These platforms are very different from each other, but they do have something in common. Thirdly, the study is based on four research and analysis methods that complement each other: interpretive-thematic content analysis, narrative content analysis, netnography, and interviews - a methodological combination that is relatively uncommon in memory studies. 
The research has several foci. The first is traditional media. I conduct an interpretive-thematic content analysis of the journalistic coverage of the Cyprus exile in two daily newspapers in real-time and over the years. Another focus is digital media. I conduct content analysis (partly interpretive-thematic, partly narrative) and a netnographic analysis of a Facebook group dedicated to the topic. The research will also include in-depth interviews with members who are first, second and third generation of Cypriot exiles. A third focus is literary works from different genres written about this topic during the exile and over the years, analyzed using the interpretative-thematic approach.
I would like to elaborate on digital media and the analysis of the Facebook group named "Cyprus Immigrants Organization", whose members are Cypriot exiles and mostly their descendants, and discuss initial findings. Memory work within this group can be classified into four main categories: 1. "Putting the pieces together": posts that aim to search for family information or assist others in getting theirs. 2. "Remembering and reminding": members discuss the commemoration of this exile, suggest different acts, and share initiatives. 3. "I am part of the story": posts that combine personal and collective memory. 4. "It was like that": posts that aim to shape a coherent narrative of this historical phenomenon as a story of outstanding bravery and resourcefulness, or on the contrary, as a story of defeat and shattered dreams.
Presenters
AK
Ayelet Klein Cohen
PhD Student, Department Of Communication, Ben Gurion University Of The Negev
Transcultural Memory Transmission: Arab and Indian Jews in Comparative Perspective
Individual paperMovement, Migration and Refugees 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/05 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 22:00:00 UTC
Recently, there has been a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of Jewish studies and postcolonial studies, particularly when it comes to questions of exile, diaspora, and memory, in the face of rising antisemitism and Islamophobia (Cheyette, 2013; Goetschel and Quayson, 2016). Iraqi-Israeli American scholar Ella Shohat (2017) has highlighted how the figure of the 'Arab-Jew' crosses these two disciplinary fields and challenges both forms of racism. The hyphenation of 'Arab-Jew' calls into question the way in which these two identities have been opposed, and often reduced to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than being seen as co-constitutive and key to understanding Jewish-Muslim interactions in the Middle East and North Africa (Everett and Vince, 2020). 
It was in the context of Tunisian, and specifically Djerban, Jews that the figure of the 'Arab Jew' was first developed (Memmi, 1974; Udovitch, Valensi, and Perez, 1984), before Shohat hyphenated the term and applied it to the Iraqi-Israeli context. Similarly, it was in relation to the Jews of Kerala that Indo-Judaic Studies emerged (Katz and Goldberg, 1993), a field that also encompasses scholarship on the Bene Israeli Jews of Konkan and Baghdadi Jews in Kolkata and Mumbai (see Katz, 2000). Writing about 'ritual enactments' of Jews from Kerala, around the time when postcolonial studies was establishing itself as a discipline, Nathan Katz and Ellen Goldberg observed that: 'no one has yet described Cochini [sic] identity as both fully Indian and fully Jewish. In part this problem is due to the disciplinary fields of study found in western universities, fields that inelegantly divide up the world into an East and a West' (1990: 199). Since then, there has been more recognition of cross-fertilisation among the fields of postcolonial and Jewish studies, in dialogue with transcultural memory studies, within a wider intersectional move to decolonize (Cheyette, 2017), largely thanks to Shohat's scholarship on the 'Arab-Jew' (2017).
Yet the figures of the 'Arab-Jew' and the 'Indian-Jew' have not yet been brought into dialogue, despite the ways in which they each represent 'Jewish/postcolonial diasporas' (Cheyette, 2007) and relate to memory preservation or transmission. Moreover, they both challenge Eurocentric or Zionist conceptualisations of Jewish identity seen through the lens of Ashkenazi memory, with an emphasis on the Shoah (Zertal, 2005), or diaspora versus Israeli 'homeland', premised on the 'negation of exile' (Raz-Krakotzkin, 2013). In the context of decolonisation, Zionism, and partition (India/Palestine), these comparative figures of exile challenge 'separatist imagination' (Hochberg, 2007), troubling fixed identities and suggesting alternative frameworks of coexistence.
This paper will hone in on the Jews of Kerala (India) and the island of Djerba (Tunisia); while there is still a small Jewish community in Djerba, only a handful of Jews remain in Kerala. Adopting a comparative approach to Indian Jews and Arab Jews in postcolonial perspective, the article will analyse how Jewish memory in and of Djerba and Kerala is preserved and transmitted through documentaries, blogs, and social media outlets.
Presenters Rebekah Vince
Lecturer In French, Queen Mary University Of London
Refuge​es narratives in some contemporary documentaries​
Individual paperMovement, Migration and Refugees 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/05 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 22:00:00 UTC
We deal with an "invisible" reality even though its existence is not completely unknown. Many parts of the planet are surrounded by walls or insurmountable barriers. Concrete, barbed wires, electric fences, and armored sentry boxes that prevent fleeing individuals from finding hospitality, that is, from finding refuge in the broad sense of the word. In his latest book, Strangers at Our Door, Zygmunt Bauman quotes Don Flynn - then director of the Migrants' Rights Network - when he told The Guardian that images of refugees on Greek islands - of drowned children's corpses; of people violently repressed at borders or of migrants/refugees in miserable conditions in confinement (or concentration?) camps - will "constitute, for many, the permanent memories of the past". 
Our time is that of the loss of territories, of the loss of ties, of ballasts, of bonds and of belonging. Our times are those in which the waters of a sea - synonymous with exchange between Europe, Africa, and Asia, as suggested by the Latin origin of "Mediterraneus" i.e. "Between lands", - become an open-air grave. Tropical forests, with their characteristic exoticism and exuberance, become insurmountable traps for those who, fleeing, try to cross them on foot. Rivers whose currents bring shipwrecked bodies to their banks. And so, geopolitical borders or natural barriers by land, water or air justify an incessant piling up of corpses. There is a passivity (or ignorance) of a great part of humanity towards these tragedies that happen here and now, in real time, and it is in this sense that I refer to what I suggest calling an "amnesia of the present time," as paradoxical as it may sound.
The world is organized in artificial geopolitical borders that subdivide the planet into "pieces": imaginary lines, territories ruled solely and exclusively by economic, geographical, and social powers. We are ruled by laws that allow the arbitrary imprisonment of refugee adults and children (often unaccompanied), we witness the construction of walls and installation of electric wire fences at borders, laws that make the power to "come and go" a privilege, laws that allow the confinement of human beings in refugee camps, distant and invisible from the rest of the world, camps that are not even represented on maps, thus avoiding greater "inconvenience": if we don't see them, we can even assume they don't exist, right?
We are legislated by what I call a "necrodiplomacy" where treaties and agreements prevent a basic universal right: the welcoming of individuals at risk. Where do "human rights" apply? Who would be human enough to be worthy of such rights? 
My proposal is to analyze a filmic corpus dedicated to the theme of contemporary forced displacement, contributing to a reflection that goes against the current of a "historical amnesia", the silencing, the invisibility, and the passivity with which the majority of society in the 21st century deals with this catastrophic situation caused by forced displacement. Taking as corpus some contemporary documentaries, such as Cries from Syria, 2017; Fuoco in mare (2016), Human flow (2017) and Purple Sea (2020), I will analyze how the theme of forced displacement is represented in such productions, how the protagonism of individuals in refuge situation is conferred, or not. Even with a growing audiovisual production – some of it made by the refugees themselves – these characters are still silenced, invisible and/or unreachable. To this must be added the fact that the drama of refuge is devoid of a memory policy and, even worse, individuals on the run take little, almost nothing - or simply nothing - with them, their voice (their testimony), their image and their memory being their greatest assets, inestimable goods that must be preserved. I will not assume a reflection focused on the Brazilian perspective precisely to be able to analyze this narrative without geographical delimitations, but rather as a chronic problem of society on a global scale. The so-called globalized world is a world in tatters. 
Some questions will guide my presentation: What kind of testimony are we talking about when we turn to this population spectrum? After all, would anyone be willing to listen/see such accounts? What is the circulation of such narratives? How can these productions be configured as testimonies of the greatest humanitarian tragedy of the history of mankind? I intend to contribute to a re-reading and a re-dimensioning of these audiovisual productions that, in my opinion, constitute - in sounds and images - relevant sources of research on the proposed theme. 
Aimé Césaire, in the text that I quoted at the beginning of this abstract, was prophetic, alerting us to an extremely current world view: a civilization incapable of solving its problems, incapable of seeing them and without principles, is a sick and dying civilization. 
Presenters Ana Carolina De Moura Delfim Maciel
De Mello Refugee's Chair President / UNHCR/UNICAMP, State University Of Campinas (Unicamp)
Lecturer in French
,
Queen Mary University of London
De Mello Refugee's Chair President / UNHCR/UNICAMP
,
State University of Campinas (Unicamp)
PhD student
,
Department of Communication, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam
,
University of Amsterdam
Spitzer Professor International Relations
,
City College of New York
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