Movement and memory are closely intertwined. Memories connect places, and preserve and establish new forms of social relations. The past takes a particularly prominent role in times of mobility and biographical rupture. Already, when setting off for another place, in the process of moving, hopes and imaginaries become reminiscences of lives lived before or in between. When stuck in a place or within a pattern of movement—as immobility represents a crucial dimension of mobility—we tend to dwell on memories of our former ways of life. In diasporic contexts, mnemonic images of ‘home’ prove to be especially pervasive, often implying a longing for—possibly never visited and virtual—faraway places. We could go on showing the myriad ways in which (im)mobility and memory are interrelated. Especially under today’s conditions of not only enhanced but also diversified mobility (see Vertovec 2007)—being not merely a manifestation of free ‘flows’ in an interconnected world, but also an expression of growing constraints, immobilities and inequalities (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013)—the interplay of movement and memory calls for closer inspection. The present volume takes up this task by assembling differing, yet pervasive, examples of how diverse patterns of (im)mobility (Salazar and Smart 2011) inform individual and collective mnemonic practices and how the latter in turn frame the ways in which (im)mobility is experienced. The different forms of lived and imagined (im)mobility with which the present volume engages include refugees remembering and ‘recreating’ in their settlements or during return journeys to homes from which they were expelled; post-socialist political elites glorifying and even embodying a foundational-nationalist past of nomadism in order to earn political points; and work migrants anticipating and framing their future ‘memory work’ 1 by carefully choosing mnemonic objects to accompany their uncertain journeys. We show in this volume that remembering—as well as forgetting or even ‘amnesia’—is actually a constitutive part of movement. Rather than conceptualizing memory or memories as being temporally located ‘before’ and ‘after’ mobility, we are interested in the mutual constitution of remembering and movement.
While going beyond methodological nationalism (Glick Schiller and Caglar 2011; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the related ‘sedentarist bias’ (Malkki 1992)—but still acknowledging the nation state’s persistent impact on movement and representations of the past—the book focuses on concrete mnemonic social practices and is built around the following main questions: What impact do different patterns of mobility have on memory practices and how do they possibly contribute to the emergence of new forms of remembering? When does memory become a resource and when a potential burden in situations of (im)mobility? How does mobility particularly frame—strengthen or unsettle—hegemonic national memories? In what ways do memories serve to re-establish old and create new (forms of) transnational social relations and identifications?
Memory and Mobility: A Retrospection and Outlook
Memory (as well as its counterpart, forgetting) has been primarily explored on a macro level in relation to hegemonic and static national history narratives (see Kidron 2009). Considerable scholarly interest has been directed at the political instrumentalization of the past, but this has neglected the quieter, everyday mnemonic practices that constitute the ‘living presence of the past’ (Kidron 2009, 8). Thus it is no surprise that the focus of much literature has been on exploring memory as bound to particular ‘places’—such as memorials or works of art—that figure as essential reference points for national narratives, as captured by Nora’s seminal concept of the lieu de mémoire (see Nora 1989). Nora argues that the linking of memory to places enables individuals to remember, since lieux de mémoire ‘are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age’ (12). Memory, we could say, has been tacitly thought of as bound to commemorative places and territories in general—in other words, as narratives conveying significant events and processes as well as identity or territorial claims. This understanding of memory, however, crucially occludes the fact that memory is also, if not even more so, provoked precisely by mobility (see Creet 2011, 5). 2
Explorations of memory—even when ‘decoupled’ from the materiality of particular places—have seldom been concerned with movement and mobility, and as such can be seen as an expression of a sedentarist bias. Speaking with Creet, ‘contemporary theories of memory have mostly considered memory in situ, and place itself as a stable, unchanging environment’ (Creet 2011, 4). Hence it is not surprising that memory studies and migration/mobility studies have generally remained two separate research fields with very little, if any, conversation between them. Migration and other forms of mobility have been peripheral in memory studies in a similar way to how memory has been a neglected topic in migration research.
As already indicated, memory has been studied first and foremost in the context of nation states and rarely in the context of migration, multilocality and transnationalism (for exceptions see, for example, Auchter 2013; Ballinger 2003; Bendix 2002; Berg and Eckstein 2015; Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004). A further notable exception in this regard has been the field of diaspora studies, which has significantly engaged with temporality, and the insight that collective memories of common origin and ‘homeland’ play a decisive role in constituting a diaspora in the first place (see Armbruster 2013; Cohen 2008; Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013).
Scholars have only recently started exploring transnational and transcultural dimensions of mnemonic processes; however, often their primary interest has been in the mobility of commemorative objects, practices and media (see Assmann and Conrad 2010; Bond and Rapson 2014), rather than the mnemonic agency of people whose lives are substantially marked by changing mobility regimes (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), such as labour migrants, refugees or members of diasporas. This focus on mobility in connection with commemorative objects and practices is also central in the special issue edited by Crownshow (2011), which deals with ‘transcultural memories’, particularly from a cultural studies perspective. Erll therein understands transcultural memory as a research perspective that is ‘directed towards mnemonic processes unfolding across and beyond cultures’ (2011, 9). She defines transcultural memory as ‘the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms and practices of memory, their continual “travels” and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders’ (11). In Crownshow’s collection, however, the focus remains on the mobility of artefacts and discourses, rather than on actual memory practices by mobile people ‘carrying’, creating and sharing memories across borders.
The edited volume History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation by Glynn and Kleist (2012) is another recent attempt to come to terms with the interrelation of memory and migration. It focuses on the link between narratives of the past and state (im)migration policies and discourses of (non-)belonging. It deals with the question of whether and in what way immigration has the potential to change hegemonic (state) narratives of history and demography, as well as how migrants themselves ‘navigate’ different mnemonic arenas (see also Hintermann and Johansson 2010). It highlights the fact that state narratives often evoke the image of the autochthonous and homogeneous—or at least ‘completed’ multicultural—nation and thereby exclude migrants’ ‘incorporation’ into the state narrative. While Glynn and Kleist (2012) focus on the important link between memory and (im)migration policies, their volume to a certain degree reproduces the binary of the society of origin and host society, which implies an image of migration as a one-way process and neglects the diversification and complexity of mobility patterns.
With the publication of the interdisciplinary volume by Creet and Kitzmann (2011), Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, the debate on memory and migration received an important impetus. On the ground of a thorough theoretical-historical assessment of why ‘place’ figures so prominently as the main ‘locus’ of memory in the seminal approaches—not only by Pierre Nora as already elaborated, but also in the works of Paul Ricoeur (2006) and Maurice Halbwachs (1980)—Creet (2011) primarily focuses on the ways in which we can explore ‘memory that has migrated or has been exiled from its local habitations’ (Creet 2011, 3). She argues that ‘migration rather than location is the condition of memory’, since ‘displacement intensifies our investments in memory’ (Creet 2011, 9–10).
In the present volume we take the exploration of the mutual constitution of memory and migration important steps further. Without neglecting the fate of ‘exiled memories’ in the terms of Creet (2011), we are primarily interested in how individuals and collectives act as mnemonic agents by engaging in memory practices in a context of (im)mobility and/or transnationalism. Hence, our engagement with memory and mobility here proceeds beyond the binary between objects/media and agents of memory often implicit in approaches to transnational memory (see Bond and Rapson 2014).
The chapters in this volume offer ethnographic insights into the ways in which memory practices using different mnemonic media enable us to make sense of and integrate experiences of (im)mobility across different times and places. Be it through photographs (see Lems and Alonso-Ray) or film (see Six-Hohenbalken), reinhabiting pre-exilic homes (see Üllen and Eastmond), through pseudo-historical performances (see Kürti), transgenerational mnemonic travels and gatherings (see Dąbrowska), by ‘domesticating space’ (see Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska) as well as transnational political activism (see Mapril), the case studies in this collection show how remembering—or anticipating the remembrance of—movement is an essential way in which we make sense of our lives and act as political subjects. By being particularly attentive to these agentive dimensions of mnemonic practice/‘memory work’, this volume engages in the actual ways of how, when and by which means individuals remember and communicate memories in contexts of various forms of (im)mobility.
By conceptually focusing on mobility instead of migration, which is the focus not only in Creet’s and Kitzmann’s (2011) volume but also in most of the literature already mentioned, we include a wide range of different types of movements such as forced mobility, labour migration, diaspora and transmigration as well as ideologies of historical mobility. While acknowledging the importance of the ‘mobility’ and ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (see Cresswell 2010; Scheller and Urry 2006) in the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, we join the anthropological critique of a simplifying ‘celebratory’ and ‘normalizing’ stance towards mobility (see Salazar and Smart 2011). As already mentioned, in this volume we aim to go beyond the binary of mobility and stasis and explore ways in which precisely immobility is also an essential aspect of contemporary mobility regimes (see Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Salazar and Smart 2011).
Finally, the prism of mobility allows for a more substantial engagement with temporality. Mobility specifically can be uniquely illuminating for exploring how indiv...