Sounds of the jungle: Re-humanizing the migrant

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais. The Jungle, strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses of illegality and violation of white suburbia. British mainstream media have either rendered the migrant voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders. Through the case study, Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS), we highlight how new media spaces can re-humanize the migrant, enabling them to tell their stories through narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance framing techniques of mainstream media, which dehumanize and silence the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies

Songs of Mobility and Belonging: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa’s Transfrontier Conservation Development

Western Maputaland is located in the borderlands of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. The combination of poverty, rural remoteness and exceptional ecological diversity has long made the region a target of conservationists and development planners, locating it centrally within the Usuthu-Tembe-Futi Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA). While driven by the rhetoric of ‘participatory biodiversity management’, which links environmental conservation with economic development, the fulfillment of the transboundary project remains dependent upon exogenous resources and authority, and conservation agencies are ambivalent towards local demands for self-determined development. This paper examines the politics of land in Western Maputaland, its position in local memories, and its foundation in spatial practices and cultural identities. More specifically, as conservation developments have affected women differently to men, my analysis focuses on the ways in which mobilities and gender intersect in a changing landscape, and how meanings given to varying mobilities through sound, song and performance inflect local experiences of land, spatiality and belonging. Building on narratives inspired by the revival of mouth-bows and the jews harp, once performed by young women as walking songs, but remembered now by elderly women only, the paper discusses how memories invoked through sounding in place and motion rehearse and revitalize senses of place. Its aim is ultimately to provide witness to transboundary conservation planners for a more culturally integrated and economically apposite reimagining of southern African borderlandscapes

Transnational transitional justice and reconciliation: the participation of conflict-generated diaspora in addressing the legacy of mass violence

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the role that conflict-generated diaspora communities can play in transitional justice and processes of reconciliation. The aim is to consider what potential there is for tapping into diaspora communities and the possible benefits this could have on diasporas themselves and on peacebuilding processes in the homeland. The goal is also to explore and reflect on ways in which reconciliatory attitudes can be encouraged among diaspora communities, as well as their participation in transnational activities. The paper begins by providing a brief overview of diasporas, followed by a discussion on relationships and attitudes within conflict-generated diaspora communities in the aftermath of violence. The paper then explores the various roles that diasporas can play in transitional justice, such as providing input to strategies and participating in established mechanisms; or mobilizing on their own to push for transitional justice measures. This is followed by a brief look at diaspora involvement in other processes of reconciliation, including dialogue and media initiatives. The paper then discusses how integration policies and outcomes in the hostland can influence the views of diasporas and their involvement with the homeland. The paper concludes with challenges related to diaspora participation and some overall reflections

Cenotaphs in Sound: Catastrophe, Memory, and Musical Memorials

Originally published at http://proceedings.eurosa.org/2/schmidt.pdfThis paper examines the peculiar status of musical compositions that are intended to serve as memorials of victims of political violence. It considers four examples of this genre: John Foulds' World Requiem (1923), Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Steve Reich's Different Trains (1988), and John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls (2002)

Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure

The history of the Maasai moves, land alienation and resistance in colonial British East Africa. In 1904, in order to make way for white settlers in what was to become Kenya, the Maasai were forcibly moved into two reserves, robbing them of the best part of their land in British East Africa. Using unique oral testimony and archival evidence, this book tells the true story behind the making of the 'White Highlands', and the repercussions of these events to the present day

Black Italianità: Citizenship and Belonging in the Black Mediterranean

This article discusses the fraught relationship between legal citizenship and Black belonging as depicted in the works of two Black Italian women writers. The protagonists in the short story “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) by Igiaba Scego and the novella Kkeywa: Storia di una bimba meticcia by Carla Macoggi resist multiple forms of dispossession and struggle to hold on to the autonomy of their self-identification and cultural attachments. Both Scego and Macoggi affirm the necessity to reclaim the power of self-definition, self-representation, and political agency when reckoning with the citizenship project and its inherent exclusions. Thus, these writings showcase the importance of studying the dynamic body of Black literature in Italian and offer us insight into some of the racialized, gendered, and religious negotiations of Italian sociopolitics for Black people navigating life throughout Italy and the Mediterranean.

The 'unseamed picture': conflicting narratives of women in the modern European past

This article arises from a personal journey through writing the history of women and gender in modern Europe. Other historians of Europe will no doubt recognise my experience of being pulled in different directions, between the general and the particular, the overarching interpretation and the closely researched case study, because it is part and parcel of being a 'Europeanist' someone with expertise in one part of the continent who is then almost honour-bound to be able to write about Europe as a whole, a task becoming increasingly difficult, maybe impossible, in view of the changing boundaries of Europe in modern geopolitics