Migration and place
Italian memories of North Queensland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2014.24Keywords:
Memories and narratives of migration, movement, emplacement, understanding of place, geographical, social and cultural reorientation and negotiation, Italian migrantsAbstract
Many memories and narratives of migration foreground the concepts of movement and emplacement. In this article, the concept of emplacement relates in particular to an understanding of place as a porous space in which social relations converge, meet, clash, change and evolve. At the same time, as argued by Massey, the social relations that make a certain place unique are not all included within the place itself. This is particularly true for migrants, whose emplacement cannot be understood independently from their transnational and translocal forms of knowledge and social relations. Thus emplacement here is understood as a complex process of geographical, social and cultural reorientation and negotiation. As spaces of complex and gradual emplacement, places are not rigidly delimited and defined. Nor are they simply connected to essentialised identities — for instance, through nostalgic memories and discourse. Rather, they are constantly influenced and modified by changes in social relations within and beyond the place itself.
References
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See, for instance, Ghassan Hage, ‘At home in the entrails of the west: Multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building’, in Helen Grace et al. (eds), Home/world: space, community and marginality in Sydney’s West (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1997); D. Massey ‘Imagining globalization: power-geometries of time-space’, in A. Brah, M. Hickman and M. Mac an Ghaill (eds), Global futures: Migration, environment and globalization (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999); J. Tomlison, Globalization and culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); S. Ahmed et al. (eds), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
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The project was supported by the University of the Sunshine Coast.
See, for instance, D. Conradson and A. Latham, ‘Transnational urbanism: Attending to everyday practices and mobilities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(2) (2005), 227–33; D. Featherstone, R. Phillips and J. Waters, ‘Introduction: Spatialities of transnational networks’, Global Networks 7(4) (2007), 383–391; G. Noble and S. Poynting, ‘White lines: The intercultural politics of everyday movement in social spaces’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31(5) (2010), 489–505; M. P. Smith, ‘Transnational urbanism revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(2) (2005), 235–44.
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The use of this term has been originally theorised in the fundamental work of the Italian ethnographer, anthropologist and historian Ernesto De Martino, and has recently been applied to the Italian Australian context by the author of this article (Embodying migrants, pp. 221–3) as well as by Ilaria Vanni. See in particular I. Vanni, ‘Oggetti Spaesati, unhomely belongings: Objects, migration and cultural apocalypses’, Cultural Studies Review 19(2) (2013), 150–74.
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See C. Dewhirst, C. Kennedy and F. Ricatti (eds), ‘150 years of Italians in Queensland’, Spunti e Ricerche, 24 (2009).
This is confirmed in many interviews, but also by the historical documents considered by Douglas. He notes, for instance, how in the 1950s, ‘a whole new contingent of immigrants was required each year, since few would return to cane cutting after finding alternative employment’ (From Italy to Ingham, p. 277).
Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p. 274.
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