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  • Gender, Culture, and Migration
  • Marilyn Barber (bio)
A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson. Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 388 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-7190-7132-1(cl); 0-7190-7133-X (pb).
Grace Kyungwon Hong. The Ruptures of American Capitalism: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labour. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. vii–xxxiv + 190 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-8166-4634-1 (pb).
Franca Iacovetta. Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. ix–xiii + 370 pp.; ISBN-10: 1-897071-11-6 (pb).
Linda McDowell. Hard Labour: The Forgotten Voices of Latvian Migrant Volunteer Workers. London: UCL Press, 2005. vii–xv + 219 pp.; ISBN-10: 1-84472-020-9 (pb).
Erica Rand. The Ellis Island Snow Globe. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ix–xvii + 339 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-8223-5578-6 (cl); 0-8223-3591-3 (pb).

These books contribute to interpretations of gender, culture, and migration in the era after World War II from quite different perspectives. Two examine the migrant experience; one focuses on institutional and state interventions to integrate and control migrants; one explores museum representations of migration; and one analyzes how literary texts challenge theories of capitalism. They cross disciplinary as well as geographical boundaries. The authors are three historians, a geographer, a professor of art and visual culture, and a literary scholar. They draw upon a variety of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches but all confirm the importance of gender for understanding issues associated with migration.

Hard Labour, Ten Pound Poms and Gatekeepers probe the construction and meaning of identity during an era shaped by war displacement and cold war fears. McDowell and Hammerton and Thomson turn to oral interviews to explore the “forgotten voices” of migrants who because of their gender or their ethnicity have been invisible in the historical record. For McDowell, the forgotten migrants are the Latvian women from displaced persons camps within German territory who during the years 1946 to 1949 [End Page 210] chose exile in the United Kingdom rather than returning to a homeland that was under the control of the Soviet Union. She argues that their story is not known in part because the voices of women, and especially young women, tend to be silenced in the dominant version of cultural memory. Hammerton and Thomson study the life stories of voluntary British migrants who participated in what they describe as “one of the largest planned migrations of the twentieth century,” the ten pound assisted passage scheme that during the quarter century after the war enticed over 360,000 people from the United Kingdom to seek a new life in Australia (9). They explain that these migrants have been neglected in spite of their numerical dominance because their Britishness made them invisible at a time when the term “immigrant” became identified with the new waves of non-English-speaking migrants that gradually transformed Australia. In Gatekeepers Iacovetta examines the Canadian experience of postwar migration, focusing on the encounters between European newcomers and an impressive range of Canadian gatekeepers that included institutional representatives, social workers, psychiatrists, and mental health experts as well as government officials and newspaper reporters. While Hard Labour and Ten Pound Poms highlight the migrants’ own sense of identity and belonging, the emphasis in Gatekeepers is primarily on the political, social, gender, and sexual assumptions underpinning the responses of the Canadian gatekeepers concerned about community and national identity. Interestingly, apart from one photograph, brief mentions of war brides and a statistical reference that confirms their numerical importance, British migrants are invisible in Gatekeepers; the newcomers that are the subject of Iacovetta’s attention are from continental Europe.

In explaining the oral history methodology at the core of their investigations, McDowell and Hammerton and Thomson reflect specifically on issues of memory and identity. They emphasize that personal life stories are always a selective rendering of experience and that cultural memories represent a negotiation between past and present. McDowell interviewed twenty-five Latvian women who came to England in their late teens or early twenties but were in their seventies and eighties at the time of the interview. While McDowell retained...

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