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Reviewed by:
  • Memory and Migration: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies eds. by Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann
  • Sarah Jamal (bio)
Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, editors. Memory and Migration: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. U of Toronto P, 2011. 329 pp. ISBN 978-1442641297; $34.95.

People and communities move, and with them so do their memories. The most vivid memories can be triggered or even altered in an instant by anything at all. It might be the sight of a shade of blue on a street sign, the smell of bread baking, the sound of children laughing, or the taste of a familiar coffee. It is in these moments that the migrant remembers and re/constructs “home.” Not shortly after comes the remembrance that “home” is likely no longer the way they left it. The memories relived in these moments can never be more than moments; these places cannot and do not exist in the ways that they do in the migrant’s memory. In this age of mass migration, Memory and Migration, originally published in 2011 and reissued in 2014, is a timely call for memory studies to shift the fixed relationship it often has to place. Drawing from migration studies, the text underscores that place and people’s relationship to it are not stagnant but constantly in motion.

The links between memory studies and the migrant experience is a theme of this volume. Within this theme is a focus on the migrant’s inability to return and the shifting nature of memory itself. The inability to return centers around a key element of existing in an in-between space that can never be adequately articulated or settled upon. Many themes of migration and memory studies stem from the inability to return, and this inability is linked to [End Page 832] notions of a lack of fixedness to place, time, and movement. The migrant can never return to the place that they left. This place no longer exists. While this might be true of all moments and places, it is particularly true for migrants. Limited in their ability to return to a physical space, they also can never return to the place that they have in their memory. The places that they have in their memories are themselves changing as moments are forgotten, stories are told, and memories are creatively reconstructed. The inability to return is something that is deeply rooted within the migrant experience. While one might be able to revisit a place, the place is never the same; the migrant returns to a place that has drastically changed, as has the migrant. They must change to adapt, they must change to fit in, and with this comes a dislocation from the previous space as they previously knew it, one that in practical terms does not exist anywhere but in the location of memory.

Memory and Migration responds to the questions about the relationship between place and memory and what that relationship means in the context of migration that coeditor Julia Creet provides in the introduction. The anthology has contributors with a variety of academic backgrounds, literature, psychology, anthropology, art history and theory, political science, English, classics, and philosophy. The essays by Srdja Pavlovic, Andreas Kitzmann, Nergis Canefe, and others dealing with the quest and impossibility of authenticity, the fragmented nature of memory, and the ways that can link into the limits of multiculturalism were particular poignant given Canada’s current political landscape and its current resurgence and reimagining of both Canadian identity and space. Chowra Makaremi’s work discussing the demands placed on asylum seekers was not only politically poignant and timely, but a key contribution in positioning the work in a larger discourse of methods, ethics, and memory studies. In addition to Makaremi’s work dealing with methods, Marlene Goldman’s discussion of fiction and its role in memory can also be read as making an important methodological contribution in the way in which it reads fiction as a place from where to read memory.

The theme of the “in-between” nature of both memory and migration was what struck me as a reader to be an important element that weaves all of...

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