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- Convenors:
-
Marija Dalbello
(Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (University of Helsinki)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-F389
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Narration of sense-events in texts generated in migrational processes is an archive of the affective construction of the sites of staying, moving, and settling. Reporting and mediating the experiences of states, events, and episodes are oral history, ethnographic interviews, print, and writing.
Long Abstract:
The narratives of migration often emphasize sensory and embodied experiences such as sight in historicizing migration. The panel draws on the scholarship of material text, narration, and epistemologies of the senses at the intersection of textuality, narrative constructions of sensory events, and material texts circulated in the context of diasporas and migration. The panel presents attitudes toward sight, seeing, sensing, and visuality in reference to locational peripheries/centers, sites, and transitional movement. Remembering and witnessing the passage is not limited to ocular-centric but includes a range of ekphrastic elements in the individual acts of narrating a vivid description of a scene, event, episode, and bodily experience in a total archive of migration. These sense events are transmitted within epistolary, statist, and commercial texts, and in oral history and ethnographic interviews. The 'site' of staying, moving, settling and migration for the publics and counter-publics spans multiple bodies of archives and material texts transmitted in the context of migration and diaspora networks. The panel encompasses epistolary and personal narrations, transmission of 'news', the constructions of places, nostalgias, fluid signs, and tropes of memory including the perspectives of those who leave by those who stay and of those who stay by those who leave. Theoretically, the panel explores the points of liminality in the conceptions of staying, moving, and settling and how the sensing (textually expressed) fosters ruptures and the states of incompleteness therein.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Marija Dalbello (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Paper short abstract:
Narrating sensory experiences of the European migration to America in the early 20th century engages a reading and interpretation of trans-generational ancestral, literary, and contemporary autobiographical texts and multiple temporalities as a possible approach to the historiography of migration.
Paper long abstract:
The existential proposition in the liminal states of placement, re-placement, and dis-placement in the context of early 20th century migration from Europe to America is expressed through sensory language of scenes depicting immigrants' passage and settling. The narratives in The Ellis Island Oral History collection offer a close reading of sensate events through trans-generational family tree storytelling. In these vernacular expressions, the genealogists appear to draw on indirect witnessing while engaging post-1960s statist inscriptions of America as "a nation of immigrants" a condition for settling their own subjectivity and citizenship. Alongside those are images of America as a never-visited but imagined place exemplified by Franz Kafka's Amerika or The Man Who Disappeared(1912), framing the displacement transition as a place of 'disappearance' from a European perspective. By contrast, select contemporary personal narrations with vivid descriptions or bodily experience and a phenomenal world in that context are records of 'appearance' through existential action and inscription. A total archive of transatlantic migration as an ancestral appearance within a horizon of generational memory, the image of America as a possible place of disappearance in Kafka's fictional account, and the transitional states marked by sensate recollections in autobiographical narratives mark existential agency. Considered together—the sensate perspectives mediated through personal narration, literary tropes, and fluid statist tropes of America ("we the people", "our fellow citizens", "a nation of immigrants") refracted in trans-generational narrations—have a prismatic effect. They combine the liminal scenes and senses of leaving, moving, and settling in the historiography of migration.
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the creation of a Finnish immigrant community in the handwritten newspaper Walotar, edited in the Finnish community of Rockport, MA 1903-1925. The analysis focuses on "local event narratives" and the reflections on gender, politics, ideology and ethnicity.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will explore the creation of an immigrant community in the vernacular writings of Finnish immigrants in North America. Handwritten newspapers edited in immigrant communities provide a valuable albeit so far sparsely studied source for this analysis. My paper is based on a large and unique collection: Walotar ('Lady of Light'), edited by the members of Walon Leimu temperance society in Rockport, Massachusetts 1903-1925. The community was established at the end of the 19th century, when Finns were recruited to work in the granite quarries on Cape Ann.
Handwritten newpapers were a common tradition in Finland and in Finnish immigrant communities. Walotar is one of the largest and most complete preserved collections, altogether about 1200 pages. It was written to empty ledgers and rather resembled a collective diary or a commonplace book. These materials are now archived at Finnish American Heritage Center (Hancock, MI).
The writers Walotar openly reflect the immigrant experience and everyday life in the immigrant community. The language is a mixture of "Finglish" (English vocabulary spelled in Finnish manner), nonstandard Finnish and dialect expressions.
I will analyse "local event narratives", which are a genre typical for handwritten newspapers, depicting events in local communities. The main questions in the analysis are: How do Finnish immigrants create their community, their own time and space? How are the social and political tensions and gender aspects reflected in these narratives? How do they comment and make distinctions to the other ethnic groups?