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- Convenors:
-
Kirsi Laurén
(University of Eastern Finland)
Tiiu Jaago (University of Tartu)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Narrative
- Location:
- VG 3.101
- Start time:
- 29 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Home is a meaningful place for everyone. All the more traumatic is to be forced to leave home as a consequence of war, violence, natural disaster, political or social disorder and lack of work. This panel investigates how narrating deals with the loss of home.
Long Abstract:
Home is a meaningful and emotionally important place for everyone. It is usually shared with relatives or close friends with whom it is possible to feel safe and relaxed. Being forced to leave home in consequence of war, natural
disaster, political or social disorder or as a result of economic upheaval creates trauma. The ways of dwelling changes dramatically when hostile forces attack one's country and occupy it. Sometimes homes have to be left because of physical or mental violence at home caused by the very people one is close to by birth or marriage.
This panel solicits papers that explore the intertwining of trauma and narration surrounding the loss of home. Open to different narrative genres and media of narration (oral, written, digital, etc.), we hope to discuss how narratives address the loss of home. In addition to diverse kinds of trauma, we are interested in how narrating is employed to bring different kinds of traumatic home-loss circumstances into the open. How do such stories handle questions of guilt, perpetration, and victimhood? How is individual experience linked to discourses of cultural trauma? Who is entitled or emboldened to narrate traumatic events of home less and who remains silent? Are there acceptable and muted traumas?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Tuulikki Kurki (University of Eastern Finland)
Paper short abstract:
The paper studies novels and memoirs written by individuals crossing territorial and symbolic borders at the Finnish-Russian borderlands in the early 20th century. The paper examines these works as trauma narratives, and focuses on their politically biased reception in Finland in the 20th century.
Paper long abstract:
The paper studies the novels and memoirs written by individuals crossing territorial and symbolic borders at the Finnish-Russian borderlands in the early 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, approximately 15 000 Finns migrated to the Soviet Union, and after a while, some of them migrated back to Finland. In Finland, many returning migrants wrote about their experiences in the Soviet Union. There are about 30-40 published memoirs of this kind in Finland.
This paper claims that these memoirs and novels can be understood as trauma narratives about migrants' experiences in the Soviet Union, where the migrants witnessed Soviet persecution of the late 1930s. The paper examines, how the reception of these memoirs and novels in Finland denied the migrant's possibility to return home. Due to political reasons, the reception the memoirs and novels was often harsh in the politically White Finland. The traumas were often denied and the returnees rejected, because migrants had initially showed political affiliation to left, and therefore, the migrants were seen as guilty for their own traumas. Furthermore, after the WW II, their memoirs were censored and silenced, because they showed hostile attitudes towards the Soviet Union. During the so-called Finlandization, that followed the WW II and lasted until the early 1980s, Finland was very cautious in showing criticism towards the Soviet Union due to politically charged situation. The public discussion of these migrants and their trauma narratives has diversified only since the late 20th century.
Senka Bozic-Vrbancic (University of Zadar) Jelena Kupsjak (University of Zadar)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores ‘the politics of sentimentality’ and ‘the politics of dwelling’ with specific reference to the documentary film SICK which represents the traumatic narrative of a young lesbian woman who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and ‘treated’ for her homosexuality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores 'the politics of sentimentality' in articulation to 'the politics of dwelling' with specific reference to the documentary film SICK which represents the narrative of a young lesbian woman, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and 'treated' for her homosexuality. In Croatia, during the last two decades, different narratives about suffering flourish in media. These narratives, as Sara Ahmed argues, even though described as a private experience, are 'evoked in public discourse as that which demands a collective as well as individual response' (2004: 20). They are designed to make viewers to be more empathic and compassionate to suffering of others, but this empathy and compassion are not neutral as it seems at the first glance - 'they are crucial to the very constitution of the psychic and the social as objects' to 'I' and 'we' (Ahmed 2004: 10). Following Ahmed, in this paper we analyse Ana's narrative, as it has been represented in SICK, as a part of the big network of projects that put on display personal stories of suffering that mobilize viewers emotional identifications with the embodied agents of pain and suffering, and we analyse how these identifications are linked to the processes of nation building and politics of dwelling.
Hence, we don't discuss representation of Ana's personal narrative as isolated from the culture and context within which the film emerged; rather, we explore how representation of Ana's narrative traverses the different forms of national imaginary of dwelling in contemporary Croatia.
Tian Shi (Wenzhou university)
Paper short abstract:
By framing the research around an analysis of social media interaction from a cross-national perspective, this paper explores how European Hmong use social media to present themselves and to what extent social media has an impact on communication flow and the construction of power and ethnic identity.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1973 and 1975 many Hmong refugees fled to Thailand, the United States, Australia, France, Germany, and other friendly countries because they had assisted the CIA throughout the Vietnam War. A large population of French and German Hmong are active online by organizing Google groups, holding public e-mail groups, and uploading videos of refugee stories to YouTube to allow their unique voice to be heard. By framing the research around an analysis of social media interaction from a cross-national perspective, this paper explores how European Hmong use social media to present themselves and to what extent social media has an impact on communication flow and the construction of power and ethnic identity. Why have they decided to use the Internet to share their stories, ethnic memories, and identity with the rest of the world? This paper concerns online identity and Miao/Hmong identity in particular is interesting as it pertains to its transnational dynamic.
Tarja Tanttu (University of Eastern Finland)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores dwelling through learning of immaterial knowledge and skills as well as social and cultural practices that migrants need to make a place a home. Learning is studied through analyzing encounters between migrants and employment officials in an employment office in Finland.
Paper long abstract:
Migrants face a situation where they have left their former homes and are entering into a new society and culture, where they hope to find places of dwelling and experience them as home. This paper explores dwelling through learning of immaterial knowledge and skills as well as social and cultural practices that migrants need to experience and to make a space and place a home. This knowledge also enables migrants to gain the full agency in the new society.
In this paper, dwelling is studied through encounters between migrants and employment officials in Finland and through migrant´s learning processes in institutional context. In this context, learning means both learning the new language and the so called tacit knowledge about the new society, e.g. institutional and social practices.
What may migrants learn in official encounters? This question is explored through analyzing discussions between immigrant clients and employment officials in an employment office in Finland. Video recorded discussions and interviews with employment officials show that the employment official´s contextualizing narrative in interaction reveals the information that the migrant needs in order to learn the practices of the new community. The official´s narrative also reveals a critical point in the process of integration: if this information is silenced, the migrant´s dwelling and making of home is seriously hampered. To avoid the migrant´s experience of exclusion, it´s important to explain so called "self-evident" cultural knowledge and practices explicitly to the newcomers.
Barbara Hillers (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the social reality and material culture underlying the popular international folktale of The Master’s Good Counsels (ATU 910B), which deals with the everyday situation of the migrant labourer, offering an eloquent testimonial of this commonplace trauma of the poor.
Paper long abstract:
The Master's Good Counsels (ATU 910B) is found throughout Europe and further afield, and is particularly popular in areas with a history of migrant labour. The folktale deals with the adventures of a migrant labourer and his eventual return home to his wife and children. It is classified as a novella tale, a folktale genre that has a high degree of social realism. The world portrayed in the folktale is the world of the landless labourer, who has to leave his family to earn a living, is dependent on his employer for food, lodgings and equitable wages; on his homeward journey he finds himself at the mercy of highwaymen as well as the authorities, and is beset by doubts about his wife's constancy.
This paper analyses the almost 300 versions of the folktale recorded in Ireland, most of them by the Irish Folklore Commission, in communities that had direct experience of migrant labour. Every aspect of daily life at the bottom rung of rural society is reflected in the narrative, and the tale thus serves as an invaluable witness to Ireland's social history and material culture. Above all else, it encapsulates the community's collective response to the trauma of forced economic migration and offers a blue-print for a better future and a more equitable social contract.
Ulla Savolainen (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores oral narratives of former child and youth internees in Finland. It investigates 1) how victimhood, culpability and agency are negotiated in these narratives, and 2) how experiences of incarceration and loss of home and material belongings influence life stories and memory.
Paper long abstract:
During the Second World War, Finland fought two wars against the Soviet Union. In the latter, Finland was allied with Nazi Germany. After the hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union ended in August 1944, the two countries signed an Armistice agreement in Moscow. The conditions of the agreement were harsh. Finland had to cede areas in Eastern Finland to the Soviet Union as well as pay extensive war reparations. In addition, Finland was obliged to banish German troops from its territory and intern all of the German and Hungarian citizens in Finland. This led to the detention of 470 civilians in 1944-1946, including children, women and elderly people. In addition to incarceration, the property of German and Hungarian citizens, including homes and other material belongings, was confiscated and handed over to the Soviet Union.
The presentation explores oral narratives and memories of former child and youth internees produced in oral history interviews. Particularly, it focuses on the descriptions of lost homes, confiscated property, and dwelling at the internment camps. By analyzing narrative positioning and the relationship between materiality, trauma and narrative, the paper investigates 1) how experiences of incarceration and loss of home and material belongings influence life stories and memory, and 2) how victimhood, culpability and agency are negotiated in these narratives. The presentation aims to open new viewpoints on the interplay of memory and matter, and the communicative and cultural aspects related to narratives of loss of home and living in captivity.
Kirsti Jõesalu (University of Tartu)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to elaborate the question of how the loss of home is narrated 50 years after the actual events and is asking how different power relations are influencing these narrations. My paper is based on video narrations, collected during the project Collect Our Story (kogumelugu.ee) in Estonia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to elaborate the question of how the loss of home is narrated 50 years after the actual events and how different power relations are influencing these narrations. My paper is based on video narrations, collected during the project Kogu me lugu (Collecting Our Story / Our Whole Story) in Estonia. In 1941 and 1949 two mass deportations took place in Estonia with over 30 000 people being taken from their homes to Siberia. Written narratives about those events have been collected in Estonia since 1980s by different memory institutions. However, in June 2013, a youth NGO staged a performance at the main square in Tallinn. Having created a 1940s home scene on the square, the activists asked people to sit down at the table and imagine somebody coming and taking them away while they were having dinner. The NGO used this performance for drawing attention for their new campaign of collecting video stories about the deportations and other violence during WWII. By now, they have collected over 50 video stories both from deportees and exiled Estonians. They have also started a series of short video-stories for public and educational use. My paper focuses on the main principles of their editing those stories, and on the questions of power of both the narrator as well as the editor.
Nandini Sen (Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, UK)
Paper short abstract:
We spend much our lives at home. Primary emotional connections are shaped in home. Home is a place of longing. The home is the social organisation of space. Family relations, gender, class identities are negotiated, contested and transformed. I demonstrate how home is unnecessarily idealised.
Paper long abstract:
Away From Home: Nazma, the waste picking woman narrates their tales of dispossession
We spend much our lives at home. Our primary emotional connections are shaped in the domestic arena of the home. Home is a place/space of longing. The home is a key site in the social organisation of space. Here family relations, gender, and class identities are negotiated, contested and transformed. I demonstrate how home is unnecessarily idealised while depicting how a community of waste pickers in Calcutta lose their serene homes in continuum.
Short (1999; x) says, 'Home is a source of work, abuse, and exploitation.' Fetcher (1999; x) wrote, 'Charity and beating begin at home…' as for example domestic violence and child abuse. I question notion of harmony and fairness at home. Due to the absence of livelihood, heavy debts due to daughter's marriage and medical treatment, natural disasters like floods or cyclones, family conflicts, severe hunger including disputes over property, for example being driven out of the house by in-laws after becoming a widow the waste pickers are forced to relocate to the city.
Woman waste picker Nazma, from Topsia related waste pickers know that they run the constant risk of being dispossessed of the other space at any point of time. When a fire gutted their 450 shelters within an hour on 5 April 2014, this devastating event placed the entire existence of the community in perilous jeopardy, underlining the need to set the other space within wider relations of unequal power, resources and representations including gender.