Traces of Mobility, violence, and solidarity: Reconceptualizing cultural heritage through the lens of migration
Traces of Mobility, violence, and solidarity: Reconceptualizing cultural heritage through the lens of migration is an international project funded by VolkswagenShiftung Foundation, Compagnia di San Paolo
Synopsis
In the current European political discourse, the historical imaginary of migrants and refugees as a threat to cultural traditions and values resounds. New nationalist narratives are emerging to defend memory and cultural heritage, legitimizing social exclusion, abuse, and the dispossession of rights of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe.
Within such a context, the traces of refugee and migrant experiences, the violence committed against them, and the solidarities they share and receive, are subject to erasure; while their memory practices, innovations, sociality, and transformative political agency are typically neglected. Migrants share experiences of oppression, violence, and struggle with each other and with the people who assist them, but they do not constitute a recognized group with a shared culture, and their memories exceed the conventional boundaries of nations and the public heritage associated with them.
Through a comparative perspective connecting migrants’ trajectories between Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Italy, in the context of war, and political and structural violence, this project offers a distinctive contribution to debates about threats to heritage and conceptualizations of cultural heritage. Undertaking ethnographies of heterogeneous memory-making practices and sites along migration routes from Africa to Europe and exploring the significance of migrant cultural heritage for political theory and action towards justice, the project focuses on migration and human mobility as analytical lenses for conceptualizing cultural heritage beyond sedentarist and nationalist frameworks.
Exploring the nexus between mobility and cultural heritage, project follows threefold direction. It investigates the political and social heritage generated by migrants’ presence and by contemporary mobile experiences of struggle and solidarity, exploring how these are remembered or forgotten through intangible, private, local, and digital forms of cultural heritage produced by migrants, as well as in forms of public heritage on migration routes. It draws on these processes to reconceptualize cultural heritage and theorize its relationship to migration. It considers whether and how the cultural heritage of mobility, violence and solidarity traced along migrant routes might serve as political resources for justice-claims.
Research team
- Luca Ciabarri (Università di Milano)
- Barbara Pinelli (Università di Roma Tre)
- Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths University of London)
- Rachel Ibreck (Goldsmiths University of London)
- Amira Ahmed (American University in Cairo)
- Fatma Raach (University of Jendouba, Tunisia)
- Elia Vitturini (Università di Milano)
- Nada El-Kouni (American University Cairo)
- Peter Rees (Goldsmiths University of London)