This post uses Helmut Newton’s provocative memoir, Autobiography, to explore how the ocean-going liner, as a mode of transportation, informed Jewish refugees’ experiences between 1938 and 1940. What did they do during their journey onboard Shanghai-bound ships? By joining Newton on the ship, this post draws connections between Holocaust Studies and Refugee Studies to reveal the significance of these vessels as a ‘space of possibilities’ for Jewish refugee passengers.
The act of deciding who deserves welcome in a country is determined not only by ‘hard’ legal facts such as visa or passport status but also by ‘soft’ factors coalescing around nebulous ideas of ‘belonging’. This post explores the experiences of Anglo-Egyptians in Britain, harkis in France, and retornados in Portugal to show just how complicated the politics of welcome and belonging could be, and highlights the role of ‘soft’ citizenship in the process.
We are pleased to announce that the ‘Doing Refugee History’ series continues this semester on the subject of refugee technologies and will take place on Thursday 20 April 20223, 2-4pm UK time.
Technology has shaped refugee history in many ways, from how refugees move and stay connected to how states seek to regulate and control migrant mobility. Boats, trains and planes enabled people to travel to places further and further afield. Letters, telegrams, emails and messaging applications have enabled people to keep in touch and raise awareness about refugee situations. Conversely, identity documents, passports and now facial recognition technologies have created layers of regulation and bureaucracy that refugees must navigate and overcome. Technology has also changed the manner in which researchers access histories of displacement and refuge, and transformed the nature of research in this field.
The purpose of this roundtable is to explore the topic of refugee technologies in history. What kinds of technologies have refugees used in their journeys? What kinds of experiences have these technologies fostered? In what ways have various technologies been used to regulate refugee movements and refugee bodies, historically and in the present? And in what ways has technology transformed historical research? We welcome contributions that discuss technologies, broadly defined, and consider how these inform approaches to doing refugee history.
On 27 November 2021, twenty-seven lives were abandoned to the English Channel by the French and British states, as fifteen calls in distress went unanswered. A year later, Le Monde exposed the exchanges between those on board the small boat and the regional maritime rescue and surveillance centre in the Pas-de-Calais, exchanges which the French state initially denied had taken place. ‘Tu seras pas sauvé… je t’ai pas demandé de partir’, rang the voice of one operator to the call of distress at sea: ‘You will not be saved… I did not ask you to leave [France]’.
This loss of life at sea, while the worst incident in thirty years in the Channel, in fact fits within a historical continuity of the last twenty years of violent and reactive Franco-British border politics. In this history, the agency of those who have decided to make this perilous journey is deeply constrained: what does choice look like when there is simply ‘no other option’?
There has been a recent global turn within Holocaust Studies: a growing body of scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees and the Holocaust in contexts that had been previously ignored, and highlights how those experiencing the war in Europe did so in different ways to those living through the conflict in other parts of the world. This post focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.
Studies of neutrality tend to focus on legal and diplomatic aspects, but there is also an important social dimension: neutral territories are often destinations or stopovers for refugees, especially when these territories are adjacent to conflict zones. What does neutrality mean in practice when we put refugees at the centre of analysis? British-ruled Hong Kong and Portuguese-ruled Macau in the 1930s and 1940s offer connected case studies of displaced persons during the Second World War in East Asia.
Digital technology has transformed archival research. Instead of painstakingly taking notes most historians today take digital pictures or scans from archival documents. The advantages are undeniable: it reduces time spent in one archive, which increases the possibility to visit more archives and enhances accuracy. However, there are downsides, too. Access can lead to excess. The sheer volume of paper has exponentially increased since the invention of the typewrite in the late nineteenth century; computers, digitisation, and online access have only enhanced this growth. Hence, historians often end up with enormous collections of research photos on their personal devices. Many struggle to properly process their digital material. The problem of multitude is no longer situated during but after the archival visit.
We are delighted to announce the speakers for the ‘Doing refugee history’ autumn semester roundtable, focusing on refugee connections. Attendance is open to anyone, but registration is required. A sign-up link is included below.
Speakers at this session are:
Stephanie DeGooyer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The connection between early American refugee history and Native dispossession
Edidiong Ekefre (University of the Witwatersrand)
Fleeing Boko Haram: historicizing the refugee connections in the Lake Chad basin, 2010-2020
Neela Hassan (University of Waterloo)
A site of connection for refugees: forming community based on shared vulnerability and precariousness at an Afghan restaurant
Ryan Sun (University of British Columbia)
The possibilities in transit: Jewish refugees onboard Shanghai-bound ships (1937-1940)
What can a poem, and the creative process of writing it, tell us about refugee history? Existing research on creative writing by refugees tends to focus either on the writing process or the writing itself. Research on the writing process is usually situated within the social sciences and examines the effect of this process on language acquisition, confidence building or wellbeing. Refugee literature is a field in itself, one that looks at the texts first and foremost, and even then mainly texts produced by published writers. Creative methods including collective poetry are a way of combining both of these approaches, allowing us to experience, document and analyse both the process and the output.
In the first half of the twentieth century millions of Europeans were displaced by war, genocide, the redrawing of international borders, and mass flight from countries ruled by autocratic regimes. In order to address the need for a more integrated analysis of their experiences, our edited volume A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe. Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars looks at the collective experience of different refugee groups through the lens of a four-dimensional model of ‘host society’, ‘homeland’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘other diasporas’.
