The story of an immigrant ship

Describes an innovative global education program that takes place aboard the Freedom Schooner Amistad

Clinical Sociology Review, 1994

West Indian intellectuals in Britain

There exists a moving photographic record of West Indian emigrants arriving in British cities in the 1950s, first by steamship and steam train, then later, by the end of the decade and into the 1960s, by plane. We still see, in our own times, these images of men and women who, for all their apprehensions, were stepping across the threshold into new lives, bringing with them a certain presence. These are images which evoke a sense of hardships in the past overcome and hardships just around the corner yet to confront. They give form to the dreams which had compelled a generation of migrants to pack up and cross the seas. And they capture too a sensibility founded on the conviction that these dreams were rightfully theirs: a dream, in other words, of colonials who believed that the privileges of empire were their due. 1 These photographic images, and those of the flickering, monochrome newsreels which accompany them, have now come to compose a social archive. They serve to fix the collective memory of the momentous transformation of postwar migration. At the same time, however, their very familiarity works to conceal other angles of vision. We become so habituated to the logic of the camera-eye that we are led to forget that the vision we are bequeathed is uncompromisingly one-way. The images which fix this history as social memory are images of the West Indians. The camera is drawn to them. The moment they enter the field of vision, the focal point adjusted, they become fixed as something new: as immigrants. The camera, in other words, organises the collective vision not of the West Indians but of the native Britons. There are in the public domain no reverse-shots, in which-from gangplank or from railway station platform-we see, through the eyes of the emigrant, the huddles of journalists and onlookers, police and social workers, white faces all. Without this perspective it is difficult to grasp that white Britons-ordinary people, doing the shopping or waiting for the bus-were, whether conscious of it or not, part of this drama of [ 1 ]

This is a bibliography of books and articles in English on BAME maritime labour. It is created as way to start a collaborative bibliography on the subject. Your additions will be welcome. Email me with them. I'll credit you. Thank you. Update 17 May 2018. Please see the new section on Maori and Aboriginal people, which has kindly been sent by Mark Howard.

Contemporary Fiction in French, A. Milne & R. Williams (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021

This article compares and reads across novels that detail two of the world’s most significant immigration crises, which culminated in the boat narratives out of Haiti and Vietnam, beginning in the 1990s. Two and three decades after the Duvalier dictatorship and the end of the Vietnam/American War propelled or exiled thousands of refugees on to the Caribbean seas and the Pacific Ocean, French language writers such as Émile Ollivier (Passages, 1991), Néhémey Pierre-Dahomey (Rapatriés, 2017), Linda Lê (Les Évangiles du Crime, 2007) and Kim Thúy (Ru, 2011) narrativized the experience of migration across perilous waters in ill-equipped vessels, recalling for us a harrowing journey in search of more hospitable lands. As readers, critics and scholars, these texts confront us with our own anthropophagic nature, our perverse fascination with the wretched of the sea and our calculated desire to count rather than ritualize the dead. Boat narratives and stories of displacement by sea search for what remains of the human in the memorialized wreckage of human remains.

1976

Using a variety of learning activities and primary sources, elementary and secondary students investigate faltily and community history and ethnicity. The major goals of the units are to provide factual information about immigrants to America from about 1820 to 1920 and to assist students in investigating immigrant history and heritage in their families and communities. The user's guide provides introductory information on how to use the series and background information about immigration. A brief description is given on the influence of immigrants on America and is followed by a discussion on how and where students gather and interpret 3,nformation.. Content topics and processes used in the activities are described along with a scheme for recording and evaluating student progress. In addition to the user's guide, the series is composed of four units each for two levels-one for grades 4-8 and one for grades 9-12. These units, available only from the publisher, are classroom-oriented and emphasize gathering and interpreting information, valuing strategies, group sharing and discussion, activities for research projects and class field trips, and individual student research in family ancestry and community. To use the materials in the classroom, both the user's guide and units for either level are needed. (Author/JR)

The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery, 2022

This chapter reconsiders chattel slavery’s legacy in contemporary stories of migration, highlighting the inadequacies of reading these works through memories of the Middle passage alone, while analyzing the insidious new forms of enslavement that African boat narratives expose. When read through the prescient work of Frantz Fanon, these stories present us with nothing less than revolutionaries of the crossing; those whose resounding “yes to life,” in the words of Frantz Fanon, is a deafening rejection of European anti-blackness, challenging border logic and the political machinations of inhospitality for a world in crisis. Migration, especially in today’s climate crisis, is above all else a human impulse that challenges the logic of inequality that slavery and colonialism have cast upon black lives, offering up movement as the dynamic imperative of life today.

This chapter reflects on our contemporary love affair with spaces of suspension such as prisons, quarantine facilities and immigration stations. I examine how the success of Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco and Ellis Island in New York, as sites of public history and venues for the performance of contemporary citizenship, depends on their resolution of a long-running political and emotional ambivalence towards movement.1 Drawing together affective conceptions of citizenship and recent research within mobility studies on moorings, I demonstrate how immigration and quarantine heritage trains visitors to become appreciative subjects of a fixed community governed by the state. They achieve this through a seductive staging of interruption which is symbolised so potently by the figure of the immigrant gazing through the bars to a destination as yet unreached. This suspense of fulfillment, I argue, exemplifies a desire for the state’s existence; a desire which visitors can experience vicariously by imagining themselves as immigrant proto-citizens-in- waiting. I explore our fascination with these moments of interruption where the destination (as both geographical location and subject position) is just out of reach and not quite realised. Immigration stations, prisons and quarantine facilities enjoy such popularity as tourist destinations because they capture that point before the ultimate arrival - an arrival which may very well be underwhelming. How many immigrants who passed through remained? How many having landed eventually gave up and went back home? It is not surprising that inscriptions of longing, hope and suspense are often the main attraction. They capture the bit before the regret; the bit when there is still so much promise. I ask that we understand this moment in the interpretive format of migration heritage as a kind of destructive love affair illustrative of what Berlant refers to as cruel optimism - a fantasy of the good life that cannot be sustained.2 In supplement to much of the existing research advancing migration museums and migration heritage as a progressive democratic movement, I maintain that the collective memory of immigration as a shared national experience can also be readily appropriated by the state wishing to promote itself as desirable.

Pappas Post, 2020