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Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: Towards an immigrant history of the present
Abstract
Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis Island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so‐called golden age of European immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobh Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance‐based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled ‘Calling Up Annie Moore’. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed.
... We are concerned in particular with the ways in which emotions are enrolled into a historic transnational travel. Such an effort also builds upon existing social and cultural geographical work on narratives of immigrant history (Kelly and Morton 2004), emotional geographies of heritage and homeland (Kearney 2009) and the geographies of secured spaces and disease control (Enticott 2008;Major 2008). In taking an historical approach, our study thus departs empirically from a recent stream of work on biopolitics, emotions and security in contemporary transnational travel (Ashmore 2011(Ashmore , 2013Hinchliffe and Bingham 2008;Kelly and Morton 2004;Muller 2008;Vannini 2012). ...
... Such an effort also builds upon existing social and cultural geographical work on narratives of immigrant history (Kelly and Morton 2004), emotional geographies of heritage and homeland (Kearney 2009) and the geographies of secured spaces and disease control (Enticott 2008;Major 2008). In taking an historical approach, our study thus departs empirically from a recent stream of work on biopolitics, emotions and security in contemporary transnational travel (Ashmore 2011(Ashmore , 2013Hinchliffe and Bingham 2008;Kelly and Morton 2004;Muller 2008;Vannini 2012). ...
This paper examines the disciplined mobility and emotional geographies of between-deck passengers in Royal Dutch Lloyd's early Twentieth Century passenger shipping network. Specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the network was established and with the efforts made to maintain it. It is found that such a disciplinary network furthers the firm's goal of shipping healthy and productive bodies for corporate profits and that transhipment facility Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam was integral to the performance and maintenance of such a transnational disciplinary network. The key consequence of such disciplined mobility was the creation of an emotional passenger-migrant subject shaped in relation to the power of corporate, cultural and other authorities in maritime travel and migration. In identifying this historic network of disciplined mobility and its emotional subject, this paper seeks to reveal the emotional geographies relating to mobile subjectivities and the power relations associated with their historically significant travels.
... Questions of biosecurity and global health are in fact assigning center-(political)stage again to interventions aimed at the definition and the protection of life (and death), while engaging with new interpretations of the human body in relation to the possibility of bio-mapping offered by the new technologies, and of population management allowed by the implementation of biometrics (Amoore, 2006;Vaughan-Williams, 2008). The threshold between life and death is therefore not only constantly questioned, but also located at the very core of biopolitical considerations about the judicial order, and the relationship between individual rights e including that of residing in one country or location e and the collective body politic (Bauder, 2014;De Genova & Peutz, 2010;Kelly & Morton, 2004). ...
... For them, 'the tautological structure of the archive reinforces a systematic amnesia of the social and historical conditions that lead to Moore's arrival and eventual assimilation'. 59 Conjuring even recent histories then, poses immediate philosophical difficulties -much like those explained by the phenomenon of Derridean différence, in which the inherent instabilities and indeterminacies of meaning found in textual and linguistic sources are highlighted. Producers ultimately fail to achieve complete epistemological control over the past and instead are confronted with producing concrete knowledge from the fragments of the past that they unearth. ...
This article is based on in-depth interviews carried out with producers involved in the restoration of Ellis Island Immigration Station, New York and those responsible for turning it into a successful national heritage site which opened to the public in 1990. The buildings on Ellis Island operated as an Immigration Station between approximately 1892 and 1924 during which time they processed over 16 million migrants of predominantly European origin. An analysis of interviews conducted as well as readings of Ellis Island taken from archives, folklore and US popular culture suggest that the site is imbued with the spectropolitics of its politically emotive immigrant processing past. Rather than dismissing the spectrality associated with Ellis Island as folkloric or irrational, the article attempts to untangle the different meanings attributed to the `ghosts' that circulate through the buildings and material objects that inhabit the island. It suggests that a number of `tropes' of ghostliness can be associated with the island; uncanny ghosts which defy the sanitizing force of the restoration; conjured ghosts, which are deliberately invoked by producers for various political and economic purposes, and the ghosts of deconstruction which make any meta-narrative of immigration history at Ellis Island a precarious if not troubling achievement.
... Recently, geographic work on the city has used notions of horror, ghosts, angels, haunting, and the uncanny to interpret city spaces (see Battista et al. 2005;Kelly and Morton 2004;Till 2005;, rural spaces (see Bell 1997) and ...
This thesis makes an original contribution to the socio-cultural and emotional geographies literature by focusing on Robyn Gordon's (the Avalanche Lady's ) experiences of grief. I argue that space, place, and emotions are mutually constituted. Thus, geographers are aptly positioned to examine the complexities and contradictions of spatialised emotions. Ideas about space and place do not exist in a vacuum. Also, the two terms, space and place offer geographers more when conceptualised as a complementary pair rather than individually (see Agnew 2005). By drawing on a wide range of contemporary geographical and social science literature, I explore how notions of space and place can be stretched to include the beyond , and how they can be conceptualised as fluid, contingent, and unfinished. In order to convey these new configurations of space and place from within an experience of grief, I employed three key methods. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with Robyn. Further, she created a digital story using photographs, her choice of music and narrative, and kept a research diary. This empirically unique approach enabled me to produce a rich and contextualised account of what grief felt like, and continues to feel like for my respondent. Although grief is often touted as an individual experience, I contend that it radiates out into the wider social milieu through emotional, virtual, national, and international communities. Thus, connections between people and places are made and remade. I found that space, place, and grief interrelate on many levels including, private-public, personal-social, and specific-ethereal places. Robyn's home, her local community, and Japan were integral to the way in which she contextualised her grief. However, these conceptually traditional places pale in comparison to Robyn's spiritual (re)connections with James. This unexpected information required me to expand the analysis of place to include spirits in this research. Finally, representations of grief in public and media spaces were found to be paradoxical. Still, the digital story and this research as a process and as a representational space were considered by Robyn to be therapeutic. Overall, Robyn's grief is evolving, changing, complex, and contradictory, and something she lives with every day.
International adoption involves crossing borders; it invokes space and geography as adoptive parents imagine distant countries, as children are moved from one nation to another, and as adoptees and their families return to their countries of origin. The spatiality of belonging and identity - but also of trauma and violence - are central concerns for the people involved and to the operations of their cultural, political, and legal practice. Yet surprisingly, cultural geographers have not yet developed a conceptualization of transnational adoption that theorizes it as a constitutive aspect of geographies of migration, domestic geographies, and geography of childhood. In this issue we seek to set out an agenda for the cultural and political geographies of transnational adoption. We do so by discussing three interrelated themes: the adoption-migration nexus, geographies of relatedness, and the biopolitics of mobility.
In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities - and the instances of incommensurability - of a juxtaposition of transnational adoption and migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in Guatemala, the article argues that kinning in this context relates not only to the construction of new forms of relatedness, but also, crucially, to the suspension and severing of relations, and to politically charged claims for the reactivation of connections and enfleshment. Against figurations of kinning as commodified and inequitable relations of ownership and exchange, struggles for ‘searches’ and ‘reunions’ in contemporary Guatemala bring into view a range of subjectivities and relations ‘under erasure,’ within the horizon of the Guatemalan conflict (1960-1996). Analogizing transnational adoption and migration is a cultural and analytical practice that performatively reveals and occludes. The article proposes a historically and idiomatically grounded reorientation of the analogic flow sideways, in the directions of the archive, as substance, sign, and trace.
This article discusses the gendering of diaspora at three different levels of analysis, first, in relation to contemporary theorising of diaspora, second, with regard to former President Robinson's representations, in the 1990s, of Irish identity as a diasporic one and, finally, with reference to the particularity of the ‘lived’ experiences of Irish women's diasporic lives. The tendency towards an asymmetric valorisation of movement over dwelling in theorisations, discourses, and practices of diaspora produces contradictory effects as Irish women emigrants are represented both in individualistic and progressive terms of achievement associated with movement, but also as connected to the national community and tradition through gendered kin relationships and obligations. The migration of Traveller women, on the other hand, because Travellers are excluded from the national and indeed the diasporic ‘imagined community’, is represented as deviant and regressive paradoxically making national borders even more significant when it comes to claims to belong. The accounts of diasporic Irish women discussed in this article are often painfully stretched between staying-put and moving out, individualism and the burden of responsibility for the maintenance of Irish culture and identity.
Photographs are used as documents, evidence, and records every day in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work, on passports, permits, and licenses. But how did such usages come to be established and accepted, and when? What kinds of photographs were seen seen as purely instrumental and able to function in this way? What sorts of agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And more generally, what conception of photographic representation did this involve, and what were its consequences?
Because public art suffers from falling between the realms of art and urban planning, it has been neglected in debates both on contemporary art and the future of cities.Art, Space and the Cityfocuses on two roles for art: as decoration within revisioned urban design and as a social process of criticism. Malcolm Miles applies a range of critical perspectives which have emerged from art criticism, urban design, urban sociology, geography and critical theory--to examine the practice of art for urban public spaces, and asks the artworld how it might contribute to the urban future. Drawing on a wealth of images and examples, including New York, Seattle, London and Tokyo, the author questions the effectiveness of public art in achieving more convivial urban environments, while retaining the idea that imagining the urban future is as much part of a democratic society as using public space. Exploring the diversity of the roles of professionals and users in the construction of the city, thegendering of space and the ways in which space and citizen are represented, Miles explains how these issues are as relevant to architecture, urban design and planning as they are to public art. After three decades of public art as an often marginalized area within the practice of art, this is the only book to take stock of what it has become and what the future holds for it in the urban setting.
This article discusses the gendering of diaspora at three different levels of analysis, first, in relation to contemporary theorising of diaspora, second, with regard to former President Robinson's representations, in the 1990s, of Irish identity as a diasporic one and, finally, with reference to the particularity of the ‘lived’ experiences of Irish women's diasporic lives. The tendency towards an asymmetric valorisation of movement over dwelling in theorisations, discourses, and practices of diaspora produces contradictory effects as Irish women emigrants are represented both in individualistic and progressive terms of achievement associated with movement, but also as connected to the national community and tradition through gendered kin relationships and obligations. The migration of Traveller women, on the other hand, because Travellers are excluded from the national and indeed the diasporic ‘imagined community’, is represented as deviant and regressive paradoxically making national borders even more significant when it comes to claims to belong. The accounts of diasporic Irish women discussed in this article are often painfully stretched between staying-put and moving out, individualism and the burden of responsibility for the maintenance of Irish culture and identity.
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technologyâfruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling. "Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."âThe Guardian "[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."âChoice "Beautifully written and clear."âJeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review "Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."âLibrary Journal
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