Migration History Seminar 2024-25

Migration is one of the great facts of human society. Its contribution to the making of the modern world cannot be overstated. While historical writing in settler societies such as the USA and Canada has emerged over a long time period, European nations with rich migration histories, such as the UK, France and Germany, have more latterly recognised the centrality of population movements. We should also consider the history of migration from the perspective of the Global South. There is great scholarly interest in the field and that will grow now as legacies of imperialism become much more directly entangled with the lives of immigrants in the countries they have settled.

All sessions will be held online using Microsoft Teams on Wednesdays, 5-6.30pm GMT. Registered attendees will receive a link to join each session ahead of time.

Programme, 2024-25

• 13 November 2024: Dr Eithne Nightingale, QMUL
• 5 February 2025: Professor William Henry, University of West London
• 5 March 2025: Dr Lewis Darwen and Professor Don MacRaild, LMU
• 19 March 2025: Dr Kieran Connell, QUB (RESCHEDULED)
• 2 April 2025: Dr Marilena Anastasopoulou, LSE

Convenors

• Professor Don MacRaild
• Dr Sundeep Lidher
• Dr Anna Maguire
• Professor Panikos Panayi
• Dr. Chris Zembe

Abstracts

Dr Eithne Nightingale, Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain - Oral Histories 1930s to the Present Day

Half the people displaced worldwide are under 18 yet their voices are rarely heard. This presentation will draw on research into child migration and the subsequent book Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain - Oral Histories 1930s - Present Day published by Bloomsbury 2024 (https://childmigrantstories.com/voices). The book opens with children's experiences of arriving in Britain from Hitler's Europe on the Kindertransport in the 1930s and ends with those escaping war in Ukraine in 2022. Some followed their parents to the motherland from the former British Empire - Jamaica, India and Pakistan. Others came with their parents from Syria to a Scottish island or from Mogadishu to Mile End. Some came independently to escape forced marriage or military conscription.

The talk will examine the impact of war on children and of early disruptions in family relationships including on adult life. It will explore child migrants’ journeys - toing’ and ‘froing’ across cultural and linguistic borders, the welcome they receive in both urban and rural settings, their rights and resilience including the role of creativity in processing and communicating trauma. It will link these historical stories of child migration with contemporary issues such as the Home Office Windrush scandal, Brexit, Britain’s Nationality and Borders Bill 2023 and what the present government should do to meet the needs of child migrants. It will also include clips from award wining films co-produced with child migrants childmigrantstories.com/films.

Dr Kieran Connell, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History

In this book talk, Kieran Connell explores Britain’s transition into the multicultural society it has become today. He focuses on the experience of increasing ethnic diversity – multiculturalism as it “actually existed” on Britain’s streets and its youth clubs, pubs, places of work, cafés and school playgrounds. The making of multicultural Britain, Connell argues, has been conditioned by the coming together of competing forces. On the one hand, the stubborn presence of racism in myriad forms, including the willingness of both major political parties to legitimize discrimination for their own short term political gain. On the other hand, however, in parallel to this the second half of the twentieth century also witnessed the arrival of unprecedented ethnic diversity, in new geographies and communities, art forms, modes of politics and in everyday relationships. Britain’s multicultural “drift”, as Stuart Hall has described it, has inserted itself into the very heart of the social and cultural landscapes of modern Britain. As this dialectical process continues apace, Connell argues, the very concept of “Britishness” cannot be what it was before.

Professor William Henry, Performing Self, Narrating Self: thinking yourself into being from a black perspective.

In this talk I will explore the role of the deejay as a ‘thoughtist’ within Jamaican Reggae Sound System Culture, to evaluate the relationship between performance as a form of self- identity and self-narration. This means an insight into this form of spoken word, as an examplar of 'music as politics' across the African Diaspora, will be shared from an insider perspective. Thus enabling a rendering of the seminal role that countercultural, 'hidden' voices play in resisting and transcending white supremacist thought and action, from an Africentric perspective across the diaspora, to be forthcoming in myriad ways. Therefore, all that is asked is that you bring your minds and make sure they are open, to ensure we share a cathartic space for reasoning, mutual healing and growth. Doing so will, in my humble opinion, perhaps assist us in our endeavours to unshackle the African mind, in this place, and at this time.

Dr Lewis Darwen and Professor Donald M. Macraild, Repatriating Irish paupers from Britain to Ireland, 1819 to the 1860s

During the nineteenth century, local officials sought to deal with their Irish pauper ‘problem’, as they viewed it, by removing these poor migrants back to Ireland under the laws of settlement and removal. New legislation in 1819 distinguished between paupers and vagrants or beggars, providing the levers of removal which so many local officials used with such alacrity to send the Irish ‘home’. Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Irish paupers were forcibly repatriated in this way. For much of the century, Irish immigrants had little chance of gaining a settlement in Britain, and even though their settlement rights gradually improved over time, removals to Ireland were still taking place into the twentieth century.

The system of removal was widely recognised as being cruel and unfair, especially in Ireland where the arrival of these poor paupers garnered considerable political and press attention. Much was made of the illegality of some removals; the authorities bridled at their inability to find satisfaction in appeals and challenges. Attention alighted on harsh removals which especially involved widowed women, children and the elderly. Sometimes, those who were sent back had no knowledge of the ‘auld country’. Such migrants had left Ireland as children, but then found themselves unable to seek support in Britain even after a life-time of work. In effect, in these cases, the paupers were sent back to an entirely alien land. The fact of these thousands of removals raised serious questions of the fairness and equality of being Irish under the Act of Union. This paper will explore a vital social and political dimensions of Irish immigration, poverty and pauperism in nineteenth century Britain; one which has many resonances with present-day arguments about immigration, the use of boats as sites of detention, and the demonisation and expulsion of people whose principal crimes poverty and bad luck.

Dr Marilena Anastasopoulou,Flight, Fight, and Fraternity: A Century of Asia Minor Refugees in Greece

In light of the centenary of the Asia Minor population transfer and the current migration and refugee crises, this talk explores refugee memories and identities of expulsion, their intergenerational transmission, and the way people with these memories think about subsequent migrations. This research is a comparative – intergenerational and interregional – history of Asia Minor memories and identities of forced displacement that examines the multilayered relationship between contemporary attitudes and refugee past. While focusing on the case of Greece, the research questions that this book addresses are: How have memories of the 1922-24 forced displacement changed over time from one generation to the next? How do people with these memories and identities think about subsequent migration? Following a regional history approach and an oral history approach, this study draws upon literature from several disciplines and rests upon oral testimony. Specifically, it employs a methodology of collecting primary sources using oral testimonies (262 life history interviews) and archival evidence (5000 oral testimonies) based on three regional case studies, namely the borderland island of Lesvos, Central Macedonia in northern Greece, and Attica. This study argues that refugee identity is a capacious and dynamic platform of ongoing understanding as well as a limited space of domination and competition. Elucidating the attitudes of refugee descendants and unfolding key patterns about the complex role of refugee memory and identity, it brings together the intersection of three interlocking elements, time (refugee generations), place (refugee locations), and subsequent migration (waves of other migrations). In short, Flight, Fight, and Fraternity sheds light on the convoluted relationship between contemporary attitudes and refugee past, providing a nuanced history of the 1922-24 memories and identities of forced displacement.