Alison Blunt

Cultural geographies of migration: mobility, transnationality and diaspora

As part of my last report on cultural geographies of home I addressed recent research on transnational geographies of home and family life for domestic and other migrant workers. Building on this my current report concentrates on recent cultural geographical research on migration in relation to broader debates about mobility transnationality and diaspora. I begin by tracing some of the connections between cultural geographies of migration and what has been termed the new mobilities paradigm and the mobility turn. To do so I trace some of the creative interfaces between work on mobilities and migrations before turning to cultural geographies of migration in relation to transnational citizenship urbanism and networks and to cultural politics and practices in diaspora. (excerpt)

Writing women and space : colonial and postcolonial geographies

A feminist examination of questions regarding mapping space and difference; the intersection of race with class and gender; complicity and/or resistance to hegemony; and strategies of critique and disruption.

Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Homemaking at McCluskieganj

Memory and nostalgia have attracted an increasing amount of critical interest in recent years. Whereas sites of memory often invoke, but also extend far beyond, spaces of home, nostalgia invokes home in its very meaning. And yet, whereas spatial narratives explore the sites and landscapes of memory, nostalgia is usually described in temporal terms rather than in spatial terms and is understood as a wider “desire for desire” [Stewart S, 1993 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, Durham, NC), page 23] rather than as a desire for home. In this paper I show how memory and nostalgia informed the establishment and promotion of an Anglo-Indian homeland called McCluskieganj in Bihar in the 1930s. Homemaking at McCluskieganj was enacted in gendered and racialized ways that inscribed and yet erased the collective memory of mixed descent shared by its Anglo-Indian residents. Whereas an imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, an Indian maternal ancestor was more usually refigured as Mother India. In this paper I examine Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj in terms of productive nostalgia. First, rather than a nostalgic desire for home being apolitical or confining, settlement at McCluskieganj showed its liberatory potential for Anglo-Indians. Second, rather than focus on nostalgia solely in narrative or the imagination, I show that productive nostalgia implies its embodiment and enactment in practice. Third, rather than nostalgia being seen in terms of loss, mourning, and the impossibility of return, productive nostalgia is oriented towards the present and the future as well as towards the past. Fourth, rather than focus on the temporality of home as a site of origin and an unattainable past, I show how productive nostalgia refocuses on the desire for both proximate homes and more distant homes. Anglo-Indian homemaking at McCluskieganj enacted a productive nostalgia that was oriented towards the present and future as well as towards the past, and revealed an attachment to both India and Britain as home.

Dissident geographies : an introduction to radical ideas and practice

1. Dissident Geographies: An Introduction2. The Fire of Liberty: Anarchism and Geography3. Class, Capital and Space: Marxist Geographies4. Embodying Geography: Feminist Geographies of Gender5. Sexual Orientations: Geographies of Desire6. Decolonizing Geography:Postcolonial Perspectives

The future of research monographs: an international set of perspectives:

This Forum makes four points. First, it expands our knowledge on the writing and publishing of research monographs in different countries and so it moves beyond accounts which generalize from the UK experience. Second, the Forum considers international differences in the ways in which the assessment of academic performances affects the writing and publishing of geography research monographs. Third, it considers the ways in which structural changes in the global publishing industry affect different national contexts unevenly. Finally, the Forums different contributions reflect on how publishing books matters (or) not to geography as a discipline.

Spatial Stories under Siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857

The 5-month siege of the Lucknow Residency was one of the most significant conflicts of the Indian uprising in 1857-58. This article examines the diaries written by six British women during the siege, all of which were subsequently published. These diaries describe daily domestic life under siege and tell spatial stories of an imperial crisis on a domestic scale. Domestic and imperial disorder were intimately connected within the spatial confinement of life under siege at Lucknow. And yet, the diaries written by British women also chart the reinscription of domestic and imperial order. Most notably, although the first relief of Lucknow was unsuccessful in military terms, it can be read through the diaries written by women as providing some measure of domestic relief. Considering residency at Lucknow in its broadest sense, this article explores the spatial confinement of British women in the Residency compound, their unaccustomed servitude as their servants left at the beginning of the siege, and the domestic relief that helped British women to reinscribe the class differences that underpinned imperial regimental life.

The ‘Skyscraper Settlement’: Home and Residence at Christodora House:

The author develops a house biography of Christodora House, New York City, to investigate the relationships between the built form of a settlement house and new forms of residence within it. Settlement houses were founded from the 1880s as centres of neighbourhood welfare and social work, and housed resident workers in the poorest parts of cities. Founded in 1897, Christodora House occupied a purpose-built ‘skyscraper’ on Tompkins Square from 1928 to 1948. This building not only provided new and modern accommodation for settlement work, but also incorporated new forms of housing. The author considers the ways in which the building itself—both as ‘house’ and as ‘skyscraper’—was not only shaped by, but also recast, embodied practices of settlement, inhabitation, and domestic life. As a skyscraper built for settlement work, Christodora House represented a new, but ultimately unsuccessful, form of dwelling in the city.

My Home: text, space and performance

We were sitting in the living room, warming up and drying out with some hot tea, when suddenly a hatch opened and a Somali man popped his head out. He beckoned us onto the balcony and, gesturing towards the council estate around us, described his beautiful garden in Somalia and all the things that grew there. He was the first of five characters we would meet over the next hour as we explored three empty flats in Shelmerdine Close, Bow, that had been transformed into the homes of Polish, Kurdish, Somali and Vietnamese migrants to London, in London Bubble’s performances of ‘My Home’. Through these spaces and the verbatim re-telling of stories gathered in interviews, we learned what home meant to different people. From his leather armchair in a richly red room, a Polish man and two friends talked about home as invoking a feeling of comfort. Over tea and biscuits, and amidst piles of boxes, a Polish woman shared memories of the orange carpet in her childhood home. The Somali man then came back to take us into his living room, where we watched and listened as he fixed the curtains and spoke about his encounters with the National Front. Blaring music from next door drew us into a Kurdish girl’s bedroom and for a while we were her teenage confidantes, staying up too late listening to stories about not being Turkish. Delicious smells lured us finally into a kitchen, where a Vietnamese man was making dinner for his mother and talking about the differences between their ideas of home. We spent only a few minutes with each character but in every scene and during the carefully choreographed movements between them we were encouraged to feel welcomed into a real home. There were no curtain calls providing closure on this immersive theatrical experience and many of us came away with heightened senses of the people and spaces around us, wondering what stories they carried with them.

Diasporic returns to the city: Anglo-Indian and Jewish visits to Calcutta

Whilst the city is a central focus of research on diasporic resettlement, little research has explored the city as a site of diasporic return. This paper explores return visits to Calcutta by members of the Anglo-Indian and Jewish communities who have migrated to London, Toronto and Israel since 1947. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader debates about return visits and migrations as well as the connections between cities, communities and diasporas. Unlike research that focuses on the nation and/or ‘homeland’, the paper explores the city as a destination for diasporic return. In contrast to work that concentrates on particular ethnic groups that become minorities after migration and expect to feel an ethnic ‘affiliation’ on their return, the paper studies two communities that were minorities before migration. Drawing on interviews with Anglo-Indian and Jewish Calcuttans, the paper argues that decisions to return – and not to return – are shaped by ideas about the city as home more than the nation as homeland. Moreover, returns to the city are also, in different and sometimes contested ways, returns to the community and are experienced and understood in terms of wider narratives of urban and community continuity and change.

South Asian cities and diasporas

This special issue aims to foreground the city within diaspora studies and, in particular, within research on South Asian diasporas. Drawing together papers that focus on cities of diasporic departure, sojourn and resettlement, the special issue explores the importance of the city rather than the nation and/or ‘homeland’ for many South Asians living in diaspora and investigates the city as a site of territorial and emotional mobility and dwelling. Through their focus on a range of cities and communities, and with a particular interest in diasporic memory, identity and everyday life, the papers contribute to broader debates about transnational and postcolonial urbanism, cosmopolitan cities and urban memory. Our focus on the relationships between cities and diasporas is informed by, but also differs from, wider work on transnational urbanism (Smith 2001, also see Smith 2005 and Smith and Eade 2008), mobile cities (Oswin and Yeoh 2010) and ‘the other global city’ (Mayaram 2009). In his influential work on transnational urbanism, Michael Peter Smith argues that the socio-economic, political and cultural dynamics of cities are central in forging and facilitating transnational networks, circuits and everyday lives (2001, also see Ley 2004). Describing transnational urbanism as a research optic and a cultural metaphor, Smith argues that it helps ‘to focus our sense of transnational interconnectivity because it capture[s] a sense of distanciated and yet situated possibilities for constituting and reconstituting social relations’ (2005, p. 237). Smith’s work has inspired a wide range of research on the everyday practices that sustain the mobile and located lives and social relations of transmigrants (including Conradson and Latham 2005). Writing with specific reference to Singapore and ‘the instrumental incorporation of various sorts of flows into the pursuit of [its] particular global city project’, Natalie Oswin and Brenda Yeoh (2010, p. 170) develop the idea of ‘mobile cities’ to analyse ‘flows and movements in and through the global city’ and the context-specific ways in which they are disciplined (p. 170). Such ideas about mobility are important in Shail Mayaram’s work on ‘the other global city’, which encompasses ‘multiple indices of globality’ (2009, p. 7) and interconnectedness beyond an emphasis on the city in relation to global finance. In her critique of Saskia Sassen’s work on global cities (1991), and focusing specifically on Asian cities, Mayaram writes that ‘it almost negates the prior and present existence of other global cities that have been and are based not merely on financial, but on other transactions; on labor, but on numerous other population flows; and not on transnational homogenous economic space alone but a cross-regional heterogeneous politico-cultural space’ (p. 5).