Franca Iacovetta

Cultures in Contact

In 2002, Dirk Hoerder published his magnum opus, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). In this book, Hoerder describes and analyses, with an unusual breadth of scope, the origins, causes, and extent of human migration around the globe from the eleventh century onward to the present day, paying particular attention to the impact migrations have had in the receiving countries and the cultural interactions they have triggered. At the 28th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association, organized in November 2003 in Baltimore, Dirk Hoerders book was the winner of the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for the best book in social science history. In this review symposium, seven migration scholars from differing national and cultural backgrounds give their comments on Hoerders book, with a concluding response by Dirk Hoerder.

Making Aboriginal People 'Immigrants Too': A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s–1960s

Canadian citizenship is a young official category of belonging, and the relationship of Aboriginal people to that category remains contested ground: scholars debate the legal status of First Nations people within the Canadian state while other academics and First Nations leaders note that these nations never ceded their sovereignty to a foreign colonial state. While such debates have deep historic roots, more recent post-1945 government policies and programs reveal the extent to which Aboriginal peoples continued to be seen as outsiders who need to be assimilated to the ‘mainstream.’ As a historical contribution to these ongoing debates, this paper explores efforts to create a distinct and common Canadian citizenship in the years after the Second World War when, as a follow-up to the passage of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act, the federal government strategically chose to combine its management of immigrant admissions, reception, and citizenship with its Indian Affairs policies under the rubric of one new federal ministry, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration (DCI). From 1950 until 1966, the Indian Affairs branch was located in the DCI, where its activities were heavily modelled after the citizenship campaigns being developed for immigrants within the DCI’s Canadian Citizenship Branch. This paper reveals the ways in which ministry officials and their network of public and private groups and agencies aimed to create a one-size-fits-all category of societal Canadian citizenship. To do so they deliberately constructed Aboriginal peoples as ‘immigrants too’ and targeted both ‘Canada’s original inhabitants’ and newly arrived European refugees and immigrants with similar ‘Canadianization’ programs. The analysis of the programs targeting both groups highlights the similarities (for example, both Natives and newcomers were constructed as outsiders who needed to adopt dominant middle-class Canadian social and moral codes and pro-capitalist values) and the differences (for example, the immigrant campaigns were more tolerant of cultural differences than the Aboriginal campaigns that, despite their seemingly progressive rhetoric, effectively continued earlier assimilationist policies) as well as their gendered and class features. In offering this comparative analysis between these twinned postwar campaigns, the paper brings together two histories, Aboriginal and immigrant, that have usually been studied in isolation from each other. La citoyenneté canadienne est une catégorie d’appartenance officielle récente, et le rapport des peuples autochtones à cette catégorie demeure problématique. Pendant que certains universitaires débattent du statut juridique des Premières Nations au Canada, d’autres chercheurs et des leaders autochtones maintiennent que ces nations n’ont jamais abandonné leur souveraineté au profit d’un État colonial étranger. Les racines de ce débat sont très anciennes, mais on peut constater, dans des politiques et des programmes gouvernementaux appliqués dans le dernier demi-siècle seulement, à quel point on a continué de traiter les Autochtones comme des outsiders qu’il fallait assimiler au courant principal. Cet article veut contribuer aux dimensions historiques de ce débat en examinant la création d’une citoyenneté canadienne distincte au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans la foulée de la Loi sur la citoyenneté de 1947, le gouvernement fédéral a fait le choix de combiner l’administration de l’immigration à celle de ses politiques autochtones au sein d’un nouveau ministère de la Citoyenneté et de l’Immigration. Entre 1950 et 1966, ce ministère a chapeauté les Affaires indiennes et en a profondément influencé les activités en les faisant se modeler sur ses campagnes de citoyenneté destinées aux immigrants. Cet article révèle que les responsables du ministère et leur réseau de groupes publics et privés ont travaillé à créer une citoyenneté canadienne sociétale uniforme. Ils ont construit les Autochtones comme « des immigrants eux aussi » et ont voulu leur appliquer les programmes de « canadianisation » conçus pour les immigrants et les réfugiés européens récents. L’analyse de ces programmes, en plus d’en montrer les caractéristiques de genre et de classe, révèle des similarités et des différences dans le traitement des deux groupes. Tant les Autochtones que les nouveaux arrivants étaient vus comme des outsiders auxquels il fallait inculquer les valeurs capitalistes et le code moral et social de la classe moyenne canadienne dominante. Mais les campagnes destinées aux immigrants respectaient davantage les différences culturelles que celles destinées aux Autochtones; en dépit de leur rhétorique progressiste, ces dernières prolongeaient en fait les politiques assimilationnistes d’autrefois. En faisant l’analyse comparative de ces politiques jumelles de l’après-guerre, cet article réunit deux historiographies (immigrante et amérindienne) qui se sont généralement développées séparément.

Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities, and Defiant Domestics: Writing About Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship

N O T SINCE THE MANIFESTOS issued two decades ago by womens historians and proponents of the new labour history have Canadian social historians been seriously challenged. Post-structuralism and discourse analysis has raised questions — intriguing to some, dismissed as extreme relativism, or politically dangerous by others— about our ability to really know the past The history of sexuality has opened the curtain on homosexuality and also begun the important work of

Women, Work, and Protest in the Italian Diaspora: An International Research Agenda

How DO WE THEORIZE global migration, family economies, and labour activism from a women-centred perspective? How do feminist and gendered frameworks challenge histories of diasporas, nationalisms, and the international proletariat?. We aim to explore these questions by focusing on the roughly 27 million people who in the 19th and 20th centuries left the geographical expression called Italy. Our work brings together colleagues from four continents in a collaborative project on Italian working women in Italy, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. We intend to probe persistent myths and distorted images of Italian women, and rethink some of the categories central to migration and diaspora scholarship. Indeed, our project should help historicize social scientific analyses of migration that treat step-migration, return migration, and transnationalism as new phenomena

Laboring Across National Borders: Class, Gender, and Militancy in the Proletarian Mass Migrations

A decade-long project on the migration of Italian laborers around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries points to the methodological challenges, theoretical debates, and some of the rewards of transnational analysis of class, ethnicity, and gender in the making of modern national states. Analyses of internationally mobile laborers historicize current transnational studies, problematize the historiography of national groups, and reveal how profoundly—and usually also how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.

‘Bodies Across Borders. Oral And Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (BABE): a conversation with Luisa Passerini, Donna Gabaccia, and Franca Iacovetta

In this final contribution to this theme issue on Luisa Passerinis important scholarship, the guest editors and Passerini discuss her current EU Research Council-funded collaborative project, BABE, which is meant to bring together oral and visual forms of memory that reformulate the concept of Europe (and Fortress Europe) in more inclusive ways. Its distinctive features are discussed, including the collection and analysis of drawings and other visual itineraries by artists and other subjects, including students, from the global diaspora in Europe. Other topics include the importance of conversation in oral history work, the ‘mobility turn,’ and the gendered nature of mentorship.

Borders, Conflict Zones, and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerinis important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerinis early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerinis insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.

Ninety-Second Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians

From April 22–25, 1999, the Organization of American Historians held its ninety-second annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The theme was “State and Society in North America: Processes of Social Power and Social Change.” More than seven hundred scholars were on the program, an impressive showing; and for Canadian historians, whose community is comparatively small, a source of envy. The participants were, of course, overwhelmingly American and US specialists, but many Canadian colleagues presented papers or attended, as did other international scholars, including Americanists based overseas. While most sessions were held at a downtown hotel, organizers made use of local cultural venues and historic sites. They scheduled a session on the Underground Railroad, for instance, at St. Lawrence Hall, site of the first meeting of the Colored Free Men in Canada and an antislavery lecture by Frederick Douglas.

‘In the case of a woman’ or ‘the headache’: married women’s nationality and Canada’s Citizenship Act at home and Europe, 1946–50

ABSTRACT In addition to making Canadian nationality independent of British subjecthood, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act made women’s nationality independent of marriage, but did not repatriate women who married aliens before 1 January 1947, when the act became law. This article examines the lobby to repatriate the women, most of them married to European allied soldiers and living in Canada or Europe, and wider contexts involved. Scrutinizing the citizenship claims made by and for ‘ordinary’ but racially privileged white women in a dominion that was both a receiving nation on the cusp of renewed immigration and a neo-colonial state vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples, it acknowledges the woman’s heartfelt sentiments and assesses the lobby against the continuing disabilities imposed on status-Indian women who ‘married out.’ The delayed reform of 1950, which fell short of automatic repatriation, and the absence of feminists from a lobby related to a long-identified feminist issue, are also addressed, as are topics in need of further research.

Women Pluralists Negotiating Immigrant Children’s Health in an Era of Mass Migration (the 1960s)

The article explores immigrant children’s health in Toronto, Canada, during mass migration by analysing a 1960s women-led project involving southern Europeans launched by the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, the city’s leading immigrant agency and part of a long-standing North American pluralist movement. Focused on the immigrant female fieldworkers tasked with convincing parents known for their ‘reticence’ in dealing with ‘outsiders’ to access resources to ensure their children’s well-being, it assesses their role as interpreters for the public health nurses investigating the Italian and Portuguese children who increasingly dominated their referrals from Toronto’s downtown schools. Without exaggerating their success, it documents the women’s capacity for persuasion, and notes the value of community-based pluralist strategies in which women with links to those being served play active roles as front-line intermediaries. The article highlights the history of women’s grassroots multiculturalism and the need to consider pluralism’s possibilities as well as its limits.