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the consequences of the fatal border by listening. In this chapter, we contribute to this alternative engagement with border deaths and argue that a key to critical knowledge is a careful and detailed telling and listening: the work of listening . For the Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, who works with oral histories, history is found in little details, and the most interesting knowledge about life is in what she calls ‘mysteries’: the memories that appear when people speak to each other and tell stories of what has happened
5 ‘Space-crossed time’: digital photography and cartography in Wolfgang Weileder’s Atlas1 Rachel Wells The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. (Proust, 2002: 513) The creation of an ‘Atlas’ is an ambitious project. The word suggests accuracy in detail
on tempo-spatiality, then a different set of questions emerge. First, a temporal focus draws attention to multifaceted sets of scale, which appear to braid into different temporal durations at social and personal levels, in an age when time appears to accelerate exponentially. Walter Benjamin once described this as Erfahrung and Erlebnis (the temporal distinctiveness of near Conclusion: back to the future 259 and far experience and memory) (see Elsaesser, 2009), and the digital mapping cases discussed in this section also evoke Bergsonian notions of durée and
subscription to import up to 2,500 addresses and overlay historical traffic data, it now only needs a download installer and a licence key. While these differences are superficially ones of cost, access and availability – between $400 and nothing at all – they are also indicative of temporal shifts in data acquisition, download speed, bandwidth capacity and user experience, as computer processing power, memory and storage have dramatically improved. Arguably, then, we are moving into another distinctive phase of digital life, characterised by ever-more novel functions
the transformations of these concepts in and through digital geomedia. Accordingly, the following pages highlight several stages of time integration in digital maps and globes to show a transition that could be part of a larger paradigm shift in cartography: from static representations to the dynamic presentation of space, at the intersection of mobility, visuality and individual memory. It is argued that a medial turn within geography introduces heterogeneous time frames missing in traditional representations of space and place. Mediality and time The assumption
approach to its study.4 Some of this has been manifested from the 1990s in the concept of ‘deep mapping’, where local, rural places are explored intensively through a conflation of literature, documentary and story, folklore, legend and oral testimony, archaeology, natural and local history and memory – an accumulation of multifarious ‘data’ and ‘texts’ which in toto produce a textured ‘deep map’ capturing essential senses of place: ‘landscape becomes a palimpsest – a stratigraphy of practices and texts’.5 In many ways, Robinson has articulated this geographical quest
global labour markets. With the neoliberal emphasis on the ‘autonomous, entrepreneurial self’ (Fortier 2013 :67), an all-encompassing Shell identity built through corporate socialisation lost its strategic importance. The divorce of individual careers from Shell, and the greater diversity in terms and conditions, encouraged an individualised self-identification as, simply, ‘expatriate’. The memory work of Shell spouses reflects how expatriate became a migrant identity largely uncoupled from its Shell umbrella. In 1990, a group of ‘Shell wives’ posted in The Hague
imaginary and narrative both combine and diverge in borderlands where they are appropriated by minorities and charged with new stories to support identity verification and political and economic gain. Hybrid forms result to weave a rich tapestry of borderland interaction and display. When this tapestry is examined carefully, different levels of discourse are evident. Also evident is the fact that border space allows these diverse discourses to coexist, and even to flourish and grow. Significantly, borderlands accommodate a diversity and plurality of cultural memories and
What does expatriate mean? Who gets described as an expatriate rather than a migrant? And why do such distinctions matter? Following the expatriate explores these questions by tracing the postcolonial genealogy of the category expatriate from mid-twentieth-century decolonisation to current debates about migration, and examining the current stakes of debates about expatriates. As the book shows, the question of who is an expatriate was as hotly debated in 1961 as it is today. Back then, as now, it was entangled in the racialised, classed and gendered politics of migration and mobility. Combining ethnographic and historical research, the book discusses uses of the expatriate across academic literature, corporate management and international development practice, personal memory projects, and urban diaspora spaces in The Hague and Nairobi. It tells situated stories about the category’s making and remaking, its contestation and the lived experience of those labelled expatriate. By attending to racialised, gendered and classed struggles over who is an expatriate, the book shows that migration categories are at the heart of how intersecting material and symbolic social inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice thus needs to dissect and dismantle categories like the expatriate, and the book offers innovative analytical and methodological strategies to advance this project.
This short chapter considers the historical connections between Manchester’s Jewish community, its presence in the built environment, and an urban history of anti-Semitism and violence in the city, highlighting how the synagogue acts as a space of memory for these longer histories, both near and far.