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This chapter examines an Italian collection of refugee stories from 2018, Anche Superman era un rifugiato: Storie vere di coraggio per un mondo migliore ( Superman Was a Refugee Too: True Stories of Courage for a Better World ) to analyze key elements that Italian literature brings to discourses about migration literature. With the increase of migration to Italy, and the harsh Bossi-Fini immigration laws of 2002, a growing number of scholars have examined migration in Italian literary and cultural studies, but English-language anthologies
took with some gratitude. Excluded by culture and language, as well as by natural inhibition and reticence, he was more than content to leave all the Important Things (which included the children) to my mother and her ample extended family. There’s only one photo of him holding the baby (me), in which he looks embarrassed and nervous (but with the same shy smile as in this photo). Someone must have told him that for once he had to take a turn in front of the camera. The photograph is a scene from one year in his life, when he was interned with other refugees in the
Among the many dramatic events that have recently attracted world attention has been the attempted migration across or around the Mediterranean of millions of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Relatively few of these migrants – and even fewer Europeans – know of a singular precedent for this mass mobility: one that moved in the opposite direction, and which involved the forcible transfer from Spain to North Africa of tens of thousands of suspected Muslims. The expulsion in 1609–14 of the so-called Moriscos – that is, individuals of Islamic ancestry who had been baptized as Catholics – was a highly controversial measure, whose explicit goal was to purge from the Spanish empire the remaining descendants of the North Africans who had conquered the Iberian peninsula in the early eighth century and then resided there as Muslims to the 1520s. The cultural memory of the expulsion of the early modern Moriscos is the subject of this chapter. Their story and the reasons why, after a long period of coexistence, they were expelled, offers lessons from the past, as well as some thoughts for the present.
6: Tante Leonie I had always assumed that my sister Eleanor was named after Eleanor Rathbone, to whom my father was always grateful for her role in support of refugees in Britain in 1940. Rathbone is best known for her long campaign for family allowances. A special issue Royal Mail stamp (56p) in her honour was issued in 2008, together with stamps for five other ‘Women of Distinction’, describing her as ‘Campaigner, Family Allowance’. Leonie Kahn It was a campaign that she pursued for many decades, beginning in 1917 and culminating in the Family Allowance Act
’s Hour, broadcasting later on Radio Manchester as well. After the death of her second husband she stayed at Rose Hill, turning it into a refuge for unmarried mothers and their babies in the 1960s, and later, in the late 1970s, for Vietnamese refugees. With a national profile, and a job that took her to London frequently, Shapley retained her deep love for Manchester, and particularly Didsbury. This is from her autobiography, published in 1996, three years before her death: A lot of the attractiveness of Didsbury lies in its proximity to the river and its abundance of
their political claims. If politicians and engineers thought of the Chunnel as a logistical infrastructure, the creation of the tunnel opened a new passageway for people who, very often, were and are fleeing conflicts in former regions of the British colonial empire such as Iraq, Sudan, or Somalia. In 1999, the influx of refugees in Calais was so strong that the French government asked the French NGO Doctors without Borders to open a temporary camp to offer minimal shelter and services. Up until it was closed in 2002, the Sangatte camp received
expressiveness of Italian writers means turning to all those who have “come home” from such former colonies, to consider their work as integral to Italian culture. A recent anthology of refugee stories co-edited by author Igiaba Scego and the UN Refugee Agency, examined by Saskia Ziolkowski, epitomizes the generative energy of this fiction, infused with African traditions. Artists working in stone and other materials also exemplify such transformations of Italian cultures. In Tenley Bick's view, the sculpted Gate of Europe that an artist erected on the island of Lampedusa
. The Sayle Gallery exhibition, articles about it in the local press, and the stamp issue seem to have changed that to some extent. As for the stamps themselves – I have never particularly taken an interest in stamps, but I have recently come to see how fascinating they can be and what stories they can tell. William Kaczynski, another refugee to Britain from Nazi Germany, interned at the age of four with his parents on the Isle of Man, has put together over many years a unique collection of postal history artefacts, all relating to the lives of refugees in the 1930s
of her years of anxiety, her feeling that she had to protect her parents, her inability to separate from them (especially her mother) and the need to be good and do well in school. My father was a refugee, not a concentration camp survivor, but many of his relatives died in the Holocaust, including his mother’s brother and sister and their spouses, and his father’s two siblings, one with her hushand. It seems very likely that the same disturbances pervaded our postwar lives. From some of the studies Karpf reviews: The Holocaust, it was claimed, had become the
to see another cousin. The handwriting is beautiful, and the thoughts of a young visitor to Europe just over a hundred years ago never less than fascinating to read. In particular, it seemed important for once to be somehow in touch with my mother’s family history. For a number of years it had been my father’s life, in Germany in the 1930s and as a refugee in England, interned for a year in the Isle of Man, which had preoccupied me. On my mother’s side, the dramas of persecution and flight were less immediate, a prehistory to her own life and experience. Even her