How does a house remember? heritage-ising return migration in an Indonesian-Chinese house museum in Guangdong, PRC

This paper is an attempt to integrate heritage and museum studies through exploring the complex relationship between the materiality of architecture and social memories with a house museum of return migration in Guangdong, PRC as a case study. It unveils that the ongoing process of memory is intrinsically intertwined with spatial and temporal dimensions of the physical dwelling and built environment and the wider social-historical context and power relations shaping them. I argue that it is the house as ‘object of exhibit’ just as much as the exhibits inside the house that materialises the turbulent and traumatic migratory experience of Returned Overseas Chinese, embodies their memories and exposes the contested nature of museumification. By looking at the socially and geographically marginalised dwelling of return migrants, the house draws people’s attention to the often neglected importance of conceptual periphery in re-theorising what is often assumed to be the core of heritage value. It points to the necessity to integrate displaced, diasporic, transnational subjects to heritage and museum studies that have been traditionally framed within national and territorial boundaries.

Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa

This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in South Africa, twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office. Drawing on over sixty in depth biographical interviews and ethnographic work in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, Daniel Conway and Pauline Leonard analyse how British immigrants' relate to, participate in and embody South Africa's complex racial and political history. Through their everyday lives, political and social attitudes, relationships with the places and spaces of South Africa, as well as their expectations of the future, the complexities of their transnational, raced and classed identities and senses of belonging are revealed. Migration, Space and Transnational Identities makes an important contribution to sociological, geographical, political and anthropological debates on transnational migration, whiteness, Britishness and lifestyle, tourism and labour migration.

Introduction: The ‘material turn’ in migration studies

This introduction firstly discusses the ongoing paradigm shift in the study of transnational migration, in particular the emergent interest in the convergence of migration and material culture as the starting point of our investigation. Then it highlights three aspects that this Special Issue could further in the current study of migration and materialities: namely, historical consciousness in materialising migration experiences and the notion of generational transmission; the everyday experience of body as the site for mutual constitution between subject and object; and the unique value of a language-based, interdisciplinary-oriented approach for migration studies. In the final part, it summarizes the four articles that follow, highlighting the contribution that each makes to our overall objective of making a ‘material turn’ in migration studies, and discusses some ways it could be further developed.

Looking Beyond ‘White Slavery’: Trafficking, the Jewish Association’s representation of ‘the potential victim’, and the dangerous politics of migration control in England, 1890-1910

This article seeks to revise Jo Doezema’s suggestion that ‘the white slave’ was the only dominant representation of ‘the trafficked woman’ used by early anti-trafficking advocates in Europe and the United States, and that discourses based on this figure of injured innocence are the only historical discourses that are able to shine light on contemporary anti-trafficking rhetoric. ‘The trafficked woman’ was a figure painted using many shades of grey in the past, with a number of injurious consequences, not only for trafficked persons but also for female labour migrants and migrant populations at large. In England, dominant organizational portrayals of ‘the trafficked woman’ had first acquired these shades by the 1890s, when trafficking started to proliferate amid mass migration from Continental Europe, and when controversy began to mount over the migration to the country of various groups of working-class foreigner. The article demonstrates these points by exploring the way in which the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW), one of the pillars of England’s early anti-trafficking movement, represented the female Jewish migrants it deemed at risk from being trafficked into sex work between 1890 and 1910. It argues that the JAPGW stigmatised these women, placing most of the onus for trafficking upon them and positioning them to a greater or a lesser extent as ‘undesirable and undeserving working-class foreigners’ who could never become respectable English women. It also contends that the JAPGW, in outlining what was wrong with certain female migrants, drew a line between ‘the migrant’ and respectable English society at large, and paradoxically endorsed the extension of the very ‘anti-alienist’ and Antisemitic prejudices that it strove to dispel.

Celebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight

Our case study of charismatic celebrity comedian Russell Brand’s turn to political activism uses Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the process of celebrity migration across social fields. We investigate how Brand’s capital as a celebrity performer, storyteller and self-publicist translated from comedy to politics. To judge how this worked in practice, we analysed the comedic strategies used in his stand-up show Messiah Complex and undertook a conversational analysis of his notorious interview with Jeremy Paxman on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight. We argue that Brand was able to secure political legitimacy by creatively constituting himself as an authentic anti-austerity spokesperson for the disenfranchised left in United Kingdom. In order to do so, he repurposed his celebrity capital to political ends and successfully deployed the cultural and social capitals he had developed as a celebrity comedian to secure widespread engagement with his media performances.