The challenge facing migration research: the case for a biographical approach

"This article argues for an alternative conceptualization of migration which emphasizes its situatedness within everyday life. Our argument is constructed largely with the use of studies of internal migration from the developed world, but it must be stressed that the general theoretical argument could be extended to the study of migration in the developing world. Furthermore, our criticisms of current conceptualizations apply primarily to research into present-day migration rather than to more historical studies."     

Memories of a time forgotten: the myth of the perennial nation

ABSTRACT. This article questions the persistent view of the Balkans as a place where ethnic and national identities were sustained over centuries of Ottoman and Habsburg rule. It concentrates on the Serbian historical narrative and challenges the picture of the Serbs as an ethnic community who gathered around their bards and priests to cherish memories of their ancient kingdom. Rather, it is argued that we can speak of two competing narratives, one ecclesiastical and the other vernacular, neither of which was even remotely national or historical, and that the Serbs, as we know them today, are not the product of centuries of cultural formation but were carved out of a Slavic mass as were the Croats, relatively recently.     

History of a renegade revolutionary: revolutionism and betrayal in colonial India

This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (1929–30). This paper contextualizes Hans Raj Vohra's decision to become an ‘approver’, or a government witness, demonstrating the difficulties in framing his perfidy as a form of collaboration.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.