From ‘flight and expulsion’ to migration: contextualizing German victims of forced migration

Abstract

The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives.     

The strange geographies of the ‘new’ state capitalism

The recent polymorphism of state intervention and attendant political geographies have been interpreted as a return of state capitalism. While commentators across the social sciences have offered competing characterizations of the new state capitalism, little attention has been dedicated to how narratives and geographical imaginaries of the new state capitalism operate as a form of geopolitical knowledge and practice. Drawing upon critical geopolitics, we make three main arguments. First, we examine the context of wider geopolitical and geo-economic shifts in which the social construction of the geo-category has happened. We contend that the emerging new spatiality of the global economy has prompted the need for new discursive frames and geopolitical lines of reasoning. Second, we argue that this need is fulfilled by the geo-category state capitalism, which acts as a powerful tool in categorizing and hierarchizing the spaces of world politics. It does so by reinstituting a simple narrative of competition between two easily identifiable protagonists – (Western) democratic free-market capitalism and its deviant ‘other’, (Eastern) authoritarian state capitalism – and by reactivating older geopolitical grand narratives. Third, the geo-category state capitalism discursively enables Western business and state actors to justify tougher policy stances in three areas: foreign policy; trade, technology, and investment regulation; and international development.     

‘The right to immobility’ and the uneven distribution of spatial capital: negotiating youth transitions in northern Sweden

‘Successful adulthoods’ are associated with mobile professionals, higher education and cosmopolitan lifestyles. This paper takes an interest in how this discourse is adopted or altered by young people living far away from big cities. Based on interviews in a traditional woodland community in northern Sweden, the study examines how young people in the second and final years of upper secondary school negotiate their transition from education to work. It draws on the two-dimensional concept of ‘spatial capital’. It sheds light firstly on a range of local possibilities underpinned by ‘position capital’, such as proximity to mining districts as well as to educational institutions. These possibilities compete with ‘situation capital’ in the form of young people’s dispositions towards mobility where they consider alternatives in other cities in Sweden and sometimes – although rarely – abroad. I argue that spatial capital is an indication of young people’s habitus, where the geographical marginality of the study location influences perceptions of the future in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. The paper also problematizes contemporary society’s privileging of mobility, which should be viewed in relation to youth’s perceived ‘right to immobility’.     

Representative democracy and the ‘spirit of resistance’ from Constant to Tocqueville

ABSTRACT

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to ‘representative government’ and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to ‘resistance theory’ as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in ‘representative governments’ or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or ‘right to resist’ oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘spirit of resistance’ since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to ‘institutionalise’ principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks.     

‘Aristocracies of thought’: social class in the early folklore of Yeats and Hyde

The years 1888–89 saw the production of two influential collections of Irish folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats and Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta by Douglas Hyde. These works broke strongly with the unscientific and patronising tone of the Buchmärchen tradition in Ireland and established a new theory of folklore. In this theory, Yeats and Hyde distanced peasant narrators in an attempt to secure literary and, ultimately, aristocratic origins for their tales. As a result, Hyde and Yeats, despite their Ascendancy upbringings, could view themselves (and not the peasant narrators) as the legitimate inheritors of folklore narratives. The very stories collected, however, challenge this power dynamic. Stories such as ‘Monachar agus Manachar’ directly critique the perceived unjust division of labour and profit in rural Ireland in a way that parallels the act of folklore collection. The tales themselves resist the rhetorical frameworks of their Ascendancy collectors.     

So many Glasgows: From ‘personality of place’ to ‘positionality in space and time’

This paper investigates place and positionality in the regional novel against a background of evolving trends in geographical scholarship of place and placelessness. In re‐examining the representation of Glasgow in the urban regional novel, it proposes that a qualitative difference exists between rural and urban epistemologies which relates to the profoundly temporal essence of ‘cityness’. Aspects of both multi‐dimensionality in urban time‐space and of the city as the locus for working‐class oppression are reviewed in the context of a selection of urban imaginings.     

The Qawa incident in 1968 and other cases of ‘spirit possession’: Religious Syncretism in Fiji

Abstract

Government medical officers investigating an outbreak among adolescent Indian schoolgirls in Fiji diagnosed mass hysteria and identified the trigger girl. Their school was temporarily closed and parents were advised to keep their daughters quietly at home. The Hindu parents were not satisfied with reassurances, since they believed that their children had been possessed by hostile Fijian spirits of a sacred pool on the edge of the school playground that had been damaged by an Indian bulldozer operator who later died. The girls were taken to Hindu healers and to a Muslim healer with Fijian‐derived powers. The local Fijian chief performed a Fijian ceremony of appeasement at the pool. A Hindu pujari prayed to the Hindu elephant god and, following Fijian ritual, poured yaqona (kava) into the pool and asked the spirits for forgiveness. Finally a Hindu pandit prayed to Hindu gods to exorcise the evil spirits, conducting the public Om Shanti ceremony. All the girls who attended the final ceremony recovered. The Indian and Fijian communities combined their beliefs and rituals to appease the spirits and, as far as they were concerned, to cause the girls to recover and to remove the troubles from the school and to prevent further troubles from occurring.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

Two visions of Indigenous economic development and cultural survival: The ‘real economy’ and the ‘hybrid economy’

Noel Pearson and Jon Altman are two of the central intellectual figures in the contemporary debate on how to address the poverty and disadvantage of Indigenous Australians living in remote regions. This article compares their visions for Indigenous economic development. Pearson advocates greater integration of Indigenous people into what he calls the ‘real economy’, but Altman has produced an alternative approach to Indigenous development – the ‘hybrid economy’ approach – which he suggests is more in keeping with the aspirations of many Aboriginal people to maintain a degree of autonomy from non-Indigenous Australians and to continue living close to ancestral lands. This article argues that both men should be understood as advocates for Indigenous self-determination, but different ways of conceptualising Indigenous autonomy and cultural survival has led them to contrasting policy positions.

在如何解决边远地区澳大利亚原住民的贫困及弱势问题的当代辩论中,诺埃尔·皮尔森和章·沃特曼是两位核心思想者。本文比较了这两个人对于原住民经济发展的愿景。皮尔森主张原住民更多地融入他所谓的实际经济,而沃特曼的思路却不一样,他是一种杂糅思路,认为应该依从许多原住民的愿望,在一定程度上独立于澳大利亚非原住民,继续生活在祖先的土地上。本文认为,两人都是原住民自觉的提倡者,只是他们思考原住民的自治及文化生存的思路有所不同,从而导致了矛盾的政策立场。     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

The space between: using ‘relational ethics’ and ‘relational space’ to explore relationship-building between care providers and care recipients in the home space

Geographers and other social scientists have a longstanding interest in ‘geographies of aging’ focused on the provision of care to vulnerable older populations and the challenges and experiences of caregivers [Skinner, M. W., Cloutier, D., & Andrews, G. J. (2014). Geographies of ageing: Progress and possibilities after two decades of change. Progress in Human Geography, 1–24]. This qualitative research project explores strategies for relationship-building used by home support workers and older residents according to a ‘relational ethics’ framework, enacted in the ‘relational space’ of the home environment. This framework rests on four principles: engagement, embodiment, mutual respect and environment, and argues that ‘relationships’ between care providers and care recipients must be preserved as the real essence or heart of the health care experience. Two linked conclusions are drawn from the research: that the treatment of the environment can be expanded using a social geographic lens to capture the more active influence of ‘homes’ on relationship-building and second, the relational ethics framework is useful in the home care context to characterize and ground the importance of relationships in the home care domain and the importance of home care to foster aging in place for vulnerable older persons.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

Trans lives in the ‘gay capital of the UK’

Recent geographical interventions have begun to question the power relations among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, challenging assumptions that LGBT communities have homogeneous needs or are not characterised by hierarchies of power. Such interventions have included examinations of LGBT scenes as sites of exclusion for trans people. This article augments academic explorations of trans lives by focusing on ‘the gay capital’ of the UK, Brighton & Hove, a city that is notably absent from academic discussions of gay urbanities in the UK, despite its wider acclaim. The article draws upon Count Me In Too (CMIT), a participatory action research project that seeks to progress social change for LGBT people in Brighton & Hove. Rather than focusing on LGBT scenes, the article addresses broader experiences of the city, including those relating to the city as a political entity that seeks to be ‘LGBT inclusive’ and those relating to the geographies of medical ‘treatment’ that relocate trans people outside the boundaries of the city, specifically to the gender identity clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. It argues that trans lives are both excluded from and inextricably linked to geographical imaginings of the ‘gay capital’, including LGBT spaces, scenes and activism, such that complex sexual and gender solidarities are simultaneously created and contested. In this way, the article recognises the paradoxes of the hopes and solidarities that co-exist – and should be held in tension – with experiences of marginalisation.     

‘Caught’ between foreign cultural and development policies: perspectives of German Studies and German as a foreign language in Africa

The promotion of the German language abroad and of German Studies plays a central role in German Foreign Cultural Policy. With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa, otherwise a peripheral region for foreign policy, German as foreign language is firmly established as second language after English. Learners especially in Francophone West and Central Africa have increased over the past decade. Numerous funding programmes and actions are supported by German nongovernmental organizations at college/university levels. But bilateral cooperation between German and African academic institutions are challenged both by negative perceptions of the ‘Global South’ among Western colleagues and by an infrastructure adverse to research and to career development in most African countries. Additionally, North/South relations are traditionally seen in terms of (under-)development by German institutions, effecting cooperation. The paper develops a differentiated picture of African Studies in Africa, and outlines benefits that can be attained through collaboration ‘at eye-level’.