This volume is concerned with the shaping of identity using the theme of migration, revealing how migration acts as a crucible for individual social development and for wider social change. The theme is developed through the forms of written biographies, oral histories and life stories.
Migration and Identity is the third volume in the series International Yearbook of Oral Histories and Life Stories. Its theme is of special concern at a time both of massive worldwide migr ation and of apparently intensifying national, ethnic, and racial conflicts. The essays in this volume examine how the identities of migrants are shaped not only by gender, class, and ethnicity, but also by the experience of migration itself; and how migration is thus a crucible for both individual development and wider social change today. Guest-edited from the United States and with a special relevance to the Americas, this volume spans the whole complex global web of migratory patterns with contributions linking Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, without losing the particularities of local and personal experience.
The aim of the International Yearbook is to increase our understanding of the recent past and the changing present. It sets out to present and interpret autobiographical testimony, whether in the form of written autobiography, oral history, or life story interviews. Each issue forms a coherent volume focusing on a single theme. The two previous volumes are Memory and Totalitarianism (volume one, 1992; special editor Luisa Passerini) and Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories (volume two, 1993; special editors Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson).
Edited by an international group of leading scholars, the Yearbook is genuinely interdisciplinary and intellectually stimulating. It will appeal to students in many areas, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and anthropology.
Migration and Identity offers a fascinating and wide-ranging selection of migrants' stories and of prisms for interpreting them....an excellent volume, allowing readers to learn a great deal about the identities of contemporary migrants as well as the theoretical prisms scholars and migrants themselves use to interrogate those identities.
