Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World
The Goan Experience, c. 1890-1980
Published in December 2014
Book
Hardback
380 pages
978-0-19-945175-3 (ISBN)
Description
Goans have long been a mobile community, but the story of their migrations has not been told until now. Using rarely-consulted archives across the world, as well as interviews with nearly 300 people of Goan origin, this book tells the fascinating story of how and why Goans went to East Africa and then on to Canada, the UK or to other parts of India. Goans helped to shape the contours of empires and the modern world. In this study of globalization from below, Frenz illuminates how Goans established communities in East Africa, and explores their experience of migration as well as their memories, and how these influenced their individual and collective identities.
This connected history juxtaposes and bridges the tensions between a structural, external account from a global perspective, and a personal, experiential, internal approach that reveals the perceptions and memories of the migrants themselves. Its analyses of general phenomena of migration processes and of economic, social, cultural, and political developments are relevant beyond the specific case of the Goans. Providing novel insights into multi-stage migration movements in a long-term historical perspective, this book is a major contribution to scholarship.
This connected history juxtaposes and bridges the tensions between a structural, external account from a global perspective, and a personal, experiential, internal approach that reveals the perceptions and memories of the migrants themselves. Its analyses of general phenomena of migration processes and of economic, social, cultural, and political developments are relevant beyond the specific case of the Goans. Providing novel insights into multi-stage migration movements in a long-term historical perspective, this book is a major contribution to scholarship.
Reviews / Votes
Overall, this is an engaging, detailed and persuasively written study, in which the voices of the interviewees are allowed to emerge but never overwhelm the author's firm grip on historical rigour. The book is a welcome antidote to Eurocentric migration histories ... It is a particularly valuable contribution for scholars and students of voluntary migration in the Indian Ocean region, and of Asian diasporas and networked histories of empire more generally, but also presents a salutary and salient account of migrants mobility, labour value and adaptability for the present. * Grainne Goodwin, English Historical Review * Margret Frenz has done pioneering work in tracing the Goans worldwide ... Her work sets a new standard for global historiography combining oral history with a thorough examination of other sources. * Dietmar Rothermund, India Quarterly * an impressive account and a fine piece of scholarship ... a serious contribution to multiple overlapping fields ... Frenz's remarkable study is a much-needed book that fills in a longstanding gap on those diasporic movements that do not fit within the neat stories of colony-metropole migrations. * Pamila Gupta, Journal of Historical Geography * Margret Frenz presents to the reader, with great care and skill, a tapestry of ideas and practices of mobility that underpin one of the great exchanges of recent human history: the mobility backwards and forwards across the Indian Ocean ... Frenz's work is an important scholarly endeavour that can catch the attention of both the specialist and the more general reader such as this reviewer. It whets the appetite to learn more both about this specific and interesting case of migration * Jo Shaw, African Affairs *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Delhi
India
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
567 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-945175-3 (9780199451753)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Margret Frenz is Lecturer in Global and Imperial History at the History Faculty and St Cross College, University of Oxford.
Content
List of Tables ; List of Maps ; List of Abbreviations ; Acknowledgements ; Maps ; Introduction ; Crossing the Ocean ; Making a Living ; Creating a Community ; Engaging in Politics ; Moving On ? Making New Lives ; Remembering East Africa ; Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Index ; About the Author