Preliminary Programme

Based on life story interviews across three generations of Caribbean families in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean, this paper will examine the role of memory in the maintenance of transnational kinship networks and the role of those networks as model and metaphors in the movements for Independence. First, it will argue that the family memory reflected an inclusive concept of family in which lineage and descent were the central arbiters of membership. Equally, the language and narratives through which memories were recalled and recounted were important in establishing and maintaining family membership and contact across generations and oceans and for encoding prescriptions for good behaviour. Families were inclusive and cosmopolitan, flexible and democratic. These qualities passed below the colonial radar, for the the predominant belief which guided colonial social policy in the West Indies in the twentieth century assumed that Black families lacked morals, structure and men, a void which could explain poverty and lack of citizenship.
Second, this paper will argue that Caribbean families stood as beacons of Creole pride, as singularly West Indian institutions which not only provided for their members strategies for survival, but foci for an alternative order, as models and metaphors for social organisation. Moreover, the transnational family networks established through migration became conduits through which remittances, people and ideas could pass. Abroad, they emerged as central to migrant identities. Reclaiming, therefore, the link between citizenship and family, this paper will conclude that one element in the development of twentieth century cultural pride (central in the Independence movements) in the British West Indies was early socialisation into the fundamental, but thoroughly Creolised, institution of the family which provided an alternative world view and ultimately an alternative vision of independent nationhood through federation – a model which, like families, was inclusive, cosmopolitan, flexible and democratic. (Show less)

In this paper I discuss how intercountry adoption patterns from China to the Western world are leading to the creation of a particular kind of diaspora where kinship and ethnicity cross-cut, and where the access of the displaced Chinese population (the children) to their land and culture of origin is mediated by the will (or lack of) of the European and North American parents. The paper begins by comparing the intercountry adoption experience in Spain and Britain. I argue that British and Spanish policies and popular attitudes towards intercountry adoption reflect broader understandings about the right to belong (to the family and to the nation), and about Britishness and Spanishness, as well as fitting into particular projects of nationhood and society. Thus, whereas only about 100 children are adopted from China into the UK each year, in Spain there are more than 1000 adoptions yearly. And, whereas British social work policies and practices actively discourage adoptions across ethnic boundaries and see intercountry adoption as morally suspect, their Spanish counterparts view intercountry and interethnic adoption in the opposite way, as 'evidence' of Spain's anti-racist and internationalist outlook. In the second part of the paper I focus on the experiences of adoptive parents and children in Spain and Britain, and analyse the role that 'having adopted from abroad' , or 'having created an international family' plays in the parents' images of themselves and their place in the world. I also look at the ways in which adoptive parents in Spain and in Britain construct an image of the homeland for their Chinese children and also the kind of ethnic self that they encourage. (Show less)

In the 19th century, Jewish financier families residing in Paris quite often resorted to matrimonial candidates born or even residing abroad, leading to talk of a European matrimonial market. The higher up the social ladder, the more pronounced the tendency. In the 20th century, a more national matrimonial market seems to have taken precedence. For Parisian families, spouses were by and large born in Paris, even if the families of the latter, often in France for less than 100 years, were natives of other countries. Another phenomenon merits mention: the drop in denominational unions. Jewish high society, while it did not encourage them, at least tolerated “mixed” marriages, which were no longer forbidden as in the past. The statistical results presented were culled from a database incorporating those wedding ceremonies performed at the Victoire synagogue from 1875-1940 and a study of Jewish families from the Livre d’Or des Salons society register of 1899. (Show less)