Preliminary Programme

In this paper I will present the Sephardi Voices UK Archive, which collects interviews with Jews from North Africa and the Middle East in Britain. While presenting some of the materials from the interviews I will explore the role of nostalgia for the interviewer and the interviewee and address the question of how the notion of nostalgia should be incorporated in oral history research. A further question which I will look at is the relationship between trauma and nostalgia in narrated lives. Can we establish what impact the experience of trauma has on nostalgia and can nostalgia reduce the experience of trauma in a life history? I will briefly compare interviews from the Sephardi Voices UK and the AJR Refugee Voices collections (Show less)

This research is the result of the fruitful couple that brings together Recent History and Oral History: it copes with an issue and a historical period in which we are actively immersed.

On July 29th 1966, only one month after the coup d’état that deposed Arturo Illia, General Onganía’s dictatorship interdicted national universities stating they were a cradle of Communism. The police burst into the departments of the University of Buenos Aires roughing up students and professors. Laboratories and libraries were destroyed. The so called “Night of the Billy clubs” was followed by a wave of resignations: 1378 professors and researchers left their positions, 300 of them emigrated. The aim of this policy was to ban academic autonomy, freedom of chair, and any focal point of dissent.

This brain drain went on for many years along Argentine history, within the framework of other dictatorial governments, and once democracy was definitely restored, under neoliberal policies.

The crisis of neoliberalism in 2001 meant a deep change of paradigm. As from 2003, almost 40 years after that sadly famous winter night, we are witnessing a real turning point with regards to scientific and technological policies, within a broader project that stresses national development and domestic market growth. This is precisely the backdrop of the scientists repatriation carried out by the Executive, in the first place under Néstor Kirchner’s administration (2003-2007) and under Cristina Fernández’s from 2007. Eight hundred have returned so far.

Our research focuses on the embodiment that this historical process and these policies acquire in the scientists that have decided to return to Argentina. Their experiences and nostalgia abroad, the complex mixture of expectations, enthusiasm, tensions and uncertainties vis à vis their return, flow in the narrations gathered mainly through collective interviews, emphasizing the “choral” character of this construction. (Show less)

Finland and the Soviet Union fought two wars during World War II which both resulted in the cession of parts of the Finnish Karelia to the Soviet Union. As a result the Finnish population living in the territory was evacuated within the new Finnish border and the group of people called the Karelian evacuees or migrant Karelians was born. In this presentation I examine nostalgia as a cultural practice in the narratives written by Karelians who were children during the evacuations. I suggest that presenting childhood and Karelia in a nostalgic manner is a narrative strategy which the writers employ to negotiate between the past, the present and the future, and to build a continuum between them. Nostalgia is not only a way to describe and perceive Karelia and childhood, but also a strategy aimed to create and maintain a contemporary relationship to them.

Evacuation journey narratives are written decades after the war and the diachronical time perspective promotes nostalgia. In addition the past located in Karelia is conventionally presented in a nostalgic manner in the collective discourse of migrant Karelians. Despite this, the variation of how the writers narrate about childhood and lost home places is wide, and a longing or an elegiac tone is not the only option. I suggest that rather than passively repeating a nostalgic account, writers moreover negotiate between different collective and individual interpretations of the past and places in the past. In my presentation I also discuss about the trips back to the former home places in Karelia that became possible in the late 1980s. I elaborate how these trips have an effect on the narratives about the past that relates to concrete places existing also in the present. The presentation is a part of my ongoing PhD research. (Show less)