REIMAGINING BORDERS: THE COST of FREEDOM PAST and PRESENT

Bridget Haney, University of Missouri-Columbia
Janet Ross

What began as an afternoon swim on a hot summer’s day resulted in the drowning death of teenager Eugene Williams and the start of the biggest race riot of the “Red Summer” of 1919. One factor that led to the turbulent year of 1919 was the Great Migration. In 2015, the world woke up to an image of a young three-year-old boy, dead on a beach in Greece. The boy, Aylan Kurdi was part of a family that had chosen to make the perilous journey to seek asylum in Greece from war-torn Syria. He lost both his mother, Rehan Kurdi and 15-year-old brother Galip Kurdi, when the boat carrying them to Greece capsized. Two boys, centuries apart, both connected by their watery death. Using these two boys, this paper interrogates the geopolitical spaces migrating people are forced to live in and the consequences they face when they dare push back against these predefined and limiting physical spaces. Far from claiming that history repeats itself, we argue that history can offer a critical lens for analyzing the present-day discourse on migration.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 114. Negotiating Historical Narrative