Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration (Studies of World Migrations)

Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and transnational communities. The essays examine how varieties of love, including sentimental, sexual, and political, redefined meanings of family, community, and national belonging, altering ideas of gender and social formation. Framed by the works of scholars of emotion, gender, and migration, these articles illustrate the complicated ways that love shapes the intimate decisions to migrate, familial expectations surrounding separations, wider cultural and political perceptions of mobility, reconfiguring the meaning of love itself. The contributors investigate the changing meanings of intimacy in a world marked by urban, transnational migrations and expanding circulations of capital and goods, and the ways in which these new meanings altered gender norms. The book’s historical framework makes visible how the sentimental and material landscapes of mobility changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers new evidence culled from archives, interviews, letters, and surveys for the study of emotion and mobility in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and opens up new avenues for future research. Love and its attendant emotions not only spur migration—they forge our response to the people who leave their homes in search of new lives. Emotional Landscapes looks at the power of love, and the words we use to express it, to explore the immigration experience. The authors focus on intimate emotional language and how languages of love shape the ways human beings migrate but also create meaning for migrants, their families, and their societies. Looking at sources ranging from letters of Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s to tweets passed among immigrant families in today's Italy, the essays explore the sentimental, sexual, and political meanings of love. The authors also look at how immigrants and those around them use love to justify separation and loss, and how love influences us to privilege certain immigrants—wives, children, lovers, refugees—over others. Affecting and perceptive, Emotional Landscapes moves from war and transnational families to gender and citizenship to explore the crossroads of migration and the history of emotion. Contributors: María Bjerg, Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, Tyler Carrington, Margarita Dounia, Alexander Freund, Donna R. Gabaccia, A. James Hammerton, Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, Emily Pope-Obeda, Linda Reeder, Roberta Ricucci, Suzanne M. Sinke, and Elizabeth Zanoni|Acknowledgments Introduction by Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder Chapter 1. What's Love Got to Do with It? Language of Transnational Affect in the Letters of Portuguese Migrants by Marcelo J. Borges Chapter 2. "The Letter Said That My Wife Had Died": Bigamy in Argentina in the Era of Mass Migration by María Bjerg Chapter 3. "People Cannot Live on Love Alone": Negotiating Love, Gender Roles, and Family Care between Slovenia and Egypt by Mirjam Milharcic Hladnik Chapter 4. Love, Mobility, and Fate in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin by Tyler Carrington Chapter 5. Brotherly Love: The Forging of an Italian-Argentine Brotherhood in Argentina, 1880-1920 by Elizabeth Zanoni Chapter 6. "Let Them Deport Me, I Will Come Back to Him Again": Romance, Affective Relations, and the US Deportation Regime, 1919-1935 by Emily Pope-Obeda Chapter 7. The Emotions of War: Italian Emigrant Soldiers and Love of Country by Linda Reeder Chapter 8. Maintaining Relationships and Creating Epistolary Personae: (Not) Articulating Emotions in the Letters of a Viennese Family of the Mid-Twentieth Century by Suzanne M. Sinke Chapter 9. Love at the Threshold of War and Migration: A War Orphan's Story by Sonia Cancian Chapter 10. Emotional Rhetoric and Sexualized Livelihood: Marriage and Transatlantic Migration in Postwar Germany by Alexander Freund Chapter 11. "When I Came to Canada, All I Did Was Cry": Emotions and Migration of Greek Women in Postwar Montreal by Margarita Dounia Chapter 12. Stories of Love and Marriage in the Modern British Diaspora: Themes of Change and Continuity by A. James Hammerton Chapter 13. "I Can Express My Feelings with Just a Tweet": Language, Emotion, and the Digital Divide among Immigrant Families in Italy by Roberta Ricucci Epilogue by Donna R. Gabaccia Contributors Index|"The rich empirical case studies of this substantive volume are difficult to cover fully in a short review. They bring the sensitivity of the history of emotion to bear on love's complexity, historicity, and changing nature, as defined and shaped through gender and place." — Journal of Interdisciplinary History "A valuable insight into the multifaceted migration experience imbued with emotions. . . . Love, gender, and migration are interwoven in all the narratives. Love...