Emigration/emigrations in the English-speaking world since the 18th century.
Location and date: Université Côte d’Azur (France). 13 March 2025.
Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2024.
Through the democratic values and freedom of conscience they uphold and through the reach of their cultures, along with the better life prospects which they reportedly offer, North America (the USA and Canada) and the United Kingdom have attracted immigrants for centuries. The nature of these population movements as well as the transformations they have entailed within these economies and societies constitute a very popular research topic, so much so that emigration from those countries is almost never explored.
It is certainly far less numerically significant than immigration. In December 2022, the figure for the United Kingdom was: 557,000 emigrants, including not just British citizens, but also EU and non-EU ones (see Office for National Statistics: Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022), while in the United States, where federal institutions keep no formal record of emigration, the most recent estimate (2018) is 4.8 million people (see Federal Voting Assistance Program, 2020 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report, September 2021). However, like immigration, emigration is an old and complex reality.
The conference will give participants the opportunity to deal with:
[1] the concrete aspects of emigration
- the reasons forcing people to emigrate, or, on the contrary, the reasons why they leave of their own volition, which may be political and/or religious (e.g. the emigration of British subjects to their colonies in the Pacific), humanitarian, personal (family reasons, the desire to adopt a new lifestyle), or economic (e.g. choosing to live in a country where the cost of living is lower), especially within the multi-faceted context of globalisation (e.g. globalisation of the labour market, of teaching, etc.), or all of the above (e.g. emigration from the Highlands of Scotland or Ireland to North America);
- the practical realities of the relocation and its implications – organisation, places of departure (e.g. British ports in the 19th century) and arrival, means of transportation, risks involved, getting to know the “Other”;
and
[2] how emigration was perceived from an exogenous or endogenous viewpoint, i.e. the various forms of narratives about emigration (from the advice given to emigrants in the form of handbooks, to log-books, press articles, novels, and so on), in other words the real or fictitious stories about/by the emigrants, which can thus be analysed through different axes – either a “civilisation studies”-based one (e.g. the way the North-American press saw the Irish who were crossing the Atlantic during the Great Famine, the emigration of Loyalists in the wake of the American War of independence, that of Afro-Americans, or that of slave-owners), or a purely literary approach (e.g. those novelists who have migrated towards another language, such as Nancy Huston, who has written many texts in French, her second language, or playwright Samuel Beckett), or both (e.g. the American poets and writers who chose to come to Europe during the inter-war years).
Abstract proposals (maximum 300 words) should be sent by 1 June 2024 to :
A selection of articles will be published in a special issue of Cycnos.
For further details, see the original CFP below.
Call-for-papers-Emigration-emigrations(Posted 23 April 2024)