Genealogy, Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2023) – 23 articles

That the Drancy transit and internment camp—the main camp from which Jews were deported from France—is currently inhabited, having reverted to its pre-war name ‘La Muette’ and initial function as a housing estate at the end of the 1940s, remains little-known. As a result of this multi-layered history, the site is deeply ambivalent, being both haunted and inhabited. Through a theoretical framework informed by psychogeography, this article brings to light the concentrationary presence that is layered onto the space of everyday life at the site of Drancy–La Muette and investigates the possibility of resisting the resulting spatial politics of dehumanisation. Through a close reading of Alexandre Lacroix’s novel La Muette (2017) and its spatial poetics, this article argues that it is by elaborating new ways of seeing, whereby the interpenetration of past and present, the visible and the invisible, comes to the fore, that the traumatic space of Drancy–La Muette may open up. This, in turn, allows for the circulation of affective resonances between the built environment and the individual, which resist the concentrationary logic. Full article

For centuries, Asians living in the U.S. have had to negotiate between the narratives that dominant society has imposed upon them and their understanding of what it means to be Asian and Asian American. When combined with the hierarchies of racial categories, the narratives underlying monoracialism are inherently limiting, obscuring their nuanced experiences, and stripping them of their ability to express the personal constructions of their identity The purpose of this qualitative case study was to elevate the voices of Asians and Asian Americans, their process of “inventing” their identity, and how their conceptualizations begin to deconstruct and challenge monoracialism. I argue that Asians and Asian Americans engage in a process where the interpretation and revision of meaning that emerges during interactions with others can illuminate the role of master narratives and how they negotiate between these structural factors and their ideas of what it means to be Asian or Asian American. The findings suggest a negotiation between master narratives at the macro-, meso-, and micro-societal levels that help them understand what it means to be Asian and Asian American. Full article

In this article, I examine two case studies of spatial representation of atrocity and trauma: Jerzy Skąpski’s poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) (1974), published in the October 1978 edition of The Unesco Courier, and the aesthetic/activist action known as “El Siluetazo” (1983), which was created by Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, and carried out as a memory-activist intervention by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Argentinian public on 21–22 September 1983. To examine the interconnections of Holocaust memory within these two case studies, I follow Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Astrid Erll’s conceptualization of transcultural and travelling memory. In particular, I analyze how Skąpski’s use of silhouettes to spatially depict the victims of Auschwitz is adopted and transformed by the Argentinian artists and public to denounce the disappearance of 30,000 of their compatriots. I argue that in outlining the figures of the victims of the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship, respectively, these creative works exemplify the transcultural use of silhouettes originating in Holocaust memory and the multidirectional influence, derived from their organic connection, of spatial visualizations of absent bodies as they commemorate and make present the victims of these traumatic histories. Full article

This study explored the motivation and the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors who were actively engaged with the traumatic histories of their parents. Our findings are consistent with contemporary views of the intergenerational transmission of the effects of trauma to descendants of Holocaust survivors and reflect a mixture of resilience and vulnerabilities. We interviewed 24 siblings from 11 families who were adult children of Holocaust survivors, alongside the experience of the first author (IK), also a child of Holocaust survivors. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of those interviews identified two overarching themes related to the motivation to gather information about their parents’ stories and their experience of seeking this knowledge. Two themes relate to motivation. The first captured a sense of immersion without choice in the family story emanating from extreme loss and grief and a deep awareness of the communal nature of Jewish history. The second theme encompassed a compulsion and desire to leave a meaningful legacy of their parents’ experiences for future generations. These themes were linked to themes capturing the experience of engaging with their parents’ traumatic stories and describing intense ambivalence. One theme reflected a reluctance to gather information detailing the parents’ trauma. Yet, the other theme emphasised positive outcomes derived from knowledge, including appreciation of their parents’ resilience and opportunities to bear witness to and support their ageing parents. Overall, the data reveal the close links between family histories and adjustment to a traumatic past. Full article

Maria Fenski was born on 14 August 1905, in Papenburg. At the age of seventeen, she was diagnosed with “dementia” and hospitalized at the Provinzial-Heil-und Pflegeanstalt Osnabrück, where she remained until 16 January 1923. After a marriage, three children, some happy family years, and various commitments to different clinics, she was killed in Neuruppin State Institution in Brandenburg in 1942, as one of the people murdered in the Nazi Euthanasia Program. Her granddaughter, Hannah, produced a series of sixteen paintings dedicated to her grandmother’s story. There are almost no people in Hannah’s artwork, but empty, lonely, symbolic spaces able to create a bond between past and present. The lack of human figures, the use of cold colors and the blurred edges contribute to creating a suspended atmosphere that seems to be full of painful silences and negations. Hannah transferred onto the canvas an echo of the feelings the victims could have felt, living in conditions they could not understand, separated from the world before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their families. Analyzing her work, I reflect on the importance of the concept of “Space” in this specific transgenerational transmission of “Aktion T4” family memory. Full article

Diasporic intimacies between Asian and Latinx groups have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and, as a result, mixed individuals are the effect of centuries of interactions with each other. In this article, I review the literature across Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) and Asian and Latinx interethnic relations to situate an AsianLatinx intervention to understand how AsianLatinxs have continually been relegated to the subaltern despite their strong presence in the U.S. I argue that it is necessary to center the AsianLatinx lived experience to understand the interconnectedness of global Asian and Latinx communities. An AsianLatinx intervention disrupts monoracial frameworks of diaspora, mixed identity and interethnic relations to (re)imagine a reality that situates the complexities of mixedness tangential to racialization processes, identity formation and transnationalism. Full article

Gabriella Trebits was a prisoner of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between November 1944 and April 1945. The spaces present in her diary include both the places of the camp and her typhoid hallucinations. Gabriella described venues through their sensuous dimensions. Since the sensory experiences of everyday life mingled with her visions, her diary became a “textual journey” between real and imagined places. Her narratives helped her to express the difficulties caused by her physical environment and the confusion caused by her hallucinations. As a result, the references to changes in her sensory impressions created a discursive space for the diarist to express her feelings. Since her narrative depicts a suffering and painful condition, we use Joanna Bourke’s concept of pain talk in our analysis. Moreover, the diary demonstrates that it was possible for typhoid patients to connect with their environment despite their isolated situation. Even on the periphery of the camp space, social life persisted. This exploration will not only uncover the narrative strategy of one diarist but also contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which tens of thousands died of starvation and diseases―without mass executions or gas chambers―in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the spring of 1945. Full article

This article presents a consideration of W.G. Sebald’s 2001 work Austerlitz—his final novel—according to a variety of spatial and cartographic concepts, including ‘fluid cartography,’ and the notion of countermapping. Particularly, the article will explore the eponymous protagonist’s sense that ‘time [does] not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry,’ and will demonstrate how this subjective experience of time is a consequence of the absence of memory experienced by the protagonist in relation to his origins as a Kindertransport survivor of the Holocaust. Similarly, the article will explore how spaces—particularly buildings—and material artefacts come to act as an (insufficient) surrogate for memory within the text. All of the above will be framed according to a reading of the fundamental spatiality of Sebald’s works, and particularly their map-like quality. Full article

Mihail Sebastian’s Journal 1935–1944 accurately reflects the changing historical realities in Romania in general and in the capital city of Bucharest in particular, before and during the Second World War. As a Jewish Romanian writer, Sebastian records a landscape of ideological change that has a clear impact on him as a lawyer, an intellectual and a member of the city’s literary high society. This article proposes a new reading and analysis of Sebastian’s work, by focusing on the close relationship between the writer and the city as a vibrant, organic space. My work introduces a new critical vocabulary to the literary analysis of Sebastian’s Journal, through the use of terminology commonly employed by performance studies. The Situationist practices of walking and drifting, further conceptualised by performance studies scholar Carl Lavery, will be utilised as methods of exploring the visual and emotional richness of Sebastian’s work. The intimate relationship between the writer and the city will be constantly framed by the historical and political realities of the time, ensuring a balanced discussion of both literary achievement and historical witnessing. Full article

Identity development among late adolescent university students and its relationship to family history knowledge was examined in this study. Identity development was examined using Marcia’s individual developmental framework (1988) of exploration and commitment and Stutman and Lich’s family systems framework (1984) of autonomy and relatedness. It was proposed that late adolescents’ personal exploration of and commitment to roles and values may be influenced by knowledge of parent and grandparent histories. It was also proposed that late adolescents’ achievement of personal autonomy and positive family relatedness may be influenced by knowledge of parent and grandparent histories. The sample consisted of 239 university students. The Parental Relationship Inventory (PRI) and the Ego Identity Process Questionnaire (EIPQ) were used to measure identity development. The Do You Know? (DYK) scale measured family history knowledge. Multiple regression analyses indicated a significant positive relationship between commitment and family history knowledge and relatedness and family history knowledge, a negative relationship between autonomy and family history knowledge, and a weak correlation between exploration and family history knowledge. Findings indicated that family history knowledge may influence components of identity development. This has implications for those working to enhance adolescent development. Full article

Virginia’s Readjuster Party was the most successful interracial political coalition in the post-Reconstruction South. Initially arising from a conflict over the payment of Virginia’s massive public debt, the new party became a force of liberal reform and democracy in the Old Dominion. It represented an alternative path before Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement became the norm. While the Readjusters have long interested historians, the significant work performed by Black Readjusters in building and sustaining the always-tenuous coalition has gone understudied. Knowing their white counterparts were anxious about interracial political alliances, Black Readjusters eased these anxieties by using the Lost Cause. Black Readjusters condemned carpetbaggers as corrupt and repurposed the myth of the faithful slave to strengthen the interracial coalition, press for their own demands, and demonstrate their status as true southerners. The strategy and its seeming contradictions succeeded in some cases and failed in others, and its ultimate effects remain unclear. By shifting focus to Black Readjusters’ coalition-building labors, this article centers Black political activism and challenges the presumptions scholars make about interracial politics and white supremacy. Full article

Genealogical research usually begins with the discovery of affinity among individual humans. Such kinship is induced by direct observation, as well as by hearsay (indirect observation) that can be independently confirmed. Those who want to continue investigating a case history after the observational mode of fact-finding is no longer sustainable have no other choice than to switch to the discovery of consanguineous relationships. This involves a paradigm shift, where investigation dramatically changes from observation to inference, from inductive to deductive reasoning. Individuation is important in characterizing the personhood of an individual, but those same facts are of little empirical value in establishing the unification of a family. In addition, genealogists rely on marriage as an observable source of evidence for unification. However, this extrapolation is not completely convincing because marriage does not take into account the uncertainty of paternity. Individual parents usually descend from different parts of family history, which suggests genealogists should evaluate cultural factors responsible for non-random mating in attempting to infer consanguinity. For example, there is the incest taboo, a cultural convention which addresses the abnormal genetic consequences of inbreeding. Other non-random mating factors of a more general nature may also be identified in the unification of genetically different individuals. Here, for example, causality is expected in cultural principles that are of a cohesive and integrative nature. Those kinds of evidence may determine an unmarried pair’s earliest engagement and may also be responsible for the origin and maintenance of the marriage relationship, even throughout post-reproductive life. Lastly, current genealogical research is severely infected with confirmation bias, and from which it must be protected if it is to achieve the status of a scientific discipline. Critical rationalism provides a solution to that kind of problem. It is with remediation in mind, as it applies to all of the aforementioned issues, that genealogical systematics is characterized. Full article

This paper presents Indigenous youths’ perspectives on well-being. Using Indigenous youth participatory action research with the Indigenous youth advisory committee of the Québec Youth Research Network Chair (Canada), community care emerged as the central feature of well-being and was then visually presented in the form of a postcard. We discuss the meaning given to community care, the factors that support it, and the role that a visual illustration can play in promoting change. The article is informed by the co-creation of the postcard, an online luncheon conversation, and several debriefing/reflexive sessions with the Indigenous youth co-authors. Emphasis is placed on cultural continuity, relational agency, and solidarity, offering an alternative point of view to the prevalent and damaging decontextualized, deficit-based, and individualized approaches to well-being. Full article

Critical family history expands the frame of a life story beyond the accumulation of facts and figures to an acknowledgement of context, a deeper understanding of structure, a reckoning of circumstance and response and a comparison across time and space. This article explores the complexity of family history in the context of colonial pasts in British India; the possibilities offered by group analysis of colonial actors; and the moral obligation of the family historian to address difficult pasts in all their complexity. Through the migratory careers and migration stories of colonial actors—the dislocated people, objects and memories that sustain identity—a longitudinal dimension is added to family history. Taken collectively, the family history of a domiciled British community in India reveals not just important blood ties, but critical associational links and shared characteristics that structure experience and enhance power. Colonial power must always be measured by its negative effects, but is also relational, situational, variable, commutable and resisted. The article further reflects on the ways in which critical research into settler-colonial migrations delivers our family histories to the doorstep of the present; their possibilities for informing truth-telling at individual and national levels; and the need for a pedagogy of historical contextualisation and ethical citizenship. Full article

This article combines history of the family with women’s and gender history and the history of women’s education; it is based on an extensive range of archives and aims at highlighting the attitude of society and families towards women who wanted to attend University studies in the beginning of the 20th century. The matter of women’s university education is directly related to the emergence of the feminist movement in Greece. The strong preference of female university students for the exact sciences at that time was justified by contemporary scholars as a choice reflecting women’s nature. This article highlights the role played by family and social class background. To this effect, the life course of three ‘heroines’ is followed from their initial desire to undertake further studies to their participation in the social and cultural life of the capital of Greece, as a contribution to current literature on gender studies. Despite the limited number of cases discussed, we strongly believe that these women’s upbringing enhances our understanding of women’s scientific pursuits and their place in Athenian elite families. Full article

This article analyzes the experiences of multiracial women of African descent in Catalonia, Spain—looking at their identity processes, social relations, experiences of racialization and discrimination, and strategies of resistance—using a novel qualitative research method called “Relief Maps,” a very useful tool for the study of social inequalities from an intersectional and multilocational perspective. Relief Maps are a data collection tool and a means of visualizing and analyzing data—providing a graphical representation of interviewee narratives that discuss processes of social inclusion and exclusion. The maps represent three dimensions of experience: (1) psychological (indicating the respondent’s level of discomfort or well-being); (2) geographical (including at least five physical or experiential locations: e.g., home, street, work, school); and (3) social (examining seven social variables or aspects of identity: i.e., gender, ethnicity/skin color, age, sexual orientation, social class, physical appearance, and religion). In this way, the maps show where greater or lesser well-being or discomfort is experienced by the respondent based on each aspect of identity, thus indicating personal places of oppression, places of controversial intersections, neutral places, and places of relief. We argue that this supplementary investigative technique is highly relevant to research in the social sciences, particularly in the field of mixed-race, critical race, and ethnic studies, as it provides an intersectional, reflective, nuanced, and contextual lens for understanding complex social phenomena, leading to information of greater analytical strength. Full article

This work investigates my family’s long-held secrets that concealed the whereabouts of my grandmother. After years of estrangement, my father discovered Ada living in a mental hospital. Memories are rarely straightforward and could only take us so far in understanding why Ada remained missing from our family for so long. My search for answers involved genealogical research and led me to access Ada’s mental patient files. This rich data source provided some troubling glimpses into Ada’s auditory hallucinations and grandiose delusions and her encounters with several mental institutions in Victoria, Australia, during the twentieth century. Critical family history approaches allow me to gain insights into the gendered power relations within her marriage and the power imbalance within families. The theme of migration is addressed through the lens of mobility when Ada relocated following her marriage and her movement between home on trial leave and several sites of care after her committal. Scholars have shown that the themes of migration and mobility are important and hold personal significance in exploring the connection between mental health and institutionalisation for our family. Here, I demonstrate how mental illness in families is stigmatised and concealed through institutionalisation and its legacy for younger generations. Full article

Since 2020, social movements, organizations, and nation-states in Latin America have taken concrete actions in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Although contingency policies were promoted, it did not take long for inequities to become visible. The paid domestic work sector, historically feminized, was strongly affected by the COVID-19 crisis. While Latin American governments launched various assistance policies for the domestic work sector, a contemporary regional initiative of Latin American women, CONLACTRAHO, was also working with its members to help them retain their jobs while risking contracting the disease. Here, we will explore the initiatives developed by some Latin American governments and strategies from CONLACTRAHO in the context of the care crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. These examples will allow us to reflect, from a qualitative, intersectional, and decolonial approach, on commonalities and differences between the civil society agenda and the gender agenda of nation-states in the region. We understand that the unequal labor conditions of domestic workers are strongly related to the societal gender regime that historically distributes roles, opportunities, and resources among gender categories. This work is part of a broader reflection regarding the process of Latin American regional construction and its interrelation with contemporary ideas of nation. Full article

In Indonesia, the island of Java is one of the largest and most populous regions. Indonesia’s population was 271.35 million in 2021, of which 271.35 million or 55.19% live on the island of Java. Most families have more than two children because of the traditional philosophy in Javanese society that more children are linked to many fortunes. Many still believe in this philosophy, but others consider it an unsuitable inheritance of the colonial era. Therefore, this ethnographic study aimed to explore the development of the traditional philosophy of “more children, many fortunes” in modern Javanese society. The results showed that parents with more than two children from marginalized and wealthy families lived in cities and were highly educated. Several things support the eternal philosophy of “more children, many fortunes” in the life of the Javanese people. These include: (1) It is against God’s decree to regulate births using contraception. (2) People believe that all children are born with their fortune. Therefore, parents should not worry about meeting the needs of many children. (3) Children are viewed as luck and eternal binders in domestic relationships. In this case, infertility is a potential source of family problems resulting in divorce. Therefore, many adopt children to avoid problems in household relationships. Full article

Background: The criminalisation of drill music, a rap-based genre, is a recent chapter in a long history of policing “Black” music. The association of drill and other rap music with “gang” violence has a direct impact on the treatment of Black boys and men in the criminal justice system. However, critics argue that, rather than causing violence, violent lyrics reflect the lived experiences of marginalised communities. Method: Using a qualitative approach, this study analysed the lyrical content of 90 drill, grime, and other rap-based songs by UK artists, using thematic analysis. Findings: The following themes were found: social issues in the local area and community, involvement in crime, social status, coping with adversity, social support network, police, and escaping. Collectively, the themes highlight a narrative of Black boys and men who have experienced a range of adversities such as poverty, racism, child criminal exploitation, and community violence. Conclusions: Artists who make reference to drugs and violence in their lyrics also discuss adverse experiences and the impact of these, supporting the view that violent lyrics are a reflection of lived experience. Thus, focusing on criminalising rap music may be deflecting attention from risk factors for serious youth violence that are evidence-based. Full article

Contextualized by contestation and deconstruction of monoracialism, this article provides an assessment of how law, as a distinct tool and technology, conceptualizes and operationalizes race and ethnicity. The focus of the comparative project, by bringing examples from various countries and jurisdictions, is specifically on the morphology and dynamics of legal categorization. A separate discussion concentrates on conceptualizing groupness and membership, with distinguished attention on self-identification and “objective” criteria. The paper shows that although identity politics has dominated the past decades, ethno-racial self-identification is not the only operationalizing model legal regimes apply, especially with the recent boost in artificial intelligence, and bio-genetic research. Examples for the “re-biologization” of ethno-racial conceptualization are brought from a wide range of legal regimes, including citizenship, anti-discrimination, asylum, and indigenous law. Full article