Moving Memories: Geographies of Diasporic Remembrance

Dr Siri Schwabe (Roskilde University)

From the Palestinian-inspired shops and restaurants in the old neighborhood of Patronato to the imposing compound surrounding the membership-based Club Palestino, Santiago de Chile is scattered with places that echo a diasporic commitment to keeping Palestine present. Through these places, memories of Palestine are effectively grounded in the city while at the same time being continuously activated to serve a political purpose in calling attention to Palestinian pasts, presents, and potential futures. In this paper I use the Palestinian-Chilean case as a starting point to explore the spatiality of diasporic remembrance and investigate how memories variously travel and come to dwell between and within complex socio-political landscapes. By looking at how memories travel from Palestine to Chile and are ultimately negotiated within a city marked in many ways by decades of state violence, political turmoil, and continued inequality, I want to scrutinize the complexities of how memory moves—or fails to move—across and beyond physical and imagined boundaries.

About the speaker

Siri Schwabe’s research focuses on urban processes related to memory and place-making. She has published on street protests and diasporic struggles for space, the entanglement of local heritage and processes of urban neoliberalization, and has an article coming out on Santiago’s Club Deportivo Palestino and the politics of football. In early 2018 she will be joining the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University as Assistant Professor with a project on urban lighting and atmosphere.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk