2.23. Memories of Displacement [ES/EN]

This paper investigates how the forced displacement of Armenians from the late-Ottoman Empire shaped community formation, identity, and collective memory in Argentina, a country deeply marked by its own histories of migration, nation-building, and colonial legacies. Rather than treating Armenian migration simply as a demographic movement, the study approaches it as a process through which survivors of imperial violence re-imagined belonging, negotiated visibility, and anchored a traumatic past in a new social and cultural landscape. The central question guiding this research is: How did Armenians in Argentina construct and transmit collective memory in the aftermath of displacement, and how did these practices intersect with local narratives of nationhood and diversity? Drawing on community publications, commemorative practices, early press accounts, and materials from Armenian cultural and religious institutions, the paper traces how memory has been sustained through schools, churches, associations, monuments, and ritual practices such as commemorative marches and April 24 observances. These sources are complemented by engagement with digital memory platforms and secondary literature, allowing for an exploration of both institutional and everyday forms of remembering. Preliminary findings suggest that Armenian memory in Argentina has evolved not as a static archive of loss but as a dynamic practice shaped by transnational connections, intergenerational transmission, and Argentina’s multicultural civic environment. Community institutions have served not only as cultural anchors but also as spaces of resilience, where narratives of survival, loss, and renewal are continuously re-interpreted. By focusing on a community shaped by imperial collapse and genocide, this paper contributes to discussions on migration, post-imperial belonging, and the ways marginalized groups forge durable forms of identity and memory across borders.

This paper examines how the transnational narratives of two Korean-Chinese (Joseonjok) creators of different generations and genders—Zhang Lu’s film Dooman River (2011) and Jeon Chun-hwa’s novel Yabeoseu (2023)—articulate shared yet distinct strategies of memory reconfiguration within the constraints of grand ethno-nationalist discourses in China and South Korea. Such state-centered narratives of homogeneity and border control often marginalize and render invisible the collective memories of the Korean diaspora and border subjects. Building on this, the study situates the Korean-Chinese (Joseonjok) diaspora within the broader context of postcolonial migration in East Asia, illuminating how their aesthetic resilience and memory practices contest the lingering colonial logics embedded in ethno-nationalist frameworks. Adopting a transnational memory studies framework, the paper conducts a comparative textual analysis operating on two integrated levels. At the macro level, a discourse analysis reveals how state policies—such as China’s minority governance and South Korea’s instrumentalization of defectors—are symbolically inscribed in the Tumen River border space, producing exclusion and silence. At the micro level, a media-of-memory analysis explores how the creators, from different generational and gendered positions, employ sensory and aesthetic strategies to restore marginalized voices and everyday subjectivities. The findings indicate that while macro-discourses generate symbolic invisibility through spatial exclusion and painful muteness, both works engage in a micro-restoration of diasporic memory. Jeon’s feminine narrative perspective transforms Yabeoseu (unfamiliar food) into a counter-site of memory that resists the "river of history" metaphor. Conversely, Zhang’s slow cinematic aesthetics and poetics of the border foreground the sensory reality of marginalized existence. Ultimately, this study argues that these artistic works, across generational and gendered lines, perform democratic memory work, reclaiming visibility and narrative agency for diasporic and border subjectivities.

This paper explores how displaced Artsakh Armenians use social media to sustain cultural memory and collective belonging through dialectal expression. It asks how online linguistic practices function as acts of remembrance, identity assertion, and democratic participation following the 2023 forced displacement of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Drawing on digital ethnography and discourse analysis of posts and interactions across Facebook (2023–2025), the study examines how the Artsakh dialect through orthographic stylization, lexical choice, and transliteration indexes shared affect, solidarity, and resilience. These digital practices transform social media into participatory spaces of cultural continuity, where marginalized voices reclaim narrative authority against erasure. Situating the analysis within sociolinguistic theories of enregisterment and linguistic anthropology’s attention to language ideology and affect, the paper argues that dialectal expression in digital contexts operates as a form of civic memory work, sustaining plural and participatory cultural identities in displacement.

Multiple demands and forms of organisation marked the Social Uprising in Chile in response to the precariousness of life imposed by the neoliberal regime. This moment of the politicisation of various social groups involved contesting historical violence that has shaped the construction of the nation-state (Gutiérrez, 2020; Sanín & Araujo, 2020). Within this framework, memories emerged that made visible subjects excluded from hegemonic national narratives and proposed new forms of collective identification (Aguilera & Badilla, 2022; Benwell et al., 2021). However, the role of migrant groups in these processes has been scarcely addressed. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study of the memories migrants construct about their participation in the Social Uprising. Understanding memory as a social action that reproduces, strains, or transforms the systems of meaning of the present by dynamically creating versions of the past, we analyse its role in social orders, power relations, and the subject positions that emerge from them (Piper & Montenegro, 2017). Based on a narrative analysis of interviews with migrants, the political dimension of these memories is addressed in two ways: first, how recollections of the past modulate migrant participation in social mobilisation processes; and second, how these memories mobilise categories of affiliation in multiple ways, shaping fields of recognition and belonging. Finally, we reflect on the potential of these memories to intervene in the contemporary political and social order by promoting reinterpretations of the barriers to admission and belonging, as well as access to and exercise of rights associated with these definitions within current democratic systems.