Synopses & Reviews
Traditionally, migration has been studied at either the beginning or the end of the journey. Surprisingly little research has been devoted to what actually happens to people in between. The contributors to this collection draw on a variety of primary and secondary sources, including travel writings, fiction, and diaries, to explore immigrants' liminal experiences on ships and in exit ports on both sides of the Atlantic. Combining scholarship from the field of transportation history with that of social history and translation studies, Tales of Transit reveals the complexity of what people experience as they get uprooted or reattach themselves to a community. A novel addition to the literature of transatlantic movements of the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tales of Transit demonstrates in vivid detail how migration was seldom a straightforward progression.
Review
"Taking as its key concepts liminality and contacts zones this volume shows how migrants, mediators and ties changed, and moved back and forth between being visible and invisible, or both at the same time. Together the contributions to this volume bring out what the rules and rituals of engagement, disengagement and re-engament were on the way from ‘here’ to ‘there’, thus taking a novel approach to transatlantic migration between 1850-1950."
Synopsis
Transatlantic Pieties: Dutch Clergy in Colonial America explores the ways in which the lives and careers of fourteen Dutch Reformed ministers illuminate important aspects of European and American colonial society of their times. Based on primary sources, this collection reexamines some of the movers and shakers over the course of 250 years. The essays shed light on the high and low tides, the promises and disappointments, and the factors within and beyond the control of a new society in the making. The portraits humanize and contextualize the lives of these men who served not only as religious leaders and cultural mediators in colonial communities, but also as important connective tissue in the Dutch Atlantic world.
About the Author
Michael Boyden is assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium.Hans Krabbendam is assistant director of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands. Liselotte Vandenbussche is assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University.