Workshop: seeing migrants in the media
This week we will have just one required reading. Alongside it, I want each pair of you to bring in two historical (pre-1997) and one contemporary representation of your assigned/chosen migrant group/topic. These may be related to the subject of your long essay or dissertation, or may be free-standing. Consider YouTube clips from historical sitcoms ('Love Thy Neighbor', Till Death Do Us Part', 'Curry and Chips',or 'Mind Your Language') or TV documentaries, news programmes or films (East is East or Bend it like Beckham, anyone?) would all be welcome! See also the digitised historical archives of the Daily Mail, The Guardian/Observer, and The Times, all available from the Library, and all of the other digital sources recommended in previous weeks (sources need not, in other words, be British -- they should reflect your interests and research in relation to the groups under consideration).
In class, we will explore the power of cultural representations as a tool in politics and society and as sources for historians, and we will map the themes and questions that emerge from these particular representations of migration and migrants.
Required Reading:
- Roberta Bivins, 'Picturing Race in the British National Health Service, 1948-1988', Twentieth Century British History2017: doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hww059
WORKSHOP DOCUMENTS:
Racialised Migrants (April and Nilesh)
Enoch Powell at 'The Sterling Times'
And for background on 'The Sterling Times', see: BBC 'Your Choice of Political Websites', 2004.
Robert Trumbull, 'Upsurge of Racism in Toronto Afflicts Asian Immigrants', New York Times, 1977.
Sandeep Pamar, 'The Good Immigrant Review' Guardian, 2016.
Medical Migrants (Arisa and Olivia)
Herald Reporter, 'These Coloured Nurses Are Happy', Daily Herald, 1955.
BBC World News (TV), 'Indian Doctors, NHS', 2017.
Maroon Productions for BBC Four, 'Black Nurses: The Women who Saved the NHS', 2016.
Rondo Media/Avatar Productions for BBC One, 'The Arrival', The Indian Doctor, Series 1 (television series) 2010.
'ART. I.—MEDICAL WORK FOR WOMEN IN INDIA', The Englishwoman's Review (London, England), Wednesday, April 15, 1885; pp. 145-159
Female Migrants (Ruby, Dominique and Tyler)
'US will Deliver "Picture Brides" from Japan to Waiting Husbands', Washington Post, 1915.
Richard Spillett, Crime Correspondent, '"You Betrayed Her": Judge jails first mother in Britain to be convicted of FGM for 13 years', Daily Mail, 2019.
Melanie Phillips, 'Virginity Tests on Immigrants at Heathrow', Guardian, 1979.
Student Migrants (Mayling and Mohammed)
David Holley, 'Chinese Scholars Learn US Ways', LA Times, 1982.
Edward A. Gargan, 'African Students in Beijing March in Outrage at a Racial Slur', New York Times, 1987.
CNN News 'Undocumented Student Earns Rhodes Scholarship', 2019
Migrants and Disease/Migrants' Health Needs (Mansa and Bethan)
'Typhoid Mary', New York American, 1909.
Mica Rosenberg, Kristina Cooke, 'Mumps, other outbreaks force U.S. detention centers to quarantine over 2,000 migrants', Reuters Health News, 2019
Migrants and Sexuality (Josh)
Keith Clark, 'U. S. Grants Asylum for Gay Mexican Citizen', Gay and Lesbian Times, 1994, via Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Stefan Vogler, 'LGBTQ caravan migrants may have to ‘prove’ their gender or sexual identity at US border', The Conversation, 2018
Jose A del Real, '"They were Abusing Us the Whole Way": A Tough Path for Gay and Trans Migrants', New York Times, 2018.
Background Reading:
Charles T. Adeyanju and Nicole Neverson, ‘“There will be a next time”: Media Discourse about an “apocalyptic” vision of immigration, racial diversity, and health risks’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, 39 (2007), 79–105
Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk, Sylvia Kafehsy, eds, Images of Illegalized Immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics (London: Transaction Publishers, 2010).
Stephen Bourne, Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (London, 2001).
Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World(Cambridge, 2006),
Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds, Empire and Film (Basingstoke, 2011)
Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds, Film and the End of Empire (Basingstoke, 2011).
Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television (London, 2002).
Mica Nava, ‘Sometimes antagonistic, sometimes ardently sympathetic: Contradictory responses to migrants in postwar Britain’, Ethnicities, 14 (2014), 458–80
James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire (Chicago, 1998).
Gavin Schaffer, ‘“Till Death Us Do Part” and the BBC: Racial politics and the British working classes 1965-75’, Journal of Contemporary History, 45 (2010), 454–77.
Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939-1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1108234/