Transmedia Storytelling for Transpacific Studies: Migrant Narratives from the Global South

Aarti Smith-Madan, Associate Professor of Spanish & International Studies, Director of HUA Buenos Aires Project Center, Co-Director of Latin American & Caribbean Studies

2019-2020

Project Description

As a Faculty Fellow, I used training and tools from The Global Lab to record migrant narratives from the Global South. By putting firsthand accounts into conversation with representations of migration in Latin American and Indian cultural production, I aimed to understand how peoples’ stories converge and diverge and, more importantly, to demystify the why behind these commonalities and differences. This comparative work—which sits at the intersection of public history, literary analysis, and transpacific studies—illuminates the deep entanglements between colonialism and migration. It reveals through the stories of real & represented peoples how colonial logics have long informed migration patterns. At end, transmedia storytelling can put a face and voice to non-state actors, generating awareness of and empathy for their lived experience in new states.

Highlight of your experience

Because my fellowship term coincided with Thanksgiving break, I took the recording equipment to my immigrant parents’ home and collected oral histories from them as well as my 95-year-old grandmother, who was a refugee during the Partition of India & Pakistan Partition in 1947. My dad was just three months old at the time, my uncle just a toddler. I’m grateful to have recorded her story, trauma and all, for posterity. History does indeed repeat across time and space: I was struck by how her mid-twentieth-century experience revealed trials and tribulations similar to those of Venezuelan interviewees who had fled their home country more recently.