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Diasporas

At the heart of my family's genealogy are many diasporas. Diasporas refer simultaneously to
closeness and distance. Diasporic communities are close, by blood, by memory, by a history
of geographic proximity. Through exile, diasporas become measures for distance: treks across
land and sea. Diasporas are a distanced diffusion of closeness. This is best represented by the
oft-used word play in diaspora studies of root/route. James Clifford writes:

"It involves dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home…
Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct what
Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987), forms of community consciousness and
solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/ space in order to live inside,
with a difference" (Clifford 1994:308).

Diasporas are only possible through both mobility and fixity. Distance through mobility, but the
shared fixity of a crystallized moment in a distant time/place. My family has at its core, the
liniment that continues, can continue in a narrative of constant disruption, the closeness/
distance evoked through diasporas.

I will tell the stories as I know them, there are many gaps, in which I fill things in as I imagine
they were. The stories seemed to me always to be in black and white, like old movies. I am just
realizing that wasn’t the case.

My Opa (Stefan Torau) was born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A October 19, 1918. He was born into a
growing US-German Diaspora. My great-Oma (Katharina Bauer) and great-Opa (Stefan Torau)
met in Pennsylvania. Katharina had been taken there as a young woman, with her brother, by
her parents. This is how the story goes… One day, my great-uncle (great-Oma’s young brother),
who was only nineteen, looked up at the sky and said, “what a beautiful day”. (At this point, I am
training myself to imagine colour, blues and whites and yellows). That night he went to a dance,
collapsed and died. My great-great-Oma was devastated. So devastated, she couldn’t stay in the
U.S. She returned to Kapetanovo. Great-Oma, as dutiful daughter returned shortly after, beckoned
by letters from her mother. (This is another story. This is a story of mobility/fixity and gender;
Great-Oma is anchored by her duties as a daughter, Great-great Oma, paralyzed by her attach-
ment as a mother). Great-Opa and little Opa returned too. However, Great-Opa liked working in
the States. He returned to work and send home remittances. After a few trips, he didn’t return
home to Kapetanovo again.

The distances can not be measured in latitudes and longitudes. The spaces in-between which
make a diaspora, are not just physical. The distances are virtual: "real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract" (Proust in Shields 2003: 2).

This following story is written in history textbooks. This story is complicated and involves Czars
and Princes. My grandparents spoke German, and were from Yugoslavia, but were German? It was
the enigma of my childhood. This enigma is revealed in my Great-Oma’s Bible. In her eighties, she
had written a family history in the inside covers and blank pages. She begins, “I am writing this
so my descendents will know from where they came.” She continues to detail how our family
came to Yugoslavia from Germany to settle some of the region.Young teachers would come
from Germany once in a while to teach the kids of Kapetanovo games and songs. It was a wel-
comed diaspora, or an intentional diaspora at least.

Finally, there is the last exile: May 1944, when Kapetanovo packed up and moved out. It took
several months to travel from their corner of now Croatia, through Hungary to Austria. In Austria,
over the next few years, many continued to Canada, U.S, Brazil, Germany. My Aunt Inge was born
in those months of exile. My Uncle Stefan died at 3 in Austria, shortly after. It is this trek that is
crystallized in the imaginary. These are the stories I always ask for.

William Safran defines diasporas as fulfilling the following criteria:

"‘expatriate minority communities’, dispersed from an original center to at least two peripheral
places; that maintain a ‘memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland’; that ‘believe
that they are not—and perhaps cannot be— fully accepted by their host country’; that see the
ancestral home as a place of eventual return, when the time is right; that are committed to the
maintenance or restoration of this homeland; and of which the group’s consciousness and
solidarity are ‘importantly defined’ by this continuing relationship with the homeland" (Safran
in Clifford 1994: 304-305).

Safran’s definition of diasporas situates diasporas within the virtual. Between the centre and
the periphery are the intangibles; imaginary returns, memories, myths, visions. Diasporas,
communities dispersed over space, yet connected through an intangible connection to another
time and place, are actualized through texts. Diasporas are an effect of “cultures of circulation”
(Lee and LiPuma 2002). Gaonnkar and Povinelli (2003) define ‘cultures of circulation’ as “a
growing recognition of the importance of circulation as the enabling matrix within which social
forms, both textual and topical, emerge and are recognizable when they emerge” (388).
Diasporas, as simultaneous mobility and fixity, closeness and distance, only exist through
circulation. Roger Rousse (1991) argues that communities emerge over separate places
“through the continuous circulation of people, money, goods, and information” (14). While
Rousse acknowledges the materialities of diasporas, there is another level of circulation.
There is a circulation in the virtual of the intangibles of dispersed communities. Beyond maps,
there are body memories, feeling the positions of houses and gardens (see citizen noplace).
A virtual place is in circulation through a translation through generations, of memories.

I have heard that it is impossible to dream in colour. Maybe, it is similarly impossible to have
virtual, translated memories in colour. I was never in Kapetanovo, in the 1940s. In translation,
something is lost through distances of space and time. Something else remains.

In-between Places

This is a story about places, virtualities, bodies and time. For Thomas Gieryn, a place is com-
posed of: space, the materiality and the discursive. For Gieryn: “a place is a unique spot in the
universe” (464), “has physicality” and is invested with meaning (465). A place is, therefore, a
confluence of geography, things and meanings.

A virtual place defies these definitions of place. This place exists in Deleuze’s “striated space”,
its materiality emerges sometimes when the place becomes actualized. A virtual place is per-
formed as memories are worked up and stories are conjured. Elizabeth St. Pierre (2000) writes
"as one's past becomes a place (Dainotto, 1996: 496), it is no longer an absent, out-of-date,
(Serres and Latour 1995/1990: 48) but a very present, up-to-date, and busy site of agency, a
or empty space productive location from which to practice Butler's (1994/ 1995) 'suvbversive
citation' " (260).

This project is situated at the crux of three geographies: Kapetanovo today, Leamington,
Ontario (location of part of the Kapetanovo diaspora) today, and Kapetanovo of the 1940s.
Two of these geographies exist in materiality today, while Kapetanovo 1940s has become
a virtual place. Rob Shields (2003) writes that "virtual worlds become important when they
diverge from the actual, or when the actual is ignored in favour of the virtual" (4). In this
project I am interested in how the virtual place of Kapetanovo 1940s becomes the principle
place of significance.

In my specialization exam research, I will explore what remains and what is lost in the trans-
lation of memory. Specifically I will explore how translated memories become materialized
and circulated. Hardt writes that "virtualities are always real (in the past, in memories)
and may become actualized in the present" (in Shields 2003: 25). I have collected some
materializations of this virtual place. This is the outline of my original plan for 'my virtual
homeland'. Polyvocal, open and transparent, the virtual homeland is a space becoming.
For this reason, raw texts are exposed- adolescent doodlings, my website plans.

In all of these materializations, a central focus is the relationship between place, memory,
and bodies. De Certeau writes:

"places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read,
accumulated times that can be unfolded, but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enig-
matic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body" (1984:
108).

Stephanie Davidson, in writing the justification for her Kapetanovo architecture project writes,
“the land that was taken from them is irreplaceable. Like a lost puzzle piece this place is a gap
in the lives of the people who lived there, and carries through like a hereditary bruise, into
younger generations”. What remains for my grandfather a gaping wound is reconciled through
generations. This website is an attempt to, in some ways, make visible the bruise.

Asides

"The space of the aside is a place, a pause in textual space" (Tuan in St. Pierre 2000: 273).

St. Pierre, writing about her research on 'going home' writes,

"So a tremendous simultaneity of pasts and presents and futures that will have been produced
a different ontological status for this ethnographer, a position that has kept her plunging through
time at breakneck speed, so that a place, the field, has simply become a pause in time (Tuan
1977:161), some time, any time. The ethnographic present, a welcome simulacra, has become
a time to catch my breath and rest a bit before the bottom drops out of the field again" (263).

This project was difficult to begin and will be impossible to finish. While Kapetanovo 1940s had
become my field of study, the crystallized moment or pause, the routes to this space are too
multiple and tangential. Photographs and phantoms, maps, trauma: all these texts and discourses
help to capture the virtual place. But, what i am also trying to capture is the affect of the trans-
lation of memories. This is impossible without slipping into the solipsism of my own memories. I
can not write stories of Katharina Bauer (my great-Oma), without remembering ninety-year old
hands and kerchiefs and the awe of being young and knowing someone that old. I need asides to
pause, find an ethnographic present in which to negotiate the multiple times and places that this
project entails.

Works Cited and Potential Bibliography

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-----Cambridge University Press.
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Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. "The 'diaspora' diaspora." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28:1-19.
Cadava, Eduardo. 1992. "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History." diacritics
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Clifford, James. 1994. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9:302-338.
De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fortier, Anne-Marie. 1999. "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)." Theory,
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Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. 2003. "Technologies of Public Forms:
-----Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition." Public Culture 15:385-397.
Gieryn, Thomas. 2000. "A Space for Place in Sociology." Annual Review of Sociology 26:463-96.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by S.
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Kasinitz, P. 1992. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca:
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LaCapra, Dominique. 2001. Writing History Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
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Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford:
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Lee, Benjamin and Edward LiPuma. 2002. "Cultures of Circulation: The imaginations of modernity.
-----" Public Culture 14:191-213.
Lozanovska, Mirjana. 2002. "The Migrants' Daughter's Story." Space and Culture 5:265-277.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: North Western University
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Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge.
—. 2004. "Visualicity- on urban visibility and invisibility." Visual Culture in Britain.
St. Pierre, Elizabeth. 2000. "Nomadic Inquiry in the Smooth Space of the Field." in Working the
-----Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, edited by E. S. P. a. W.
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Van Loon, Joost. 2002. "Social Spatialization and Everyday LIfe." Space and Culture 5:88-95.

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