The wars of the twentieth century uprooted people on a previously unimaginable scale to the extent that being a refugee became an increasingly widespread experience. With the arrival of refugees, governments of host countries had to mediate between divided national populations: some wished to welcome those arriving in search of refuge; others preferred a strategy of exclusion or even expulsion. At the same time, refugees had to manage conflicts of the self as they responded to the loss of nationhood, families, socio-political networks, material goods, and arguably also a sense of belonging or home. While return migration was usually perceived by governments and refugees alike as the best solution to the dilemmas of forced displacement, consensus about the timing and dynamics of how this would actually occur was very difficult to achieve. In practice, the return of refugees to their countries of origin rarely, if ever, produced a wholly satisfactory outcome. Conflicts clearly resulted in forced displacement, but it is equally true that forced displacement created conflicts. The complex inter-relationship of conflict, return migration and the sometimes chimerical, but still compelling, search for a sense of home is the central preoccupation of the contributors to the two volumes of the Coming Home? series. Scholars from history, literature, cultural studies and sociology explore the tensions between nation-states and migrants as they have anticipated, implemented or challenged the process of return migration during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book begins with Western Europe and progresses to Central and Eastern Europe from the period of the Spanish Civil War to the Cold War era, whilst the second volume – Coming home? Vol. 2: Conflict and Postcolonial Return Migration in the Context of France and North Africa – shifts the focus to the colonial and post-colonial framework of the French-North African nexus. What emerges from the two volumes of essays is that, as ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent as home could appear, it was nonetheless central to migrants’ preoccupations about returning.

Aunque en los libros de Historia se suelen recoger los nombres de los protagonistas que se consideran relevantes, quienes verdaderamente hacen la historia son las gentes anónimas, combatientes que lucharon en el frete, mujeres, niños y ancianos que tratar

Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war.

Hybridity in Spanish Culture is an anthology that explores hybridity in select works from the dawn of Imperial Spain to the twenty-first century. The phenomenon of hybridity has been pervasive throughout Spanish history. The hybrid literary and visual texts studied in this volume—ranging from aljamiado writings and the legacy from the convivencia to contemporary immigration narratives—blur or erase purportedly fixed boundaries: between history and fiction, story and History, nationality and transnationalism, subjectivity and objectivity, as well as between genres, cultures, languages and eras. Hybridity constitutes the state of simultaneously belonging to categories that had previously been considered exclusive. It renders the concept of pure as a construct, a chosen perception, a psychic imposition on experience. Implicit within hybridity is a fusion of two or more separate factors, entities or concepts, but the essential aspect of this fusion is that the hybrid text becomes an original. Hence, hybridity nods to the past, but points to the future. Hybridity in Spanish Culture, written both in Spanish and English, as a “metahybrid,” is a collection about hybridity that is a hybrid itself. In hopes of blurring borders, dissipating taxonomies, and dehierarchizing binary oppositions, the European and US authors and editors contribute to cultural studies scholarship and underscore the omnipresence and ubiquity of interstitial conditions as they relate to national or cultural identity, linguistic crossings, inter-genre blendings and the conception of home and belonging.