engleski

Speakers on the move: a historical perspective of surveillance

Historical legacies of transnational practices have an impact on the concerns about current migration and mobility processes, adding analitically to their spatial dimension, that of time. Mass migrations from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century to North America present such a historical legacy which deserves to be reconsidered from the present point of view of regulating moving speakers and their languages and on the basis of a more empirically grounded research. Using discourse analysis of historical data from contemporary newspapers and other sources, including diaries and autobiographies of Slavic speakers, the paper will explore admission policies and practices of their inclusion and exclusion on the ground of legitimized ethnic and racial segregating practices. Paradoxically, immigrants coming from the multilingual empire who were admitted (about 80%) after restrictive procedures, in the end faced the demanding issue of enforced linguistic and cultural assimilation in order to become accepted as loyal Americans. We use these pieces of historical memory of mass migrations as a resource to understand the present attitudes and policies toward migrating people, and their languages and cultures.

migration ; multilingualism ; Austria-Hungary ; USA ; newspapers ; stereotypes ; anthropology

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