Abstract
This facet discusses the community oral history project ‘Voices of Kosovo in Manchester’. A group of Kosovar Albanians who came to Manchester in 1999 following the war in Kosovo undertook interviews in 2015–2016 with the aim of making the story of their community better known. The facet first focuses on trauma in individual accounts, both traumatic reactions discussed in the interviews and traumatic features in how memories are recounted. The second focus is on the incorporation of other voices in individual accounts: the interviewer’s memorial co-construction, accounts from parents and media, stories circulating at the time, and master narratives such as the dominant narrative of Kosovar Albanian identity with respect to the Serbs, traumatic and nostalgic childhood and narratives of refugees in the new land.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Permission has been obtained from Manchester Aid to Kosovo to use the online archive Voices of Kosovo in Manchester (VOKIM) and to use the interviewer’s and interviewees’ first names.
- 3.
Leys (2000, 265), for example, observes that the literal nature of traumatic memory is weakly supported by scientific evidence.
- 4.
A similar link was mentioned earlier with regard to the Anne Frank award. Linking memories across different time periods and geographical spaces has been termed ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg 2009).
- 5.
There is also a hidden story: the 4346 Kosovans evacuated by plane to the UK under the auspices of the UNHCR (of whom the interviewees were a part) were provided with very good conditions as compared to the difficult conditions of those who made their own way to the UK and claimed asylum (about 15,000 Kosovar Albanians in 1999) (Harrison 2016).
- 6.
Hamilton and Shopes’ edited volume (2008) provides a range of examples of how oral history projects serve to both constitute and challenge public memory via museums, heritage sites, classrooms, community groups and other fora.
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Brownlie, S. (2020). Facet B: Oral Histories—Voices of Kosovo in Manchester. In: Discourses of Memory and Refugees. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34379-8_3
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