Border Heritage

This book takes the city of Trieste as a starting point to think critically and comparatively about migration, border regimes, and memories of displacement.

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Border Heritage opens new insights in migration studies through analysis of the same emblematic eastern-central European borderland in Trieste, crossed by four refugee migrations over 70 years of history (1945–2022). Born from a dual personal and professional perspective, the book’s original structure starts from the Ukrainian displacement, going back to the asylum seekers arriving via the Balkans, then to refugees from the former Yugoslavia, and the exodus from Istria after the Second World War; the second part focuses on places, objects, and displaced memories. Each chapter begins with a particularly significant account by a refugee, which anchors the argument in everyday life and gives a human dimension to the following conceptual developments. All but scattered, the narrative plot offers a cohesive thread through the various chapters, analyzing how the various migrations have stratified, overlapped, and contaminated each other.

Critically rethinking the heritage of a borderland means rethinking cognitive categories and being able to perceive the different nuances of those on the margins, without necessarily wanting to merge them into a generic “social inclusion” and instead giving them the right to a different voice. This book reverses the monochrome historical perspective to instead adopt the migrants’ perspective and make them the subject of study in a set of historical migrations.