Walking tours as transcultural memory activism: Referencing memories of trauma and migration to redefine urban belonging

Abstract

This article maps two grids of city walking tours, conceptualizing them as expressions of transcultural memory activism. The first are walking tours in Berlin, guided by Syrian refugees, which use memorials of local traumatic history to testify to the refugees’ current traumas. The second are walking tours in an impoverished neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv, that inter-weave African asylum seekers’ travelling memories as part of the story of those streets. Analysing these tours, the article probes how references to histories of urban migration and traumatic legacies might inform contemporary political projects asserting the rights of refugees, and redefine the parameters of urban belonging. It therefore proposes a dual theoretical contribution: (1) advancing the transcultural turn in memory studies by paying greater attention to the materiality and performativity of transcultural memory and (2) enhancing research on the agency of refugees by demonstrating how they affect and expand the public memory of the contested national and urban contexts in which they travel or inhabit.