Authors

Discussion

The proposed paper focuses on the intergenerational transmission of memories and imaginations of home among Georgian families who moved to Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union (many of these families fled from Abkhazia after the war 1992-93).

During my PhD fieldwork in Moscow in 2021-2022, I looked at various forms of migrant families’ engagement with their homeland at a distance: through dance classes, religious rituals, language learning, family and friends' gatherings, and cooking. I paid attention to the ways migrants’ memories of their homeland were evoked and passed to their children through various “sensoriums”, which they found or created in emigration. I questioned how complex geopolitical relationships between the neighbouring countries shape individual perceptions of the environment and affect the processes of reformulation of second-generation migrants’ identity and belonging. 

As part of my fieldwork, I designed a creative workshop for a group of young people aged 20-35 years old inviting them to discuss their Georgian “roots” and to explore their sense of belonging through material memory: their family photographs, images from their Georgian trips, and Georgia-related objects collected at their homes in Moscow. This was a methodological and existential investigation into second-generation migrants’ perceptions of their parents’ past experiences as these influence their understanding of themselves and their narrations of their personal experiences of growing up in Moscow against the backdrop of the geopolitical tensions between Russia and Georgia. To address these questions, I borrowed a term “postmemory” suggested by Marianne Hirsch for the study of traumatic and difficult pasts internalised by the second generation: “postmemory” “characterises the experiences of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 1997, 22). The workshop revealed similarities and differences of young people’s experiences, the ambiguity of their dis/connectedness to their homeland (and to their family narratives about their homeland) and their shared sense of temporality in Moscow that charged their imaginations of the past and expectations from the future.