Spectres of migration and the ghosts of Ellis Island

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 359-381

  Maddern, Frances Jo ^a  

^a School of Education and Lifelong Learning   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Ellis Island; Materiality; Migration; Restoration; Spectrality

Indexed keywords

BUILDING; CULTURAL HERITAGE; EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT; INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION;

ELLIS ISLAND; NEW YORK [UNITED STATES]; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 55349085801     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474008091332     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. N. Barr, Liberty falling (New York, Avon Books, Inc., 1999), preface.
2. B. Perec and R. Bober, Ellis Island (New York, New Press, 1995), p. 39.
3. Quote taken from the interpretive board at Ellis Island Immigration Museum, 2002. Photographs exhibited from a set taken by Shirley Burden, 1954.
4. M. Monk, 'Ellis Island'. Greenwich Film Associates.
5. B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination culture: Tourism, museums, and heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1998).
6. N. Barr Liberty falling, p. i.
7. Quote taken from Ellis Island audio-guide, narrated by Tom Brokaw, 2002.
8. M. Newman, 'The rust must go but the ghosts linger', New York Times New York, 2001. Available online at: http://www.saveellisisland.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5023 [accessed 06/07/06].
9. S. M. Kurin, 'Ellis Island: A haunting return'. Available online at: http://www.toowrite.com/newcomp2/0548.shtml [accessed 03/07/08].
10. J. Attenberg, Online journal. Available at: http://www.whatever-whenever.net/111900.htm [accessed 07/03/08].
11. I use 'spectropolitics' here to suggest the power-laden nature of that/ those which/who can be represented but cannot 'speak.' Derrida suggests that the motif of the spirit or spectre is regularly inscribed in contexts that are highly charged politically, in the moments when thought lets itself 'be preoccupied more than ever by what is called history, language, the nation...', see J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 72.
12. The author's research explored the production of immigrant knowledge at this national heritage site through interviews with the producers of the museum and archival research which uncovered the politics involved in the museum's creation. Fieldwork was carried out between 2001 and 2002 and consisted of around 40 in depth interviews with key actors involved in restoring the buildings and turning Ellis Island into a museum. The site was chosen because of its unique status as a national museum which focuses on immigrant memories and was therefore a model which followed the geographical connectivity acknowledged by new social historians to be largely absent from most Anglo- American heritage institutions.
13. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001).
14. Avery Gordon has been one of the few recent social theorists to take the notion of haunting seriously by arguing that the spatial 'presence' of ghosts can signify a history of unaddressed social injustice and state repression. In her book Ghostly matters she draws on several case studies including the state terror of disappearance in Argentina and lingering inheritance of US racial slavery, as a way of developing a social understanding of how 'hauntings' work on and through people and place in everyday life. She describes the ghost as a 'seething presence' where an absence is expected, and argues that the spectre is a social figure that deserves further investigation'.
15. See A. F. Gordon, Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5. The opaque history of immigrants' treatment in the US in the nativist and eugenic era also remains largely unaddressed in the present and thus remains fertile ground for continued speculation.
16. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 213.
17. J. Smith, 'Exhibition review: Celebrating immigration history at Ellis Island', American quarterly 44 (1992), pp. 82-100.
18. See N. Thrift, 'Posthuman world of technology', in Paper session of the IGC - UK (2004) One Earth - Many Worlds.
19. Glasgow, UK and B. Anderson, 'Practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect', Social and cultural geography 6 (2005), pp. 645-60.
20. J. P Jones III is perhaps here drawing on Derrida's phrase 'a genealogy of ghosts'.
21. C. Nash, 'Genealogical identities', Environment and planning d: society and space 20 (2002), p. 49.
22. M. Foucault, 'Neitzsche, genealogy, history', in Language, counter-memory, practice (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 162.
23. For Nietzsche, an interest in 'history' represents an obsession with the past and the dead. For Nietzche, the strength to 'let go'' of the dead and forget the past was a step away from 'slave morality' towards the superman to come. See F. Neitzsche, On the genealogy of morality: A polemic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1887]).
24. Derrida, Specters of Marx.
25. Others have also actively 'hunted' for ghostly traces of the past at Ellis Island. Barry, a NPS librarian at Ellis Island comments for example, how during the course of his job: 'a lot of people called me up and asked me how to get the record of their brother or aunt that died at Ellis Island' (Interview with Barry Moreno, March, 2002).
26. M. Degen and K. Hetherington, 'Hauntings', Spatial hauntings special edition of Space and culture 11/12 (2001), p. 1.
27. Ibid.
28. S. Pile, 'Spectral cities: Where the repressed returns and other short stories', in J. Hiller and E. Rooksby, eds, Habitus: A sense of place (Hampshire, Ashgate Publishing, 2001), pp. 219-39.
29. For recent research on this see A. Frood, 'Ghosts all in the mind', BBC News online 21 May 2003. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3044607.stm [accessed 07/03/08].
30. A. Vidler, Architectural uncanny: Essays in the modern unhomely (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1992).
31. Gordon, Ghostly matters, p. 196.
32. K. Hetherington, 'Secondhandedness: Consumption, disposal and absent presence', Environment and planning d: Society and space 22 (2004), pp. 157-73.
33. K. Gelder, and J. M. Jacobs, 'The postcolonial ghost story', in P. Buse and A. Stott, eds, Ghosts: Deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), pp. 179-99, p.181.
34. See T. Edensor, 'Mundane hauntings: Commuting through the phantasmagoric working-class spaces of Manchester, England', Cultural geographies 15(3), pp. 313-333.
35. Interview with Michael Paskowsky, October 2001.
36. Interview with Peg Zitko, October, 2001.
37. Interview with Mary-Angela Hardwick, Metaform, 2001.
38. Interview with Alan Kraut, October 2001.
39. A. L. Huxtable, 'The way it never was', in The unreal America: architecture and illusion (The New Press, New York, 1997), p. 31.
40. Interview with Harlan Unrau, October 2001.
41. Interview with Professor Rudolph Vecoli, 2002.
42. K. Hetherington,'Phantasmagoria/phantasm agora' materialities, spacialities, and ghosts', Spatial Hauntings special edition of Space and culture 11/12 (2001), p. 28.
43. Perec and Bober Ellis Island.
44. As Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, a member of the history advisory writes in a letter to Gary Roth of the NPS on 23 October 1985, 'Immigrants came to get work in America. And America wanted them to work, to fill the demand for labour in an expanding industrial economy. [Any museum] ... exhibit must convey the sense that Ellis Island was not just a point of entry; it was a labour market distribution centre. Much of what went on at Ellis was intended to make sure that those who came to the United States would be healthy workers, that they could in fact work, and not end up as charges to the state' (NPS private archives, Boston).
45. S. Strunsky, 'Coming out of the dark', The daily record, date unkown. It is estimated that 3500 persons (including 1400 children) died on the island between 1900-1954 (Chermayeff, Wasserman and Shapiro, 1991).
46. M. De Certeau, L. Giard and P. Mayol, 'Ghosts in the city: An uncanniness of the "already there"', in M. De Certeau and L. Giard, edL, The practice of everyday life: Vol. 2: living and cooking (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), pp. 133-43, p. 135.
47. Interview with Nathan Glazer, April, 2002.
48. E. Hallam and J. Hockey Death, memory and material culture (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2001), p. 9.
49. Interview with Thomas Kessner, October 2001. Similarly, Alan Kraut writes in a letter to Gray Roth, NPS project manager, 27 May 1988, 'the History Committee appreciates how difficult it has been to reconcile the preservation of Ellis Island's quiet dignity as a genuine American ruin with the need for modern interpretive equipment to make Ellis Island understandable to all...'.
50. De Certeau, Giard and Mayol, 'Ghosts in the city', p. 141.
51. Steve Briganti recalls, 'most museums start slowly and they are... lets say the Metropolitan Museum was put together as I understand it by a group of people who were interested in art and four or five wealthy families, and from there expanded and expanded and expanded. Ours was different. It just grew full-blown. I mean it was born full-blown and so that was very challenging, a very challenging thing to do' (October 2001).
52. J. Urry, 'Connections', Environment and planning d: Society and space 22 (2004), pp. 27-37.
53. M. Callan and J. Law, 'Guest editorial', Environment and planning d: society and space 22 (2004), pp. 3-11.
54. Hetherington, 'Secondhandedness', p. 161.
55. Interview with Mary Angela Hardwick, 2002.
56. George Tselos (April 2002) tells the same story during an interview, though he thinks that is was 'scavengers... people who had a hobby of going through the alleys and checking out the trash for anything interesting,' that found the material and handed it to the NPS.
57. Marie Rust, NPS Regional Director, North Atlantic Region, in a memorandum to the Director of the US Department of the Interior (2 May 1994).
58. Degen and Hetherington, 'Hauntings', p. 3.
59. Hallam and Hockey, Death, memory and material culture, p. 9.
60. Interview with Heather Huyck, February, 2002.
61. She writes, 'in the beginning of visiting [Ellis Island] I felt some creepy nausea that felt like oppression overload or something, but more so I remember thinking, like, oh, those are the ghosts people are talking about' (Erica Rand, personal email communication, 9 October 2003).
62. E. Rand 'Breeders on a golf ball: Normalizing sex at Ellis Island', Environment and planning d: Society and space 21 (2003), p. 443.
63. S. A. Kelly and S. C. Morton, 'Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: Towards an immigrant history of the present', Social and cultural geography 5(4) (2004), pp. 633-50.
64. NYNEX promotional campaign at Ellis Island, in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination culture, pp. 177-87.
65. K. Marx and F. Engles, The communist manifesto (Various editions, 1848).
66. S. Connor, 'The machine in the ghost: Spiritualism, technology and the "direct voice"', in P. Buse and A. Stott, eds, Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history (London, Macmillan Press, 1999), pp. 203-25.
67. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination culture, p. 185.
68. D. Inglis and M. Holmes, 'Highland and other haunts: Ghosts in Scottish tourism', Annals of tourism research 30 (2003), p. 56.
69. Ibid., p. 61.
70. C. Britzolakis, 'Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the poetics of urban modernism', in P. Buse and A. Stott, eds, Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history (London, Macmillan Press, 1999), pp. 72-91.
71. 'Phantasmagoria' was a device invented for the exhibition of optical illusions usually produced by magic lantern. It created an optical effect so that figures on a screen appear to dwindle into the distance or to rush towards the observer with rapid changes in size. The term is also more generically utilized to denote a constantly shifting, confused succession of things seen or imagined, whilst in a dreaming, delusional or feverish state. Importantly, the term phantasmagoria is pejoratively used to describe the illusions created by commodity fetishism.
72. B. Graham, G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge, A geography of heritage: Power, culture and economy (London, Arnold, 2000).
73. Interview with Peg Zitko, October 2001.
74. Interview with Michael Paskowsky, October 2001.
75. Interview with Marian Smith, immigration historian for the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, 2002.
76. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination culture: Tourism, museums, and heritage, p. 185.
77. Alan Kraut, Historian, in a letter to Bruce McHenry, NPS, 18 December 1983.
78. Alan Kraut, October 2001.
79. Royle's book length treatment of 'the uncanny' demonstrates how the photographic image creates a parallel world of phantasmic doubles alongside the concrete world of senses verified by positivism.
80. See N. Royle, The uncanny (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003).
81. Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island Foundation promotional leaflet.
82. J. Baudrillard, 'The year 2000 will not take place', in E. A. Grosz, ed., Futur·Fall: Excursions into postmodernity (Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1986).
83. J. P. Jones III, 'What's the matter with ghost stories?' Paper presented at Association of American geographers conference. New Orleans, 2003 p. 5.
84. Buse and Stott, Ghosts, p. 14.
85. S. Sim, Derrida and the end of history (Cambridge, Icon Books, 2000), p. 63.
86. K. Foote, Shadowed ground: America's landscapes of violence and tragedy (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 5.
87. G. C. Hoskins, 'Materializing memory at Angel Island immigration station', Environment and planning a 39(2) (2007), pp. 437-55.
88. A. Leighton, 'Ghosts, aestheticism, and "Vernon Lee"', Victorian literature and culture 28 (2000), pp. 1-14.
89. Buse and Stott, Ghosts, p. 11.
90. J. Wylie, 'The spectral geographies of W. G. Sebald', Cultural geographies 14 (2007), pp. 171-88.
91. F. Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
92. Interview with Jeff Dosik, museum librarian, 2002.
93. Gordon, Ghostly matters, p. 12.
94. Interview with Michael Paskowsky, October 2001.
95. Interview with Professor Alan Kraut, 2001.
96. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 176.
97. De Certeau et al., 'Ghosts in the city', pp. 137-8.
98. See Nash, 'Genealogical identities', p. 49.