Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari, Rituals of Migration: Irish and Italians on the Move (New York University Press, 2025).
In Rituals of Migration, editors Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari—with eleven scholars of migration—provide a powerful and timely reminder of the bold intellectual analyses and conceptual craftsmanship historians can achieve when they collaborate. This volume focuses on ritual—as an analytical vehicle—to capture the migration process and rites of passage at an individual and intimate level. In doing so, Rituals of Migration redefines migration at a multiscalar level with a keen eye toward imperial formations, grapples with a diverse array of historical sources from policy documents to family heirlooms and offers an interdisciplinary approach to rigorous historical analysis.
Hardeep Dhillon interviews Maddalena Marinari and Kevin Kenny about the book.
HD: This volume gives you a slightly different voice than some of your earlier work. In fact, what struck me in Rituals of Migration was its interdisciplinary nexus. The introduction invokes anthropology and ethnography, and many contributions in the volume draw on theorists and conceptual frameworks commonly found in other disciplines or in scholarship that has addressed history as a field of study. I want to invite you to discuss how you developed the conceptual framing for the book and how it evolved while collaborating with such an esteemed group of scholars.
KK: Much of my recent work has been in legal, constitutional, and political history, taking a deliberately top-down approach to analyze the logic of sovereignty and race in laws regulating human migration—in sharp contrast to my earlier work, which took a bottom-up, social history approach to ordinary migrants seeking to make better lives for themselves and their families and sometimes engaging in social and political protest. So, in many ways, working on Rituals of Migration took me back to the kind of social and cultural approach that got me interested in history in the first place. That approach to history involves sociology and folklore among other disciplines, and part of the pleasure of working on Rituals of Migration was learning from practitioners of these disciplines.
MM: The moment we decided to focus on rituals as an essential element of the immigrant experience, we realized that we needed to draw from other disciplines to provide a framework for the project, the authors, and the readers since only a handful of historians have explored this idea. Doing this also allowed us to invite scholars who study migration but work in other disciplines using a historical approach. This made for fruitful intellectual exchanges that enriched everyone involved in the project. One of the most intellectually engaging moments of working on this volume was to be in conversation with all the authors during a workshop at Glucksman Ireland House at NYU.
HD: The volume is organized around three temporal moments of a migrant’s journey—departure, transit, and return. These moments disrupt the narrative of arrival, contestation, and assimilation that characterizes the liberal premise in much of the scholarship on immigration. How did you interpret what “migration” means for this volume?
KK: As the subtitle to the book suggests, we focus on people in motion. We examine what people did, felt, thought, and carried with them—on the eve of departure, in transit, and when returning home (or dreaming about doing so). We look at the communities that migrants left behind and the impact of departure on those who remained at home. We follow migrants across the oceans, with particular attention to discipline and disorder on board ship. We examine the rituals of inspection migrants endured on arrival in their new countries. And we follow some of the migrants as they return to their home countries, whether as deportees, sojourners, or tourists. Many books on immigration history take a quick look at conditions in the country of origin, pick up the story again when migrants arrive in their destinations, and focus on their post-migration lives. Our book is all about journeys: departure, transit, and return.
MM: We adopted an expansive definition of migration so that the project could explore rituals can have not only among immigrants but also among their descendants. This approach allowed us to include authors like Linda Reeder, Bernadette Whelan, Hidetaka Hirota, and Lauren Braun-Strumfels and Clara Zaccagnini whose essays focus on the process of departure or involuntary return. It also allowed us to work with scholars like Donna Gabaccia, Joan Saverino, and Joseph Sciorra, whose essays focus on the descendants of immigrants. Most of these authors explore the meaning of immigrant family heirlooms and all of them grapple with the impact of immigration and the immigrant past on family history. Given Americans’ interest in genealogy, this felt like a particularly important element to include in the project. It hopefully serves as a reminder of the role that immigration plays at the personal and familial levels.
HD: Many contributors to this volume possess a keen understanding of various geographies and imperial formations. These insights represent a crucial intervention in migration histories—particularly in the U.S. where transnational and imperial history are often seen as additions to the history of the nation-state. How has collaborating with scholars who conduct multi-sited research influenced your approach to studying migration and rituals?
KK: In this volume, we focus on two diasporas that spanned the globe. The United States was the largest single destination for both groups, but Italians also went to Brazil, Argentina, and Australia in large numbers as well as to Canada and many parts of continental Europe. The Irish settled in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina as well as the United States. Nearly all the places where the Irish settled, not coincidentally, were settler colonies in the British Empire. Ireland was both a British colony and a major source for the migrants, soldiers, administrators who settled in the empire. Diasporic and transimperial approaches allow us to move beyond the “spokes on a wheel” model of migration (departure from a central hub) to consider mobility and connectivity among multiple sites, in which the “homeland” is reconceived as one node in a global network.
MM: Living in the United States makes it easy sometimes to forget the transnational and transimperial dimensions of migration. We chose to include these perspectives because we felt that it was critical to help readers understand the importance of placing migration history in a global framework. Working with scholars who conduct multi-sited research gave us an opportunity to think about how the same rituals take on different meanings depending on the context in which they unfold, are adopted, or created. Rituals of inspection introduced by US authorities in New Orleans, as Lauren Strumfels and Clara Zaccagnini describe in their essays, served as enforcing mechanisms for immigration policy, whereas similar shipboard rituals for Irish migrants en route to Australia, as Cian McMahon and Jill Bender explain, aimed to uphold Victorian notions of respectability and religiosity. These examples also provide powerful reminders of how the migrant experience can change depending on the context and the receiving country’s ideas of citizenship, identity, and belonging.
HD: Moving from scale, I want to shift the conversation to the realm of intimacy. Some scholars in this volume integrate themselves into the history they are producing. Whether it is Donna Gabaccia’s expertise in handweaving and crocheting or Joseph Sciorra’s examination of his family photographs, many contributors demonstrate an intimate relationship to their analysis and the historian’s craft. How did you approach the personal ties contributors had to their research and writing?
KK: Some of our authors tell stories about their own families; all of us, I suspect, are intimately invested in the stories we tell in this book, even when they are about strangers in the past. As an immigrant and a historian of immigration, I both live and write about the kinds of experiences we examine in the book. So, this history is deeply personal for me, even if I don’t write about myself directly. As editors and contributors, inspired by some short stories we had read and some films we had seen, we were trying to capture the intimate realm of migration history that you refer to. But a historian is like a novelist under oath, always constrained by the available evidence. To what extent, then, can scholars get at the more personal and affective dimensions of the migrant experience? The reader can be the judge.
MM: From our early conversations about this project, we hoped to include authors who had a personal connection to the stories they would write about in their contributions to the volume. At a time when immigrants are constantly dehumanized and when the study of marginalized groups is facing a backlash in the public sphere, we felt it was important to find authors who could show how everyday objects, family traditions, or personal stories are critical to our understanding of ordinary people’s historical experiences. In practice, this meant finding a balance between working through these personal stories while maintaining a focus on the scholarly contributions these stories can make.
HD: If I ask about intimacy, it’s only fair that I turn to gender. The first third of the volume provides a rigorous analysis of gender but gender is instructive for all the chapters. I understand that Dr. Marinari is currently working on a book manuscript that centers gender. I would like to invite both of you to comment on the prominence of gender and family formations in the various rites of passage associated with migration.
KK: Most migrations in history have been predominantly male in their initial phases. Early nineteenth-century Ireland was no exception. Yet after the Great Famine half of Irish emigrants were female, young, and single—a highly distinctive pattern that prefigured international migration after World War II. Italian migration, by contrast, was heavily male, with “birds of passage” intending to spend a few years working abroad before returning home. More than 50 percent of them did so—compared to only about 5 per cent of the Irish. Italian men often married before leaving “white widows” behind, who often turned dependency into opportunity. “Birds of passage” who returned to Italy without having fulfilled their dreams abroad found their masculinity undermined. The gendered dynamics of migration and return had a major impact on Irish and Italian family formation and produced widely divergent levels of naturalization and political participation abroad. For all these reasons, gender is one key to our book.
MM: Two of the main goals we hoped to accomplish with this were to remind readers that migration is a family project and that class and gender profoundly shape the immigrant experience both for those who leave and those who stay behind. The essays by Jill Bender, Gráinne McEvoy, Linda Reeder, and Joseph Sciorra powerfully show how migration challenges and transforms women and families in ways that can’t always be predicted and that have profound implications for gender roles, notions of respectability, and family dynamics.
HD: We are currently in a moment where immigration arguably defines the American political landscape more distinctly than any other policy issue. You emphasize the significance of historical scholarship to the present in your epilogue. I would like to take this final question and ask you to elaborate on that and thank you for your insights.
KK: Most of the ritual moments we consider in this book—from the “American wake” for departing emigrants in rural Ireland to farewell family meals in southern Italy, the things that migrants carried, the letters they wrote, and the photographs they took—are migrant-centered in the sense that ordinary migrants created and performed them. To see how migrants negotiated the obstacles placed in their path by lawmakers and officials, we also consider rituals of discipline during travel and rituals of inspection on arrival. Above all, writing at a time when migrants are being dehumanized around the world, we wanted to humanize people who migrated in the past.
MM: Much of my work focuses on immigration and mobilization against immigration restriction, but I felt strongly about working on a project that could humanize immigrants and remind us of the importance of remembering why people leave and how they try to make sense of such a transformative experience. I hope the essays in Rituals of Migration help readers understand what it’s like to leave everything behind in search for new opportunities, how intimidating it can be to deal with the bureaucracy that has become such an integral element of the immigrant experience, and how this immigrant past affects families for decades to come. We seem to have forgotten that most people around the world don’t leave. The people who leave home do so at great personal cost and with huge family sacrifices behind them. The least we can do is to recognize their humanity.