This article is the introduction to a new History Workshop series on itinerant histories called From Place to Place.
Itinerance – the practice of journeying from place to place, usually for work. The word ‘itinerant’ can also describe a person or group, where other synonyms might be sojourner, traveller, nomad, vagabond, wanderer. Such a persona has long been romanticised in popular culture, with the likes of hawkers, pirates, performers, runaways, and criminals cast as folk heroes. On the other hand, nomadic communities have also historically been pushed to the edges of society, where different types of movement and practices have been criminalised and stigmatised (‘itinerant’ is sometimes considered a slur). Itinerance has often been a focus of antagonisms between the state and the public, falling at the centre of discussions of how to live and work.
This series explores the notion of ‘working and wandering’ in radical histories of labour, exchange and mobility. These histories bring to light conflicting ideas about space, modernity and culture; negotiations of social and racial injustice, poverty, and movement; constructions and cultivations of identity and community; and ambiguous spatial and sensory modes of protest. The series also aims to consider how radical ideas of itinerance can conjure questions about historical research methods and institutions in increasingly precarious times for both people and places.
Crossing the line
Moving and working from place to place has historically been at odds with modern Western ideas of stability, legitimacy and belonging. Under the surface of this inquiry is the question of who is wandering and working. What kinds of ‘wandering’ and ‘working’ are we talking about? Against the backdrop of the 21st century ‘digital nomad’ and post-pandemic practices of ‘working from home’, the contemporary context of mobility (and itinerance as part of it) has often skewed towards neoliberal narratives of ‘lifestyle’, discovery and self-fulfilment.
‘Wandering and working’ bring up histories related to migration and mobility as well. Often used interchangeably, mobility and migration are entangled in ideas of identity, nationhood, citizenship, and freedom. Itinerance adds another layer to this, existing within the folds of mobility and often sharing histories with migration, while potentially providing another perspective altogether. These terms are not the same but nevertheless have been used to address overlapping issues and histories.
There are clear intersections between itinerance and migration, where migration is broadly defined as the process of travelling to a new place, or movement of a person or people from one place ‘to settle in another’. While it might be easily assumed that itinerance is not about settling, both migration and itinerance do share the notion of settling ‘at least for a while’; movement is not constant, and at the points of settling, social and cultural boundaries, or ‘lines’, are crossed.
History Workshop’s archive offer two examples of this boundary crossing, as well as presenting the conundrums of defining itinerance alongside migration: the first is Andrew Whitehead’s article on the history of a Burmese noodle dish in Chennai called atho, as a result of the expulsion of the Indian-origin community from Burma in 1964. As Whitehead concludes, ‘while in Chennai, the Burmese noodle stalls are the most tangible remaining imprint of the once close bonds bridging the Bay of Bengal.’ Within this article, we encounter chosen and forced migrations, repeated travels back and forth between different places over generations, different kinds and scales of settlement, and itinerant hawker practices. Different religious, linguistic and social boundaries emerge from the starting point of this dish. Similarly, Becky Taylor and Jim Hink’s piece on the ‘assimilation’ strategies placed on Gypsies in the New Forest in the 1960s presents a complex narrative in ideas of citizenship, ‘rehabilitation’ and settlement of itinerant communities. Again, culture and space are significant factors in the way these narratives of itinerance and mobility show up, such as the symbolic images of the pony and the caravan in negotiating ‘Gypsyness’.
While it is clear that itinerance and migration share similarities, this series is not an attempt to cover the vast scope of migration histories relevant to radical history. Instead, this series will take the concept of itinerance as the practice of movement, focusing on the histories that emerge within and through movement in the public sphere. The series is interested in the frictions and tensions between stability and mobility, as opposed to destinations and processes in migration, and what histories such frictions can tell. While migration histories will inevitably emerge through the juxtapositions and antagonisms border crossings create, the series will not focus on routes or objectives. Itinerance looks to expand beyond individualistic notions of movement as ‘lifestyle’ to think about disruptions, appropriations and negotiations in the practice of moving from place to place. Itinerance stays in the crossing, often in sight of others to share in the experience.
Ephemeral spaces
As well as making various boundaries visible, itinerance engages other sensory experiences. Itinerance can involve a radical appropriation of space, but it is the ephemeral aspects of these practices that interrupts the status quo. We are drawn to itinerant spaces, not for their permanence, but rather because they encompass impermanence. A circus is all the more wonderous in the overnight raising of a tent; a street food stall entices custom through the smells and tastes of their wares; musicians enchant audiences with their skills and transform the street if only for the duration of a song. These core understandings of itinerant practices are difficult to pin down since their significance relies on embodied experiences of a transient space in the moment.
In my own research on spaces of consumption in Hong Kong from the 1950s onwards, itinerance was a significant feature of everyday life. Hawkers have been a part of Hong Kong’s history since the beginning of British colonisation in the 1850s, the history of which is archived through the early criminalisation of ‘loitering’ and the demarcation of legitimate and illegitimate spaces for exchange. But in Hong Kong’s case, however much the colonial government tried to contain hawker practices, people found radical ways to resist. They physically took over the street (assembling on mass), or reappropriated space using objects (makeshift stalls), bodily behaviours (squatting in the street) and sensations (the smells, sounds and tastes of cooking). These negotiations of space continue today. Although the number of street food stalls is being reduced every year due to privatisation of the city, such practices nevertheless prevail through various tactics, like souped-up mobile hawker stands on wheels or provoking social media uproar against closure, as well as in the memory of people. Throughout Hong Kong’s history, hawkers have clashed with the state, acting as representatives of a culture and body politics at odds with the city and society that different governments have tried to build.
The ephemeral aspects of itinerance are fruitful ground to explore spatial history. Spaces of itinerance are no longer there by design: they are difficult to archive and record, grass grows over signs of past spaces, structures and objects are packed away. Much that is left is through stories told by word of mouth, memories of a specific flavour, relationships made through encounters, repetitions of momentary experiences of the same place over time. Such histories are a challenge to pin down, and to do so perhaps rubs up against cultures of itinerance themselves. Still there is significant value in working with the ephemeral in writing histories, taking tactile understandings of sound, taste, friction and motion as central to the way that histories are narrated and shared.
Itinerant methods
This leads to the question of how best to capture itinerant histories and what modes of dissemination might be necessary. This series will attempt to expand ideas of how the archive, the researcher and the historical object themselves embody notions of itinerance. Personal positionality, a researcher’s own identity and relationship to research, has become increasingly relevant as the intentions of researchers become more at odds with the institutions they sit within. Universities have also become more hostile places to be (and harder places to enter), with increasing surveillance on students and researchers, pressure on academics speaking out against institutional politics, precarious and exhausting working conditions, and redundancies (particularly for women, people-of-colour, and trans and non-binary people). As arts and humanities departments and funding across all types of institutions continues to be cut, researchers have been forced to think on their feet. As a result, many academics are seeking other avenues to continue research. Independent research outside of the institution has likewise opened doors to alternative understandings of the research process, and new ideas of what research ‘outcomes’ could be, albeit with different kinds of precarity. Researchers are having to, wanting to, change the way we work.
Specific parts of the discipline of history already speak to these alternative modes of history-making. Oral history is now an established method within the discipline but has its roots in recording the lives of often marginalised communities. ‘Doing’ oral history often requires ‘going outside’ and borrowing ethnographic and observational methods from other disciplines (although it must also be acknowledged that oral histories within state archives can also be a product of violent policing). Similarly, archival research does not always lie within the institution. Many historians who focus on radical, grassroots, non-Western and localised histories increasingly have to make their own archives, collecting objects, ephemera, oral accounts, or tracing their own family histories. Speculative histories are becoming increasingly important in the face of archival absences or inaccessibility to institutions, but also in response to the uncertainties of the climate crisis and the safety of such histories in political crises. The use of fiction, comics, table-top museums, and other expressions provide avenues for articulating time-travel, parallel histories, sonic story-telling and collective iteration. When materials are overlooked or actively destroyed, itinerant methods can be an expansive alternative.
Many of these modes have been featured in the archive of History Workshop, where central to the manifesto of public history is moving the study of the past beyond the academy. In historical accounts of History Workshop, Luke Parks and Anna Davin described the spatial transformation of History Workshop from a singular meeting place at Ruskin into ‘an itinerant event’ moving across universities, colleges and polytechnics in the 1980s. Since the making of History Workshop into a digital magazine in 2010, the online space has allowed for the continuation of public access to history at a time when academic publishing has created more barriers to entry. Perhaps we might think of this as a way of working through itinerance, a kind of space-time travel that connects people through the digital dimension, in amongst the uncertainty and changing landscape of the internet.
This series hopes to bring these ideas of itinerance together to unpack what it means to work, wander and ‘wonder’ from place to place. Where do itinerant histories clash and converge with ‘static’ histories and other ‘moving’ histories alike? What complexities emerge from putting different forms of movement and migration alongside each other? How do such histories provide a radical lens with which to understand and (re)write historical narratives of people and place? What are the potentials of itinerant methods outside of disciplinary or institutional boundaries? How might we collectively imagine new ways of doing research itinerantly?