Samuel vander Straeten is a social anthropologist and historian interested in urban life in postcolonial Europe, racialisation, young people, and everyday relationships of care. In his doctoral research, he explores how Moroccan-background young men navigate interrelated dynamics of historically ingrained racialised exclusion and everyday care in an Antwerp neighbourhood (Samuel’s hometown).
Postcolonial urban spaces often surface ‘knotted intersections’ of a variety of transnational histories (Gilroy 1993 in Rothberg 2010:8). The way city dwellers ‘inherit’ and ‘piece together’ (Han 2021) these histories, however, is contingent. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Antwerp neighbourhood of Borgerhout, this paper explores how the area’s transnational histories have ‘travelled’ to and with young men of Moroccan descent, whose ancestors migrated to the neighbourhood since the 1960s. To this end, I trace an assemblage of fragmentary migration and family histories that were central to these men’s historical consciousness and that were embedded in and around Terloplein, an (in)famously ‘Moroccan’ square. In particular, this assemblage covers histories of Amazigh anti-colonial struggle in Rif Mountains of Northern Morocco and of the ‘pioneer’ Moroccan-Amazigh ‘guest workers’ who moved to Antwerp to ‘build a better future’ for their children and grandchildren. Mapping the domestic, affective, and more-than-narrative ways in which the young men inherited and collaged these histories, I argue that, for them, history actively articulates, ‘teaches’, and produces intergenerational relations and masculine subjectivities. Not only, I will show, did the men piece together their histories through social media images, disputes about the name of ‘their’ square, or sensory interactions with their ancestral land; histories were also evoked and reproduced through everyday affective family dynamics: through mothers’ labour of care at home, through fathers’ silences and ‘hard work’ away from home, through the way the young men managed their emotions as a man and a (grand)son of the ‘pioneers’ of ‘the first generation’, through masculine feelings of indebtedness to these ‘pioneers’, and through a related masculine sense of responsibility towards the future.
Drawing on both the field of memory studies and the anthropology of history (Palmié & Stewart 2019), I thus demonstrate how my interlocutors’ fragmentary histories and historical inheritances are deeply shaped by – but also shape – local spatial configurations, kinship structures, and gender scripts. In this process, I emphasise, histories are often not just ‘transmitted’ as a narrativised ‘testimony’, but rather inherited and rearticulated through a variety of ordinary practices and performances.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.
Han, C. (2021). Seeing like a child: Inheriting the Korean War. Fordham University Press.
Palmié, S., & Stewart, C. (Eds). (2019). The varieties of historical experience. Routledge.
Rothberg, M. (2010). Introduction: Between memory and memory: From lieux de mémoire to noeuds de mémoire. Yale French Studies, (118/119), 3–12.
Practical information:
28.05.2026, 15h
- ufo
- 3th floor
- 130.002
Link to online meeting: