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Peng, Lance 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1825-6146
(2026)
The return was never here: mnemohistory, nostalgia and the fiction of home.
International Review of Sociology, n/a.
pp. 1-14.
ISSN 1469-9273
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Abstract / Summary
This conceptual paper interrogates the idea of ‘return’ in women’s migration through the lens of mnemohistory: a mode of analysis that centres memory not as passive inheritance but as active construction. Framed by the provocative claim that the return was never here, the article explores how return migration is less a homecoming than a gendered performance shaped by nostalgia, postmemory, affective labour. Drawing on Boym’s (2001) distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, Hirsch’s (1997) theory of postmemory and Ahmed’s (2004;, p. 2010) work on affective economies, the article explores how familial, national, diasporic imaginaries recruit women into emotionally charged scripts of cultural restoration. Through a constellation of theorists including Halbwachs (1992), Assmann and Czaplicka (1995), Braidotti (1994) and Gordon (2008), it argues that return is not a reversal of departure but a looping, haunted process of re- membering, often requiring women to reconcile inherited fictions of ‘home’ with present dissonance. By shifting focus from structural integration to mnemonic desire, the paper offers new theoretical insights into how return migration operates as a site of affective contradiction, memory politics and feminist refusal. It invites us to imagine ‘home’ not as a destination but as a verb still in the making.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Identification Number: | 10.1080/03906701.2025.2607115 |
| ISSN: | 1469-9273 |
| Subjects: | History, Geography & Environment Social Sciences |
| Department: | Academy of Innovation and Research |
| Related URLs: | |
| SWORD Depositor: | Mr Pub Router |
| Depositing User: | Mr Pub Router |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Mar 2026 15:56 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Mar 2026 15:56 |
| URI: | https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6333 |
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