The materialities of belonging: Objects in/of exile across the Mediterranean

INTRODUCTION This thematic issue of Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal is dedicated to the ‘unex pected directions’ that research can take when things are taken seriously (Brown 2001; 2004; 2015). Like human beings, things also ‘embark on a journey and find themselves somewhere – elsewhere in the world – again’ (Bischoff and Schlör 2013b: 9, our translation). To follow the trajectories of displaced things and persons requires openness to the ‘surprise of movement’, to the ‘cultural connections between unexpected times and places’ (Greenblatt 2010: 18; 17). Researching the entanglement of ‘materiality, agency, and subjecthood’ (Dini 2017: 3) in the context of exile and migration encompasses the effort to unveil an object’s ‘resonance’: its power ‘to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which – as a metaphor or, more simply as metonymy – it may be taken by a viewer to stand’ (Greenblatt 1990: 19–20). What place do objects occupy in the process of making sense of a specific event or an entire life trajectory? Do objects enable us ‘to find more imaginative ways of connecting micro and macro levels’ (Rügen 2010: 660), knowing that ‘a change of scale might lead to a change of question and of explanation’ (Struck, Ferris and Revel 2011: 579)? How is it that some objects are mobilised and others are instead – consciously or unconsciously – left aside? Do the latter tell us different stories than the former?