Biography

Dr. Tine Vekemans is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University (2019-2023). Her FWO funded project Remember Africa? The effects of twice-migration on the religious and cultural lives of British ‘East-African’ Jains uses different types of contemporary memorial projects and narratives of individual Jains in the UK to address the experience of twice-migration and its impact upon religious and cultural praxis. It comprises two distinct levels of inquiry.

First, it approaches memory as a source, and constructs a continuous history of Jainism as it moved spatially from India to East-Africa to the UK, and temporally from a 20th century colonial to a 21st century postcolonial context, identifying successive cultural and religious transformations that arose in the course of this collective movement through time and space.

On a second level memory becomes the subject of inquiry. The nostalgia and fear of forgetting that resonates from individual narratives and public memorial projects indicates an increased preoccupation with the past. As their shared migration experience gradually fades from living memory, this community is developing strategies to establish transgenerational memory and strengthen a common narrative.

Contact

Department of Languages and Cultures, Room 150.009
Ghent University