In an article 'Living in a material world: object biography and transnational lives", it is recognized that the objects have played a very important role in the reproduction of diasporic communities. Important in a sense that not only it is associated with personal experience and memory, but also it resembles both personal and group identities. In this regard, objectivity is not just related to material things such as clothes or musical instruments. Rather, it is cultural material in which it reveals diasporic identities. According to the authors, places, people, things and practices and ideas are constantly in motion and shape each other. By means, object-centered approach allows social interactions that involve people and objects create meaning and understand how these meanings change across space and over time.
Having used heart-touching stories as narrative strategies to support their arguement, the authors illustrated stories of "Guna Kinne's Latvian national dress" and " Minh Tam Nguyen's Dan tre bamboo musical instrument". In the first story, the nature of the relation between objects and diasporic practices was the symbol of the costume which could be used in a way for Latvian people to express their ethnic identity. In other words, it is a part of preserving and promting their ethnic culture in a diasporic community. In the second story, dan tre musical instrument is associated with emotional attachment that a person has strongly felt within. In this regard, Dan tre is a trigger of memory coming from personal experience. The authors were very good at defining the term "object biography" and make it easier for the readers to follow their point . However, I found that the authors tend to focus on the influences of history on object biography; they do not mention about the meaning of object that can possibly be changed across space and over time. For instance, Dan tre told a story of sadness that Minh has exprienced. Nonetheless, it was only his point of view, what about others? To Minh, dan tre is a priceless object that he always treasures because it travels with him all his life journey. But to others who have not known or even heard of dan tre before, would they share or understand the same experience? I guess that probably not.
Unlike Schamberger, Kelly has particularly talked about the idea of re-memory in which she refers to the material culture such as identity, history and heritage. According to her, material cultures are the nodes of connection in a network of people, places and naration of the past stories and traditions. Furthermore, she talked about the idea of home in which she noted that home is not just historical identification, signification of lanscapes of belonging or tradition and self-identity. Rather, she articulated on the idea of the 'imaginary home' in which memoryy can be traced as the feeli ng og coming to a place where you have never been to but a place where you have heard of or imagined of. In this regard, the objectivity is associated with cultural identity in which relates to personal experience or memory as well as cultural practices.
Schamberger's work does not have enough and concrete evidences to support her arguemenets. At some point, she mentioned about the 'black double consciousness' in which i found not relevant to her arguement. Perhaps she should some connections between black consciousness and South Asian racial consciouness. Moreover, I have trouble understanding Kelly's methodological approach in which she chose to have interviews, mapping and home touring as her main approach for addressing the questions of her research. I found that this is not a convincible way because with the short time of conducting research and small sample group, the result might fall into generalization and less reliable. Such problems lead me to a question Is Kelly's claim of makinhg the value of re-memory suitable and applicable in the case of South Asian diaspora in England?