Between Fear and Hope: Displacement, Migration, and Belonging Across Eras and Continents
A Gegenüber TALK with Julia Cumes and Roy Grundmann.
As part of the Literature Across Borders series with the Goethe Institut, “Between Fear and Hope” brought together MISI fellows Julia Cumes and Roy Grundmann to explore migration as a lived, layered human experience.
Photographer Julia Cumes discussed her portrait project Invisible Threads: Portraits and Stories of Our Global Neighbors, created in collaboration with Lipe Borges. The project centers immigrants who have made their lives on Cape Cod – a region whose tourist economy depends on a global workforce, even as that community often remains invisible in public narratives. Through extended interviews and carefully staged portraits, Cumes emphasizes absolute collaboration. Each subject participates actively in shaping how their story is told and how they are visually represented.
Film scholar Roy Grundmann approached migration from a historical lens, discussing his research on the MS St. Louis, the German ocean liner that left Nazi Germany in 1939 carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees bound for Cuba. When the Cuban government invalidated their visas, the ship was turned away and ultimately forced to return to Europe. He writes more about the incident in his book On Shoreless Sea: The MS St. Louis Refugee Ship in History, Film, and Popular Memory. From his research, Grundmann underscored how refugees– both historically and today– are frequently reduced to narratives of anonymous suffering. The passengers aboard the St. Louis, like migrants everywhere, represent diverse nationalities, classes, and cultural backgrounds.
Across disciplines, both Cumes and Grundmann returned to a shared concern: how public narratives shape our understanding of belonging and of the individual. Whether through portraiture or archival research, both projects challenge the flattening of migrant identities and seek to restore visibility, dignity, and agency.