“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay,
A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.
"A provocative, virtuosic inquiry that reveals how the valorization of times and migrations past are intimately linked to our exclusion and demonization of migrants in the present When and how did migration become a crime? Why did "Greek ideals" become foundational to the West's idea of itself? How have our personal migration myths -and our nostalgia for a lost world of clear borders and values - shaped our troubling new realities? In 2020, Lauren Markham went to Greece to cover the burning of a refugee camp on Lesbos. Some said the refugees had done it, to destroy what had become their prison. Others said it was the island's fascists, or the government itself, enraged at the burden they bore for an overwhelming global problem. Soon-too soon-six young Afghan refugees were arrested. As she immersed herself in the reporting, Markham-an American of Greek heritage who had been working with and writing about migrants for more than a decade-saw that the story she was reporting was part of a larger tapestry, with roots not only in centuries of history but in the myths we tell ourselves about who we are. In this mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins makes us realize that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future"--]cProvided by publisher.
