The study of migration literature has often been characterised by the reproduction of Beck’s (2002) “methodological nationalism” due its frequent focus on literature produced by migrant writers as separate, while at the same time challenging the tenets of the literature produced by writers of non-migrant background. Recent critical approaches to the study of literature (Walkowitz 2006) have underscored the significant role of this migration literature, in the context of globalisation and of the increasing “cosmopolitanization of reality” (Beck 2006), to render the logic of the nation state within the discipline of literary studies as “unmeaning” (Damrosch 2003: 1), thus arguing for its “denationalisation” (Dimock 2001: 176). Still, within this context of emergent understandings of national literature as transcultural, migration literature has often maintained the migrant background of the author as the main criterion for inclusion in this system. In the British context, English writer Rose Tremain’s work signifies a challenge both to dominant disciplinary categorisations of migration literature, and to contemporary approaches to the study of migration and collective identities through the re-examination of past national experiences of migration in a context of colonization. By mostly resorting to Rothberg’s “noueds de mémoire”, this paper contends that in her historical novel The Colour (2003) Tremain resorts to re-enacting migration to the British colony of New Zealand during the 1860s gold rush as a way of underscoring the points of contact between different experiences of migration past and present. Thus, Tremain contributes both to de-migranticising (Dahinden 2006) migration literature and to highlighting the role of transnational migration in (re)shaping national narratives of identity.