Situating Strangeness Exploring The Intersections Between Bodies And Borders

SITUATING STRANGENESS

Situating Strangeness: Exploring the Intersections between Bodies and Borders

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Zygmunt Bauman, in his publication Liquid Modernity, described the meeting of strangers as a mismeeting – a brief encounter which had no past and the unlikely possibility of a future. This suggests a meeting which is free from expectation, but it also has the potential to fuel alienation and displacement. Being a stranger is not synonymous with distant geographies or borderlands, though it does include them: strangers and peculiar places can be found closer to home. Themes of alienation, strangeness and foreignness converge in the following accounts. The reader will migrate through unrecognisable narratives coming into contact with diasporic identities, stand-up comedians, English Language Educators, artists and photographers, to mention a few. These accounts are diverse but commonalities are tangled between webs of thought. Readers are invited to tug at the threads of this web, to find their own connections and chance upon unexpected revelations which come through picking the ends.

Identity here and there. Migration as resource for identity construction

In this book, I make use of concepts such as collective identity, identity construction, migration as discursive resource and ethnicity in tackling the question of how identity is constructed by the interviewees in their interactions with the researchers. More specifically, a certain part of this constructionist setting is emphasized: the role played by migration as concept brought by interviewees into the discussion flow in order to define social categories or, in social identity theory’s vocabulary, in-groups and out-groups. Given this analytical orientation, using as introduction the words and story of a migrant among those whose voices I present and discuss seemed only natural. The book is not focused on migration as phenomenon, and it does not place it in causal relations to states of facts. Instead, it is a proposition to explore discourses and narratives of migration and the shifts in various social definitions performed within them. It basically brings forward migration and identity as two related concepts and explores how the latter is constantly redefined in reference to the former. The theoretical perspectives that link identity and migration presented here are assimilation and transnationalism, and, albeit from different directions, they both relate to issues such as integration and dealing with borders, be they political, social or psychological.