3 - Geographies of un/belonging

Summary

Diasporic identity demands the management of an unsettled self, of a subject permanently entre-deux, in process rather than ‘becoming’, without a necessarily teleological structure to support that process and relieve it of some of its destabilizing impact. This is particularly evident in the context of the lives of second-generation migrants. As Nancy Foner (1977) put it in relation to migrants to the UK from the West Indies: ‘Jamaican migrants in England are caught between two worlds: they are no longer just like Jamaicans back home but they are also not exactly like, or fully accepted by, most English people’ (121). But whereas economic despair and aspiration may have prompted the first generation of migrants to undertake the journey to the UK, and that very history mediated between the past in Jamaica and the present in the UK, second-generation migrants face a present without that particular past. Thus whilst first-generation migrants may think of their country of origin as ‘home’, especially when faced with discrimination and racist experiences in the country they migrated to, for second-generation migrants the question of where you belong is not easily resolvable, either in terms of a spatialization of belonging that points to a geographical place as the site of their belonging, or within the imaginary.