Adopting broad, interdisciplinary definitions of both ‘migrant’ and ‘narrative’, this volume examines the construction and narration of migrant identities in Nordic contexts. Adopting a social constructivist view of identity, the authors focus on narrative as a key site of identity construction, and therefore as a productive window into migrant experience. The nine chapters weave together theoretical insights with concrete data and observations, returning always to guiding questions around how identity is constructed via migration and the narration thereof: How do migrants shape the places they live? How does migration (and the telling thereof) shape migrants?
In addressing these questions, the authors integrate lenses from disciplines as diverse as museum studies (chapter 6), literary inquiry (chapters 3, 7), cultural and postcolonial studies (all chapters), and qualitative sociolinguistics, specifically discourse analysis (chapters 2, 4, and 8 in particular). They discuss how migrant narratives come into being and are negotiated in arenas such as asylum interviews (chapters 2, 3), literature and popular media (chapters 3, 7), job interviews (chapter 4), and career paths (chapter 5). In juxtaposing these various arenas, the authors highlight the complicated interplays that arise between personal and community narratives of migration—between the private and the public—tracing the ways that personal, professional, and political identity constructions become (or perhaps always are) inextricable from one another in migrant narratives.
Chapters 2 and 3, for instance, drive this idea home. In chapter 2, we see how a clash in narrative expectations is at the heart of why one man from Côte d'Ivoire, Saïdou, was denied asylum in Norway in 2010. Bjørghild Kjelsvik frames the Norwegian asylum interview as a genre with rigid expectations about how a traumatic experience must be told in order to qualify the teller for asylum; specifically, in apparent contrast to Saïdou's own narrative frameworks, Norwegian immigration law requires that the telling include concrete episodes in which the teller is an agentive and specific participant, rather than ‘generic narratives’ about how violence affects a community generally and repeatedly. In chapter 3, Annika Bøstein Myhr highlights how one intending Norwegian asylee, Maria Amelie, used her autobiography as a substitute for the asylum interview, allowing her to narrate her migration in relation to a different set of genre expectations.
Saïdou's and Maria Amelie's are individual cases, but are narrated in connection to larger themes, as is true of all the data presented in this volume. In weaving diverse data together, the authors construct a narrative that Anna De Fina makes clear in the volume's post-script: this book is written with the underlying recognition that mobility for some does not mean mobility for all. There runs throughout the volume an understanding that migration and the ways it is restricted and controlled have tangible and far-reaching influences in shaping both individuals and societies. Taken together, the chapters in this volume emphasize the importance of considering the real-world impacts of how migration is (allowed to be) told, who it is told by, and whom it is told to.
