ABSTRACT
Focusing on forced relocation, this chapter touches on some questions by approaching migration and diaspora as not only culturally inflected, but material, embodied, sensorial and emotional. This perspective foregrounds the ways in which migrants perceive, imagine, engage with, make and re-make their worlds and are made and re-made by them. The environmental and other material changes that result, together with the addition of an emotionally loaded spatial distance between present and past, challenge the ontological experiences of authenticity, familiarity, intimacy that help to bring about feeling right. The extent to which forced migrants work to bring about appropriate combinations of sensory, cognitive and cultural conditions – and their sensitivity to potential tensions therein – shows how far affective engagement with particular objects, spaces and materialized practices is intensified in displacement.
