ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the role of language, and the dis/placement of language in our continuing struggles for a sense of home and belonging: hence the title, accent(uat)ing nostalgia. My attention to 'accent' here will thus be both literal and figurative; ethnic and gendered. Can we hear one another across the regional boundaries that connect and separate us? Do women speak in specific accents to other women? To what extent does the separation of time, as well as space, cause us to hear one another differently? I will be exploring these and other, related
questions with reference to two very differently accented texts: the North West playwright Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, and the Scottish poet, Kathleen Jamie's 'For Paola' from the Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet (the latter produced collaboratively with photographer Sean Mayne Smith). 3 But first, to locate my own self I history in all this, I begin with an anecdote.
