ABSTRACT

With a focus on migrant narratives, or the storytelling about migration, this volume considers the ways in which migration is and has been shaped by individual and collective experiences of agency, belonging and community.

Driven by an agenda of deep listening, each chapter presents a narrative directly derived from qualitative research, an outline of the methodological framing as well as narrative analysis. Through close attention to the narrative, its performative aspects and its ruptures and silences, authors identify patterns and material in the fabric of such telling and retelling of stories that open up new perspectives on the migrant experience. This book develops a methodology of "dwelling with stories" that allows for sustained and slow interrogation of the migrant experience and the accompanying decisions that shape narratives around mobility across borders. Its structure is innovative by emphasising the migrant voice and reflecting on the scholars’ positionality, while also offering new theoretical contributions that will advance the field of narrative analysis.

The book will appeal to academics, students and practitioners in a wide range of subject areas within the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, human geography, migration/refugee/diaspora studies and oral history.

Chapter 5, 6, 7 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

chapter 1|14 pages

Analysing migrant narratives as an ethnographic project

Academic representation as storytelling

part I|40 pages

Scripted narratives

chapter 2|12 pages

Narratives of absence

Making sense of loss and liminality in the post-war Bosnian diaspora

chapter 3|12 pages

Home at last

Narrating community and belonging through retirement migration to Spain

chapter 4|12 pages

Homecoming as exile?

Experiences of rupture and belonging

part II|48 pages

Agency

chapter 6|14 pages

“When you win, you are a German, when you lose, you are a foreigner”

Claiming position beyond the meritocratic and discriminatory migration discourse

chapter 7|17 pages

“None of these are jokes, it's just my life…”

Migrant narratives and female agency in Shazia Mirza's comedy

part III|46 pages

Silences and voids in gendered narratives

chapter 8|14 pages

The Syrian taxi driver

Migrant narratives or narratives of a researcher?

chapter 9|13 pages

Reluctant stories

Silences in women's narratives of war and exile

chapter 10|15 pages

Planting the colonial narrative

The migrant letters of James Taylor in Ceylon 1

part IV|56 pages

Collective narratives

chapter 11|18 pages

The “Titanic legacy”

Collective narratives as resources of diasporic communities

chapter 12|14 pages

Migrant ethnography on YouTube

“GermanLifeStyle” and the German “refugee crisis”

chapter 13|20 pages

The migrant storyteller

Mnemonic and narrative strategies in migrant stories