ABSTRACT
In responding to the condition of postmodernity and globalization with their increased mobilities and flows (Appadurai, 1996), contemporary autobiographical writing by migrant and diasporic subjects shows how they cross various state, ethnic, and cultural borders on their way towards new locations and identities (see, e.g., Luca, 2014; Rahbek, 2014). In narrating such life histories as part of global mobility, life writing by migrants reveals that identity is transnational and communal, and that memory plays a major role in the making of migrant subjectivities. In representing migrants’ life histories, rooted in global transitions, autobiographies rely on memory and related tropes to link with each other distant spaces and times, and construct new subjectivities in the process. Sara Ahmed et al. (2003, p. 9; emphasis original) understand this process as an act of ‘making home’ that ‘is about creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of present’.
