Full Description
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, 8 and 12 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Contents
1. Analysing migrant narratives as an ethnographic project: Academic representation as storytelling Part I: Scripted narratives - Continuities and ruptures 2. Narratives of absence: Making sense of loss and liminality in the post-war Bosnian diaspora 3. Home at last: Narrating community and belonging through retirement migration to Spain 4. Homecoming as exile? Experiences of rupture and belonging Part II: Agency - Resourceful victimhood 5. Female agency, resourceful victimhood and heroines in migrant narrative 6. "When you win, you are a German, when you lose, you are a foreigner": Claiming position beyond the meritocratic and discriminatory migration discourse 7."None of these are jokes, it's just my life...": Migrant narratives and female agency in Shazia Mirza's comedy Part III: Silences and voids in gendered narratives - What can and cannot be told 8. The Syrian taxi driver: Migrant narratives or narratives of a researcher? 9. Reluctant stories: Silences in women's narratives of war and exile 10. Planting the colonial narrative: The migrant letters of James Taylor in Ceylon Part IV: Collective narratives - Stories as a way of doing community 11. The "Titanic legacy": Collective narratives as resources of diasporic communities 12. Migrant ethnography on YouTube: "GermanLifeStyle" and the German "refugee crisis" 13. The migrant storyteller: Mnemonic and narrative strategies in migrant stories
