Migrant Poet(h)ics

Abstract

Sociological investigations of migrancy have traditionally relied heavily on narratives. Social scientists record and research life experiences, using life narratives and interviews as privileged sources of information. These narratives are treated as a repository of experiential data, a collection of detail that provides source material for sociological or anthropological analysis of life experience. However, life narratives naturally produce contradictory, diverse manifestations of experience, and this in turn gives rise to a wide array of differing definitions of migrancy. To a significant degree, definitions of migrancy reflect the perspectives from which migration and/or being a migrant is witnessed or experienced. In terms of physical location, the term denotes relational mobility: being removed from a place of familiarity and positioned in an unfamiliar, ‘foreign’ environment. From a social-psychological perspective, it is a relational identity, where the self is either displaced in its surroundings or exists in a minority community which is defined by such factors as ethnicity or religion. Definitions of migrancy resist homogeneity, just as, significantly, definitions of nationality do. Interpretations differ enormously depending on the perspective taken — economic, ethnic, racial, gender or class. The generational aspect of migrancy also has to be considered with differentiations made between first and subsequent generations of migrants. Significantly, migrancy can also be defined empirically (discussing lived experiences), culturally (examining it as a state of being) or with the more holistic approach of ethnography.