Chapter 6: The Diaspora Narrates
摘要
Chapter 6 brings the various threads spun by this publication together from the perspective and narrator’s position of the diaspora. Diaspora is framed as a lived and experienced phenomenon: The chapter focuses on the strategies diaspora members are developing to deal with feelings of alienation, expectations from home, and internal and external claims to belonging. Such claims emerge in the form of story games between migrants and kin back home, between diaspora members and fellow migrants, and between migrants and institutional actors in the country of residence. Although there is a dire need for connection, trust is usually precarious in those constellations and proximity can become dangerous. Faced with claims of having become ‘transformed beings’ through travelling, diaspora members are performing belonging on various scales while asserting their agency. They are storytellers of the betwixt-and-between.