Migration Italy

A bricolage of identifications: storying postmigrant belonging

“…As I have said, we need to move away from representational strategies which focus exclusively upon ethnicity or migrancy or minority to explore narratives that are post-national/ist, post-ethnic and postmigrant in order to produce stories of complex subjectivities which unsettle, render unstable, ideas of otherness. Parati 15 employs the useful concept of "talking back" to master political narratives about identities as a way of developing postmigrancy, not as a new category of separateness but as a condition marked by intercultural spaces, shared and collaborative dialogues/conversations in which host/migrant distinctions are placed under erasure in a new intersectional context within a destination culture; a destination, moreover which is beyond the nation, and which perhaps is never finally reached. These dialogues should be seen as generative activities, spaces of creativity, provisional, impermanent but, above all dynamic: a series of new alliances, new paradigms, multi-normative (in the sense of setting up a range of norms rather than thinking in terms of the norm) and associational, based upon a reversal of stereotypes and expectations.…”