See(m)ing strange: Methodologies of memory and home

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the stranger and Anne-Marie Fortier’s approach to remembering home, this article argues for a methodology of memory and migration that would explore individuals’ encounters between lived spatio-temporalities without affirming a migrant ontology. I look to my ethnographic research on diasporic narratives among migrants from the former Yugoslavia in the United Kingdom to ask how recounted memories of home might be bound up in, but not confined to, the experience of migration. Exploring mnemonic journeys that go beyond dichotomies of displaced origins and strange new homelands, I suggest that stories of embodied sensory experience can make visible people’s encounters with forms of difference: both in the past home, which loses its ontological fixity, and in the process of inhabiting a ‘diaspora space’, which comes with its own narratives and trajectories of being a stranger.