Immigrants, narratives, and identity : how immigrants frame their identity through discussing the recollections of experiences of migration

Abstract

This critical and ethnographic study explores the complex assemblage of linkages between migration and uncertainty as a symptomatic case of how African boat migrants are constructed and regulated. In line with recent scholarship on uncertainty as a mode of governmentality, I discuss how this felt mode of governing affects one’s being-in-the-world, that supports the bureaucratic techniques of classification, in managing and controlling irregular boat migrants. Processes of subjectification, I argue, are navigated, negotiated and reconstructed through hope. Concluding, I contend that these sparks of faith in the future are interconnected to social imaginaries, emerging from the present while pointing beyond it. The generative account of subject formation, I show, provides a fruitful analytical framework to examine the dynamic connections between structures and agency. It is the actors’ active, creative and imaginative engagement with the present which ultimately sets in motion new possibilities for action.