Archiving Displacement and Identities: Recording Struggles of the Displaced Re/making Home in Britain

This chapter analyses extracts from ten life histories of displaced men and women who migrated from seven countries in the Global South to Britain before 2016. Seeking safety, they faced challenges in re/making home under restrictive immigration practices and changing policies framed within the “Hostile Environment”. We explore identity, memories of “home” and loss, and analyse lived experiences of the displaced re/making “home” in England and Scotland, and their struggles over identities and belonging within British immigration policies. We recognise the different meanings of “home” and address challenges to identity by taking Mbembe’s (from http://wiser.wits.ac.za, 2015) suggestion to decolonise knowledge in the archive. In addition, a non-essentialist intersectional approach to identity, migration and diaspora helps us to comprehend the paradoxical, relational, multiple, and complex meanings of “home” and identity to different generations and the “race” of irregular migrant women and men. We argue, however, home to the displaced is not solely about materiality or spatiality. Home and identity are influenced by the policies of the host country, immigration practices, race and other structural power relations, and politics of belonging.