BETWEEN OUTCAST AND OUTSIDER: CONSTRUCTING THE IDENTITY OF THE FOREIGNER

ABSTRACT

Through the adoption of a dialogical, self+other model, which can appreciate the presence of different discourses and cultures within the self, I have investigated the identities of young migrants. A sample of young Europeans participated in the research, narrating their migration stories with a variety of autobiographical methods which integrated interviews with diaries and visual media. Young migrants refer to their condition as foreigners as an ambivalent one, which, involving also much suffering, oscillates between two different ways of positioning the self. A dream of return is always dominant for the outcasts, who either feel at the margins or do not wish to immerse themselves any deeper in the society they have moved into. Migrating means instead reaching a different level of experience and knowledge of the world to the outsiders, who can successfully translate the detachment of their special positioning into a creative and hybrid reconstruction of identities.

Keywords:

• migration
• identities
• dialogical self
• autobiographies
• young people
• hybridity

Acknowledgments

The photograph in Figure 1 and drawing in Figure 2 are part of the autobiographical data that I have collected in this research. All participants have agreed to their data being used for research purposes and in publications. In the case of photographs, I have requested for special permission to publish. I am grateful to the young people who participated in this research for their generosity and enthusiasm. A special thank you to Emma for allowing me to use her photograph in this context.

Notes

¹This project was supported by the European Commission with a Marie Curie TMR Fellowship.

²All names are fictional and have been chosen by participants themselves.

³ Feeling = in English in the original.

⁴ Magari is an adverb expressing a hypothetical situation and a wish with few chances of success. The Hazon English/Italian Dictionary translates it as: even; perhaps, maybe; even if; if only (Hazon 1981).

⁵ Filmino = home-movie.

⁶‘Lo straniero’ = ‘The foreigner’.