Affect and Spatial Experiences of Migration in Karen Campbell’s This Is Where I Am

ABSTRACT

Drawing on recent theorisation in the field of emotional geographies and Sara Ahmed’s approach to migration as a spatially-mediated and bidirectional process of reorientation, this article analyses the potential of literary representations of the city for exploring the intersections between affect, space and friendship in the context of migration and transcultural encounter. It analyses how the novel This Is Where I Am (2013), by the Scottish writer Karen Campbell, presents its protagonists’ different local and refugee perspectives of the city of Glasgow and how their friendship reshapes their spatial experiences. This article also shows the ways in which the study of the heterogeneity of urban experience through fiction plays a fundamental role in current debates on national identity, belonging and the future of the nation in post-devolution Scotland.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Hames, 1.

2 Whyte, 284.

3 Calder, xiii–xiv.

4 Gifford, 596.

5 Schoene, “Going Cosmopolitan”.

6 Schoene, “Post-devolution Scottish Writing”, 2.

7 Bell, 122.

8 Conradson and McKay, 169.

9 Cohen, 13.

10 Whyte, 277–8.

11 Wallace, 3.

12 Kravitz, 22.

13 Bissett, 59.

14 Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 1.

15 Davidson and Milligan, 523–4.

16 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenologies, 9.

17 Ibid.

18 McDowell, 864.

19 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 69.

20 Ibid., 63.

21 Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 8.

22 Allan and Adams, 183.

23 Neal and Vincent, 913.

24 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 225.

25 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 33 (emphasis in original).

26 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenologies, 11.

27 Deborah shows many connections with Janice Galloway’s character Joy Stone in The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), which can be appreciated in her broken narration and experience of loss. Even if the development of the novel is completely different from Galloway’s, these connections with a recognisable character in Scottish literature are fundamental to make evident how the local subject is also lost, also in a process of making and remaking points of reference.

28 Bissett, 60.

29 Scullion, 3.

30 The first city to be designated City of Culture was Athens in 1985, followed by Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris in the subsequent years, until Glasgow had the title in 1990.

31 Centre for Cultural Policy Research, 3.

32 Kelman, 21.

33 McDermid, 147.

34 Campbell, Twilight Time, 8 (emphasis in original).

35 Saadi, 196.

36 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 197 (emphasis in original).

37 Ibid., 237 (emphasis in original).

38 Crawford, 306.

39 Gardiner, 28.

40 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 39.

41 Ibid., 62.

42 Crawford, 264.

43 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 37 (emphasis in original).

44 Meighan, 41.

45 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 346–7 (emphasis in original).

46 Clandfield and Lloyd, 131.

47 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 22 (emphasis added).

48 Ibid., 89 (emphasis added).

49 Ibid., 67 (emphasis added).

50 Ibid., 199.

51 Ibid., 325.

52 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 185.

53 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 459 (emphasis added).

54 Ibid., 301.

55 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 11.

56 Campbell, This Is Where I Am, 45–6, 86, 97–8.

57 Ibid., 62, 82, 154–5, 183–4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2013-45642-R to the project “MultipliCities: Embodied Encounters and Alternative Knowledges: Inhabiting and Creating the Transnational City”); Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU14-03220).