The Scent of Memory

Strangers, Our Own, and Others

Bibliographic Data

ID3945877
AuthorsAvtar Brah (corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume61
Issue1
Pages4-26
Publication date1999-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1080/014177899339261
OpenAlexW2081410475
LanguageEN
Citations received50
References cited7

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of 'race' are all but absent, and the racialized 'commonsense' that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the 'diaspora space' of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist 'origin stories' of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism, and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms - 'ajnabi', 'ghair', and 'apna/apni' - in constructing a non-binarized understanding of identification across 'difference

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Diaspora · Epistemology · Essentialism · Ethnic group · Ideology · Kinship · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Subjectivity · White (mutation · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Philosophy