Mothers and Daughters in Historical Perspective

Home, Identity and Double Consciousness inBritishPakistanis' Migration and Return

Bibliographic Data

ID4827751
AuthorsPnina Werbner
Year2013
Volume26
Issue1
Pages41-61
Publication date2013-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Historical Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0952-1909 • E-ISSN: 1467-6443
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/johs.12011
OpenAlexW2246505393
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited19

Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on the predicament of second-generation counter-diasporic return migration to an ancestral homeland. The present paper portrays two generations ofPakistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived inManchester in the 1970s, and their daughters, who both returned to live inPakistan, one at the age of 11 and the other in her twenties, to marry. The latter in particular experiencedPakistan as culturally alien and unhomely. In Britain one mother has become extremely pious after 9/11. The paper looks at the moral careers of mothers and daughters, starting from the fact that migration initiates an irreversible process in which everyday, taken-for-granted intimacies and socialities of home and identity are subverted. Refuting simplistic theories of a continuous "transnational field", it argues that migrants experience "double consciousness", an awareness of competing rules, expectations and a doubling up of a subject's sense of belonging and alienation, which no return home can reverse

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Consciousness · Double consciousness · Homeland · Identity (music · Middle class · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Gender Studies · Law

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