‘Narrations of the Nation in Mobility Life Stories: Gendered Scripts, Emotional Spheres and Transnational Performativity in the Greek Diaspora’

Abstract

As a translocal, transcultural and transnational phenomenon, migration in its varying manifestations of mobility pathways (e.g. ancestral homeland return, homecoming visits, etc.) is a highly emotional experience, deeply performative and gendered in cultural processes often translated through the hegemony of the nation. Diasporic lives are vastly interrupted and disrupted through both temporal and spatial shifts beyond physical movement as the cultural politics of social and ethno-national institutions re-configure migrant lives in the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of the respective ‘home’ and ‘host’ lands. Understanding the perfomativity of gendered migrant lives requires a range of translations from the micropersonal to macrosocial as social subjects cross both imaginative and pragmatic boundaries in their movement across continents and cultural worlds. This chapter aims to unravel the complexities of such emotional and gendered negotiations by exploring a range of experiences that Greek migrants encounter in various diasporic and transnational settings and their embodied representations in everyday life. The analysis draws from extensive empirical data gathered in the last decade through multi-sited and multi-method research with first- and second-generation Greek migrants in various European and North American destination countries.