Dislocated Selves: Creative Life Writing and the Politics of White Migration

Abstract

This thesis explores the complexities of immigration through a creative and exegetical project that includes personal memoir and scholarly analysis. Centred on my experience as a white South African woman who emigrated to Australia in 2012, the project comprises a series of memoir-essays that interrogate themes of home, identity, belonging, whiteness, and cultural estrangement. The creative work adopts a fragmented, essayistic form, shaped via the senses of loss and the dislocation, both of which I suggest are inherent in the migrant condition. The work leans towards a reimagining of the self as it is reshaped by memory and the negotiation of belonging. The exegesis situates the creative work within broader discourses of the Western concept of home, postcolonial theory, feminist life writing, and critical whiteness studies. It draws on theorists including Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Paul John Eakin, and G. Thomas Couser to examine how memoir can both reflect and resist dominant narratives of multiculturalism, identity, and national belonging. In particular, the project interrogates the position of the “privileged immigrant”, those whose whiteness, language, and socio-economic status confer certain forms of inclusion, even while they experience othering. The thesis considers a position of ethical unease, and argues that immigrant life writing offers a means of re-evaluating belonging and implicatedness in a settlercolonial context. Although this thesis is based in academics, the foundations upon which it has been written is based in a highly personal narrative that forms the nexus upon which the themes mentioned have been researched and discussed. Therefore the intention of this project is to advance the understanding of memoir both as a literary form and also as a process for witnessing while demonstrating how writing becomes a way of understanding how both self and home may be recreated in unfamiliar surroundings.