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Mothers and Daughters in Historical Perspective: Home, Identity and Double Consciousness in B ritish P akistanis' Migration and Return
Author(s) -
Werbner Pnina
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/johs.12011
Subject(s) - homeland , alienation , gender studies , consciousness , identity (music) , sociology , perspective (graphical) , double consciousness , middle class , subject (documents) , political science , psychology , aesthetics , politics , law , art , neuroscience , library science , computer science , visual arts
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 of P akistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived in M anchester in the 1970s, and their daughters, who both returned to live in P akistan, one at the age of 11 and the other in her twenties, to marry. The latter in particular experienced P akistan 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.