Displacement Stories of Identity and Belonging. Andrea Levy

       Displacement Stories of Identity and Belonging: Introduction

      It is a human characteristic (and, many socio-psychologists would even say, necessity) to define ourselves and our identities in terms of both personal development and social norms. But, in the course of modern and eventful lives, our senses of identity and belonging will develop and shift greatly. This process is particularly apparent when people are faced with displacement from the cultures and social environments in which they grew up. In new, multi-ethnic, diverse religious or cultural contexts, this evolution of identity might encounter obstacles and lead to struggles – economic ones as well as ‘mere’ psychological ones, for it is a natural and eternal fact of human existence that people with not much will gravitate towards places where there is more.

      In our post-colonial, globalised world, we constantly meet people who were not born in the town they now inhabit, or whose parents came to this country from a place far away. We have become used to a variety of restaurants in our city centres: Turkish takeaways, Italian pizza joints, Japanese sushi restaurants… Your hairdresser might be French originally, your yoga teacher Indian. And maybe, in a couple of years, you yourself might venture out and settle down far away from the place you originally called home.

      What will await you there? Will you fit in?

      Will the locals be friendly towards you?

      When will you finally call this new place ‘home’?

      This book is a collection of five short stories, written by five authors from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but which all deal with the concept of displacement and its impact on identity and a sense of belonging. It can be roughly divided into two sections: the first three