Returning migrants must renegotiate a homeland that has itself been transformed

Evidence

Once my parents were dead, it was easier to make a relationship to the new Jamaica that emerged in the 1970s. This Jamaica was not where I had grown up. For one thing, it had become, culturally, a black society, a postslave, postcolonial society, whereas I had lived there at the end of the colonial era. So I could negotiate it as a “familiar stranger.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 766

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall introduces ‘familiar stranger’ as the stance of the returnee whose homeland has become a different society — a mutable, negotiated relationship rather than a fixed home.
• XREF: Connects directly to theories of colonial and postcolonial temporality; echoes the always-out-of-sync migrant in the reader’s The Namesake context. — connects to: Refugees’ professed desire to return fades once they urbanize — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 1635