Diasporic identities and mediated experiences in everyday life

Immigration may now be considered one of the most fraught political issues in Europe. Over the past 40 years, immigration from developing countries – and now from East Europe - has changed the face of Western Europe. The periphery has moved to the centre. This move has generated western’s response towards more draconian immigration policies coupled with more nationalist discourse in the public sphere, including the media. In the political culture of post-September 11, the question of ‘othering’ in terms of ethnic, national and/or religious identity assumes great significance in various parts of the world. The racialised ‘other’ as a designation given to non-westerns, to those at the ‘fringe’ of national as well as geopolitics, brings with it a constellation of meanings that are fundamental to the reinforcement of preferred discourses based on ‘difference’. In other words, contemporary forms of paranoid nationalism, working alongside discourses of ‘the war on terror’, often invoke the racialised ‘other’ in terms of religious and/or ethnic difference and its negative web of signification as threat, hostility and antagonism towards the ‘Other’. What these narratives fail to show is the life stories, the daily life of immigrants and diasporic. [...