The Homeless Self. Migrants, space-time and biographical strategies

This essay is included in an interdisciplinary volume which explores the many facets of migration and the consequences of displacement on the biographies of those individuals who undertake the experience. The main assumption of the volume is that the migrants' sense of disorientation about their home and their sense of belonging - which can be a consequence of the pluralisation of self-identities, languages, biographical plans and places that inevitably occurs in a migratory experience - turns out to be a more or less active search for a new home and a new sense of belonging.Presenting a case-study of Italian migrants in Canada, this essay assumes that the diverse ways in which the migratory experience has been lived and re-elaborated constitute the central core for examining the effects of the migration event on the shaping of individual biographies. Through the prism of the migratory experience, the migrants' cultural dislocation has altered perceptions of space-time, such that dichotomies of here-elsewhere and then-now linear temporality present challenges, both real and metaphysical, for the migrants seeking to reconstruct their identities in the new location and rediscover a sense of home that has been irrevocably altered.