the scent of memory: strangers, our own and others

• Published in: Feminist review Vol. 100; no. 100; pp. 6 - 26
• Main Author: Brah, Avtar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan 01-03-2012; Palgrave Macmillan UK; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Activism; Asians; Autobiographies; Black people; Blacks; Boundaries; Class; Classroom communication; Communities; Consciousness; Cultural Studies; Cultures and civilizations; Diaspora; Difference; England; Ethnic relations. Racism; Ethnicity; Families & family life; Family; Feminism; Gender; Gender Studies; Identification; Interpersonal relations; London, England; Meditation; Memory; Mothers; Narratives; Nostalgia; Parents; Police; Political factors; Political Participation; Political Science; Production; Racism; Reconstruction; Social Sciences; Socioeconomic Factors; Sociology; Subjectivity; United Kingdom; White people; Whites; Working Class; London; Great Britain; South Asia; racism; memory; gender; ethnicity; posthumanist subject; interpellation; Blacks; biography/autobiography; whiteness; class; Asians; Autobiography; Social Class; Ethnicity; Subjectivity; Racism
• DOI: 10.1057/fr.2011.73
• EISSN: 1466-4380
• ISSN: 0141-7789

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of 'race' are all but absent, and the racialized 'commonsense' that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the 'diaspora space' of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist 'origin stories' of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms - 'ajnabi', 'ghair' and 'apna/apni' - in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across 'difference'.