Paper short abstract:

Displacement dispossessed Bosnian refugees. Recovery includes the resumption of materially-qualified life, what I term repossession. Repossession is achieved through dynamic interplay between the affective influence of new material absences and presences, and the reflexive construction of new rhetorical stances regarding materialism.

Paper long abstract:

"I only brought my name with me." So says Semira, former refugee from Prijedor, current British citizen. "I can't have knives in my house because of what happened," confides Šemsa. Whether taken, destroyed or disavowed, absent objects have powerful affective presences for these women. Loss, injury, and despair are felt and framed through past and present dispossessions. Reflecting on ethnographic research undertaken in 2010-2011 amongst Bosnian former refugees residing in Britain, I conceive of dispossession as fundamental to the individual and social experience of displacement. And yet, the story of this displacement does not end with loss, injury, despair and dispossession. Semira brought only her name, but she has since bought the cot in the living room that her grandson rests in. Šemsa cannot have knives in her house, but she has two new kittens who would otherwise be banished to the gardens and streets in Bosnia. In this paper, I pluck what I term 'repossession' from amongst the myriad strategies and practices that constitute the labour of life-resumption after refugee displacement. Repossession is achieved through dynamic interplay between the affective influence of new material absences and presences, and the reflexive construction of new rhetorical stances regarding materialism. Just as it has been observed that when a refugee becomes a citizen and a diaspora member, bare life becomes politically-qualified (Agamben 1995, 1998), so repossession realizes materially-qualified life. I examine how the attainment of materially-qualified life through repossession inflects both personal recovery and the construction and consolidation of a Bosnian diaspora.