Paper short abstract:

This paper employs visual ethnographic research methods to examine the plurality and multiplicity of 'everyday' narratives and narrations in the neighborhood of Southall in London. In doing so, it aims to challenge binaries that seek to create and 'explain' a homogenous 'migrant' experience.

Paper long abstract:

Southall, a Western London suburban district, has one of the largest concentrations of a South Asian population outside of the Indian subcontinent. Industrial development and ensuing employment opportunities brought the first wave of South Asian migrants to the region in the early 1950s. Since then, the community has expanded considerably and has transformed into a diverse urban space with intersecting, overlapping, and contesting narratives of migration, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, class, caste, gender, sexuality, belonging, and identity. While urban space in Southall has been 'marked' by the 'visibilities' of 'everyday' experiences of emigration and Diasporic exile of a highly pluralistic community; scholarly, visual, and political/policy examinations (including those by the UKBA) have often portrayed the community as a sharer of a unified 'migrant' experience enforcing dichotomies of centre/periphery, legal/illegal, rooted/marginal, home/away, belonging/unbelonging, personal/political, subject/agent, native/migrant, and us/them.

This paper uses photography as a research method to dispel the notion of a homogenized 'migrant' experience. The photographs presented in this paper use intersectional analytical categories (gender, race, class, caste, citizenship etc.) to challenge the aforementioned binaries and draw out the contradictions inherent in them. They aim to problematize the sheer possibility of a coherent 'migrant' narrative and assert that Southall remains a 'neighborhood' of multiplicity and plural emigrant experiences from exile to the everyday. While this paper definitely does not aspire to construct a narrative, it aims to add to visual and scholarly work on migration, identity, Diaspora, and the broader realm of Urban Anthropology and South Asian studies.