IMAGINARIES OF BELONGING IN MIDDLE-CLASS RELOCATION NARRATIVES: The French in London

Migration narratives are produced and shaped by lived experience in the contexts of particular historical, personal, and sociocultural circumstances of departure and settlement. In this chapter, I reflect upon Savage’s concept of “elective belonging” in published tales of relocation and emplacement, the ways in which writers from various backgrounds convey the emotions associated with migration, and the silences in their stories. I use examples from three books written by French citizens who settled in London during the 21st century, with some reference to my previous analyses of published memoirs produced by internal rural French migrants in the 20th century. I was drawn to this literature via my long-term ethnographic research among the French in London, whose relocation I characterize as “sideways migration”-referring to moving from one nation to another nearby one that is similar in terms of wealth and other social indicators. I refer to the recent publications by the French in London as “relocation narratives” that depict middle-class aspirations for self-fulfillment and emplacement abroad. This chapter also considers the relationship between autoethnographies in fiction and memoir written by migrants that enter the public arena via publication and my own collections of migration stories “in the field” among those who do not write them down.