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Feeling/being ‘out of place’: psychic defence against the hostile environment
The materialised reality of the place matters not least because it is drenched in power relations but also as it is where an immigrant worker seeks to live. The hostile host, in this sense, sees immigrants not simply as its guests (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), but as unwelcome yet persistent guests to be yoked to their place of otherness and inferiority. By presenting vignettes of my encounters with the Home Office, I call into question the existential conditions of the immigrant worker and the potentiality for object-relatedness on relational grounds problematically punctured by hostile rhetoric. Could an immigrant’s sense of locality ever be anything but ‐ evoking Said ([1999] 2013) ‐ ‘out of place’? To address this, I will explore ‘out of place’ not simply as an emotional, lived experience, but also as a state of being that is embodied, psychically worked on and strategically evoked in resisting the power of the hostile host.
12 References.
Keywords: hostile environment; immigrant worker; out of place; psychosocial
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: University of Edinburgh, UK
Publication date: July 2020
This article was made available online on April 27, 2020 as a Fast Track article with title: "Feeling/being ‘out of place’: psychic defence against the hostile environment".
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