Immigrants and expatriates : status, agency and home in the early work of Fatou Diome

This article explores the use of ‘figures’ in contemporary debate over migration, with specific reference to the figures of the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘expatriate’. Drawing upon English- and French-language sources, it is argued that these two figures emerge as two extremes in useful if problematic ways in discussions and perceptions of the contemporary ‘migrant’. The particular political charge of these two figures is clear when they are juxtaposed, as issues of race, class and economic status in the globalised world are thrown into sharp relief. We will explore how the construction of figures such as the ‘stranger’ in Kristeva (1988) and the ‘tourist’ in Bauman (1998) is replicated in popular and media discourse, where the figures of the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘expat’ dominate. This is developed in a reading of the first two major published works of Fatou Diome, a Senegalese writer based in France, which draw attention to the difficulties and dangers of the deployment of such ‘figures’.