Between Outcast and Outsider: Constructing the Identity of the Foreigner

Through the adoption of a dialogical, self+other model, which can appreciate the presence of different discourses and cultures within the self, I have investigated the identities of young migrants. A sample of young Europeans participated in the research, narrating their migration stories with a variety of autobiographical methods which integrated interviews with diaries and visual media. Young migrants refer to their condition as foreigners as an ambivalent one, which, involving also much suffering, oscillates between two different ways of positioning the self. A dream of return is always dominant for the outcasts, who either feel at the margins or do not wish to immerse themselves any deeper in the society they have moved into. Migrating means instead reaching a different level of experience and knowledge of the world to the outsiders, who can successfully translate the detachment of their special positioning into a creative and hybrid reconstruction of identities.