Relational Debris: Notes Toward a Research Methodology of Postness

Abstract

Drawing on long-term qualitative research conducted with migrants in Britain, this contribution explores the methodological possibilities of viewing “postness” as a subjective sense of aftermath which creates a space for narrating individual encounters with postsocialist and postcolonial conjunctures. It highlights the diaspora space (Brah 1996) of Brexit Britain as a specific site of such encounters, where debates about the role of postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy 2004) in nativist nationalism and anti-migrant hostilities find their echo in the material presence of (post)colonial artefacts and objects. At the same time the intertwining of migratory routes presents an opportunity to reflect on multiple geographies of “postness”, including the ways in which postsocialist aftermath invokes, resonates with, or differs from legacies of colonialism, and the possibilities for alternative affective orientations toward remnants of the past in the present.