In Pursuit of Utopia: “A Pakistani, an Arab and a Scotsman ‘Return’ to Cyprus…”

Abstract

This paper explores the role of aspiration in the formation of migrant experience, and argues that sparks of utopia are inherent to the human migratory process. A relationship between racism and anti-utopianism is drawn out in the tentative formation of a theory of migrant reception. Drawing on personal experience of transnational migration, the author narrates an ethnographic journey from second-generation migrant born and raised in Scotland of Greek Cypriot parents, to his recent 'return', illustrating that rejection of identity proliferation – the antithesis of conservative multiculturalism – can be experienced as liberatory. Personal narrative is situated within a wider socio-political analysis of modernity's shifting public-private divide, the contours of which are played out in the post-cold war demise of Left-Right ideological contest. The author contends that a politics of identity proliferation (multiculturalism) compliments the current capitalist dystopia, and concludes by arguing for a new utopian vision.