Blue, Brown, Orange, Grey: On the Colours of Migrant Affective Landscapes

Kurt H. Wolff begins Surrender and Catch by describing a place, the mundane practices he undertook there, the colour of the sky and the fact the wind made him return home prematurely. Even though the sun was shining on his back! Why begin a book on sociology as theory and method thus? Is it a detour into “autobiography” or an act of "regression”? Wolff replies that all sociological meaning is “made by a person”; one with a body; and that the feelings evoked by sun, wind, sky and landscape can be mobilised “in the effort to understand what ha[s] happened”. He labels the process one of “accepting” or “surrendering” to the aesthetic and emotional qualities of an experience. But what of migrants and their affective sensescapes? Is the surrender Wolff speaks of unitary or fragmentary, fixed or in motion? In this paper, rather than aiming for objective validity or causal explanations I attempt to think about the dynamic and relational qualities of migrant affective landscapes by focusing on the landscapes that have shaped my own biography and my sense of what is picturesque, affords wellbeing and allows me to feel at home. Having just commemorated the 50^th anniversary of my family migrating to Sydney, Australia from Montevideo, Uruguay, I use family photographs, reflective writing pieces and other cultural artefacts to think about the colours of the water, the landscape and the cities involved. Throughout I will organise my consideration of the colours in question – namely, blue, brown, orange and grey – via the prism of Wolff’s claim: “the effort to regain meaning... inevitably is made by a person”. And, in my own case, the person reconstructing meaning became a cultural sociologist interested in the textures of the world.