Clearly announced in the title, the topic of this collection of essays is the experience of spatial displacement conveyed through narrative by the individuals who undergo it. The authors approach it as a theoretical and methodological problem in narrative studies, as well as an opportunity for reflecting on a social and political phenomenon – the (forced or freely chosen) movement of people – that has come to be seen as central to the experience of modernity (2). The project is very ambitious. It not only seeks to make a conceptual contribution to the already vast and multidisciplinary literature on narrative, but also hopes to address enough instances of discursive practices that involve migrants and minorities around the world to be able to claim that it sheds light on the general phenomenon of displacement. Overall, the book is stronger when it addresses its second objective, and it offers a multi-layered and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of dislocation as captured through narrative practices. What contributes to the success of the book are, in addition to the quality of the individual contributions, its rigorous organization in parts that cohere conceptually and thematically, the clear justification of the project offered by the two editors in an excellent introduction, and the concluding remarks by James Collins, which leave the reader with a sense of a consistent intellectual product.

The theoretical premise on which the collection is based is that context plays a key role in shaping the meaning and structure of a narrative, by providing texts with features that make them recognizable as belonging to a particular genre. Borrowing this insight from the work of Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, the editors set out to rectify a common methodological error in the study of narrative – the tendency to reduce context to a temporal dimension and to pay much less critical attention to space – and to provide a more fully inflected conception of context, one that includes a spatial as well as temporal dimension. The essays manage to do so by grounding context in time and space not just as abstract philosophical categories but as axes of social and political settings that involve negotiations of power and agency. The affiliation with Norman Fairclough's intellectual program is visible (and indeed explicitly mentioned) not only in this theoretical caveat, but also in the declared political aim of the volume. This aim is to make heard the voices of those who commonly get silenced by public discourse on displacement and migration: the migrants and refugees themselves. Such a goal is all the more important at the current political juncture of increasing restrictions on migration worldwide and intensified state suspicion toward foreigners. But it is precisely for this reason that any emancipatory project risks robbing migrants of their agency, depicting them as the victims of unjust and almighty political institutions that render them powerless and incapable of responding. One of the merits of this book is that it strives to identify and explain the rhetorical mechanisms behind the discursive strategies used by migrants and refugees in their daily interactions with more powerful and often unsympathetic interlocutors.

The book is structured in three parts. The first one analyzes the discursive practices that allow individual migrants to situate themselves in particular social settings; such positioning is often a way of challenging power structures and asserting their own agency. The essays included here share a concern with the individual migrant who fights marginality and discrimination on two fronts: with the members of the host society, and with other, better positioned migrants. Whether it is a Moroccan woman in London challenging hegemonic narratives of migration that glorify the male immigrant (as in Mike Baynham's chapter), or a Mexican woman in San Diego who asserts her authority by sanctioning exclusionary practices directed against other immigrants (in the chapter by Relano Pastor & Anna de Fina), these protagonists manage to overcome linguistic difficulties in order to express their own beliefs and intervene in the social order. These migrants manage to affirm their agency through the “strategic deployment of multilingual resources” (33), switching from one language to another in ways that allow them to make themselves heard and understood, and even to be “actively engaged against social practices that they consider unfair or unacceptable” (57). While the case studies presented in this first part are methodologically sound, their analysis is sometimes rather thin theoretically. Baynham, for example, uses the concept of hegemony in order to show how female migrants can articulate their agency in response to dominating male-oriented narratives. But he offers a sketchy presentation of hegemony that seems predicated on the assumption that any alternative narrative is counter-hegemonic. Pastor & de Fina rely on Labov & Waletzky's model of narrative, and indeed take it completely for granted, displaying no awareness of the ways in which this particular account has been criticized by language theorists (e.g., Hopper 1997). A theoretically more careful approach is offered by Grit Liebscher & Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain; in their study of West German migrants going to the former East Germany and negotiating a new lifestyle, these authors, too, draw on Labov & Waletzky, but they also enrich their model with more recent work in Conversation Analysis that factors in the role played by the interviewer in shaping the form of an elicited narrative.

The second part, which is more sophisticated in terms of its theoretical contribution, looks at the intricate connections between space and identity, paying particular attention to the “disruption of old space delimitations brought about by globalization and transnational movements” (6). John Haviland studies the ways in which immigrants choose linguistically, through their use of deixis, how to insert themselves discursively into a particular space, regardless of whether they are physically present there as well. Haviland's is perhaps the best essay in the entire collection, a fascinating and complex analysis that seamlessly blends careful micro-level linguistic analysis with a social history of Zinancantec migratory practices. Analyzing exchanges between a Zinancantec migrant in Oregon and members of his family who stayed behind, Haviland shows that spatial deixis can function as a “creative vehicle for discursive shifts in virtual location and alliance” (125), allowing the migrant both to distance himself from his family when he does not want to give in to their requests that he return home, and to signal closeness in order to offer reassurance that he will eventually return.

Jan Blommaert focuses on the impact of globalization on the perception of space and the ways in which space makes certain identity statements possible. Studying the discursive style of a South African DJ, Blommaert shows that identity is a “semiotic potential” (131) that uses space as a strategy of indexicalization. Thus, the DJ uses different varieties of English from various parts of the world in order to tap into the cultural and symbolic resources commonly associated with those regions. For example, he uses Standard English for formulaic messages that identify the radio station, but Black English to produce confessions or tell jokes. Sifting through the layers of the DJ's identity and their linguistic packaging, Blommaert argues that identity should not be limited to the usual large categories of gender, class, or nation, and should be seen instead as a “matter of details,” a “repertoire of identity features converted into complex and subtle moment-to-moment speaking positions” (139).

Kay McCormick studies narrative accounts produced by displaced South Africans who were forced to leave their neighborhood under the apartheid-era Districts Acts. Although these South Africans did not end up crossing national borders, the experience of dislocation was still a traumatic one, and its recounting follows some of the same discursive conventions as in the case of immigrants, suggesting that displacement must be understood from the perspective of the individuals who experience it.

Part 3 focuses on the encounter between migrants and official representatives and studies the nature of discursive practices that are shaped by legal or bureaucratic processes. Robert Barsky's contribution focuses on the ways in which the appeal mechanisms in a legal setting systematically leave out the story of the displaced, and by so doing deny them agency. The distinctiveness of his chapter lies in its rich data, drawn from asylum seeker hearings, but also from interviews with homeless men and even from literary works about immigration. Marco Jacquemet analyzes the interview procedure used by UN representatives to filter out Albanians trying to pass as refugees from Kosovo, emphasizing the clash between the refugees' discursive strategy of telling the story of their plight to appear convincing, and the officials' criteria, which disallow narrative evidence and insist instead on displays of more general, nonpersonalized local and cultural knowledge. Similarly, in Maryns's chapter the African asylum seekers interacting with the Belgian government officials must establish their eligibility (and fail to do so) according to discursive conventions that are unfamiliar to them, such as structuring a narrative in terms of temporal and causal sequences. This final part of the book is a sobering lesson in the (sometimes truly crushing) power of institutional settings, and their ability to control individual expression and limit an individual's ability to assert her agency. The nuanced and highly compelling analyses included in the third part can also make the studies presented in the first part seem rather naive, or too idealistic.

Mike Baynham and Anna de Fina have put together an impressive book, with very interesting case studies that raise important methodological and theoretical issues, and make a genuine contribution to the study of narrative as well as that of migration. For this reason, their collection of essays should be of interest to a variety of scholars, not just in in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology but also in rhetoric and communication, cultural studies, and sociology.