Traversing No Man’s Land in Search of An(Other) Identity An Autoethnographic Account

In this autoethnography I provide a reflective-reflexive account of my search for an(other) identity following my move from my native Bavaria to North West England. It is a story of contradiction and uncertainty, which addresses issues of national identity and cultural adaptation. I offer a human portrait of how I experienced the interaction of agency and structure in my endeavor to become British and how I became embroiled in a moral, ethical, and emotional turmoil of conflicting imperatives. The key themes, through which I make explicit the struggle to create a coherent narrative of my self in relation to experiences of belonging, difference, and attachment in social, cultural, and political spaces, are departure and arrival, border crossing, and a disoriented self in transit. In presenting this multilayered account, I employ the technique of performance frames in the form of three literary categories, epic, drama and lyric, through which I revisit critical events and elucidate the gradual process of br...