Mothers and Daughters in Historical Perspective: Home, Identity and Double Consciousness in British Pakistanis’ Migration and Return PNINA WERBNER* Abstract Scholarly interest has increasingly focused on the predicament of second-generation counter-diasporic return migration to an ancestral homeland. The present paper portrays two generations of Pakistani middle class women migrants: two mothers, who arrived in Manchester in the 1970s, and their daugh- ters, who both returned to live in Pakistan, one at the age of 11 and the other in her twenties, to marry. The latter in particular experienced Pakistan as culturally alien and unhomely. In Britain one mother has become extremely pious after 9/11. The paper looks at the moral careers of mothers and daughters, starting from the fact that migration initiates an irreversible process in which everyday, taken-for-granted intimacies and socialities of home and identity are subverted. Refuting simplistic theories of a continuous “transnational field”, it argues that migrants experience “double consciousness”, an awareness of competing rules, expectations and a doubling up of a subject’s sense of belonging and alienation, which no return home can reverse. ***** Introduction: “You Can Never Return Home” Stuart Hall famously summed up the painful predicament of inter- national migration as the dawning realisation that one can never return home. 1 Overseas migration sets in motion a process of dislocation along with the encounter with new social environments and landscapes. Over time, these change migrants’ consciousness, their intimate knowledge and taken-for-granted expectations, while in their absence, the countries and friends they left behind change too, often to the extent that on their return, they find they are no longer in the same country. Describing himself as a “cosmopolitan by default”, Hall reflects on the sense of loss, noting that “every diaspora has its regrets:” Although you can never go back to the past, you do have a sense of loss. There is something you have lost. A kind of intimate connection with landscape, and family, and tradition, which you lose. I think this is the fate of modern people – we have to lose them, but [we believe] we are going to go back to them. (Hall 2008: 349–350) * Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita at Keele University, UK. Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 26 No. 1 March 2013 DOI: 10.1111/johs.12011 © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.