In The Migrant's Paradox, Suzanne Hall takes us through streets in the urban margins of Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London and Manchester. As she reminds us, drawing on bell hooks' Feminist Theory, 'to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.' Hall asks us to look 'both from the outside in and the inside out', to look again and pay attention to the often ordinary and banal spaces that make up cities. In reading and writing these streets - and the spaces connected to them - Hall draws out the complex layers of dispossession and wide geographies of entanglement that mark and define these edge territories. In writing the street from the scale of the migrant to that of the planet, she argues for recognition of the interwoven nature of street and state, where the street is an outcome and actor of, and in, history. Importantly, for Hall, while these streets are sites of enduring and 'durable precarity' this does not exclude forms of sustenance and quiet resistance. The conceptual framework of reading the street in The Migrant's Paradox is made possible by the methods of thinking 'with' the street that Hall puts forward: a series of immersive practices of walking, listening, looking and talking, alongside drawing and mapping. We are introduced to the commonplace small-grain interiors of domestic goods stores which sell everything needed for a student room or bedsit. We read of the 'Lucky Dragon, Caspian Pizza, Yesmin's Cafe and Grill, Dhaka Deli or Istanbul Eestaurant': names that betray a longing for a sense of home, perhaps, as they cohere, tightly packed, into adjacent storefronts. We are introduced to multi-lingual former teachers, civil servants and aspiring engineers.
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