The glamorous ‘diasporic intimacy’ of habitus ‘Taste’, migration and the practice of settlement

What follows is an auto/biographical telling (Stanley 1992; Anderson 2011: 40; Tulloch 2016: 7–8) of the place of my Jamaican parent’s cocktail champagne glass in their practice of settlement and becoming in England. The study takes note of the possible impact of what Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew A. Becker refer to as ‘cultural bereavement’ (Bhugra and Becker 2005) experienced by Caribbean migrants in their new home of England, and what role the seemingly innocuous champagne glass may have on their sense of well-being post-migration. The inheritance of this glass by my siblings and me is an example of what I call generational continuity. The chapter explains how the taste of an earlier generation, my parents, is passed on as evidence and meaning of a particular tactic of their being and as an investment in their future self through their children who keep their things.