Navigating identity continuity in multicultural settings: Longing in the discourse and narratives of African migrants in Hong Kong

With a strong reputation as world-class international city, coupled with China’s rising global economic and geopolitical influence, Hong Kong has recently witnessed a growing influx of African migrants (Amoah et al., 2020). As these migrants leave their home countries and acquire new experiences in their host country, they tend to develop a longing which may be associated to something they miss in the past and present or expect in the future. This, in turn, moderates how they feel about themselves, members of their ingroup and members of the outgroup. It is therefore crucial to examine immigrants’ longing narratives as this holds relevance for understanding how they acculturate and identify with both their home and host countries. Although a plethora of studies exist on migrants’ acculturation experiences that impact their wellbeing (Agyenim‐Boateng, 2023; Amoah et al., 2020; Gu & Ho, 2024), longing as an emotional category in global south migration research and its role in immigrants’ adaptation to life in a multicultural setting from a linguistic and discursive perspective is underexplored. We focus on longing because it is broadly understood as common emotional sentiment (Ipsos Mori, 2016) that captures people’s perception of the pluralised world in which they live and their relation to it (Smeekes & Jetten, 2019), how they navigate displacement and alienation in such a world (Morley & Robbins, 1995) and how they construct hope as pragmatic and reflexive action (Silva, & Borba, 2024) to recreate a ‘new’ home apart from their home country. Combining intergroup emotion theory, critical discourse analysis framework and interview data, this study examines the discursive construction of longing in the acculturation experiences of ten of Hong Kong’s African migrants. The findings show that these immigrants, in maintaining their original identity and coping with the pressure to assimilate to the new culture, employ narratives of nostalgia, homesickness and anemoia to discursively express their longing for their home country. Overall, these aspects of longing suggest that these African immigrants have a stronger preference for multiculturalism and a weaker preference for assimilation, which corresponds to stronger identification with other immigrants and weaker identification with Hong Kong natives, respectively.