In the late 1990s and early 2000s, faced with the new globalisation of goods, services and peoples, Italy and Britain sought to reassert the supposed sovereignty and racialized hierarchies of their colonial pasts. Refugees arriving in Britain and Italy increasingly felt the effects of this shift in hostile news coverage and anti-‘asylum seeker’ state policies, which trivialised or ignored their motives, journeys and experiences. In response, some refugees turned to self-representation as advocacy and rights activism. This chapter follows social and cultural historian Graham Dawson’s injunction to complicate and expand our understandings of ‘lived emotions’ by exploring in depth two particular self-representations of migrant emotions related to inclusion and exclusion. To achieve this the chapter uses a comparative methodology in the analysis of two migrant self-representations. First, Dagmawi Yimer’s ‘Our Journey’ (2013), by an Ethiopian who settled in Italy (2006). Second, Vesna Maric’s Bluebird (2010), which describes a Bosnian teenager’s early years in Britain (1992-6). Both Yimer and Maric examine how they were ‘misread’ by their host societies and the sensations of shame, fear and resentment this produced. Both represent their singular, but also communal experiences to expand imaginative sympathy, to make sense of, and to help interpret as well as resolve difficult pasts.