Read more
This book examines return mobilities to and from ancestral homelands of the second generation and beyond. It presents cutting-edge empirical research framed within the mobilities, transnational and return migration/diaspora paradigms on a trans/local and global scale. The book is unique in presenting not only a variety of return movements, including short-term visits and longer-term return migrations, but also circulatory movements within transnational social fields while engaging with notions of 'home', belonging, identity and generation. The individual contributions range widely over different ethnic, national, regional and global settings, including Europe, North America, the Caribbean, the Gulf and Africa. The result is a remapping of the conceptualisation of 'diaspora' and of the role of successive generations in the diasporic experience, as well as a nuancing of the concepts of return migration and transnationalism by their extension to the second and subsequent generations of 'immigrants'.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.
List of contents
1. Of Counter-Diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland Russell King and Anastasia Christou 2. Beyond Home and Return: Negotiating Religious Identity across Time and Space through the Prism of the American Experience Peggy Levitt, Kristen Lucken and Melissa Barnett 3. 'Diverse Mobilities': Second-Generation Greek-Germans Engage with the Homeland as Children and as Adults Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Jill Ahrens 4. Return Visits of the Young Albanian Second Generation in Europe: Contrasting Themes and Comparative Host-Country Perspectives Zana Vathi and Russell King 5. Negotiating 'Belonging' to the Ancestral 'Homeland': Ugandan Refugee Descendents 'Return' Naluwembe Binaisa 6. Caribbean Second-Generation Return Migration: Transnational Family Relationships with 'Left-Behind' Kin in Britain Tracey Reynolds 7. Going and Coming and Going Again: Second-Generation Migrants in Dubai Syed Ali 8. Young Dutch Somalis in the UK: Citizenship, Identities and Belonging in a Transnational Triangle Ilse Van Liempt 9. (Re)constructing Roots: Genetics and the 'Return' of African Americans to Ghana Benedicte Ohrt Fehler
About the author
Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex, UK, and Willy Brandt Professor of Migration at Malmö University, Sweden. He is also the editor of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Anastasia Christou is Reader in Sociology, Middlesex University, UK. She has conducted multi-sited, multi-method and comparative ethnographic research in the US, Germany, Denmark, Greece and Cyprus and has widely published on issues of diasporas, return migration, second generation, ethnicity, transnationalism, identity, gender, home, belonging, emotion and narrativity.
Peggy Levitt is a Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, USA, and the co-Director of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University, USA.
Summary
This book examines return mobilities to and from ancestral homelands of the second generation and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.
Report
"Links to the Diasporic Homeland: Second Generation and Ancestral 'Return' Mobilities was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities, one of the most relevant international journals on migration. Now, this volume edited by the leading researchers in migration, Russell King, Anastasia Christou and Peggy Levitt, is also available in a book form. It puts forward empirical analyses of return mobilities to and from the ancestral homelands of the second generation and beyond. The nine individual contributions show the diversity of return migrations and circulatory movements in Europe (the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and Albania), North America, the Caribbean, the Gulf, South Asia and Africa (Ghana, Somalia and Uganda). They are framed within the mobilities, transnational and return migration/diaspora paradigms on a trans/local and global scale." Joanna Rak, University in Poznan
