Links to the Diasporic Homeland ― Second Generation and Ancestral 'Return' Mobilities

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.

Russell King is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex, UK, and Willy Brandt Professor of Migration at Malmo 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.