Links to the Diasporic Homeland

Second Generation and Ancestral 'Return' Mobilities

Russell King, Anastasia Christou, Peggy Levitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415745154
• eBook ISBN: 9781317755449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Of Counter-Diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland

RUSSELL KING & ANASTASIA CHRISTOU
Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the special issue on return mobilities. Return movements have been relatively ignored in migration and mobilities research, despite their scale, frequency and variety across time and space. This special issue is part of an overdue but now growing interest in return visits, return migration and transnational circulation which lays special emphasis on ‘ancestral returns’ of the second generation and beyond. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an explanatory framework for locating return mobilities within three conceptual domains: the mobilities paradigm, the transnational approach and diaspora studies. A typology of return mobilities is then developed, onto which the following papers in this issue are mapped.

Introduction

One of Ravenstein’s famous ‘laws of migration’, set out in two papers published more than 120 years ago, was that every migration has a ‘counter-current’ going in the opposite direction to the main migratory flow (1885, 1889). Ravenstein was imprecise about the exact nature and timing of the counter-flow: the implication was that it developed simultaneously with the main flow and was mainly made up of a different set of migrants rather than returnees from the principal migration. It was not until the 1970s that return migration started to be systematically analysed, categorised and theorised, Bovenkerk’s (1974) extended essay being the starting-point (see also Gmelch, 1980; King, 1978; Richmond, 1984). One of Bovenkerk’s types of return migration was ‘ancestral return’, but, after briefly mentioning the ‘Back to Africa’ movement of the Rastafarians and the ‘return’ of the Jews to Israel, he quickly dismissed this as ‘“return” that is not return’ (1974, p. 19). We take issue with this throwaway remark, and the papers in this special issue illustrate the importance, richness and variety of return mobilities to ancestral and parental homelands. We disregard the issue of whether the statistics record this as ‘return’ or not (much depends on how migration is measured – by birthplace, nationality, ethnic origin etc.); what is important, we assert, is the emic perspective of the migrants themselves; if they believe they are ‘returning’ to a ‘homeland’ to which they have an emotional and historical connection, then it is the ontology rather than the statistical measurement of return which is the overriding criterion.

The publication date of Bovenkerk’s study was highly significant, for it coincided with the migrant ‘recruitment-stop’ implemented by Europe’s industrialised countries as a consequence of the economic downturn provoked by the first oil crisis, which led to large-scale return flows of labour migrants back to their countries of origin. Thus the late 1970s and the ensuing decade saw the publication of numerous studies of return migration, especially to those Mediterranean countries which had been the main suppliers of labour migrants to Western Europe during the early post-war decades.¹ Almost without exception, these studies focused on the return of the ‘first generation’, i.e. the original migrants, back to the countries, villages and towns whence they had come. Occasionally there was mention of the ‘problems’ associated with the social and educational adaptation of the second-generation (i.e. host-country-born) children of the returnees, but generally this group was overlooked at this time.²

After a lull in the scholarly output on return migration during the late 1980s and 1990s, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest (see inter alia, Christou, 2006; Conway & Potter, 2009; Ghosh, 2000; Harper, 2005; Long & Oxfeld, 2004a; Markowitz & Stefansson, 2004; Potter et al., 2005; Tsuda, 2003, 2009). We suggest that this has less to do with a ‘real’ growth of return movements in these recent years,³ and more with the reconceptualisation of the study of migratory phenomena within three analytical and explanatory frameworks: the mobilities paradigm, the transnational approach and diaspora studies. In the main body of this introductory paper we examine the rekindled interest in return moves, taking each of these three conceptual lenses in turn. We then develop a typology of return mobilities onto which we map the various papers in this issue, thereby demonstrating their complementary features in collectively presenting an integrated survey of diverse mobilities that develop beyond the simple return of the first-generation migrants.

Regarding definition of terms, we follow Long and Oxfeld (2004b, p. 4) in making the distinction between return migration – a physical relocation of the migrant with the intention of staying for some time, maybe permanently, in the place of origin – and return, a broader concept which includes return migration and repatriation (where the return is forced) but which can also be imagined or provisional, encompassing various short-term visits such as holidays. All are return mobilities. We also distinguish between first-generation return, where it is the original (e)migrants who are returning, and the ‘return’ of the second and subsequent generations, including historically remote ancestral return, also known as ‘ethnic return’ (Tsuda, 2009). Although the experiences of the first generation are not completely overlooked, since these have a bearing on the return mobilities of the ‘next generations’ (Conway & Potter, 2009), our discussion here, and in the papers that follow, concentrates mainly on these later-generation return mobilities.

Return Migration: No Longer a ‘Retro’ Concept

Earlier studies of return migration reflected the simplistic model of migration that held sway at the time. Migrants moved from origin to destination; some stayed for good, others returned after a while; end of story. Of course it was never as simple as that. Some migrants went back and forth in a continuous regime of migration, return, and re-migration, even over large distances such as the Atlantic, whilst geographers and sociologists developed a solid body of literature on circulatory regimes in Africa and other parts of the less developed world (Amin, 1974; Kosiński & Prothero, 1975; Prothero & Chapman, 1985; van Amersfoort, 1978).

What characterises recent studies of return is a far more variegated and nuanced exploration of the ontology of return, stretching its meaning across time, space and generations, and where the ‘place’ of return and the type of movement can have various expressions – real, virtual, imagined, desired, forced or denied. The return as a corporeal event can be a fleeting visit, a languid summer holiday, an extended stay for a few years, or for good. Intention may not match outcome: a temporary return may turn out to be permanent, and vice versa (Boverkerk, 1974, pp. 9–19). Return can be as a child, as a working-age adult, upon retirement, or after death. It can be an individual action or embedded in household and family mobilities. As the titles of some of the books already cited illustrate, return can represent a variety of emotions and outcomes: returns can be ‘journeys of hope but also of despair’ (Ghosh, 2000), the return can be an ‘unsettling path’ (Markowitz & Stefansson, 2004), and the returnees may be ‘strangers in their homeland’ (Tsuda, 2003).

In broadening our definition of return to embrace a variety of mobilities beyond the original migrants, we derive conceptual insight from three paradigm shifts which have fundamentally reframed the study of migration in recent years and encouraged new questions to be asked.

The Mobilities Paradigm

As argued by Cresswell, Hannam, Sheller and Urry, a ‘mobility turn’ has taken place over the past decade or so, affecting not only how we think about migration but also how we conceptualise society and, hence, social science (Cresswell, 2006; Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2000, 2007). It is difficult to summarise the mobilities framework in a few words given its all-encompassing nature and its multiplex approach, embracing a range of types, forms and meanings of mobility. It covers, for instance, not just human mobility, but also transport and communication; the mobility of objects, images, information, systems and networks; as well as social mobility.⁴ In scale terms it encompasses both mass movements of people, goods, capital and information at a global level, and more local processes of daily movement and the travel and location of material objects within everyday life (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 1). Of the five interdependent mobilities listed by Urry (2007, p. 47) – corporeal, material, imaginative, virtual and communicative – we are mainly concerned in this special issue with the first, although there are links also to the imaginative and communicative domains inasmuch as migrants and returnees often develop powerful affective and mythological connections to a ‘homeland’ as well as communicating transnationally back and forth within kinship, friendship, business and religious networks. From the point of view of corporeal movement, the mobilities turn challenges the sedentarist assumptions about the nature of society as being stable (i.e. ‘a-mobile’) and place-bound; it privileges instead movement, change and placelessness; territorialisation is replaced by deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 2; Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 208). At the same time, these authors are aware of the problematic nature of the ‘grand narrative’ of mobility and fluidity; they acknowledge, for example, the politically contested nature of many forms of (especially international) mobility, issues of unequal access to mobility amongst different social groups, and therefore the importance of immobility or ‘moorings’ (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 5). Within (return) migration, there is a tension between mobility on the one hand, and a search for a stable home(land) in which to settle and ‘belong’ on the other. Again, this apparent conflict is problematised and accepted into the dialectics of the mobilities framework. Thus, it is stated that: ‘studies of migration, diasporas and transnationalism [have] offered trenchant critiques of the bounded and static categories of nation, ethnicity, community, place and state within much social science […], highlight[ing] dislocation, displacement, disjuncture and dialogism as widespread conditions of migrant subjectivity’; yet at the same time such studies ‘also foreground acts of “homing”… the complex interrelation between travel and dwelling, home and not-home’ (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 10).

These migratory tensions are highlighted in the study of return movements which, beyond the physical act of return, can be seen as a ‘performative act of belonging’ (Fortier, 2000, pp. 1–5), a search for ‘re-grounding’ (Ahmed et al., 2003). Perhaps because return implies a ‘homing’ process, a return to base, an endpoint of the migratory cycle, return mobilities do not feature much in the mobilities literature,⁵ which makes this collection of papers all the more valuable. The papers that follow not only explore a range of return spatialities and temporalities, organised around a matrix of different times, distances and genealogical variations (first-generation, second-generation, ancestral), they also question the very nature of return – return to where, to what, to whom? The return can be – often is – a chimera in that the status quo ante does not exist; it can be a journey of profound disillusionment, so that the first return provokes another ‘return’ to the place once inhabited before the first return took place, or to another real or imagined ‘home-place’. These problematics of home, return and belonging are further explored by Levitt et al. in the next paper of this issue.

The Transnational Approach

The transnational communities framework – arguably the dominant paradigm in migration studies for the past fifteen or so years – provides a more explicit context for exploring return mobilities, although, as with the mobilities school, there is a notable lack of attention to return movements, and even less so for the second generation.

Amongst many definitions offered by several scholars since the pioneering studies of the early 1990s (Basch et al., 1994; Glick Schiller et al., 1992), the following represents a typical view:

Transnational migration is the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement […] Transmigrants are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state (Glick Schiller et al., 1999, p. 73).

Although some maintain that international migrants have always displayed transnational characteristics (e.g. Smith, 2003), Glick Schiller et al. (1999, p. 81) argue that the current connections are of a different order to the previous era’s in two important ways. First, transformations in the technologies of transport and communications have made it possible for transnational connections – including visits home – to be sustained at a greater density and multiplicity than in the past (also Portes et al., 1999, pp. 223–224). Second, international migration in recent decades has taken place within a context of economic and cultural globalisation, above all driven by the current process of restructuring and reconfiguring global capital. As a form of ‘globalisation from below’ (cf. Smith & Guarnizo, 1998)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Of Counter-Diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland
• 2. Beyond Home and Return: Negotiating Religious Identity across Time and Space through the Prism of the American Experience
• 3. ‘Diverse Mobilities’: Second-Generation Greek-Germans Engage with the Homeland as Children and as Adults
• 4. Return Visits of the Young Albanian Second Generation in Europe: Contrasting Themes and Comparative Host-Country Perspectives
• 5. Negotiating ‘Belonging’ to the Ancestral ‘Homeland’: Ugandan Refugee Descendents ‘Return’
• 6. Caribbean Second-Generation Return Migration: Transnational Family Relationships with ‘Left-Behind’ Kin in Britain
• 7. Going and Coming and Going Again: Second-Generation Migrants in Dubai
• 8. Young Dutch Somalis in the UK: Citizenship, Identities and Belonging in a Transnational Triangle
• 9. (Re)constructing Roots: Genetics and the ‘Return’ of African Americans to Ghana
• Index