Full Description
Few things weigh on the human spirit more heavily than a sense of place; the lands we live in and return to have a profound ability to shape our notions of home and homeland, not to mention our own identities. The pull of the familiar and the desire to begin anew are conflicting impulses for the nearly 180 million people who live outside their countries of origin, often with the expectation of returning home. Of 30 million people who immigrated to the United States alone between 1900 and 1980, 10 million are believed to have returned to their homelands.
While migration flows occur in both directions, surprisingly few studies of transnationalism, global migration, or diaspora address return experiences. Undertaking a comparative analysis of how coming home affects individuals and their communities in a myriad cultural and geographic settings, the contributors to this volume seek to understand the unique return migration experiences of refugees, migrants, and various others as they confront the social pressures and a sense of displacement that accompany their journeys.
The returns depicted in Coming Home? range from temporary visits to permanent repatriation, from voluntary to coerced movements, and from those occurring after a few years of exile to those after several decades away. The geographic sites include the Balkans, Barbados, China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Germany, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Vietnam. Several studies portray the experiences of returning refugees who earlier fled war and violence, while others focus on economic or labor migrants.
As the essays show, connections between permanent returnees and home communities are contentious and complex. On the one hand, issues of land title, property rights, political orientation, and religious and cultural beliefs and practices create grounds for clashes between returnees and their home communities, but on the other, returnees bring with them a unique ability to transform local practices and provide new resources.
Contents
Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Return
—Ellen Oxfeld and Lynellyn Long
PART I: IMAGINED RETURN
Chapter 1: Illusions of Home in the Story of a Rwandan Refugee's Return
—John Janzen
Chapter 2: Contemplating Repatriation to Eritrea
—Lucia Ann McSpadden
Chapter 3: Filipina Depictions of Migrant Life for Those at Home
—Jane Margold
PART II: PROVISIONAL RETURN
Chapter 4: Viet Khieu on a Fast Track Back?
—Lynellyn Long
Chapter 5: Chinese Villagers and the Moral Dilemmas of Return Visits
—Ellen Oxfeld
Chapter 6: Changing Filipina Identities and Ambivalent Returns
—Nicole Constable
PART III: REPATRIATED RETURN
Chapter 7: Returning German Jews and Questions of Identity
—John Borneman
Chapter 8: Repatriation and Social Class in Nicaragua
—James Phillips
Chapter 9: Refugee Returns to Sarajevo and Their Challenge to Contemporary Narratives of Mobility
—Anders H. Stefansson
Chapter 10: The Making of a Good Citizen in an Ethiopian Returnee Settlement
—Laura Hammond
Chapter 11West Indian Migrants and their Rediscovery of Barbados
—George Gmelch
Chapter 12: An Historical Exploration of "Coming Home" from Central Africa
—David Newbury
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
