Second-Generation Transnationalism and Roots Migration

Susanne Wessendorf is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany, and co-editor of The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices.

’Full of wonderfully rich and absorbing material, this well-written ethnographic study of second-generation Italians in Switzerland and southern Italy provides important insights into how and why the adult children of migrants maintain ties with their parents’ country of origin - a topic that is central to our understanding of contemporary immigration.’ Nancy Foner, Hunter College and City University of New York, USA ’This book is a welcome addition to theory building and ethnographic literature about the second generation. Aptly deploying concepts of transnational social fields, ways of belonging and home making, Wessendorf traces migrant networks beyond ethnically defined activities and identities. By abandoning an ethnic lens she provides a multi-sited description of how people of migrant backgrounds form social relations in villages of Italy and urban Switzerland.’ Nina Glick Schiller, University of Manchester, UK

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Social Affiliations and Ethnicity in the Context of Second-Generation Transnationalism; Chapter 2 Transnational Childhoods: Growing Up in Transnational Families; Chapter 3 Transnational Continuities, Ethnic Reification and Local Ties; Chapter 4 Transnational Discontinuities: Developing Local Attachments; Chapter 5 Transnational Realizations and Relocation to the Homeland: Roots Migration; Chapter 6 Conclusion: Individual Trajectories of Transnationalism and Integration;