Introduction: Reimagining Migrant Generations

[Published Winter 2015]

We live in an era of globalization involving large-scale international migration and increasing transnational connectedness that have contributed to the emergence and growth of diaspora communities. In this context, questions of how diaspora migrants adapt to host societies and engage with their homelands are becoming increasingly important economically, politically, socially, and culturally—to diasporic groups themselves, to their homelands, and to the countries where they settle. Yet little is known about internal diversity and stratification within individual diasporas. Our understanding of how pre-migration experiences shape migrants’ adaptation where they resettle and their homeland involvements, as well as their relations to other diaspora members settled elsewhere, remains especially inadequate. This Introduction and the special issue more generally advance the understanding of diasporas and their internal diversity, analytically and descriptively, through a historically grounded conceptual generational frame.

The concept of generation has been fundamental to the scholarly understanding of migrant adaptation, especially within the assimilation-ist and transnational frameworks. Most typically, studies of migrant generations focus on contrasts between the foreign-born, defined as the first generation, and their progeny, born where they resettle and defined as the second generation. In these studies, generation is used in the sense of kinship descent, focused on genealogical remove from the person within a family who moved to a new country. Within the social sciences more broadly, as David Kertzer (1983) has shown, generation is also used to refer to age- or birth date–based cohorts with distinctive historical experiences, as in “the 1968 generation” or “generation Y”;to life-stage groups, such as “the college generation”; and to people living in a particular historical period, such as “the generation of 1914.” These meanings of generation are distinct from each other, but as Nancy Foner argues in this volume, they are often interrelated and overlapping (see also Kertzer 1983).

We offer a conception of generations that foregrounds the cohort sense of the term and emphasizes country-of-origin lived experiences. The articles in this issue show that migrant experiences are affected in important ways by pre-migration experiences, as filtered through age, as well as class, ethnicity/race, gender, and sometimes also regional differences. Different pre-migration experiences contribute to generational differences—including among genealogical first generations from the same country of origin—that the conventional conception of generations overlooks. We argue and demonstrate that a historically grounded conception of generation deepens the understanding of the diversity of experiences and perspectives within diaspora groups and, by implication, within migrant groups in general. We use diaspora, in turn, to refer to globally dispersed peoples, whether they migrated voluntarily or involuntarily, who maintain links with globally dispersed coethnics and who identify with, and remain committed to, an actual or imagined homeland over time.¹

Our historically grounded approach, as detailed below, draws on the seminal work of the German political sociologist Karl Mannheim ([1952] 1997). Mannheim wrote about political generations in nineteenth-century Germany. We take his conceptual framework across borders, addressing how and why pre-migration lived experiences shape migrants’ adaptation where they resettle, including relations among members of a shared diaspora who settle in different locations.

In this Introduction, we first discuss generational analysis in existing assimilationist and more recent transnational migrant research. Then, we detail the bases and merits of our historically grounded generational frame of analysis. We highlight the importance of cohort-linked generational experiences for understanding diasporic migrant experiences. The articles that follow illustrate the usefulness of our framework with reference to a range of diaspora groups, selected for their diversity of regional origins, countries of settlement, and experiences. Specifically, the essays focus on the Russian Jewish (Larissa Remennick), Greek (Vassiliki Chryssanthopoulou), Chinese (Min Zhou), Croatian (Daphne Winland), Bangladeshi (Nazli Kibria), Cuban (Eckstein and Berg), Eritrean (Tricia Redeker Hepner), and Liberian (Stephen C. Lubkemann) diasporas. Authors base their articles on research in countries of both origin and settlement and mainly compare two or more historically grounded generations of migrants from a shared homeland who uprooted at different times with different pre-migration lived experiences. Foner’s article, in contrast to the others, examines migrants...