Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity

Christou explores the phenomenon of 'return migration' in Greece through the settlement and identification processes of second-generation Greek-American returning migrants. She examines the meanings attached to the experience of return migration. The concepts of 'home' and 'belonging' figure prominently in the return migratory project which entails relocation and displacement as well as adjustment and alienation of bodies and selves.Furthermore, Christou considers the multiple interactions (social, cultural, political) between the place of origin and the place of destination; network ties; historical and global forces in the shaping of return migrant behaviour; and expressions of identity. The human geography of return migration extends beyond geographic movement into a diasporic journey involving (re)constructions of homeness and belongingness in the ancestral homeland.

Anastasia Christou is a Lecturer in Cultural Geographies and Culture in Time and Space at the Department of Geography, University of Sussex, UK. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Department of History, International and Social Studies at the University of Aalborg and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Academy for Migration Studies in Denmark.

1 Introduction, 2 Situating and theorising national and ethnic expressions of place, vulture and identity, 3 The Greek-American experience: emigration, settlement, return and identity, 4 Ideologies of home and geographies of place, 5 Ideologies of return and geographies of culture, 6 Ideologies of self and geographies of identity, 7 Conclusions, Notes, Appendix, Bibliography