‘Why Are You Not Crying?’

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which young people with a migration background develop their own transnational engagement with their or their parents’ country of origin. Drawing on 17-months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Ghana, we add to the emerging literature on ‘return’ mobilities by analysing young people of Ghanaian background, irrespective of whether they or their parents migrated, and by looking at an under-researched form of mobility that they engage in: that of attending funerals in Ghana. Funerals occupy a central role in Ghanaian society, and thus allow young people to gain knowledge about cultural practices, both by observing and embodying them, and develop their relationships with people in Ghana. Rather than reproducing their parents’ transnational attachments, young people recreate these according to their own needs, which involves dealing with tensions. Peer relationships—which have largely gone unnoticed in transnational migration studies—play a significant role in this process.

Following the ‘hype’: The role of leisure practices during ‘homeland’ visits in transnational youth's way of relating to Ghana

“…This temporal perspective allows for an understanding of young people's experiences in relation to previous episodes in their mobility trajectories. During earlier trips to Ghana, their movements often remained limited to kinship contexts (Akom Ankobrey et al., 2021 ) and were largely controlled by adults. The mobility experiences analysed in this paper, which took place when young people were in their late teens and early twenties, show that participants expressed an emerging sense of independence, albeit in varying degrees, by engaging in affective leisure practices with peers.…”

“…In fact, this activity represented their (temporal) move away from adult surveillance and family obligations, central features of pathways towards adulthood (Northcote, 2006 ). Moreover, young people did not rely on adults (Akom Ankobrey et al., 2021 ) but drew on previous connections they had made throughout their mobility trajectories, including with friends in the country of residence, and with same‐generation family members and romantic partners in Ghana, facilitating their ability to establish and renew their own intimate transnational relationships. Some participants had lived extensive periods of time in Ghana during which they had laid a strong foundation for accessing peer networks, whereas others had nurtured peer relationships over the course of multiple trips, for example.…”

“…Here, it is particularly important to consider the temporal dimension as mobility experiences can transform through the life‐course (Akom Ankobrey et al. 2021 ; Cheung et al., 2020 ) and in response to changing circumstances in the ‘homeland’ (Vathi, 2015 ).…”

“…This vignette illustrates that participation in leisure practices enabled young people to bond in new ways with their siblings and/or cousins from Ghana during trips. Their earlier social engagements used to be mainly limited to kinship settings (Akom Ankobrey et al., 2021 ), sometimes in hometowns that lacked leisure facilities such as in Rebecca's case, but this changed when their same‐generation relatives took on the role of ‘local guides’ in the country's urban leisure scene. For example, Rebecca felt her brother had shown her ‘all the places’ that contributed to the ‘hype’ including parties, luxury resorts and restaurants among other things, during her three independent trips to Ghana.…”

Young lives on the move

“…This literature often perceives young people's ties to the country of origin as a continuation of their parental ties and as limited to the family sphere. As such, it has failed to consider young people's agency in creating their own transnational networks with peers in the origin country (but see Akom Ankobrey, Mazzucato, and Wagner 2021). Furthermore, this body of literature commonly conceptualizes migrant youth as sedentary and has ignored their physical mobility, even though almost half of all migrant youth in European secondary schools visit the country of origin at least annually (Mazzucato and Haagsman, 2022;Schimmer and Van Tubergen 2014).…”