Overview

Migration journeys are not unidirectional. In Counterstreams in Migration, Hewan Girma reveals a more complex circuit of migration, concentrating on the motivations behind non-migration, return migration, and repeat migration to show how these flows mutually affect and influence the migrant as well as the family members who remain at home. Weaving together nearly 100 stories of non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants from Ethiopia, Girma advances a theory of migra-emotions, emotions specific to migration, to understand decisions and experiences, such as the imaginary of home and the lived reality of alienation, disaffection abroad, and feelings of duty to one’s homeland. Looking beyond the meanings of migration or processes of integration, Girma explores the emotional subtext of migration aspirations. In doing so, Counterstreams of Migration complicates conventional understandings of migration and provides a more complete picture of migrant stories.

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9781439925652

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Reviews

""Counterstreams in Migration is a major intervention into the field of migration studies. Hewan Girma examines non-migrants, return migrants, and repeat migrants to reshape how we understand movements of people and demonstrates that mobility is a dynamic process rather than a one-time event. Girma's attention to storytelling, vibrant narratives from migrants, and the emotional dimensions of migration make Counterstreams in Migration a lively read."" --Daniel Mains, Wick Cary Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and author of Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia ""Hewan Girma's book is an exciting, timely, and pioneering work on the experiences of Ethiopian non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants. It provides a transnational perspective for a '360-degree view' of migration experiences to better understand the emotional labor undertaken by both stayees and migrants. Counterstreams in Migration is an excellent contribution to migration studies as well as to the emerging scholarship on African diaspora studies.""--Cawo Abdi, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria, and author of Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity ""In Counterstreams in Migration, Hewan Girma smartly shifts our analytical focus not only to the multidirectional and agentic nature of migration (who migrates, who returns, who does not migrate, etc.) but also to equally important Black mobilities (migrants and non-migrants alike). In doing so, she provides an essential intervention in critical migration studies. Highly recommended!""--Jean Beaman, author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France

Author Information

Hewan Girma is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She cofounded and codirects the Ethiopian, East African and Indian Ocean Research Network. She is the coeditor of The Global Ethiopian Diaspora: Migrations, Connections, and Belongings and Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of Names.

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