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Abstract
The future of diaspora goes together with the future of diversity, and the different ways in which states and nations can reconfigure how their mobile, multifaceted members are accepted as belonging. The 2018 FIFA World Cup, like many international sporting events, crystallised some of debates about citizenship and belonging as applied to specific players and, notably for this event, to the ‘foreign-born’ men playing for the Moroccan team. Though public debates often focus on evaluating the ‘belonging’ of individuals who are chosen for elite events to represent the nation, that lens did not seem to be applied to the Moroccan team. By exploring how diversity and diaspora were debated in relation to players for European teams in this same tournament, I explore here how the Moroccan example represents perhaps a new direction for diaspora: one which connects descendants across multiple nations and states without character judgments about who can belong.
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.