ABSTRACT
Exploring the break between the generations within migrant communities involves understanding how a politics of belonging needs to be refigured for each generation, and that the solutions an older generation of migrants discovered for themselves often do not work for their children’s generation.1 Often the second generation, many born and educated in Britain, had not grown up with the same feelings for place that their parents often carried with them; and often they do not feel a similar connection to the countries where their parents came from. With global media, a younger generation who have been brought up by parents schooled in Britain sometimes regain a connection with language that their parents had lost. In the Bangladeshi community in East London, for example, there are young children with a more intense relationship with the language and culture of their grandparents than their parents who had been eager to learn English and so become ‘like everyone else’. The possibility of watching programmes on satellite TV in different languages has sometimes encouraged a fluency that their older siblings lack. So we need to be aware of how new media technologies create opportunities for particular generations that allow them to forge complex identities of belonging of their own.2
