ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the agencies, transformations and obstacles that intersect in the diasporic lives of second-generation Greek-American ‘return migrants’, which are characterized by both mobility and stasis. The returnees, who are mostly young, middle-class, highly-skilled and highly-educated professionals, imaginatively construct and implement their ‘return project’ as a praxis of their signication in terms of their identication, sense of belonging, as well as contribution to their ancestral homeland. In practice, however, they mostly encounter spaces of antagonism and exclusion (Christou 2006c). Such encounters become spaces of transformation in their changing (ethnic and cultural) identication and sense of belonging, which are ltered through their experiences of migrancy and diaspora. Furthermore, their life stories and narratives develop into a multidimensional context of agency, whereupon the verbalization and narrations of their transcultural-selves become a discourse to explore questions of identity and home that are remoulded along gender, ethnicity, class and generational lines (Christou 2006b).
