ABSTRACT
This book has focused on the conceptual parameters of homeland and belonging in return migration through the voices of second-generation Greek-Americans. In so doing, I have sought to explore the return migration project as situated in an arena of discussion of place, culture and identity, extending across and beyond static territorial boundaries. The subjective terrain of the returnees’ negotiating processes of place, culture and identity incorporates their ideologies and constructs their geographies. Both these key terms – ‘ideology’ and ‘geography’ – are used according to their original Greek linguistic meaning. For the former term, the meaning is ‘study of ideas’ or ‘discourse’, that is to say, the ‘speech of ideas’. So, the participants’ expressions of their ideas of home, return and self, the voices of the returnees, are their ideologies. The same holds for the usage of the term ‘geographies’, again from the Greek, which means ‘to write one’s world’. The geographies of place, culture and identity are the articulation of their new world. Hence their ideologies become the method of articulating their geographies. And here, too, I use the term ‘method’ from the Greek: ‘a route that leads to the goal’. The participants’ oral and written narratives were those ideologies – that is to say, ‘speech of ideas’ – that clearly reflected the geographies of their return migration.
