The African second generation in the United States – identity and transnationalism: an introduction

ABSTRACT

The New African Diaspora’s second generation in the United States is large and growing, yet it is one of the least studied immigrant groups. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together recent work by immigration researchers on the identity negotiations and transnational engagements of the children of first-generation African immigrants. Second generation Africans, who create hybrid identities at the intersection of their ethnic/national origins and the racial categories of U.S. society, often contest (and sometimes embrace), being boxed into embracing a Black identity that is the product of specific African American histories, values, and experiences not shared by recent African immigrants. Contributors examine these issues, as well as the occurrence, distinctive nature of, and motivations for second-generation economic and cultural participation in transnational activities. The collection by key immigration scholars represents a groundbreaking contribution to the nascent discussion of the New African Diaspora’s second generation.

KEYWORDS:

• The new African Diaspora
• identity
• the second generation
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

This special issue benefited considerably from many scholars and researchers. Special thanks to Dr Fassil Demissie of DePaul University at Chicago and senior editor at Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (Routledge) for providing me feedback as the ideas for this special issue developed. I truly appreciate his support and encouragement throughout the process of putting the articles together. I am also grateful to the contributors of the chapters and the many anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. Special gratitude to Dr Fumilayo Showers, associate professor of Sociology at Central Connecticut State University, who worked with me on the call for papers and reviewing proposals. Her generosity of heart and insightful ideas made this special edition possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this study, second generations are classified as including children born in the United States to at least one African parents or who migrated to the United States before age twelve (Portes and Zhou 1993, 75).

2 The new second generation refers to children of immigrants who have come to the United States following the 1965 reforms in immigration policy. Although the term most often refers to U.S.-born children of immigrants, I use it here to also include those who migrated as children to the United States (see Portes and Rumbaut 2001).

3 Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), an American writer and activist, wrote the poem The New Colossus (1883) which welcomes immigrants. It appears on a bronze plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty. For the musical, Miss Liberty (1949), Irving Berlin set the last stanza to music in the song ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor.’

4 The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Western donors advocated and implemented Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which emphasized macroeconomic stabilization, privatization, and free market development.

5 The 2.5 million does not include 619,000 unauthorized black immigrants living in the U.S. in 2015 (Anderson and López 2018, 1).

6 Shaw-Taylor and Tuch (2007) used the ‘other African Americans.’ Although many African immigrants consciously maintain the dress, language, and many aspects of their homelands to classify them as other or othering implies exclusion of persons who do not fit the norm of a particular social group.

Additional information

Funding

My research was supported by Eastern Washington University Faculty Grant for Research & Creative Works 2017-18.