Counterstreams in Migration

Migration journeys are not unidirectional. In Counterstreams in Migration, Hewan Girma reveals a more complex circuit of migration, concentrating on the motivations behind non-migration, return migration, and repeat migration to show how these flows mutually affect and influence the migrant as well as the family members who remain at home.
Weaving together nearly 100 stories of non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants from Ethiopia, Girma advances a theory of migra-emotions, emotions specific to migration, to understand decisions and experiences, such as the imaginary of home and the lived reality of alienation, disaffection abroad, and feelings of duty to one’s homeland.
Looking beyond the meanings of migration or processes of integration, Girma explores the emotional subtext of migration aspirations. In doing so, Counterstreams of Migration complicates conventional understandings of migration and provides a more complete picture of migrant stories.

Hewan Girma is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She cofounded and codirects the Ethiopian, East African and Indian Ocean Research Network. She is the coeditor of The Global Ethiopian Diaspora: Migrations, Connections, and Belongings and Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of Names.