Finding a Place in the Homeland: Diasporic Black Placemaking and Ethnic Return Migration to Jamaica

Description of research project: 

This project is motivated by a central question: How do Black people make places for themselves under conditions structured by racial capitalism? Scholarship on Black placemaking examines how Black people create spaces of belonging, endurance, pleasure, and resistance amid structural racial exclusion and marginalization (Hunter et al. 2016). Yet this literature largely focuses on placemaking within the countries where Black people already reside. Far less attention has been paid to Black placemaking across national borders, despite the longstanding significance of migration and transnationalism to Black life undermodernity (Gilroy 1993). 

This project extends scholarship on Black placemaking through the study of “ethnic return migration” (Tsuda 2003): a growing form of transnational mobility wherein descendants of migrants’ 'return' to their ancestral homelands (i.e., a country that an earlier generation emigrated from). This migration pattern has been documented among descendants of diverse migrant populations around the world, including throughout the Black diaspora: from second- and third generation descendants of Bajan, Jamaican, and Ghanaian migrants relocating to their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of origin (Potter and Phillips 2006; Reynolds 2008; Haarman 2026), to African Americans, generations removed from the continent, relocating to West African countries such Ghana (Akinwotu 2024). These transnational migration patterns suggest that Black placemaking is not confined within the borders of the nation-state.  

This project therefore asks what happens to our understanding of Black placemaking when we examine it through this growing form of transnational mobility? For one, a global perspective forces us to confront the tensions and global power asymmetries produced through racialcapitalism (Robinson 1983). While the conditions produced by racial capitalism may contribute to Black people’s desire to leave Western countries, their positioning within the same global system nevertheless provides many with the resources, opportunities, and forms of capital that invariably facilitate their return projects. Racial capitalism, therefore, not only shapes the desire for diasporic return, but also how return migrants eventually become emplaced in their ancestral homelands.Drawing on in-depth interviews with second- and subsequent-generation Jamaicans from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom who have migrated to Jamaica, this project theorizes what I tentatively call “diasporic Black placemaking”, and examines how Black return migrants’ efforts to make place in their homeland it is facilitated, constrained, and complicated under racial capitalism.

Description of work that will be assigned to research assistants: 

Research assistants will:

• Review, clean, and prepare existing interview transcripts for qualitative analysis.
• Read and discuss scholarship on qualitative methods, ethnic return migration, Black placemaking, and racial capitalism.
• Code interview transcripts
• Write weekly analytic memos connecting insights from the literature and interview data to the project’s developing arguments.
• Help translate relevant scholarship and high-level research findings into accessible social media content for Jamaican and Jamaican-diaspora audiences.
• Participate in weekly research-team meetings and collaborative data analysis.

Supervising Faculty Member: Paige Sweet

Graduate Student: Kayonne Christy

Contact Information: kchristy@umich.edu

Average hours of work per week: 9-12

Range of credit hours students can earn: 3-4

Number of positions available: 4