This chapter reports on trends of continuity and divergence within the heritage generations examined and between heritage and homeland varieties. It discusses the degrees of similarities between the varieties in terms of (a) rates of use of innovative forms and (b) conditioning factors in the constraint hierarchy. The three variables examined are voice onset time (VOT, n=8,909), case-marking on nouns and pronouns (CASE, n=9,661), and variable presence of subject pronouns (PRODROP, n=9,190), each in three or more languages. The similarity in rates and conditioning effects across generations for (PRODROP), examined in seven languages, particularly contrasts with findings for this variable in experimental paradigms. Similarly, findings of little simplification or overgeneralization of the case system in three languages stands in contrast to the outcomes of several previous studies. (VOT) shows a drift toward (but not arriving at) English-like values for only some of the languages examined. For each variable, models are presented and interpreted; a table then details which aspects of the analysis contribute to the interpretation of stability and of each type of variation.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the prose Anaplous Bosporou (Upstream Voyage on the Bosporos) by one Dionysios of Byzantion, written around the middle of the 2nd century AD. As the chapter introduction shows, this striking prose work is ‘perhaps the most detailed description of a landscape to have survived from the ancient world’, and expresses Dionysios’ admiration for his homeland. It also preserves a host of invaluable topographical details along both shores of the Thracian Bosporos and in the Golden Horn (especially the locations of sacred places), as well as information about fisheries. A new, detailed map shows many of the localities mentioned, with an inset showing the area immediately around Byzantion in more detail.

Chapter 6 looks at Naipaul’s travel writings on India and on Islam. To Naipaul, the novel, the novel of the long twentieth century, no longer gets at “difficult social and human truth.” The novel, having lost its dynamism is no longer the correct or even legitimate form for the expression of the heightened, sensitive, and expansive human imagination. In its place, suggests Naipaul, the forms that will re-shape our ideas of the world, are “biography, art history, cultural history, perhaps even history.” The travel form, as a historical undertaking, however, cannot be simply a factual survey of an unfamiliar place; it must be about things seen and people met, with writing matching the experience to be transmitted. The turn away from the novel produced works that were original and challenging, even if, at the level of social anthropology, they may be seen as throwbacks to ethnographic narratives of imperialist writers like James Anthony Froude. A close reading of the travel books, however, shows the persistence of the ironic temper, without that proactive or politically determined piety which has been the hallmark of much contemporary ethnographic writing.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

This concluding chapter maintains that Liberia’s battle to eradicate Ebola from 2014 to 2016 represented an interface wherein state-, nation-, and peace-building objectives converged. Whereas counterparts across Africa had waged nationalist struggles decades before against European colonialism, Liberian domestic and diasporic actors for the first time collaborated to fight a common enemy, Ebola, outside of themselves. As a direct response to deeply embedded inequalities in primary care, non-government Liberian actors at home and abroad embodied active citizenship by engaging in public health measures that reshaped how we envisage public authority in conflict-affected states. Their relatively successful struggles against an existential threat illuminated how the political economy of belonging to Liberia could be made manifest. This chapter demonstrates further that the 2020 referendum proposition based on Liberia’s Dual Citizen and Nationality Act of 2019 would be moot without reconciling disputes over the meaning and practice of Liberian citizenship amongst actors of divergent social locations and life-worlds. It contends that a Liberian citizenship triad—which frames citizenship as identity (passive), practice (active), and a set of relations (interactive)—could be used as a model for theorising citizenship generally since it moves citizenship from the abstract and Eurocentric to the concrete and Afrocentric.

Divided into three parts, Chapter 1 outlines the rationale for selecting respondents—homeland Liberians, permanent and circular returnees, diasporas—with an overview of their demographic profiles; the conceptual framework, actor-oriented analysis, which considers myriad responses to development interventions based on actors’ disparate life-worlds (lived experiences), social locations (socio-economic positions), and levels of agency (capacity to act); as well as deep thinking about the author’s positionality. The methodological, theoretical, and biographical reflections in this chapter are intended to contextualise how the author came to understand Liberia’s political economy of belonging and its relationship to contestations over dual citizenship.Chapter 1 demonstrates why it was essential to converse with Liberian actors inhabiting different locales in three continents. It shows, for example, that diasporas disclose through their identities, practices, and relationships that citizenship can be simultaneously passive, active, and interactive. They also both challenge and substantiate certain theoretical approaches including conceptualisations of diasporic influences on homeland foreign policy and, by the author’s extension, homeland domestic policy. Reflecting on her positionality as a Liberian researcher who has occupied multiple spaces and places, the author evaluates her own biases as someone who made a conscious choice not to naturalise abroad and how this decision influences her analysis of Liberian citizenship construction and practice.

The chapter summarises the various ways through which attachment to a particular geography - be a street or a nation - can be compromised. Memory, familiarity with customs and rules, and access to public space, as well as safety, personal and political freedoms are key constituents of belonging as is basic economic well-being.