‘Returning’ to Barbados as a Second-Generation Caribbean-Briton: getting back, or getting ahead?

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of two biographic interviews carried out in 2021 with second-generation Caribbean-Britons with a project of return to Barbados. These interviews are part of a wider PhD research project on the nature and scope of the transnational ties established by next-generation Caribbean-Britons with contemporary Jamaican and Barbadian societies, which relies on 60 interviews of adult (21+) members of the second and third generations. These two interviews suggest that the next generations have reinvented the project of ‘return’ to the ancestral homeland which has been passed down to them by their elders. They have used transnational living – and projects of returning to the Caribbean in particular – as a way of getting ahead in their lives and of making the most of their dual heritage, while adapting to external macro-constraints. This article first provides a description of the socio-political and legal macro-context in which these personal projects of return emerged, before offering a comparative and context-based analysis of the two interviews.