New Youth Mobilities: Transnational Migrations, Racialization and Global Popular Culture

Abstract

This chapter draws on a project on so-called ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ ¹ youth cultures to examine new forms of mobility among young people who have grown up as children of migrants. It traces changing mobility patterns, from the migration and settlement patterns of the parental generation to the physical and virtual mobilities of the next generation. Children of migrants move locally to participate in activities with ethnic and racial co-peers, take transnational trips and engage virtually as global youth. As the editors to this volume suggest, examining the short-term and the micro-movements of children and young people within major migration fluxes brings to light experiences that are pres ently invisible and undertheorized. By using the concept of ‘mobility-in-migration’, they capture new complex, changing forms of movement that occur in response to migration and global economic and social change. By discussing how the mobilities of children of migrants are shaped by family transnational migrations, this chapter illustrates how shifts from childhood to youth intersect with migration trajectories However, by tracing the ways in which young people also craft their own forms of movement, it considers how their present mobilities, shaped by processes of racialization, relate specifically to a localized global youth culture shared with both migrant and nonmigrant co-racial youth and thus transcend pathways forged by familial and ethnonational ties.