Childhood, Emotions and the Labour of Transnational Families

This paper focuses on children of Bangladeshi heritage who are born in London and are mobile between the (trans) localities of East London and their ancestral home land of Sylhet (a district of Bangladesh). ‘Being there’ in Sylhet is intimately related to children’s membership of transnational families and most of them recorded ‘being there’ on two occasions by the age of 11. The paper demonstrates that while there has been considerable attention on South Asian first and second generation transnationalism, comprising a focus on marital strategies, remittances, cultural productions and roots tourism, little is known about young children’s transnational experiences or practices. The omission of children in part reflects a broader trend, wherein children until recently have been marginal in migration research, but more specifically stems from an emphasis on socialization. Hence South Asian children are constructed as passive members of transnational families. In this paper, I draw from a broader literature that highlights transnational ways of being to involve gendered labour which includes emotions and, I argue, this is necessary to locate children as active agents in the context of familial transnationalism.