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This paper presents a conversation between second-generation Eritreans in Milan.The focus is cast on how the youths speak about themselves and their experiences living in Milan, going to Eritrea, their transnational family and their daily life between different realities. Their words show that belonging is not clear cut, and neither are identities. Blackness, Africanness, Italianness, Eritreanness, race and culture, closed and opened mentality, and civilized versus uncivilized behaviours are the topics they speak about in the group conversation, in which they open the debate as to how they play with existing definitions of the self and how they reproduce them.

Eritrean Diasporictourism is a striking example of how Diasporas are not only victims of the nation state, but also play a great role in wider transnational cultural and economic dynamics of change. The present economic and political situation in Eritrea and the stability reached in Milan has diminished the probability that Eritreans in the Diaspora will return to Eritrea to live. Nevertheless, many people in this Diaspora community return to Eritrea for holidays at least every two years. The Eritrean summer returnees invest in Eritrea by becoming its tourists. This paper explores the narratives of Eritreans in Milan around going to Eritrea on holiday and returning from their vacation, and questions the impact of their imaginary of Eritrea as a place for leisure and tourism. The returnee is much more than a simple tourist as she/he also performs a wider Diasporic identity, which acts as a separate but influential collective category.Eritrea is the one of newest nation states in Africa and has been the subject of much scholarly attention, especially by those seeking to understand its unique political development. Its liberation struggle, first against the imperialist regime of Haile Selassie and then the military one of Mengistu, has been widely perceived as an unprecedented show of the people's power to overcome and eradicate imperialism from society as a whole, by implementing elements of civic behaviour and individuals' social, active participation. Many scholars working on Eritrea in the past were drawn into this historical paradigm, but scholars working on Eritrea today are now anxious to emphasise the state's strong, authoritarian hold over the lives of both those at home and those abroad (Koser 2003;Hepner 2009aHepner , 2009b. In doing research on Eritreans in Milan, I investigated performances of the self and the ways in which Eritreans in the city (from 2003 to 2005) related to the past, specifically, how people used narratives and commemorations to describe themselves (Arnone 2008).In this paper, I aim to demonstrate that there are ways through which we can possibly go beyond the 'false' agency hidden underneath Giddens' (1984) grand social theory which plays with concepts of choice and individualism, so that the strength of the all-encompassing structure seems less annihilating. My anthropological approach not only focuses on the force and influence of the two elements: structure and agency; but also explores the 'politics of little things', through which people live their life as agents of change. Campbell (2009) analysed the Eritrean Government's strong hold over the diaspora and clearly explained how the forms *

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