The New Expatriates

Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals

Anne-Meike Fechter, Katie Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415503662
• eBook ISBN: 9781135701031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While scholarship on migration has been thriving for decades, little attention has been paid to professionals from Europe and America who move temporarily to destinations beyond 'the West'. Such migrants are marginalised and depoliticised by debates on immigration policy, and thus there is an urgent need to develop nuanced understanding of these more privileged movements. In many ways, these are the modern-day equivalents of colonial settlers and expatriates, yet the continuities in their migration practices have rarely been considered.

The New Expatriates advances our understanding of contemporary mobile professionals by engaging with postcolonial theories of race, culture and identity. The volume brings together authors and research from across a wide range of disciplines, seeking to evaluate the significance of the past in shaping contemporary expatriate mobilities and highlighting postcolonial continuities in relation to people, practices and imaginations. Acknowledging the resonances across a range of geographical sites in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the chapters consider the particularity of postcolonial contexts, while enabling comparative perspectives. A focus on race and culture is often obscured by assumptions about class, occupation and skill, but this volume explicitly examines the way in which whiteness and imperial relationships continue to shape the migration experiences of Euro-American skilled migrants as they seek out new places to live and work.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Examining ‘Expatriate’ Continuities: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals
• 2. ‘New Shanghailanders’ or ‘New Shanghainese’: Western Expatriates’ Narratives of Emplacement in Shanghai
• 3. ‘Realising the Self and Developing the African’: German Immigrants in Namibia
• 4. Work, Identity and Change? Post/Colonial Encounters in Hong Kong
• 5. Institutionalising the Colonial Imagination: Chinese Middlemen and the Transnational Corporate Office in Jakarta, Indonesia
• 6. Gender, Empire, Global Capitalism: Colonial and Corporate Expatriate Wives
• 7. A Postcolonial Imagination? Westerners Searching for Authenticity in India
• 8. From ‘Trucial State’ to ‘Postcolonial’ City? The Imaginative Geographies of British Expatriates in Dubai
• 9. ‘They Called Them Communists Then… What D’You Call ’Em Now?… Insurgents?’ Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism
• Index