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.
Anne-Meike Fechter is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Transnational Lives: Expatriates in Indonesia (2007). Her current research focuses on aid workers as mobile professionals.
Katie Walsh is affiliated with the Sussex Centre for Migration Research as a lecturer in human geography in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Her ethnographic research on British migrants in Dubai explores transnational belonging and identities, with an emphasis on embodiment, emotion, intimacy, and materialities.