Examining ‘Expatriate’ Continuities: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals

Abstract

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of colonial and postcolonial studies have been enriched by nuanced analyses of the ways in which racialised colonial identities (cross-cut by gender, class and sexuality) have been enacted in particular settings. Nevertheless, the quantity and quality of knowledge about the lives of European colonials and settlers can be held in stark contrast with the relative scarcity of studies of those who might be regarded as their modern-day equivalents: contemporary ‘expatriates’, or citizens of ‘Western’ nation-states who are involved in temporary migration processes to destinations outside ‘the West’. These contemporary expatriates are rarely considered through a postcolonial framework. As a corrective, this special issue of JEMS draws together eight articles, each of which explicitly engages in different ways with this theoretical concern. In this introductory paper we argue for the significance of the past in shaping contemporary expatriate mobilities and note postcolonial continuities in relation to people, practices and imaginations. While discussing the resonances across various geographical sites, we emphasise the need to also consider the particularity of postcolonial contexts. Finally, we suggest that we need to broaden the current, somewhat myopic focus on Western expatriates, to understand them in relation to other groups of migrants, particularly in globalising cities, and to include the perspectives of locals.

Keywords:

• Postcolonialism
• Expatriates
• Mobile Professionals
• Whiteness
• Class

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Culture, University of Sussex, and the British Academy (Conference Grant BCG-46814) for funding the workshop (27–28 September 2007) where the articles were first presented. In addition, we would like to thank the anonymous JEMS referee and the journal editor for their comments, as well as Eric Anton Heuser, Uma Kothari, Lars Meier, Karen O'Reilly and Silke Roth, who also presented papers and contributed to the discussion that shaped this special issue.

Notes

1. The relevance of the past surfaces, for example, in the observations of casual visitors who encounter the often luxurious lifestyles of Euro-American expatriates based in cities such as Singapore or Hong Kong, prompting remarks such as ‘They are living just like colonials!’. Such apparent similarities indicate more profound issues. One is the imbalance and disconnect between historical scholarship on colonial expatriates, on the one hand, and research on their successors, Euro-American migrants to former colonies, on the other. Not only is the former much more extensive than the latter, but there appear to be few deliberate efforts to relate the two. One exception is Yeoh and Willis' (2005) analysis of the negotiation of cultural difference in Chinese cities, in which they draw on Pratt's (1992) notion of the ‘contact zone’; another is Kothari's (2006) tracings of colonial and postcolonial power in the practices and imaginaries of colonial officers and development professionals which we discuss later. The aims of the workshop which generated this collection of papers were thus twofold: one was to explore in what ways insights from scholarship on colonial expatriates could be made fruitful for analyses of contemporary ones; the other was to consider how ideas and practices stemming from the colonial past feature in the lives of contemporary expatriates. This means asking, among other things, how mobile professionals draw on, mobilise or ignore the past in the construction of their own migrant identities.

2. Such practices often first become visible in the domestic realm, such as expatriates' relations with their local household staff. The fact that they often employ a considerable number of staff well above the level of domestic help that they might have in their home country invites comparisons with colonial lifestyles. Domestic architecture, too, plays a role, since expatriate housing is often more secluded and comfortable than that of the local population, including fenced-in properties and separate servants' quarters. The fact that many of the local elites and upper middle classes live in equally, if not more comfortable circumstances does not diminish the perception of these Westerners' lifestyles as ‘colonial’.

3. The notion of the global city has become prominent in attempts to conceptualise contemporary cities with a high concentration of command-and-control functions in the global capitalist economy, most notably Paris, New York and London (Sassen 2001). The notion of globalising cities acknowledges different degrees of world city-ness (Yeoh 2004) and is a useful term through which to conceptualise global cities in the making, such as those featured in articles by Farrer (Shanghai), Leonard (Hong Kong), and Coles/Walsh (Dubai).