Expatriate
Following a migration category
By Sarah Kunz
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Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerBook Information
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 312
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: January 2023
Description
Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and history of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and studies the usage and significance of the category in Kenyan history and present-day 'expat Nairobi'. Doing so, the book traces the figure of the expatriate from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today's heated debates about migration.
The expatriate emerges as a malleable and contested category, of shifting meaning and changing membership, and as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. The book situates the changing usage of the term in the context of social, political and economic struggle and explores the material and discursive work the expatriate performs in negotiating social inequalities and power relations. Migration, the book argues, is a key terrain on which colonial power relations have been reproduced and translated, and migration categories are at the heart of the insidious ways that intersecting material and symbolic inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice needs to dissect and interrogate categories like the expatriate, and this book offers analytical and methodical strategies to advance this project.
Reviews
Winner of British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2024
'By focussing on the trajectory of a social category so many of us take for granted, this book offers a creative, critical and provocative engagement with the discursive and postcolonial history of the ways we think about migration more generally. For anyone concerned about the ways migration and mobility have been, and continue to be, governed, imagined and experienced, this book is an essential read.'
Tariq Jazeel, University College London
'Kunz's delicate, scholarly tapestry of ethnography and Kenyan independence archives reveals how the category 'expatriate' is entangled in the shifting postcolonial power dynamics of migration and the murky politics of oil. A must read for migration scholars.'
Caroline Knowles, Queen Mary, University of London
'Brilliant, insightful and often surprising, this book leverages the ever changing social category "expatriate" to explore the intersections of race, colonialism, management and migration. Scholarly work at its best.'
Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol
Contents
Introduction
1 Following the expatriate: theoretical and methodological starting points
Part I: The historical expatriate
2 From colonial civil servant to expatriate at the eve of Kenyan independence
3 Towards a new breed of expatriate manager in international business
4 Remaking the Shell expatriate: from company wife to global citizen
Part II: The expatriate today
5 Making international expats in Nairobi
6 Archiving the temporary expatriate
7 Studying expatriates: academic divisions of (skilled) labour
Conclusion
Index
Author
Sarah Kunz is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex