Inhalt
'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.'
> '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
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.