Abstract
This engrossing volume edited by Lars Meier dwells on the interlacing of locality with social identity and illustrates how migrant professionals (sometimes referred to as ‘placeless elite’) grapple with a reality wherein locality and social identity impact each other in unanticipated ways. The narratives based on participants’ observation and structured interviews are crafted in various urban settings ranging from London and Dubai, to Singapore, Jakarta, and Melbourne, and goes beyond merely pointing out the relevance of locality for a mobile community to highlighting contemporary inequalities in destination cities. The book’s focus is the accelerated level of immigration and remigration among highly skilled professionals, who move along with their families and face the challenges of ever-changing cityscapes. This brings with it its own set of anxieties, not the least of which is a contextual re-ordering of one’s identity.
The term ‘migrant professionals’ introduced by Meier suggests a new dimension to urban ethnography, offering insights into the settlement experiences of a specific set of migrants – privileged, highly educated, and part of a transnational community. They receive preferential treatment in the workspace and have access to an elite lifestyle, yet struggle with issues of identity, acceptance, and belonging.
One of the most riveting chapters – ‘Seeing “Difference” Differently’ – is based on interviews (in the form of life trajectories), conducted with the children of migrant professionals or Third Culture Kids (p. 41). Desilets demonstrates the paradox of longing for similarity and putting ‘difference’ at the heart of one’s experience. The author explores the ‘complex relation between migration, cultural diversity and attachment to place’ (p. 41), of the city, and, most importantly, links the two concepts of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and thus creates an evocative account of how they manage ‘cultural otherness’ in the context of constant transience.
Meier’s ‘Learning the City by Experiences’ is another fascinating chronicle of how even the selection of a residence is impacted by the local experience of the place, as well as the imaginings of the city prior to visit. As Meier puts it, ‘learned urban imaginaries, habitus-related practices and sensual bodily experience of place are intertwined in the process of evaluating city quarters’ (p. 59). These migrants experience London as a divided city marked by architectural, social, and cultural heterogeneity, while Singapore is experienced as a ‘city of social harmony’.
Importantly, the aura of privilege and the assertion of social and economic capital in the local context demonstrate how the class position of the migrant professional influences the choices made in terms of home-making in a new city. This case study thus provides an invaluable perspective on the social identity of class.
The second section of the book is structured around the centrality of work in reorganizing identity and everyday life. It showcases the processes of local incorporation, including the cultural learning processes and social networking opportunities specially organized for these professionals, and the ways in which entry into suitable local clubs is negotiated.
The third section ‘Local encounters and identities’ has an intriguing opening chapter by Shimoda questioning the assumption that professional migrants are ‘elite’, while Walsh’s wonderful chapter ‘British transnational (be)longing: emplacement in the lives of skilled migrants in Dubai’ reflects the changing status of migrants in a post-colonial world.
Harris contributes a chapter on the family ethnic entrepreneurship of Polish migrants in the UK. However, the author struggles to establish the significance of the city itself in the formation of social identity of migrants who remain embedded in translocality across national borders and in fact actively utilize social networks, especially those with their family, to drive their entrepreneurial trajectories.
Surprisingly, the book pays only cursory attention to the overlap of space/place and gender, and the construction of gendered social identities in urban drift. Perhaps, a summary, however breviloquent, could have pulled together these different threads in a compendium on mobility, social identity, and locality.
This book is a must-read for the student of spatial studies, migration, transnationalism, and social inequalities. It breaks away from the dominant academic paradigm of immigrants’ integration into the host society, to examine the settlement experience of ‘migrant professionals’ – a nomenclature that underlines the correlation between work and the decision to migrate, of migrants who are both accepted and respected in the destination country. It is a valuable addition to the typology of ‘expatriates’, ‘skilled (international) migrants’, ‘migrant elite’, and ‘transnational capitalist class’.
The value of the book also lies in its exploration of a gamut of direct experiences of the city in which social networks are locally formed, used, and reproduced, and the rich insights gleaned from the migrant professional’s exposure to the interplay of locality and social identity. What stands out is the sensitive portrayal of feelings of confusion and isolation, and a sense of not belonging anywhere, highlighting instances where the self feels ‘othered’ by the host society while simultaneously ‘othering’ the local, deeming it ‘different’. It is this thread of marginalization, teased out from a pastiche of responses to living life in liminal spaces that renders this collection lustrous.