Transnational Lives

Privileged migrants, such as expatriates living abroad, are typically associated with lives of luxury in exotic locations. This fascinating and in-depth study reveals a more complex reality. By focusing on corporate expatriates the author provides one of the first book length studies on 'transnationalism from above'. The book draws on the author's extended research among the expatriate community in Jakarta, Indonesia. The findings, which relate to expatriate communities worldwide, provide a nuanced analysis of current trends among a globally mobile workforce. While acknowledging the potentially empowering impact of transnationalism, the author challenges current paradigms by arguing that the study of elite migration shows that transnational lives do not always entail fluid identities but the maintenance of boundaries - of body, race and gender. The rich ethnographic data adds a critical dimension to studies of migration and transnationalism, filling a distinct gap in terms of theory and ethnography. Written in an engaging and accessible style the book will be of interest to academics and students, particularly in anthropology, migration studies and human geography.

This book provides targeted suggestions that educators can use to ensure successful teaching and learning with today’s growing population of transnational, multilingual students. The text offers insights based on the author’s observations, interactions, and interviews with second-generation immigrant children, their families, and their teachers in the United States and South Korea. These collected stories give educators a better understanding of how elementary school children engage in language, literacy, and learning in and across spaces and countries; the forms of unique linguistic and cultural knowledge immigrant children build, expand, and mobilize as they move across contexts; the ways in which immigrant children position themselves and represent their identities; and how educators and researchers can honor these children’s identities and unique talents. Featuring children’s narratives, drawings, writings, maps, and photographs, this resource is must-reading for educators and researchers seeking to create more inclusive learning spaces and literacy practices. Book Features: Examples of students’ literacy practices with insights for more effective teaching.Practical lessons gleaned from children engaging with language and literacy in flexible and dynamic ways in their everyday lives.Targeted suggestions to help educators better understand and utilize children’s unique linguistic abilities and cultural understandings. Discussion questions and examples that challenge deficit perspectives of immigrant children and reposition them as multilingual and transnational experts. Implications for educators and researchers seeking ways to amplify young immigrant children’s voices and leverage their knowledge.

The transnationalism of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography. This book takes mobility, not nation, as its frame, and captures a rich array of lives, from the elite to the subaltern, that have crossed national, racial and cartographic boundaries.

An exploration of how personal life-stories, when reconstructed as 'transnational lives,' escape the confines of national histories and open up new avenues for interpreting cultural identity, social mobility, and public memory.

This book investigates the transnational experiences of Chinese Singaporeans who lived in one of four global cities: Hong Kong, London, New York, or Singapore. Plüss argues that these middle-class, well-educated, and often highly skilled migrants mostly experienced a sense of dis-embeddedness, and not cosmopolitanism, or hybridity, in their transnational lives. The author’s multi-sited study intersects the Chinese Singaporeans’ highly varied perceptions of these global cities and their biographies to show that these migrants—who often were repeat migrants—foremost experienced ruptures and disjuncture in their education, work, family, and/or friendships/lifestyle contexts. Transnational (dis)embeddedness is explained in terms of the Chinese Singaporeans’ access to resources and their views of self, others, places, and societies. Plüss recommends that research on these migrants should more fully account for the complexities of transnational processes, and contributes with such a knowledge to the scholarship on transnationalism, migration, race and ethnicity, and migrant non-integration.

Contrary to popular opinion, increasing numbers of migrants continue to participate in the political, social, and economic lives of their countries of origin even as they put down roots in the United States. The Transnational Villagers offers a detailed, compelling account of how ordinary people keep their feet in two worlds and create communities that span borders. Peggy Levitt explores the powerful familial, religious, and political connections that arise between Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston and examines the ways in which these ties transform life in both the home and host country. The Transnational Villagers is one of only a few books based on in-depth fieldwork in the countries of origin and reception. It provides a moving, detailed account of how transnational migration transforms family and work life, challenges migrants' ideas about race and gender, and alters life for those who stay behind as much, if not more, than for those who migrate. It calls into question conventional thinking about immigration by showing that assimilation and transnational lifestyles are not incompatible. In fact, in this era of increasing economic and political globalization, living transnationally may become the rule rather than the exception.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

"This book tells the stories of a selected group of geographers who migrated to one side to another of the Canada-US border. The often emotional autobiographical testimonials of those academics go a long way toward capturing the full range of feelings and experiences related to migration and settlement decision-making, especially as personal processes play out within the larger context of North American mobility"--Project Muse website.