Transnational skilled migrants are often thought of as privileged migrants with flexible citizenship. This book challenges this assumption by examining the diverse migration trajectories, experiences and dilemmas faced by tertiary-educated mobile Malaysian migrants through a postcolonial lens. It argues that mobile Malaysians’ culture of migration can be understood as an outcome and consequence of British colonial legacies – of race, education, and citizenship – inherited and exacerbated by the post-colonial Malaysian state. Drawing from archival research and interviews with respondents in Singapore, United Kingdom, and Malaysia, this book examines how mobile Malaysians make sense of their migration lives, and contextualizes their stories to the broader socio-political structures in colonial Malaya and post-colonial Malaysia. Showing how legacies of colonialism initiate, facilitate, and propagate migration in a multi-ethnic, post-colonial migrant-sending country beyond the end of colonial rule, this text is a key read for scholars of migration, citizenship, ethnicity, nationalism and postcolonialism.
Table of Content
Introduction.- British colonial legacies and the making of Malay(si)a.- A culture of migration.- Education-migration pathways and the (re)production of race.- Interpreting and practising citizenship.- Returning to Malaysia?.- Conclusion: Postcolonialising a culture of migration.
About the author
Sin Yee Koh is Assistant Professor of Geography at the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Her research, positioned at the intersection of migration studies and urban studies, is informed by three areas of interest: (1) postcolonial geography; (2) migration/mobilities and citizenship; and (3) urbanization, inequality and social change.
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