‘It’s not what it was’: British Migrants in Postcolonial Hong Kong

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Knowles, Caroline. 2007. ‘It’s not what it was’: British Migrants in Postcolonial Hong Kong. Sociology Working Papers, pp. 1-25. [Article]

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This paper explores the colonial in postcolonial migration tracing its surfaces in the bodies, travel and settlement practices of British expatriates in Hong Kong and in the architecture and social arrangements of their everyday lives. It argues that empire still matters and makes matter; that it has tangible surfaces in lives and buildings, in scenes of routine operation. Its focus is a fragment of the Hong Kong post/colonial-landscape-in-transition. It is grounded in the operation of two social clubs, a microcosm of broader social changes, as Hong Kong establishes its new relationship with China; and as new intersections between migrant and Chinese bodies forming the post- colony forge emerging social morphologies. It argues that new instanciations of old, colonial, surfaces inflect the production of postcolonial (white) Britishness-in-migration; and shape migrants’ engagement with landscapes of new settlement and (ethnicised and racialised) difference.

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