The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia

Book excerpt: As the world globalises, more people than ever are on the move, including the many professional, managerial and entrepreneurial elites—often referred to as ‘international talent’—who circulate between cities in response to career and business opportunities. While much has been written about the economic motivations behind these mobilities, less is known about the everyday experiences and encounters of highly skilled transnational migrants, who, with the rise of Asia as an economic powerhouse and cultural magnet, are not only increasingly Asian in composition but also rapidly attracted to the globalising cities in Asia. The book demonstrates how the migratory moves of transnational elites are not only implicated in the reality of multiple belongings, but are also intertwined with the broader cultural politics of specific places. By exploring the interfaces of contact and their diverse subjectivities from race and gender to class and nationality, this collection as a whole—with papers examining talent moving among cities in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Britain and Canada—paints a decidedly complex picture of how talented migrants inhabit the world in ‘more-than-rational’ ways. Through the lens of the everyday, this book uncovers the ways in which ‘cosmopolitanisms’ are forged in uneven and contested ways in different localities, as well as offer new insights into cities as transnational spaces of encounter in the 21st century. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.