Caroline Knowles

Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city’s status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. Hong Kong is a tour of the city’s postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper’s point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, Hong Kong offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.

The landscape of post-imperial whiteness in rural Britain

Abstract Rural racism is a serious political problem and this paper explores the conditions of its production. Most significant among conditions producing racism is not the management of racialized otherness, as many writers contend, but the fabrication of white Britishness itself in the peculiar, shifting, social alchemy of rural life and landscape. Particularly important in the production of rural whiteness is the ‘Raj factor’; the contribution of returnees, retired from service in the British Empire. These lives are expatriated from Britain, forged in the social relations and landscapes of empire, and then repatriated. This paper is about the intimate place of empire in rural South Devon and the production and re-inscription of practices of empire which cohere with the fabric of rural life. It argues that these elderly returnees add a tone, an inflection, in the social production of whiteness as place and human fabric, and that this is significant in the production of rural racism.

Seeing race through the lens

Abstract This article reflects on the uses of visual ethnography to expose the mundane substance of racial categories and intersections with (racialized, ethnicized) cultural difference. Race and ethnicity are lived as well as narrated and, indeed, living is a form of narration which is particularly amenable to visual exploration. It is set in an empirical investigation of a microcosm of global migration in the lives of two white British lifestyle migrants to Hong Kong and their relationship with Chineseness, entered through their domestic arrangements, with the camera lens.

Nigerian London: re-mapping space and ethnicity in superdiverse cities

Abstract This paper explores the idea of ‘superdiversity’ at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a vital and visible element of superdiversity. This paper argues that we can trace the journeys composing Nigerian London in the deep textures of the city thus making it visible, but this involves re-mapping space and ethnicity. It argues that visibility is vital in generating more open forms of urban encounter and, ultimately, citizenship.

Handling your Baggage in the Field: Reflections on research relationships

This paper explores some of the benefits of pursuing difficult, antagonistic, research relationships in the context of biographical interviewing methods that are sensitive to spatial relationships. It argues that confronting sources of tension between researchers and informants and being more open about the emotional baggage we bring to the field as researchers yields more rigorous fieldwork with more insightful results. The argument is developed from a particularly difficult research relationship: an encounter between the author and a British expatriate diving instructor living in Hong Kong. The broader context of the research is the production of white privilege through migration and the operation of global/postcolonial landscape.

Race, Identities and Lives

This paper uses an individual biography to make an analysis of racial-ized identity. It explores the connections between subjectivity and the broader social scenes in which it operates, and argues that identity is the outcome of a negotiation between existential conceptions of the self in racial terms, and the administrative mechanisms through which individuals are dealt with as members of social categories. By thinking about identity in terms of specific forms of alterity, mobility and conceptions of home, this paper argues that lives acquire race through their social practices and spatial arrangements.

Cities on the move: Navigating urban life

This paper explores the imaginative and analytical potential of ‘journeys’ in understanding the fabric and fabrication of cities and urban lives. Journeys foreground navigational skill offering a grounded way of thinking about contemporary mobilities and the interpenetration of distant worlds. This paper suggests some of the ways in which journeys matter and make matter, in flesh and stone, co‐creating social interactions, social relationships and, ultimately, the social morphologies to which all of these things accumulate, drawing some of the small quiet contours of the contemporary global world. It suggests that journeys provide powerful intersections from which to observe, ask questions and act. These explorations are developed by taking some of the people I have met in the course of my research over the last years out for a city walk in Montreal, Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Addis Ababa and its Somali borderlands. Evoking a deeper aesthetic sense of these journeys than words alone make possible are the accompanying photographs of three artists/photographers. 1

The symbolic empire and the history of racial inequality

Abstract Historiography is routinely employed to support contemporary accounts of racial inequality. Subjecting Khans (1991) exploration of the history of East Indians1 in Canada (1903–47) to critical analysis this article argues that ‘empire’ is used as a narrative and symbolic device. But the symbolic empire is a constrained analytic tool which can only produce a circumscribed account of race and a limited form of race politics. By substituting the symbolic empire with an empire invoked as an administrative device, registered in political discourses, the symbolic empire becomes two nationhoods‐in‐process. These two very different nation‐building processes, one Indian the other Canadian, are connected. The Canadian nation was constructed as a white enterprise in a defensive action against the immigration of East Indians who were concurrently awarded a second‐class citizenship by Britain. This article shows how the Canadian discourse on alien immigrants was a device used to affirm its own (white) identit...

Minimum City? The Deeper Impacts of the ‘Super-Rich’ on Urban Life

This chapter offers an analysis of the spatial distribution of the wealthy in London and considers how their pronounced growth has affected neighbourhood life and the social politics of London. These changes entwine with ideological commitments to welcome capital and the rich, while at the same time, investments and commitments in the public sphere diminish. We thereby consider the lived impacts of these shifts at a time when the city faces one of the worst social crises in generations. We describe this political conjunction and its associated socio-spatial formations as a ‘minimum city’ in which growing abundance among the few moves the city away from collective provision, social justice and inclusive urban spaces.

Nigerian London and British Hong Kong: rethinking migration, ethnicity and urban space through journeys

The city remains a crucial arena in condensing the challenges we face in migration and transnational research. Our understanding of cities and their connections with migration and ethnicity lies at the centre of these challenges and raises two problems demanding urgent attention. These relationships are under-theorised and poorly demonstrated. Secondly, older, more settled notions of the relationship between ethnicity, migration and space persist, supporting new nationalisms. This paper suggests that we think about ethnicity and migration cartographically as translocal journeys around and between cities.