Following the expatriate offers an in-depth exploration of the history and politics of the category expatriate. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, the book tells situated stories about the category’s making, re-making, contestation and lived experience. It traces the expatriate’s transformation since the mid-20th century era of decolonisation, and locates the changing usage of the expatriate in the context of social, political and economic struggle and explores the material and discursive work the expatriate performs in negotiating social inequalities and power relations. The expatriate emerges as a polysemic and contested, mobile and malleable category whose transformations speak to broader reconfigurations of power and privilege. As the book demonstrates, migration and its categories form a key terrain on which imperial and colonial power relations are reproduced and translated, and offers innovative analytical and methodical strategies to study these processes.
