Migration, Transnational Flows, and the Contested Meanings of Race in Asia

This open access edited volume addresses the multi-layered relations between migration, transnational flows, and the contested meanings of race in Asia. It tries to answer the following questions: how do migration and transnational flows from the Western world impact racial knowledge formation in Asian societies? To what extent do they challenge, perpetuate, and reshape unequal power relations based on the intersection of race, gender, class, nationality, citizenship, and migration status in Asia? How are dominant Western racial categories such as race, whiteness, and blackness redefined and reconstructed in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, when transnational mobility became both heavily restricted and stigmatized ? The book is divided into three parts: Race, Language and Migration status, Covid-19 and the Dynamics of Racialization, Gender and Interracial Encounters. This book positions itself in the nexus of race, migration and pandemic research and will make a significant contribution to critical race studies, whiteness studies, globalization, multiculturalism, and social transformation in Asia. This book is aimed at students and scholars in race and migration studies in Asia and beyond. This is an open access book.

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and mobility regimes, comparative racial formations in Asia and Euro-America, transnational student mobility, global cities, African diaspora in China, Chinese diaspora in the United States, and class and social transformations in Chinese society. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). She is the author of two books: Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago (2012), and Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (2017). She also published articles in American Anthropologist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, International Migration, and other academic journals.

Miloš Debnár is Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Kyoto University in 2014 and his main research interest is sociology of European migration to Japan. He has written on migration patterns, social integration and the role of race and whiteness in the integration. His current projects are a comparative study analysing choices of staying and leaving by European migrants to Japan, and a collaborative project with the University of Vienna on study abroad in East Asia by students at Central European universities. He is the author of Migration, Whiteness, and Cosmopolitanism: Europeans in Japan(2016) and his recent publications include a paper co-authored with Špela Drnovšek Zorko Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK (CMS, 2021, 9:30) and a chapter Privileged, Highly Skilled and Unproblematic? White Europeans in Japan as Migrants published in Expatriation and Migration: Two Faces of the Same Coin (ed. Sylvain Beck, 2023).