With the number of Chinese living outside of its borders expected to reach 52 million by 2030, China has one of the most mobile populations on earth, shaping economies, cultures, and politics around the globe. Trans-Pacific Mobilities charts how the cross-border movement of Chinese people, goods, and images affects notions of place, belonging, and identity, particularly in Canada. Drawing on the new mobilities paradigm, contributors explore this phenomenon through five lenses, mapping out historic, cultural and symbolic, highly skilled, family and gendered, and transnational mobilities. This volume offers fresh insights into historical and contemporary Chinese mobilities and issues of transnationalism.

This book argues that transpacific history cannot be comprehended without including “vertical” connections; namely, those between the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere. It explores such connections by uncovering small histories of ordinary people’s attempts at événements which they undertake by means of uneven, unlevel, and multidirectional mobilities. In this way, this book goes beyond the usual notion of transpacific history as a matter of Northern Hemisphere-centric connections between the United States and Asian countries, and enables us to imagine a transpacific space as a more dynamic and multi-faceted world of human mobilities and connections. In this book, both eminent and burgeoning historians uncover the stories of little-known, myriad encounters in various parts of the Asia-Pacific region. By exploring cases whose actors include soldiers, missionaries, colonial administrators, journalists, essayists, and artists, the book highlights the significance of "vertical" perspectives in understanding complex histories of the region.

The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War–era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. “Chineseness,” the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.

Pacific Islanders have engaged in transnational practices since their first settlement of the many islands in the region. As they moved beyond the Pacific and settled in nations such as New Zealand, the U.S. and Australia these practices intensified and over time have profoundly shaped both home and diasporic communities. This edited volume begins with a detailed account of this history and the key issues in Pacific migration and transnationalism today. The papers that follow present a range of case studies that maintain this focus on both historical and contemporary perspectives. Each of the contributors goes beyond a narrowly economic focus to present the human face of migration and transnationalism; exploring questions of cultural values and identity, transformations in kinship, intergenerational change and the impact on home communities. Pacific migration and transnationalism are addressed in this volume in the context of increasing globalisation and growing concerns about the future social, political and economic security of the Pacific region. As the case studies presented here show, the future of the Pacific depends in many ways on the ties diasporic Islanders maintain with their homelands.

Transforming the Politics of Mobility and Migration in Aotearoa New Zealand is a future-focused edited collection that formulates alternative paradigms that can lead to a more just and ethical politics of mobility and migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Examining a variety of topics, the book addresses the challenges of structural discrimination, integration and migrant rights framed within larger regional and global concerns. Collectively, the contributors advance perspectives on social justice and migrant rights, specifically addressing issues of ethics, collective well-being and solidarities. The collection brings together leading and early career scholars paired with practitioners in the migrations sector. Developing conceptual knowledge in migration studies, it fills a gap in the sparse literature on the politics of migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. While theoretically engaged and of value to the research community, the book also follows recent calls to better communicate the complexities of migration to policy makers, with accessible chapters that address a range of issues faced by migrants and speak to a wide audience.

The mobility of people, objects, information, ideas, services, and capital has reached levels unprecedented in human history. Such forms of mobility are manifested in continued advances in communication and transportation capacities, in the growing use of digital and biometric technologies, in the movements of Indigenous, migrant, and women's groups, and in the expansion of global capitalism into remote parts of the world. Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice demonstrates how knowledge is mobilized and how people shape, and are shaped by, matters of mobility. Richly detailed and illuminating essays reveal the ways in which issues of mobility are at the centre of debates, ranging from practices of belonging to war and border security measures, from gender, race, and class matters to governance and international trade, and from citizenship and immigration policies to human rights. Contributors analyze how particular forms of mobility generate specific types of knowledge and give rise to claims for social justice. This collection reconsiders mobility as a key term in the social sciences and humanities by delineating new ways of understanding how mobility informs and shapes lives as well as social, cultural, and political relations within, across, and beyond states. Contributors include Rob Aitken (Alberta), Tanya Basok (Windsor), Janine Brodie (Alberta), William Coleman (Waterloo), Ronjon Paul Datta (Alberta), Karl Froschauer (Simon Fraser), Daniel Gorman (Waterloo), Amanda Grzyb (Western), Suzan Ilcan (Waterloo), Eleonore Kofman (Middlesex), Anita Lacey (Auckland), Theresa McCarthy (Buffalo), Daniel J. Paré (Ottawa), Nicola Piper (Sydney), Parvati Raghuram (Open), Kim Rygiel (Wilfrid Laurier), Leslie Regan Shade (Toronto), Sandra Smeltzer (Western ), Daiva Stasiulis (Carleton), Myra Tawfik (Windsor), and Lloyd Wong (Calgary).

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.