Introduction: Approaching Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts

Summary

Migration and the human diversity that necessarily accompanies it present multifarious challenges and opportunities within the varied social and cultural landscapes of Asia. The contributions in this volume set out to interrogate some of these challenges and opportunities and to discuss emergent governance regimes, identities and practices across and within the nations, cities, neighbourhoods, communities and families of East and Southeast Asia. This simultaneously varied and integrative approach to the subject matter speaks to the wide-ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migration and diversity in Asia. In some parts of the region, contemporary migration and diversity symbolize a historically significant rupturing of long-held self-representations of ethnically homogeneous nations and communities (such as in Japan and Korea). Elsewhere, migration as both historical memory and contemporary experience serves as a foundational basis to the imagining of a multicultural nation and community (as is the case in Malaysia and Singapore). Within such polarities of collective belonging, diversity is also negotiated on an everyday basis in the homes of multiethnic families, in the lives and identities of minorities and individuals, and in the always challenging encounters with others in social spaces such as workplaces, public spaces, restaurants and sports fields.

This introduction serves as an entry point into the themes addressed in this volume, situating the more detailed chapters that follow within extant scholarship on migration and diversity in Asia. In reviewing the current treatment of migration and diversity in Asia, it is clear that while both “migration” and “diversity” as phenomena are of increasing interest to scholars within and beyond the region, there are very few examples of scholarship that have focused on how they relate to each other. Rather, most academic work has been concerned either with increasing mobility within the region or with the already diverse social and cultural landscapes of certain parts of the region, instead of the ways in which mobility feeds into changing experiences of diversity (and vice versa), both historically and in the contemporary era. This volume, then, offers a first step in the effort to understand the increasingly important question of human mobility and its subsequent effects on population diversity in a region that is becoming ever more open and central to the processes of globalization.