PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter1- Introductionmigrants‘ identity reflected in and mediated by their practices of belonging isparticularly important when studying migrants in a foreign land with a shared ethnicityand assumed shared cultural origins and background. For Taiwanese migrants in China,the complex historical and cultural linkages amidst antagonistic political relationsconstitute a challenge to Taiwanese people in their interactions with the Chinese in thePeople‘s Republic of China (PRC) and to their identity performance.Integral to the discussion of migrants‘ practices of belonging in relation to materialculture, transnational practice and identity practices are geographical concepts of placeand space and their role in shaping migrants‘ emotional process of belonging. This is inline with recent literature on emotional geography and geographies of belonging thatarguesthat people‘s emotional experiences cannot be separated from place, as theyare the result of the interactions between people and place (see Anderson and Smith2001; Davidson and Bondi 2004; Bondi et al. 2005). This perspective thus allowsgeographers to engage in the scholarship of migrant belonging through understandingbelonging as a sense of (being in) place and place identity. Consequently, this researchon Taiwanese expatriates‘ practices of belonging will focus on the spaces of migrantbelonging which currently receive little attention in transnational migration studies.Given that migration studies on spaces of migrants‘ practices to forge belonging havepaid significant attention to the domestic sphere and some public domains, includingneighbourhoods, ethnic and social gatherings (see Çağlar2001; Jazeel 2006; Gordon2008), my discussion aims to add to this present literature by including the full range ofmigrants‘ everyday living spaces into my analysis. In particular, I incorporate the oftenomitted workplace because it is the place where Taiwanese expatriates spend most oftheir time. Also, the workplace is a place in which migrants‘ practices around material20