a set of difficult conditions that threatens to
appropriate us as subjects, an appropriation that
can work just as well by way of acceptance as it
can by rejection’ (1997: 10).
Moving back to the ‘edge of empire’ (Jacobs,
1996) and in rethinking the in-betweenness of
Australia as a place which ‘belongs to neither its
Anglo-centred past nor to an assuredly post-
colonial or Asian future’, Anderson (2000: 381,
383; see also Schech and Haggis, 1998, on post-
colonial understandings of the ‘white self’ in
Australia) argues for ‘historiciz[ing] the nation-
state within the global relations of European
modernity and colonialism, recognizing that the
very concept of the “nation-state” was itself an
export of Europe’. This opens the way to denatu-
ralizing claims on the part of Anglo-derived
white settlers to ownership of a ‘national’ or
‘core’ culture vis-à-visother ‘minority’ groups
conventionally categorized as ‘migrants’ and
‘indigenous’ people. Anderson goes on to con-
tend that the politics of majority–minority status
positionings are not confined within national bor-
ders but are more usefully mapped onto a broader
transborder terrain to take into account ‘diaspora
relationships’ (2000: 386). It should be added that
as much as the nation-state, along with its mater-
ial borders and metaphorical boundedness, has its
genesis within European colonialism, trans-
national flows which criss-cross the world today
are also rooted in, and inflected by, the same con-
ditions (these flows presuppose the presence of
national borders to be crossed in the first place).
The ‘postnational’ imaginary – ‘imagining
and feeling geopolitical connections across and
beyond national borders’ – that Anderson
(2000: 385) advocates therefore cannot pre-
clude, and perhaps must be heralded by, a sense
of the ‘postcolonial’. It is by historicizing our
understandings of ‘nation’ and ‘diaspora’, as
well as the space of their encounter, within the
power relations spun by colonialism that we
problematize and come to grips with the simul-
taneous logics of nation-building and transna-
tional flows in a globalizing world. In short, we
should recognize that the localizing of identities
(that nations strive after) and the migrancy of
identities (that transgress the nation) – as well
as the ways in which they collide, collude
or contradict – are both part of the same post-
colonial conundrum.NOTESThis chapter would never have seen the light of day
without the encouragement and patience of Jane Jacobs
and Steve Pile.1 Some of these ‘inescapable markings’ are obvious if
taken for granted, including the ‘growing hegemony of
English as the language of geography’ (Short, et al.,
2001: 1) as well as ‘academic dependency’ of a
practical nature in the postcolonial world perpetuated
by ‘the relative abundance of Euroamerican funding
for research and training, the high levels of prestige
attached to publishing in British and American schol-
arly journals, the greater value attached to a Western
university education’ (Alatas, 2001: 26).
2 That there are ‘multiple postcolonial conditions’ has
already been noted, for example by Sidaway (2000)
who maps a range of ‘postcolonialisms’ in counter-
point to a number of colonialisms, quasi-colonialisms,
neocolonialisms, internal colonialisms, breakaway
settler colonialisms, etc.
3 This does not imply that the question of the hyphen is
a trivial one. Mishra and Hodge (1991: 399, 407) take
the compound word ‘post-colonial’ to refer to ‘some-
thing which is “post” or after colonial’ and go on to
further distinguish many forms of postcolonialism
when the hyphen is dropped, including a key distinc-
tion between ‘oppositional postcolonial’, forged in its
most overt form in post-independent colonies at the
historical phase of ‘post-colonialism’, and ‘complicit
postcolonial’, which is ‘an always present “underside”
within colonization itself’.
4 I owe the heuristic distinction between ‘groundings’
and ‘unmoorings’ to Jane Jacobs.
5 When asked to consider Singapore, Hong Kong and
Seoul as successfully liberalized economies and soci-
eties in East Asia, an elderly Arab intellectual was
reported to have replied: ‘Look at them. They have sim-
ply aped the West. Their cities are cheap copies of
Houston and Dallas. That may be all right for fishing
villages, but we are heirs to one of the great civilisations
of the world. We cannot become slums of the West’
(Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International,
reproduced in The Sunday Times, 21 October 2001).
6 The ‘migrancy of identity’ is Rapport and Dawson's
term, which they use to signal that socio-cultural places
are not ‘coherent’ or ‘localized’ ‘universes of meaning’
and that questions of identity must be ‘treated in rela-
tion to, even as inextricably tied to, fluidity or move-
ment across time and space’ (1998: 4–5).
7 In Singapore, the term ‘foreign workers’ is usually
applied to unskilled or semi-skilled migrant workers
while the term ‘foreign talent’ is reserved for the
highly skilled.
8 It should be noted that civil society in Singapore is still
largely constructed on the basis of a fixed centred
polity, not on the reality of a fluid, fractured landscape
which Singapore as a global city typifies, or what
Appadurai (1990) calls the ‘ethnoscape’, the ‘land-
scape of persons who constitute the shifting world in
which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles,
guestworkers and other moving groups’. In particular,
by virtue of being women, domestics and non-citizens,
foreign domestic workers are usually excluded from
public discourse and debates on the shape of civil
space in Singapore (Yeoh and Huang, 1999). MackiePOSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF PLACE AND MIGRATION 3773029-ch19.qxd 03-10-02 10:58 AM Page 377