Routes of Identity: Malay Liverpool and the Limits of Transnationalism

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Rather than focusing on either bounded conceptions of migrant assimilation or unbounded transnational linkages, this paper situates migrant experiences in broader routes of identity. In the case of Malay ex‐seamen in Liverpool, UK, all of whom are now in their seventies or eighties, this has meant tracing life geographies extending back well over half a century. During the middle decades of the twentieth century when these men arrived in Liverpool, the city was a major seaport with longstanding maritime connections to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific. Drawing upon fieldwork carried out in Liverpool and Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2008, the paper gives attention to four geographical dimensions of the shifting identities of Liverpool‐based Malay ex‐seamen: (1) the always‐ already fluid and mobile nature of their identifications which preceded long‐distance migration; (2) shifting political geographies of identity (re)formation, particularly the establishment of post‐colonial national boundaries which cut across prior modes of identification; (3) historically variable constitutive geographies of long‐distance interconnection, most notably the transition from maritime socioeconomic networks to a post‐maritime period; and (4) social sites through which individual and collective identities are emplaced. The intention is to sketch these four different dimensions in such a way as to allow them to speak critically to issues of transnationalism and migrant identity beyond the specific case of Malays in Liverpool.