Postcolonial border crossing

Through a postcolonial lens and based on in-depth interviews with British expatriates who moved to Hong Kong in the first decade after its handover, this paper highlights the contested role of borders in the everyday making and remaking of skilled migration. It draws on Paasi's (2003 Paasi, A. (2003). Boundaries in a globalizing world. In K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, & N. Thrift (Eds.), Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781848608252.n33[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) definition of boundaries to denote that borders are not merely geographical lines but zones of mixing, blending and reconfiguring historically formed material connections, identities and power relations through which contemporary skilled mobility is constituted. The border crossing of skills in Hong Kong and elsewhere is a historically contingent phenomenon whose meaning derives not only from economic forces and social networking but also the accumulated history of the borders they cross. The notion of ‘postcolonial border crossing’ highlights the dis/continuity in skilled migration and integrates social, cultural and economic spheres into the same framework in interpreting skilled mobility.     

Reading Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant's fiction has been steadily undergoing critical reassessment since the 1990s. The advent of the Selected Works from Pickering & Chatto testifies to the growing significance of this great novelist within the scholarly community. The inquiries of several researchers, especially Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock, have transformed our understanding of this prolific author's achievements. Yet the larger proportion of Oliphant's novels await the critical attention they deserve. The present discussion focuses on the main reasons why her seemingly minor works of prose fiction possess a psychological understanding that is as great as that which we find in her more famous narratives, such as Miss Marjoribanks (1866). The recognition of divided minds, of the games the mind plays, and her dramatization of them, is part of what gives her novels power that general critiques of her work often miss. This point becomes clear when we broaden our perspective on Oliphant's novels beyond the six fictions that comprise her Chronicles of Carlingford (1862–76). Here the analysis concentrates on The Ladies Lindores (1883) and, more expansively, the little-known For Love and Life (1874).