Unsettling Potentialities: Topographies of Hope in Transnational Migration

Abstract

For transnational migrants, hope is of practical significance, as an emotional structure accompanying complex temporal and spatial strategies, often involving the splitting of selves, relationships and families. This paper examines some configurations of hope in motion, drawing on ethnographic research on movements of Hong Kong migrants between Hong Kong and Australia. As a complex affective and intellectual practice, hope encompasses both momentary embodied affects and more consciously and collectively articulated emotional trajectories, to practically and psychologically manage temporalities of change and flux. Objects of hope emerge as shifting referents in a play of loyalties, attachments and desires. Migrant hope is examined in terms of spatialised object relations, in which hopeful affects cohere around imaginings of place and temporality constituted by specific transnational pathways. An often dualistic structure of spatial imaginings contains complementary elements of an imagined fullness of existence that connects to differing social imaginaries of ‘the good life’. Australia could stand for aspects of the pleasure principle—enjoyment of nature or prospects of retirement—in opposition to the hard ‘reality’ of Hong Kong capitalism. Temporal narratives of ‘national’ and more local places ‘being ahead’ or ‘being behind’ are important elements locating the subject and their specific trajectory within a migrant ‘economy of hope’. Hoping turns on the fantasy integration of such shifting identifications and attachments which emerge as contingent objects in a transnationally articulated ‘space of play’.

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