Becoming Cosmopolitan? Roots, Emotions, and Everyday Diversity Encounters amongst New Chinese Migrants in New Zealand

Abstract

This research focuses on new Chinese migrants living in New Zealand. It takes shape within a growing body of literature on cosmopolitanism that is providing new insights into understanding migration, mobilities and diversities. The research is empirically situated in a context of increasing ethnic diversity in New Zealand, particularly in its largest metropolitan region Auckland. It contributes to the pressing need to ground cosmopolitanism through researching people’s lived experiences, thus exploring how migration processes intersect with cosmopolitan manifestations at an individual and everyday level. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 new Chinese migrants to New Zealand, I first unpack the opportunities and barriers that are involved in the process of them encountering diversity and conducting everyday cosmopolitanism in various kinds of contact zones. In this regard, the research advances and enriches the knowledge of studies in ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, by locating quotidian and down-to-earth cosmopolitan engagements that are grounded in everyday migrant lives. Secondly, employing the concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, I examine how different degrees of sense of rootedness towards China (or New Zealand) interrelate with the strength of cosmopolitan openness to cultural others and the socialising patterns displayed in daily interactions. In doing so, the research transcends the Eurocentrism that dominates cosmopolitan theories. Lastly, I draw attention to the emotional dimension of cosmopolitanism and migrant mobilities, with a focus on the role of emotions in generating cosmopolitan sociability and building intercultural relations. The research findings demonstrate that being able to engage in cosmopolitanism is not a given result of increasing levels of cross-border mobilities or cross-cultural interactions, but rather occurs through and in relation to social structures and power relations that individuals negotiate in society. The process of becoming cosmopolitan relies on much more than intercultural competence. It demands ongoing emotional labour in order to overcome the dissonance that characterises the lives of many migrants. This study thus contributes to existing literature by relating cosmopolitanism to migration studies and by revealing cosmopolitanism’s social situatedness, its relation to rootedness, and its entanglement with emotions under a non- Eurocentric framework.