Prologue: Between Empires

Summary

Abstract

The colonial histories of mixed-race diasporic communities have often been linked to narratives of policy discrimination, strategic collaboration and collective resistance. Deviating from these themes, the experience of the Macanese diaspora in British Hong Kong offers us an opportunity to observe the constructions of race, class and culture as more nuanced than the colonizer–colonized polarity usually allows. Through the lenses of transimperial migration, identity contestation and cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, the collective biographies of middle-class Macanese individuals in this book combine to demonstrate the resilience of mixed-race diasporic communities in the face of normative reality and uncover the liberties they exercised on foreign soil in the search for wider opportunities, a better life, social status and power.

Keywords: transimperial migration, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, collective biographies, Luso-Asians, diaspora

This is a book about mixed-race people that aims to look beyond skin color in understanding the construction of human lives and the evolution of diasporic communities within unequal, racialized and biased systems. It is a collection of narratives and snapshots of the Macanese, spread over a century, that speak of the power of individual aspirations, social networks, global developments and identity shifts in countering the challenges of settling in a British colony. As Luso-Asians born out of the Portuguese empire, the Macanese took root and propagated in sixteenth-century Macau. Their status as a mixed-race diaspora granted them resilience, allowing them to shift between various cultural identities that transcended a single political unit, all while remaining as a marginal ‘Portuguese’ community in Hong Kong's official records and public description. In a metaphorical sense, the Macanese continuously drifted, their movement driven by the currents of historical development and the tides of chance. This led to the flowering of various Macanese communities across East Asia by the early twentieth century, with settlements emerging in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Kobe; in Southeast Asia, the Philippines became a destination. While each experience marked a new set of practical challenges and institutional inequalities, the move from Portuguese Macau to British Hong Kong was particularly transformational. By the 1930s, Hong Kong sheltered the second-largest Macanese community, with more than a quarter naturalized as British subjects. The city also paved the way for the proliferation of unprecedented class and identity differences that ripped through the community, creating a division that lingers today.