Return : nationalizing transnational mobility in Asia

Book review - Readers familiar with mainstream debate on transnational migration may be puzzled by the cover image on this provocative new volume edited by Xiang Biao, Brenda Yeoh and Mika Toyota. Instead of familiar shots of walls or barbed wire, the book features a time-lapse photograph of cars circling a roundabout in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City. The roundabout, explains Xiang in his Introduction, channels "traffic into certain patterns that can be monitored and regulated from a distance". The image provides an appropriate icon for the eight chapters that follow, which, in various historical and geographical contexts, explore the theme of return migration from an epistemological angle that emphasises the critical difference that Asian perspectives can make. What emerges is a book that registers the continuity between national and transnational processes by investigating the diverse ways in which seemingly ungovernable migratory flows are made to produce mobile subjects that are governable by nation-states.