Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on new Chinese migrants living in New Zealand and examines how migration processes intersect with cosmopolitan manifestations at an individual and everyday level. It provides a brief review on cosmopolitanism and illustrates how the concept is understood and approached. The book analyses the major shifts in theoretical frameworks within migration studies a move from methodological nationalism to transnationalism and then to an emerging focus on cosmopolitanism. It provides a brief introduction about how new Chinese migrants have developed ethnoscapes and created new and different spaces and senses of place in Auckland, which is the major destination of Asian migration. The book focuses on the three perspectives to explore the emotional dimensions of cosmopolitan sociability: emotional difficulties emerging from early settlement; emotions and home-making in a transnational context; and emotional dissonance generated in everyday intercultural encounters.