J Lowe
Biographic Data
| ID | 10244 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Lowe |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Lowe |
| SIGNATURE | LOWE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5865-2480 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Calibrated structures of feeling: Cultural citizenship and the reproduction of the military in Singapore
This article discusses the nexus between Raymond Williams’ structure of feelings and the reproduction of military masculinity as cultural citizenship. By placing the gaze upon National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces as a rite of passage into manhood, this work uses representations of the military in popular culture and souvenirs/ephemera to elucidate how structures of feeling are calibrated as masculinity the state wants its citizenry to i…
Militarized granularity: Sand's making of men and masculinity in Singapore
Land reclamation is the process of transforming mined sand from rivers, estuaries, the seabed and even islands into new land parcels. This article examines Singapore’s insatiable appetite for sand and discusses the relationality between a singular grain of sand’s capacity to militarize and gender the Southeast Asian island-state. With opaque sand supply chains, Singapore can project its sovereignty as a militarized nation-state through the neo-co…
For granular geographies: Conceptual spaces of anatopism and land reclamation in Singapore
The call for granular geographies represents an interesting intervention in the nexus between old and new materialisms in human geography. While there is a need to look beyond reclamation as volumetric expansion of territory, this commentary discusses how we can think about locating granular geographies in the complex nexus between the conceptual spaces of the ‘tropics’ and ‘temperate.’ This is in addition to theorizing how a singular grain of sa…
Legitimizing viewing publics through nostalgia: The mediated tropicality of Singapore’s ‘kampong spirit’
Using two recent films—Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era—this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the “kampong spirit” through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government’s authoritarian rule. In supporting the state’s presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party’s unpopular housing and language pol…
Ten Years as Boundary Object: The Search for Identity and Belonging as ‘Hongkongers’
This article examines the complex process of symbolic boundary-making of ‘Hongkonger’ cultural identities through the lens of the controversial 2015 film Ten Years, which is a celebrated omnibus production comprised of five short segments that picture a dystopic end to Hong Kong’s cherished way of life in the year 2025. The article is premised on an interdisciplinary approach engaging with cultural studies and film studies. On one hand, it explor…
Cultural Studies as “Export” Discipline and its Challenges
In response to [Tomaselli, Keyan, and Xiao Yao. 2023. “Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia.” Critical Arts. doi: 10.1080/02560046.2023.2289315], this work locates the status of Cultural Studies as an export’ and “import” discipline in the wake of the Birmingham School being subject to two “restructures.” It is argued that in the face of inevitable audit cultures in the neoliberal University, the…
Mapping tropicality in the masculinities and femininities of global Singapore in Crazy Rich Asians
The blockbuster film based on the acclaimed novel Crazy Rich Asians provides an alternative representational space to examine how masculinities, femininities, Chinese ethnicity and networks of economic power feature in the reproduction of the gendered body-in-space and body-as-space. In the reproduction of the gendered body in cartographic space, it is argued that in the film, the projection of temperate qualities avoids incorporation of Singapor…
Graffiti of the “New” Hong Kong and Their Imaginative Geographies During the Anti-Extradition Bill Protests of 2019–2020
In current conditions of late-modernity, nativism, localism, populism and racism are articulating as each other in Western European societies. In Asia’s global city, Hong Kong witnessed revivifications of nativist and localist identities that were negotiated to counteract socio-cultural and political “Mainlandization” in the former British colony. The imaginative geographies underscoring political graffiti and civil disobedience wresting the righ…
Toxic Military Masculinities and the Politics of Conscript After-Death Remembrance in Singapore
This article discusses the relationality between death and masculinity in economically prosperous Singapore. In positioning the Singaporean male conscript, spatially disciplined by the state in both life and death, this article discusses how the reproduction of militarized masculinities through National Service (NS) in Singapore is co-constitutive of geopolitical tensions that contour how the space of the male body is reproduced. In the aftermath…
The affective cultural commons of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and figurations of the anonymous protestor
The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters and post-it notes on Lennon Walls, a variety of consumable artworks including food items. This work introduces the notion of visceral citizenship and discusses how, through creative art forms, the identity and ‘figure’ of the Hong Kong protestor is (re)p…
Photo Essay: Reclaiming the University - Cartographies of Student Resistance During the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests
This interpretive visual report interacts with repertoires of graffitied messages photographed at two university campuses in Hong Kong after skirmishes laced with tear gas and fire between students and riot police had ceased. This work is a response to several graffitied images taken in early 2020 after the campus siege of 2019. It is accompanied by a reference to the reverberations of recent watershed developments that have fundamentally changed…
Beyond the spectacle of property windfalls in Singapore: Lefebvrian spaces of home against profit‐making
In Singapore, owners of private housing estates reaping windfalls through collective sales have been subject to the news media's sensational coverage of the topic. While collective sales will give rise to new developments that regenerate the country's landscape to reflect the image and identity of an entrepreneurial city, efforts to resist this wealth generating urbanism are subject to erasure. Instances of minority owners disinterested in profit…
The Polemical Rhetoric of Jack Neo’s Ah Boys to Men and Repertoires of Filmic Masculinity as Sacrifice in Singapore
In Singapore, a strict policy of male conscription or national service (hereafter, NS) that transforms boys into men is carefully calibrated to maintain support from the civilian sector. I argue that, in the widely acclaimed Ah Boys to Men film series directed by Jack Neo, cinematic scripts of military masculinities are inflected by class and ethnicity. While Neo’s film series does not depart from the realities of everyday multiculturalism in Sin…
Unmasking nativism in Asia’s world city: Graffiti and identity boundary un/making in Hong Kong
This work examines the discursive bases to Hong Konger identities by using a repertoire of anti-mainland and pro-democracy graffiti that impose alternative, counter-geographies onto space. Given the spatial specificities of pro-Hong Kong graffiti, the communication of nativist messages is potent in demarcating the boundaries of Hong Kong nativism and mainland ‘Otherness’ by virtue of how mainland China and its peoples are cognitively experienced …
Peasant Sex Workers in Metropolitan China and the Pivotal Concept of Money
This article is a theoretically informed empirical investigation of breadwinning peasant workers in China’s urban metropolis of Guangdong and the values they ascribe to money acquired through sex work. The existing literature about money sits at the very core of modernity, individualisation and mobility providing endless opportunities to explore its variegated meanings in China’s global commercial sex industry. We situate the women’s desires and …
Migrant Philippine teachers in Indonesia: The nexus between precarious skilled work, illegal mobility and the cosmopolitan
This article examines the nexus between the illegal migration of Filipino teachers as a form of precarious skilled employment in conjunction with the mobility of choice and hope found in the adoption of cosmopolitan outlooks. Catering to the aspirations of Indonesia’s rising middle class, privately managed “international” schools actively recruit trained teachers from the Philippines. Many of these teachers are migrants negotiating journeys of fi…
Disunited in ethnicity: The racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong
In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duali…
The Socio-historical Racialization of Asians in New Zealand
This article seeks to establish comparability and continuity to past and present anti-Asiatic racisms in New Zealand society. In the years after 1986, the acceptance of non-European immigrants to New Zealand has drawn criticisms from both the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority in conjunction with the country’s indigenous Maori population. At a time when Asian minority subaltern existence fails to challenge the dominant discourse that has forestalled …
The Cultural (Re)production of Masculinities
In Asian societies, the framing of contemporary masculinities and femininities remains under-theorised. This article critically examines the interplay between schooling, Indonesian Chinese ethnicity and the (re)production of male entrepreneurial masculinities manifested in teenage boys’ sexual/gender subjectivities and identity formation. The qualitative data obtained from an anonymous Chinese-Christian majority international school in Indonesia’…
Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: The case for cosmopolitanism and indigenous rights
In light of biculturalism's prevalence as a power-sharing agreement between New Zealand Maori and the Crown, any attempts to establish a state-sponsored project of multiculturalism have been treated by Maori with suspicion and controversy. This article presents cosmopolitanism as an appropriate solution to citizenship and cultural diversity in New Zealand that can coexist in harmony with the country's biculturalism that enjoys a constitutional-li…
Socio-Cultural Preconditions of Economic Modernization of Russia: Subjective Approach
4 .. - ..6 .., .. , ...8 ., . : , , (
Calypso Magnolia: The Caribbean Side of the South
Calypso Magnolia urges the transnational study of a new region, one that configures the coastal United States with the Caribbean islands and the gulf coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The essay maps the extensive connections between the U.S. South and the Caribbean, and examines the basin's treatment in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. southern writers such as Martin Delany, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, William Faulkner, Zora N…
Bramcote Green, Bermondsey: A Bronze Age Trackway and Palaeo-Environmental Sequence
An archaeological evaluation and excavation were carried out prior to a housing development in 1992, at Bramcote Green, in the London Borough of Southwark. Up to 3 m of organic rich, alluvial clay silts were deposited during the late Glacial period between about 12,000 BP and 9000 BP. A wide, shallow channel flowing south towards the Thames cut through the clay silts during the early Holocene and was filled with a series of clay and peat layers. …
Education and Nation-Building in the Third World
Charles I and the confederation of Kilkenny, 1643-9
The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary int…
Disunited in ethnicity: The racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong
In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duali…
The affective cultural commons of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and figurations of the anonymous protestor
The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters and post-it notes on Lennon Walls, a variety of consumable artworks including food items. This work introduces the notion of visceral citizenship and discusses how, through creative art forms, the identity and ‘figure’ of the Hong Kong protestor is (re)p…
Unmasking nativism in Asia’s world city: Graffiti and identity boundary un/making in Hong Kong
This work examines the discursive bases to Hong Konger identities by using a repertoire of anti-mainland and pro-democracy graffiti that impose alternative, counter-geographies onto space. Given the spatial specificities of pro-Hong Kong graffiti, the communication of nativist messages is potent in demarcating the boundaries of Hong Kong nativism and mainland ‘Otherness’ by virtue of how mainland China and its peoples are cognitively experienced …
The Polemical Rhetoric of Jack Neo’s Ah Boys to Men and Repertoires of Filmic Masculinity as Sacrifice in Singapore
In Singapore, a strict policy of male conscription or national service (hereafter, NS) that transforms boys into men is carefully calibrated to maintain support from the civilian sector. I argue that, in the widely acclaimed Ah Boys to Men film series directed by Jack Neo, cinematic scripts of military masculinities are inflected by class and ethnicity. While Neo’s film series does not depart from the realities of everyday multiculturalism in Sin…
Bramcote Green, Bermondsey: A Bronze Age Trackway and Palaeo-Environmental Sequence
An archaeological evaluation and excavation were carried out prior to a housing development in 1992, at Bramcote Green, in the London Borough of Southwark. Up to 3 m of organic rich, alluvial clay silts were deposited during the late Glacial period between about 12,000 BP and 9000 BP. A wide, shallow channel flowing south towards the Thames cut through the clay silts during the early Holocene and was filled with a series of clay and peat layers. …
Ten Years as Boundary Object: The Search for Identity and Belonging as ‘Hongkongers’
This article examines the complex process of symbolic boundary-making of ‘Hongkonger’ cultural identities through the lens of the controversial 2015 film Ten Years, which is a celebrated omnibus production comprised of five short segments that picture a dystopic end to Hong Kong’s cherished way of life in the year 2025. The article is premised on an interdisciplinary approach engaging with cultural studies and film studies. On one hand, it explor…
Mapping tropicality in the masculinities and femininities of global Singapore in Crazy Rich Asians
The blockbuster film based on the acclaimed novel Crazy Rich Asians provides an alternative representational space to examine how masculinities, femininities, Chinese ethnicity and networks of economic power feature in the reproduction of the gendered body-in-space and body-as-space. In the reproduction of the gendered body in cartographic space, it is argued that in the film, the projection of temperate qualities avoids incorporation of Singapor…
Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: The case for cosmopolitanism and indigenous rights
In light of biculturalism's prevalence as a power-sharing agreement between New Zealand Maori and the Crown, any attempts to establish a state-sponsored project of multiculturalism have been treated by Maori with suspicion and controversy. This article presents cosmopolitanism as an appropriate solution to citizenship and cultural diversity in New Zealand that can coexist in harmony with the country's biculturalism that enjoys a constitutional-li…
Peasant Sex Workers in Metropolitan China and the Pivotal Concept of Money
This article is a theoretically informed empirical investigation of breadwinning peasant workers in China’s urban metropolis of Guangdong and the values they ascribe to money acquired through sex work. The existing literature about money sits at the very core of modernity, individualisation and mobility providing endless opportunities to explore its variegated meanings in China’s global commercial sex industry. We situate the women’s desires and …
For granular geographies: Conceptual spaces of anatopism and land reclamation in Singapore
The call for granular geographies represents an interesting intervention in the nexus between old and new materialisms in human geography. While there is a need to look beyond reclamation as volumetric expansion of territory, this commentary discusses how we can think about locating granular geographies in the complex nexus between the conceptual spaces of the ‘tropics’ and ‘temperate.’ This is in addition to theorizing how a singular grain of sa…
Graffiti of the “New” Hong Kong and Their Imaginative Geographies During the Anti-Extradition Bill Protests of 2019–2020
In current conditions of late-modernity, nativism, localism, populism and racism are articulating as each other in Western European societies. In Asia’s global city, Hong Kong witnessed revivifications of nativist and localist identities that were negotiated to counteract socio-cultural and political “Mainlandization” in the former British colony. The imaginative geographies underscoring political graffiti and civil disobedience wresting the righ…
Toxic Military Masculinities and the Politics of Conscript After-Death Remembrance in Singapore
This article discusses the relationality between death and masculinity in economically prosperous Singapore. In positioning the Singaporean male conscript, spatially disciplined by the state in both life and death, this article discusses how the reproduction of militarized masculinities through National Service (NS) in Singapore is co-constitutive of geopolitical tensions that contour how the space of the male body is reproduced. In the aftermath…
Photo Essay: Reclaiming the University - Cartographies of Student Resistance During the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests
This interpretive visual report interacts with repertoires of graffitied messages photographed at two university campuses in Hong Kong after skirmishes laced with tear gas and fire between students and riot police had ceased. This work is a response to several graffitied images taken in early 2020 after the campus siege of 2019. It is accompanied by a reference to the reverberations of recent watershed developments that have fundamentally changed…
Migrant Philippine teachers in Indonesia: The nexus between precarious skilled work, illegal mobility and the cosmopolitan
This article examines the nexus between the illegal migration of Filipino teachers as a form of precarious skilled employment in conjunction with the mobility of choice and hope found in the adoption of cosmopolitan outlooks. Catering to the aspirations of Indonesia’s rising middle class, privately managed “international” schools actively recruit trained teachers from the Philippines. Many of these teachers are migrants negotiating journeys of fi…
Cultural Studies as “Export” Discipline and its Challenges
In response to [Tomaselli, Keyan, and Xiao Yao. 2023. “Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia.” Critical Arts. doi: 10.1080/02560046.2023.2289315], this work locates the status of Cultural Studies as an export’ and “import” discipline in the wake of the Birmingham School being subject to two “restructures.” It is argued that in the face of inevitable audit cultures in the neoliberal University, the…
Calypso Magnolia: The Caribbean Side of the South
Calypso Magnolia urges the transnational study of a new region, one that configures the coastal United States with the Caribbean islands and the gulf coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The essay maps the extensive connections between the U.S. South and the Caribbean, and examines the basin's treatment in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. southern writers such as Martin Delany, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, William Faulkner, Zora N…
Charles I and the confederation of Kilkenny, 1643-9
The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary int…
The Negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny, 1642-9
Negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny lasted from January, 1643, until his death in January, 1649, and were carried on from time to time in Paris and Rome as well as Dublin, Kilkenny and Oxford. Charles required troops, arms and money to enable him to defeat the English Parliament and the Scots: the Confederates desired religious freedom and political concessions. The operations of Charles' several agents were rarely co…
Charles I and the confederation of Kilkenny, 1643-9
The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary int…
Education and Nation-Building in the Third World
Bramcote Green, Bermondsey: A Bronze Age Trackway and Palaeo-Environmental Sequence
An archaeological evaluation and excavation were carried out prior to a housing development in 1992, at Bramcote Green, in the London Borough of Southwark. Up to 3 m of organic rich, alluvial clay silts were deposited during the late Glacial period between about 12,000 BP and 9000 BP. A wide, shallow channel flowing south towards the Thames cut through the clay silts during the early Holocene and was filled with a series of clay and peat layers. …
Calypso Magnolia: The Caribbean Side of the South
Calypso Magnolia urges the transnational study of a new region, one that configures the coastal United States with the Caribbean islands and the gulf coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. The essay maps the extensive connections between the U.S. South and the Caribbean, and examines the basin's treatment in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. southern writers such as Martin Delany, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, William Faulkner, Zora N…
Socio-Cultural Preconditions of Economic Modernization of Russia: Subjective Approach
4 .. - ..6 .., .. , ...8 ., . : , , (
Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: The case for cosmopolitanism and indigenous rights
In light of biculturalism's prevalence as a power-sharing agreement between New Zealand Maori and the Crown, any attempts to establish a state-sponsored project of multiculturalism have been treated by Maori with suspicion and controversy. This article presents cosmopolitanism as an appropriate solution to citizenship and cultural diversity in New Zealand that can coexist in harmony with the country's biculturalism that enjoys a constitutional-li…
The Socio-historical Racialization of Asians in New Zealand
This article seeks to establish comparability and continuity to past and present anti-Asiatic racisms in New Zealand society. In the years after 1986, the acceptance of non-European immigrants to New Zealand has drawn criticisms from both the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority in conjunction with the country’s indigenous Maori population. At a time when Asian minority subaltern existence fails to challenge the dominant discourse that has forestalled …
The Cultural (Re)production of Masculinities
In Asian societies, the framing of contemporary masculinities and femininities remains under-theorised. This article critically examines the interplay between schooling, Indonesian Chinese ethnicity and the (re)production of male entrepreneurial masculinities manifested in teenage boys’ sexual/gender subjectivities and identity formation. The qualitative data obtained from an anonymous Chinese-Christian majority international school in Indonesia’…
Disunited in ethnicity: The racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong
In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duali…
Peasant Sex Workers in Metropolitan China and the Pivotal Concept of Money
This article is a theoretically informed empirical investigation of breadwinning peasant workers in China’s urban metropolis of Guangdong and the values they ascribe to money acquired through sex work. The existing literature about money sits at the very core of modernity, individualisation and mobility providing endless opportunities to explore its variegated meanings in China’s global commercial sex industry. We situate the women’s desires and …
Migrant Philippine teachers in Indonesia: The nexus between precarious skilled work, illegal mobility and the cosmopolitan
This article examines the nexus between the illegal migration of Filipino teachers as a form of precarious skilled employment in conjunction with the mobility of choice and hope found in the adoption of cosmopolitan outlooks. Catering to the aspirations of Indonesia’s rising middle class, privately managed “international” schools actively recruit trained teachers from the Philippines. Many of these teachers are migrants negotiating journeys of fi…
Beyond the spectacle of property windfalls in Singapore: Lefebvrian spaces of home against profit‐making
In Singapore, owners of private housing estates reaping windfalls through collective sales have been subject to the news media's sensational coverage of the topic. While collective sales will give rise to new developments that regenerate the country's landscape to reflect the image and identity of an entrepreneurial city, efforts to resist this wealth generating urbanism are subject to erasure. Instances of minority owners disinterested in profit…
The Polemical Rhetoric of Jack Neo’s Ah Boys to Men and Repertoires of Filmic Masculinity as Sacrifice in Singapore
In Singapore, a strict policy of male conscription or national service (hereafter, NS) that transforms boys into men is carefully calibrated to maintain support from the civilian sector. I argue that, in the widely acclaimed Ah Boys to Men film series directed by Jack Neo, cinematic scripts of military masculinities are inflected by class and ethnicity. While Neo’s film series does not depart from the realities of everyday multiculturalism in Sin…
Unmasking nativism in Asia’s world city: Graffiti and identity boundary un/making in Hong Kong
This work examines the discursive bases to Hong Konger identities by using a repertoire of anti-mainland and pro-democracy graffiti that impose alternative, counter-geographies onto space. Given the spatial specificities of pro-Hong Kong graffiti, the communication of nativist messages is potent in demarcating the boundaries of Hong Kong nativism and mainland ‘Otherness’ by virtue of how mainland China and its peoples are cognitively experienced …
The affective cultural commons of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and figurations of the anonymous protestor
The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters and post-it notes on Lennon Walls, a variety of consumable artworks including food items. This work introduces the notion of visceral citizenship and discusses how, through creative art forms, the identity and ‘figure’ of the Hong Kong protestor is (re)p…
Photo Essay: Reclaiming the University - Cartographies of Student Resistance During the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests
This interpretive visual report interacts with repertoires of graffitied messages photographed at two university campuses in Hong Kong after skirmishes laced with tear gas and fire between students and riot police had ceased. This work is a response to several graffitied images taken in early 2020 after the campus siege of 2019. It is accompanied by a reference to the reverberations of recent watershed developments that have fundamentally changed…
Mapping tropicality in the masculinities and femininities of global Singapore in Crazy Rich Asians
The blockbuster film based on the acclaimed novel Crazy Rich Asians provides an alternative representational space to examine how masculinities, femininities, Chinese ethnicity and networks of economic power feature in the reproduction of the gendered body-in-space and body-as-space. In the reproduction of the gendered body in cartographic space, it is argued that in the film, the projection of temperate qualities avoids incorporation of Singapor…
Graffiti of the “New” Hong Kong and Their Imaginative Geographies During the Anti-Extradition Bill Protests of 2019–2020
In current conditions of late-modernity, nativism, localism, populism and racism are articulating as each other in Western European societies. In Asia’s global city, Hong Kong witnessed revivifications of nativist and localist identities that were negotiated to counteract socio-cultural and political “Mainlandization” in the former British colony. The imaginative geographies underscoring political graffiti and civil disobedience wresting the righ…
Toxic Military Masculinities and the Politics of Conscript After-Death Remembrance in Singapore
This article discusses the relationality between death and masculinity in economically prosperous Singapore. In positioning the Singaporean male conscript, spatially disciplined by the state in both life and death, this article discusses how the reproduction of militarized masculinities through National Service (NS) in Singapore is co-constitutive of geopolitical tensions that contour how the space of the male body is reproduced. In the aftermath…
Legitimizing viewing publics through nostalgia: The mediated tropicality of Singapore’s ‘kampong spirit’
Using two recent films—Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era—this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the “kampong spirit” through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government’s authoritarian rule. In supporting the state’s presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party’s unpopular housing and language pol…
Ten Years as Boundary Object: The Search for Identity and Belonging as ‘Hongkongers’
This article examines the complex process of symbolic boundary-making of ‘Hongkonger’ cultural identities through the lens of the controversial 2015 film Ten Years, which is a celebrated omnibus production comprised of five short segments that picture a dystopic end to Hong Kong’s cherished way of life in the year 2025. The article is premised on an interdisciplinary approach engaging with cultural studies and film studies. On one hand, it explor…
Cultural Studies as “Export” Discipline and its Challenges
In response to [Tomaselli, Keyan, and Xiao Yao. 2023. “Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective. China, Africa, Asia and Australasia.” Critical Arts. doi: 10.1080/02560046.2023.2289315], this work locates the status of Cultural Studies as an export’ and “import” discipline in the wake of the Birmingham School being subject to two “restructures.” It is argued that in the face of inevitable audit cultures in the neoliberal University, the…
For granular geographies: Conceptual spaces of anatopism and land reclamation in Singapore
The call for granular geographies represents an interesting intervention in the nexus between old and new materialisms in human geography. While there is a need to look beyond reclamation as volumetric expansion of territory, this commentary discusses how we can think about locating granular geographies in the complex nexus between the conceptual spaces of the ‘tropics’ and ‘temperate.’ This is in addition to theorizing how a singular grain of sa…
Calibrated structures of feeling: Cultural citizenship and the reproduction of the military in Singapore
This article discusses the nexus between Raymond Williams’ structure of feelings and the reproduction of military masculinity as cultural citizenship. By placing the gaze upon National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces as a rite of passage into manhood, this work uses representations of the military in popular culture and souvenirs/ephemera to elucidate how structures of feeling are calibrated as masculinity the state wants its citizenry to i…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (11 works) · Art (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)