Suchergebnisse

In traditional societies, a sense of the "sacred" is often inherent in the form of the urban built-environment, which, in turn, cannot be understood apart from the "mythical-magical concern with place". According to Mircea Eliade, the act of settlement itself is perceived as a re-enactment of the mythical creation of the world. Ancient Indian cities were designed according to a mandala replicating a cosmic image of the laws governing the universe and, similarly, Chinese cities were conceived as "cosmo-magical symbols" of the universe. These cities were laid out as terrestrial images of the macrocosmos, distinct spaces sacralized for habitation within a continuum of profane space.

This article examines the oriental project of imagining migrant women through commercially arranged cross-border marriages. Taking the 'foreign bride' in Singapore as a subject of 'oriental simplicity', it shows how contemporary orientalism continues to shape practices and beliefs in something as familiar as searching for a wife and having a family. The article questions the gendered, classed and sexualised politics that render the migrant woman from less developed nations an ambivalent figure of desire, further complicating the already problematic articulation of womanhood and selfhood in the post-colonial state. By reinforcing a cultural marketability of 'oriental simplicity', commercially arranged cross-border marriages serve to naturalise patriarchal family structures and strengthen the hegemonic ideology of the Asian family.

This special issue develops brokerage as a historically specific category of practice to investigate its intricate link in shaping and sustaining Asian migration infrastructures. To understand this specific interconnection, the authors focus their analytical lenses on the emergence and functioning of migration infrastructures in the particular socio-cultural contexts of Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. Reflecting the "Asian infrastructural turn," the collection examines diverse infrastructural forms, processes, and potentials embedded in, and in turn productive of, a range of brokerage activities, objects, institutions, and actors. Inspired by the ongoing methodological attention to the "migrant-broker" category, our ethnographic cases illuminate in various ways the specific social histories and political processes on which understandings of brokerage are based, and account for the different ways brokerage practices materialize across Asia. Of particular interest is the contingent social worlds of brokerage as they unfold in the everyday—through indeterminacy, unstable relational dynamics, institutional limits, and experimental possibilities—(re)organizing existing socio-cultural orders as well as convening infrastructural potentials. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

This paper interrogates the exclusionary politics of casino urbanism in Singapore, especially in terms of how this particular brand of urbanism reproduces disciplinary regimes through the uneven consumption of fun and leisure. Singapore's vision of becoming a world-class "state of fun" is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated measures of boundary making between global leisure citizens and the excluded others, often comprised of the working class and those deemed to be at risk or lacking self-control and responsibility. The evolving biopolitical borders coincide with the multiple borders set up around Singapore's casino spaces, ensuring the exclusive consumption of Singapore's casino urbanism by the wealthy few. The fun regimes help to normalize social exclusion, moralize disciplinary control, and give legitimacy to the new class of global consumers under the operations of the state-capital apparatus. This paper argues that exclusive casino urbanism has broader social and political implications on issues of equality, accessibility, and urban participation.

Changing economic realities in the last decade have seen the People's Republic of China (PRC) emerging as a major source of 'new' migrants in the world. In the context of Southeast Asia as 'destination,' inflows from the PRC take on another level of significance given the historical antecedents. In this article, we take Singapore, a Southeast Asian global city-state, as a case study of how Chinese migration histories and circumstances have evolved through time. While colonialism has left the city-state with a large ethnic Chinese population that persists till today, Singapore's present-day aspirations to become a globally oriented, open economy have led to a new round of transnational migration, where PRC nationals feature prominently. Focusing on the streams of people moving from China to Singapore in the past and present, a comprehensive range of developments surrounding the said mobilities will be examined. These include a short historical account of Singapore's, and more generally Southeast Asia's, longstanding exchange with China; regulatory regimes that govern Singapore's immigration policies today; the typologies and varied characteristics of modern Chinese migrants gracing the city-state's doorsteps; and social tensions arising from these contemporary PRC flows into Singapore sitting uncomfortably between being predominantly 'Chinese' and 'anti-Chinese.' A few reflections follow as a means to conclude this paper.

The increasing numbers of men and women involved in international labor migration at all skill levels have raised crucial policy issues and concerns for both sending and receiving countries, not only in the area of migration and employment legislation, but also in terms of how migrant workers are positioned within the larger society. Using the case of Singapore, we adopt a gendered analysis to examine the central role of state policies and practices in the incorporation vis-à-vis non-incorporation of male versus female contract migrant workers into Singapore society, in terms of their differential access to legal protection; the differential effects of state medical surveillance of their bodies; the different ways in which their 'skills' are valorized; as well as differences in the efforts invested into the social control of these workers in public space.