This article examines how migrant domestic workers' knowledge becomes legible and sustained under conditions of precarity by theorizing co-making as a methodological intervention into minor transnationalism. Rather than treating solidarity as a pre-given alignment or an achieved outcome, I approach it as something assembled through micro-practices of mediation and care-practices that make relation possible while leaving difference unresolved. Drawing on feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge alongside zine scholarship's "do-it-ourselves" ethic, I argue that radical publishing can operate as an infrastructural method for cultivating lateral connection beyond state-centered or institutional models of transnationalism. The article traces a decade-long publishing practice of Hong Kong artist-publisher Beatrix Pang and centres an in-depth, process-oriented analysis of Women Behind Closed Doors (2023), a collaboratively produced zine initiated by Pang with migrant domestic workers in London. Reading the zine as both cultural artifact and processual practice, I trace how solidarity is negotiated across three stages: participatory workshops, editorialization (through scanning and collage), and production and circulation. The analysis highlights how workshop exercises such as self-introduction and mind-mapping enact provisional forms of recognition; how scanning preserves the textures of process while refusing editorial smoothing; and how collage stages adjacency between testimony, activist research, and facilitator reflexivity without collapsing them into a unified voice. Attending to uneven labour, material constraint, and modest circuits of dissemination, I show how minor transnationalism takes shape not as a coherent network or shared identity, but as a fragile, present-tense practice enacted through co-making.
This paper examines the politics of representation in Chinese non-state documentaries within the cross-cultural context of the Global South. Through analyzing About Bintou (2019) and Bobby's Factory (2021), I argue that Chinese non-state documentaries produce a knowledge structure of representing Sino-African interactions and perceiving Global South connectivity through the xianchang (on-the-spot realism) aesthetic and practices. Xianchang-a core concept in Chinese documentary studies-connotes a politics of representation that foregrounds everyday and bottom-up dynamics. The politics of representation embedded in xianchang can be fashioned to interrogate global racial order and represent African experiences as integral to Chinese urbanization and globalization. It manifests nuanced interracial dynamics beyond a polarized national-racial reading of African experiences and challenges the domination-subjugation framing of viewing Sino-African relationships. As part of the Global South knowledge production, xianchang serves as a site of non-Western utterance and cultural exchanges within a context-specific framework.
Home videos function as family artifacts that embody a household's spirit and values, while also documenting social transformation and contributing to cultural heritage. Yet the videotape formats on which many of these recordings were produced were never designed for long-term preservation, and their material fragility and technological obsolescence create a growing risk of loss. This urgency provides the context for the Saving Family Memory Campaign. Drawing on participatory observation, this study examines the Campaign, a grassroots archival initiative that organizes videotape preservation workshops to safeguard the personal, familial, and communal videotape heritage of Taiwan. This methodological approach enables the study to examine how the Campaign addresses the challenges inherent in protecting vernacular audiovisual records. Such challenges include the deterioration of videotapes, the lack of standardized digitization procedures and sustainable digital preservation workflows, and the absence of a robust metadata infrastructure, all of which limit the possibilities for long-term stewardship. The Campaign's archival value and potential lie in its pedagogical and participatory model, which cultivates public engagement and helps secure vernacular histories. Moreover, the Campaign underscores distributed stewardship and individual empowerment by situating it within a broader global movement of community-based archival practice. The significance of home video preservation in Taiwan lies in both restoring visibility to individuals, families, and communities that are often underrepresented in dominant historical narratives and in preserving records of everyday life across time and space.
This study examines the origins and semantic evolution of Thai first-person singular pronouns corresponding to the meaning "I." Drawing on historical-comparative linguistics, theories of semantic change, and cross-linguistic semantic comparison, it investigates how Thai first-person forms developed from different lexical and cultural sources. The analysis suggests that these pronouns may have multiple origins, including body-part terms, kinship terms, animal names, and loanwords from Chinese. Evidence from Chinese, Tai-Kadai languages, and other related linguistic materials is used to clarify the semantic pathways through which ordinary lexical items came to acquire pronominal functions. The findings show that the Thai first-person pronominal system is not the result of a single historical source, but rather of layered processes involving metaphor, social deixis, grammaticalization, and language contact. This study, therefore, contributes to a better understanding of Thai pronoun formation and offers broader insights into semantic change, person reference, and cross-linguistic comparison in Sino-Tibetan and Southeast Asian linguistic contexts.
Independent bookstores in Taiwan have long served as important venues through which cultural activism is practiced in everyday forms. Since 2020, the emergence of Hong Kong-run independent bookstores in Taiwan has generated a distinctive transnational cultural presence shaped by political displacement and exile. This study examines how these bookstores operate as transnational infrastructures of cultural action, sustaining diasporic agency beyond symbolic representation. Drawing on prolonged participant observation and in-depth interviews with three Hong Kong bookstores in Taipei, the analysis demonstrates that cultural activism is mobilized through three interlocking performative mechanisms: curatorial, linguistic, and community-based practices. These mechanisms generate strategic visibility and community cohesion while remaining continuously negotiated amid internal diasporic differences and external structural constraints, including graduated sovereignty and public fatigue within Taiwan's civic environment. The findings further illuminate tensions surrounding ethnicized identity, host-society reception, and the commodification of solidarity. By reframing these bookstores as infrastructures of cultural action rather than merely descriptive sites, this study offers an analytical lens for understanding how diasporic cultural resistance is sustained through adaptive and negotiative politics under conditions of political precarity in contemporary Asia.
This article aims to explore Hsu Kai-yu and his works related to modern and contemporary Chinese literature, including the literary anthologies he compiled and translated, his academic research, interview records, biographical writings, and personal creations. It seeks to outline Hsu's intellectual journey that represents a generation of overseas scholars/Chinese intellectuals in the United States. Hsu's academic and intellectual journey is an important case study in the development of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, opening a window for us to revisit this field. The multiplicity of his experiences and identities brings a unique perspective as both an "internal outsider" and an "external insider," providing overlooked phenomena and insights that add a crucial dimension to modern and contemporary Chinese literature studies during the Cold War. Hsu's writings are embedded with his life experience and understanding in different periods. Only by observing both the man and his works can we investigate the ways Hsu intervened in the politically charged modern and contemporary Chinese literature with his lifelong aesthetic reflections and literary insights, as well as the excitement and resonance thus generated.
This article approaches the topic of Nanyang popular culture from the perspective of language use and language politics. Revisiting a canonical text by Miao Xiu, Singapore under the Roofs (1951), which is set in Singapore on the cusp of decolonisation, this article examines the left-leaning realist camp's engagement with a plurilingual and transnational public sphere where different forms of popular culture-some profit-driven, others politically oriented-competed for resources and audiences. The story's incorporation of non-Mandarin Chinese languages and non-standard linguistic registers draws attention to how linguistic variations associated with the subaltern class mediate access to their subjectivity. In seeking to broaden the scope of current discussions of the language question beyond the conventional framing of the state's ideology of language in Singapore, the analysis here refutes the technological determinism inherent in excluding literature in print from popular culture simply because its medium of production has been overtaken by "newer" technologies.
The conduits for cultural studies' haphazard entry to South Africa occurred through history, sociology, anthropology, and performance studies. Such conceptual fracturing coincided with economic turmoil, anti-apartheid resistance, global cultural and academic boycotts, and border wars. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) underpinned the establishment in 1985 of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Stuart Hall, previously the director of the CCCS, and many of his British colleagues visited Durban in 1997 along with delegates from Zimbabwe and Norway. Activists in these disciplines recognized the contextual relevance of Hall's theories, while those engaged in popular performance and media studies split between a semiotised cultural studies on the one hand and labor sociology manifested as worker theater and culturalism on the other. This analysis will examine the political economy trajectory of British cultural studies that emerged in South Africa after 1980. The inclusion of social theory casts the field emanating from KwaZulu-Natal as the study of the relationship between texts and contexts while also intervening in both sites conducted at the invitation of local and national communities of practice. The combination is discussed in relation to the singular textual preference of literary scholars. Hall's influence, within these various trajectories, will be identified. Specifically, the questions to be addressed include: By what routes did Hall first arrive in South Africa? How did they take root in different disciplines? What are their current contours? and Why is his massive contribution to media studies still blinded by other disciplines?
Established in the late 1980s in Chiayi County, the campus of National Chung Cheng University (CCU) offers a compelling case study for interrogating the cultural politics of space, utopian architecture, and post-authoritarian civic imagination in Taiwan. Conceived during a transition from martial law to democratization, CCU's master plan reflects the developmental state's ambition to redistribute higher education resources while inscribing a "civic utopia" into the landscape. At the heart of this vision lies a monumental main axis-a symbolic spatial spine linking the Grand Auditorium and the Library-functioning as a ceremonial stage, a pedagogical environment, and nucleus of collective identity. This study argues that CCU's main axis embodies a hybridized architectural language negotiating between Western paradigms of campus-town planning and Taiwanese cultural spatiality. Drawing on archival records and design documents, the analysis situates CCU within transnational traditions of American campus design while tracing its adaptation to Taiwan's unique ecological, seismic, and cultural conditions. From a cultural studies perspective, the axis operates as a site of meaning-making: the Grand Auditorium enacts commemorative memory, while the Library anchors intellectual centrality, together producing a spatial discourse of civic utopia. The planning of CCU coincided with Taiwan's democratization and regional development. By analyzing CCU's architectural expression, this article demonstrates how campus planning materializes the developmental-state ideology of 1980s Taiwan. Ultimately, it reveals how such projects blended modernist aesthetics with localized symbolism, shaping collective memory and civic pedagogy within the broader cultural negotiations of identity and modernity in East Asia.
This paper investigates the emergence and evolution of digital feminism in post-socialist China, with particular attention to the linguistic, political, and cultural negotiations that shape gender discourse in online spaces. Drawing on theories of translingual practice, cyberfeminism, and intersectionality, the study examines how feminism-originally a Western neologism-has been translated, contested, and transformed within China's digital public sphere. Through a historical overview of feminist movements in China and a case study of the social media platform Xiaohongshu, the paper explores how gendered neologisms and misogynistic slurs-such as nvquan-biao and "Chinese pastoral feminism"-reflect underlying class divisions, consumerist ideologies, and the state's increasing control over ideological expression. The analysis reveals the dual character of Chinese digital feminism: it operates both as a vehicle for empowerment and as a site of backlash and fragmentation. Ultimately, rather than constituting a unified movement, online feminism in China is marked by its heterogeneity. This study offers a localized understanding of feminist discourse in contemporary China by tracing its entanglement with neoliberal desire, patriarchal power, and socio-economic inequality in the age of social media.
This study examines the professional and personal narratives of male fashion models in 1970s South Korea through life history interviews. Employing Mandelbaum's framework, the analysis is organized through three analytic categories: dimensions (enduring aspects of life as models), turnings (key career transitions), and adaptations (responses to aging and industry change). In 1970s Korea, traditional masculinity centered on breadwinning and professional authority, positioning male models uneasily within prevailing gender expectations. Through in-depth interviews with two pioneer male models now in their seventies, the study reveals how recollections foreground economic hardship and provider responsibilities rather than social stigma. Dimensions reveal participants' experiences of unstable incomes, reliance on informal networks, and wage disparities compared to female colleagues. Turnings identify two critical transitions: entry into modeling and subsequent shifts to event planning and catalog production to meet breadwinner responsibilities. Adaptations examine how participants navigated aging through divergent strategies, including mentorship, advocacy for senior models, and legacy preservation. This research contributes to understanding fashion as a lens for examining cultural modernization, gender dynamics, and memory practices in contemporary Korea, underscoring the importance of preserving marginalized voices in fashion history.
