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 sand is capable of militarizing and gendering the Southeast Asian island state.

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-colonialist like extraction of sand from other countries to widen its territorial frontiers. In placing the spotlight on extensive land-reclamation works to expand Tekong Island, Singapore's largest outlier into a military base, I explain how sand serves the role of creating a militarized boundary object. While sand's coarseness configures military masculinity, sand's smoothness serves the additional function of maintaining civilian support for militarism by way of 'packaging' masculinity. The granular cartographies of trauma arising from Singapore's territorial expansions wrought upon Southeast Asia's rural poor require urgent recuperation.

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 explores how Ten Years functioned as a boundary object, a vast terrain within which cultural identities of what it means to be a Hongkonger are constructed, banished, imagined, and performed under the rubric of bodily performatives. On the other hand, it offers blurring encounters into unfamiliar and precarious territories where the formation and formulation of Hongkonger identities and sense of belonging are negotiated, evacuated, and inhabited. In the end, the key tropes in Ten Years suggest that boundary work in post-Umbrella Hong Kong affectively negotiates with state-level nationalism advocated by the central government in Beijing through establishing and reformulating notions of 'localism' and Hongkonger identities.

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 policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow "the tropics" by nostalgizing the state's modernization efforts. The cumulative thrust of an evidence-free and presentist nostalgia ostensible in both films, this work argues, satisfies the paternalistic state's obsession with the public legitimation of its ruling mandate.

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 classics remain relevant for the purposes of preserving the legacies of Cultural Studies as a discipline of "export" rather than "import". At a time when there are regimes of authoritarian governance curtailing academic freedom in Asian countries, I suggest that there is promise in the materialist and post-materialist perspectives found in Cultural Studies which facilitates the engagement of issues affecting wider publics.

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 right for political self-determination from Beijing during the anti-extradition bill (anti-ELAB) protests of 2019-2020 is retrospectively discussed in relation to frequent pro-establishment assertions that Hong Kongers ought to accept Beijing's sovereignty over the semi-autonomous region. The graffiti vignettes presented in this work express opposition towards the Mainland presence in Hong Kong, which illustrates underlying nativist sentiments.

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 acclaimedAh Boys to Menfilm 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 Singapore as celebratory, the film is a rhetorical resource of the patriarchal state, albeit one that lacks finesse, which prepares teenage males for their indelible rites of passage into manhood. The film represents the symbolic power of the state in communicating the necessity of conscription as a proving ground of masculinity. In counteracting rhetorical fears of training fatalities and injuries to disarm questions about the relevance of male conscription, the state is careful not to undermine its militarised ambitions. Instead, it deploys curious narratives of masculinised sacrifice to propagate ideological control of the citizenry.

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)produced through its capacity to engender raw, affective feelings and orientations towards China through sensorial embodiments. In the aftermath of a recently introduced national security legislation creating a fresh climate of fear, cultural artefacts popular with pro-democracy Hong Kongers encourage the material consumption and (re)production of a localist identity and politics of belonging to Hong Kong that engenders visceral and affective responses from viewers. Visceral forms of belonging, it is argued, have the potential to not only create creative forms of activism but provide an important substrate to Hong Konger identities in the body.

John Lowe is currently working in the Migration and Mobilities cluster at Monash University, Malaysia. He previously taught in the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Gender Studies Programme. Hsun-Hui Tseng completed her PhD at the University of Washington and is currently Assistant Professor at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. She was previously Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Gender Studies Programme. Stephan Ortmann was previously assistant professor in City University of Hong Kong's Department of Asian and International Studies. He is currently adjunct professor in the Chinese University's Centre for China Studies. He has written previously for Asian Affairs.

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 and perceived by geographical imaginations of place. As a spatial practice, graffiti writing, it is argued, contests hegemonic representations of space and disrupts representational space through the imposition of 'counterspaces' that subsume a set of power relations which reinforce the boundaries of Hong Kong nativism using geographical imaginations of mainland China blended with truths.

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‐making using the courts to save their homes from the collective sale juggernaut are certainly emblematic of the inherent tension between one's home as housing and home as investment repository. Drawing upon ethnographical experiences from a housing estate built for public officials in Singapore, this article's use of the Lefebvrian theory of spatial production sheds light on how minority owners unmotivated by monetary windfalls (re)produce spaces of their homes that are overtly inimical to the impulses of majority owners to monetize their homes at high premiums.

As a conscription-based military, the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) fulfils an important role in transforming Singaporean boys from various classes and ethnic backgrounds into adult men. At a time when there is interest in the production and performativity of military masculinities in countries that have abandoned conscription, this article examines how, as a rite of passage into manhood, compulsory enlistment in the SAF reproduces hegemonic masculinities denoting ruggedness, perseverance, leadership, muscular manliness and self-discipline. Whilst the SAF can be represented as a site for hegemonic masculinities in the authoritarian Southeast Asian city-state, this work articulates a framework for theorizing how military masculinities are responsible for gendering male citizenship in Singapore. It also suggests that military masculinities can be conceptualized as cultural capital that allows Singaporean males to construct masculinity and assert a male identity in various social settings whilst gaining access to elite networks of power.

As prostitution is widely condemned as a form of criminality in China, there is a need to examine how Buddhism functions not as a form of therapy for the purposes of rehabilitating or deterring prostitution but as a force that encourages participation in prostitution. In this work, we argue that rural-urban migrant sex workers who are Buddhists appropriate the religion's teachings of compassion, mindfulness, and karma to find a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in their livelihoods. We illustrate how Buddhism allows sex workers to cultivate the affective labor required for the purposes of servicing male clients in conjunction with finding positive purpose in their lives. In doing so, their bodies gain affirmative value in the form of helping their heterosexual male clients address deficits in their masculinities.

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is the most radical political movement to have taken place in the former British colony since 1967 anti-colonial demonstrations. Using empirical evidence obtained from activists who participated in the Umbrella Movement, this paper explains how Hong Kong's youth are looking simultaneously to both the past and future to secure their identity in the colonial past even as some hope to achieve ultimate secession from Mainland rule. Racism and anti-Mainland hostilities in Hong Kong are the result of nostalgia and the insurrectionary impulse akin to the millenarianism of social movements founded on suffering and loss that continually seek the recovery of pasts of which they are now deprived. We illuminate how, to young activists, the Umbrella Movement presents hope for a future embedded in the past that remains one the territory and former colony may still aspire toward.

As a social movement demanding universal suffrage, Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement mobilized thousands of young protesters and fomented radical views stridently subversive of mainland China's political interference. The social movement continues to promote further forms of deviance in the form of calling for independence. As the city and former British colony lacks the sovereignty of statehood and democracy, the movement's non-conformity to law needs to be contextualized as a form of deviance. In contributing to the deviancy of social movements, we utilize data obtained from interviews with participants of the movement alongside those who opposed the protest to understand the East Asian cultural setting of the Umbrella Movement's promotion of deviance.

In the late modern era, emigration and concomitant citizenship renunciations in countries that do not allow dual citizenship can be the result of lifestyle preferences or better work opportunities. Although emigration is an integral dimension of cosmopolitanism in an era when national borders are porous, Singapore discourages the emigration of its citizens but prefers its new migrants to maintain cosmopolitan links. This is perhaps anomalous to its cosmopolitan vision. Eurasians of mixed European and Asian ancestry are a small minority ethnic group who have emigrated out of Singapore in large numbers. This work examines how their cosmopolitan politics of belonging have been at odds with the state's authoritarian tropes of citizenship as 'push' factors responsible for this minority ethnic group's dwindling population.

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 endeavours to escape from rural poverty in relation to the nuances of economic and class location in the urban context of post-reform China. We, then, argue that the rural poor migrant women interpret sex work and money as "contradictory" properties of individualism that enhance their personal options, as well as meeting their costs. We introduce a typology of the multiple roles that money plays in their lives. Our findings, we suggest, have significant "general" resonance and ramifications for the ongoing de-collectivisation of rural Chinese society.